Webcurios 29/05/20 – webcurios

Reading Time: 33 minutes

Jesus, that was a week. It started with a national feeding frenzy over the minutiae of a series of car journeys, mutated into one of the biggest ‘fcuk you’s I can remember seeing a government giving an electorate since basically Italy in the 80s and 90s (and, er, 00s), segued into another series of demonstrations of how horrifically broken race relations is in the US (and let’s not lie to ourselves, everywhere else too), and has ended with a totally edifying spat between the President of the United States of America and the…what, sixth-most-popular social network in the world? AND FRIDAY’S NOT EVEN OVER YET!!

I imagine what you really need after such a febrile, jittery, spiky week of creeping enervation and mounting incredulous impotence is something comfy and soothing to take the pain away; instead, what I’m giving you as per usual is far too many words and links, delivered in a style which might best be described as ‘loose-but-relentless’. Sorry about that.

Still, phase one of lockdown is ALMOST OVER! A BIT! So ‘celebrate’ the last weekend indoors until we all start ill-advisedly rubbing up against each other again with Web Curios – who knows, maybe when this is all over you’ll have found a better way to pass these empty hours between birth and death than this. The sad truth, of course, is that I will not.

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you voted for this shower of cnuts then you’re still a cnut yourself.

(NB I have tried really hard to find a credit for the above photo but with no success, so if anyone knows then please let me know and I’ll add one in)

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS FIRST BIT WITH SOME PHILIP GLASS?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ENJOY SEEING TWITTER SUSPEND TRUMP’S ACCOUNT FOR A WEEK AS A PETTY, TIT-FOR-TAT RESPONSE:

Facebook Launches Catchup: Ok, OK, fine, ‘launches’ is perhaps an exaggeration; this is another project by Facebook’s new projects division, meaning it’s got a super-limited release and may never see the light of day caveat caveat caveat. Regardless, it exists! Though, er, I’m not sure why. The best explanation is ‘houseparty, but for phonecalls!’; the idea is that the app gives anyone the ability to advertise the fact they are AVAILABLE FOR CALLS; any of their friends can then join said call, in multiple numbers, for a marvellous free-talking phone jamboree! This basically reminds me of the feature that phone companies developed in the 80s or 90s where if you paid them money you could patch multiple phonecalls together for ‘party calling’ or similar, and I’m not 100% certain why people would want to bring that back, but someone over in Menlo Park obviously thought this was taking a punt on. Literally nothing you can do with this information other than drop it into a few client-facing documents as a vague indication of your being ON THE PULSE – don’t worry, the client will be vaguely-impressed by your zeirgeistyness and then never mention it again, meaning it won’t matter that this is both the first and last time you will ever here about this doubtless-doomed-to-irrelevance failure (feel free to remind me of this when all social media has gone voice-only by 2027).
Facebook Launches Collab: TWO THINGS IN ONE WEEK! Collab is another experiment by FB, but one with (I think) significantly more potential, and which looks like quite an interesting spin on TikTok’s ‘make videos out of other people’s videos’ schtick. Collab is…oh, here: “Collabs are three independent videos that are playing in sync. With the app, you can create your own arrangement by adding in your own recording or by swiping and discovering an arrangement to complete your composition. No musical experience is required.” Now, I can’t play with this as it’s waitlist-only, but it looks as though it’s effectively an infinite-remix kit, the idea being that you’ll be able to splice together any combination of existing ‘Collabs’ with your own; there’s some detail in here about crediting original creators in here, which is interesting in terms of potentially enticing makers to the platform, and the sharing functionality (to whit, it bugs you to share its output ALL THE TIME, apparently) is a clever leaf from TikTok’s book. Worth keeping an ear out for this, I think.
Updates To The Facebook Creators’ Studio: I don’t care, this is very boring. Here: “The Creator Studio app is starting to roll out a brand-new experience for creators who want to manage their content on the go. With this update, you can now publish and schedule Facebook posts within the same Creator Studio app where you check content insights and respond to your fans’ messages and comments.” Happy? No, of course you’re not.
Instagram Makes It Easier For Creators To Earn: It feels ever so slightly like that point in the film in which all those portentous stones with all the carvings and the knife marks and the bloodstains that have been heavily trailed as being of MASSIVE SIGNIFICANCE since the first act start to slowly, grindingly turn on their axes as they move to some sort of universe-shattering alignment. Or at least that’s how it feels to me – ‘it’ in this case being ‘all the stuff Facebook is doing to bring money for individuals and businesses inside of the Big Blue Misery Factory’, which very much looks like the culmination of a lot of long-thought-out bits and pieces starting to coalesce into a very, very solid set of business reasons as to why basically everyone in the world who would like to make money online ought to be on at least one of the company’s apps. This update is about ads coming to Insta TV, with a limited number of creators on the platform getting said ads inserted into their content as 15s ‘swipe up for more content’ promo clips; there’s also some stuff in here about IG Live giving streamers the ability to sell stickers to fans, which work in much the same way as similar systems on Twitch and YouTube (stickers give you special status in the comments, basically, functioning as a massive, glowing ‘PICK ME, SENPAI!’ to whichever blandly-attractive FIAT500 identikit sportswear-endorsing cut-out they happen to be watching at the time.
Updated Guidelines for Music on IG: Worth a read if you do lots of livestreaming and want to know exactly how much music you can have on in the background before the copyright police take you down.
YouTube Adds ‘Chapters’ Feature for Easy Timestamping: Not really sure what to add here, but it’s now LOADS easier to add little timestamps to your YT uploads so that viewers can easily find the bits they want to watch. Which, if you think about it, you could probably use for some moderately-clever gags within a video if you could be bothered, but which, now I think about it, almost certainly won’t be funny or smart enough to warrant the time it’ll take you to come up with them in the first place.
Pinterest Launches Curated Highlights: Have YOU been after a feature on Pinterest which will “bring the expert recommendations of influential fashion and home tastemakers as well as publishers directly to you”? I imagine you have! And now it’s here! This very similar to the Insta announcement from last week – effectively it’s curated editorial by influencers, but potentially makes Pinterest a more appealing platform for publishers than it might have been otherwise. As per, there are literally no details about how this will practically function, but maybe use your imagination and think really hard and you might be able to develop a rough idea.
The Adobe 99 Conference: Adobe are a company I deeply dislike – not least as I briefly had a pleasantly-lucrative little gig with them where I basically repackaged about 3% of Curios every couple of weeks for the handsome some of £500 a pop, a task which took me approximately 7 minutes and which I would happily have carried on doing forever but which fell victim to some managerial musical chairs at their end (oh, and I hate them for trying to stop us from using photoshop as a verb NO I WILL NOT ADD A ™ AT THE END OF THAT FCUK YOU ADOBE FCUK YOU!!!) – but this year they are offering a virtual version of their annual 99 creativity conference, attendance at which is normally about a grand, for FREE! It’s all about ‘creativity’, apparently, and features keynotes and workshops and might be useful; if nothing else, though, given that it’s free there’s practically no reason why your employer shouldn’t be happy for you to take two days for some personal and professional growth, leaving you free to sack the whole thing off and go and spend 48h drinking 20/20 in a park.
The Reddit Advertising School: Also free! You are all probably FAR TOO SENIOR to need any of this, but for any more junior advermarketingpr folk, or any students reading this, you might find this genuinely useful: “r/Advertising School is a free portfolio school hosted in Reddit’s r/Advertising community. The 12-week program features courses from industry professionals alongside real assignments to promote diversity in the ad industry.” It looks quite formal and structured, which might be a particular appeal, and given the breadth of what it covers – art direction to copywriting to brief writing to the relationship between advertising and PR – it’s definitely worth sharing with any kids curious about the industry if nothing else.
Nana by IKEA: If you don’t ordinarily read ‘the boring section at the top about a hateful industry which the world would be better off without’ but just happen to catch this out of the corner of your eye as you scroll past then WAIT STOP WAIT STOP COME BACK! This is, I concede, just a promotional website for furniture from Sweden, but it is SO FUN! Nana is a site created for IKEA Spain (I think), as part of competition to win the perfect bedroom or somesuch; that’s not the important bit. The important bit is that the site is also a competition mechanic, which requires you to sing along to a Swedish lullaby to register your entry; the better you sing the lullaby, the more sleepy your digital neighbours become, with ‘victory’ coming when you successfully lull them to sleep. Look, maybe it’s just a lowering of standards as we reach the fag-end of quarantine (ha! WE’LL ALL BE DOING THIS AGAIN IN A FEW MONTHS!!) but I found this properly charming, and absolutely belted this out when I played it earlier this week. Seriously joyful.

By Flora Yukhnovich

NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB, HIPHOP-HEAVY MIX COMPILED BY THE SUPERB B DOLAN!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PEOPLE INCREDULOUSLY MOUTHING “IT’S LIKE THERE’S ONE RULE FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US” THIS WEEK HAVE EVER STUDIED THE HISTORY OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY OR INDEED READ ONE OF ITS ELECTORAL MANIFESTOS, PT.1:

Jazz Keys: There was a part of me when I found this that really wanted to see what would happen if I wrote all of Curios in it; the answer, it turns out, as I found when typing this paragraph through the interface, is that I would find it almost impossible to stop typing, as the free-flowing piano does rather encourage the sort of preposterous run-on sentences of which I know I am already too fond for your liking. Right – back to the GDoc in which this is normally composed. WOW THIS IS SO MUCH FUN CLICK THE LINK RIGHT AWAY! Jazz Keys is very simple – you type, and the site turns your keystrokes into jazz piano. That’s it – except, seemingly-miraculously, whatever you type sounds sort-of…ok? I don’t know whether it’s a peculiar characteristic of jazz piano that you can basically cobble any notes together in a vaguely-syncopated rhythm and it’s just-about-listenable, or whether (more likely) there’s something under the hood here that prevents you from creating anything too cacophonic, but, regardless, the sounds this produces are lovely. I promise you, it’s nearly-impossible to feel stressed or annoyed when typing on this website – why not keep it open in a tab and use it as your new Tweet composer? I guarantee all your communications will be 17% cooler as a result.
It’s Me: I do wonder whether the recent boom in popularity of videocalling will in any way alter our relationship with the concept of the ‘avatar’ in online interactions; whereas a degree of anonymity was an expected and often mandatory part of online life back in the day, are we all becoming generally more accepting of revealing our real identities online? If your immediate answer to that is ‘dear god no, give me all the digital masks to hide behind so I can mask my hideous, disfigured countenance’ then a) hello kindred spirit; and b) you might like It’s Me, a new ‘friend finding’ service whose gimmick is that all interactions by default take place from behind an avatar. It’s designed as a layer on top of Snapchat, with users being able to autogenerate an avatar and jump into chats, which the idea being that if you like people you can move to Snapchat to take the conversation to the next level. I don’t know if I’m just being a bit middle-aged about this, but this does rather scream ‘beware of the paedos’ imho – also, there is something SO SAD about the App Store page featuring an image that reads ‘don’t get judged by your face’. I know that that’s how the world works, but, God.
Alethea: My boss got the ‘rona, so to cheer him up during his convalescence I popped on Cameo and spent 30 whole quid getting Duncan from Blue to record him a ‘get well soon’ message. Fair play to Duncan from Blue, he delivered within 24h and gave a good 90s of straight-down-the-camera, bronzed, beautiful, cheering inanity – he also, though, saw fit to share some slightly-bizarre and probably-not-totally-medically-accurate bits of wisdom about the importance of fighting COVID-19 with ‘plenty of vitamin C’, which did rather make me wonder whether if I logged onto his Insta I’d see him grifting for some sort of orange juice-based miracle cure. Anyway, that’s by way of pointless, unasked-for preamble to Alethea, which is ‘Cameo, but with people who aren’t real and have been generated by computer’ – basically a sort of deepfake factory, churning out custom content which you script and they render for $50 and upwards. There are some stock models to choose from – a baby Barack Obama (I really don’t want to think about some of the things I worry that baby Barack might have been made to say), a weird mashup of Trump and that bloke off that Netflix programme about the tigers you were all shouting about 11 weeks ago – and all you have to do is send them a script and they’ll do the rest (costs are per 200 words). This is really interesting; the models are ok, but very obviously CG-generated and I can’t imagine why you would ever want a video of a fake person saying made-up stuff straight to camera, but the potential is huge.
Manova: This is one of the…bolder ideas I’ve seen in a while. Undeterred by the fact that VR worlds haven’t exactly been setting the world alight of late, and the fact that Second Life creators Linden Labs last year shuttered their own planned version of a new digital universe, and the additional and probably more significant fact that Fortnite looks like by far and away the best bet for any sort of persistent metaverse-type-thing right now, a former HTC boss this week announced a standalone VR headset with its own standalone virtual world called Manova. So, er, they are gambling on a VR headset from a brand-new maker that noone has heard of, and a brand-new virtual world with no IP that can only be accessed by the aforementioned headset…no, sorry, this is absolutely never going to be anything other than a colossal failure. Even the website looks like it was cobbled together from unused CG renders from previous versions of the Sims, or by someone who remembers Playstation Home, complete with generic ‘watch films with friends!’ and ‘play games!’ exhortations with no actual detail about how these things will work, and why they will work better than previous versions of this sort of thing that literally noone wanted to use, ever. Still, fair play to whoever’s getting rich off this – someone DEFINITELY is.
This MP Does Not Exist: Insert your own, lame, moderately-topical gag here about whether the website name refers to members of the cabinet with a sense of shame or integrity. This is the latest project by Matt Round, whose trained a GAN on all the MP’s portraits and trained it to spit out new, imaginary ones at the push of a button – brilliantly, it does names and constituencies too (these must have been edited a bit, they are TOO perfect – I am sure Sir Edward Mole MP, Westworth and Dulsea, is a real person). I presume that these are all pre-generated and hosted somewhere in the background and that you would eventually run out of new, imaginary MPs to generate if you clicked long enough, but there are enough in here that you can keep going for quite a while. I feel there’s a pointless-but-fun bot you could make with this which automatically replies to people complaining about petty local matters on Twitter with one of these, along with a made-up .parliament.uk email address exhortation for the complainant to contact their MP and really vent.
Teooh: One thing I’ve learned about WORKING LIFE since it’s all gone virtual is that people really love having events. Love them. “We must do a webinar!”, they say, “we must do this conference!” Why, though? Be honest, how many work events or conferences have you ever been to that were anything other than, at best, a marginally-less painful way of wasting your time than being at work? Has anyone, ever, said anything useful or interesting on stage at an industry event (I talk specifically about advermarketingpr here – you may well do something less hatefully stupid for a living, and your conferences may be shining beacons of worth and meaning)? Yes, that’s right, I really am this much of a hateful misanthrope and a pleasure to have as a colleague! Now, imagine the horror of attending an event, but now it’s happening VIRTUALLY in what looks like a cross between The Sims circa 2005 and Habbo Hotel – yes, that’s right, it’s a VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE! You can have a DIGITAL STAGE and everyone can have their OWN AVATAR and there will be little emotes you can do, and…NOOONE WANTS THIS! Noone, literally noone, wants to have to learn a whole new series of inputs and a new UI and to customise their own avatar using totally unfamiliar settings and controls and to be dumped into a virtual space with a few dozen other avatars all flailing spastically and shouting things like “DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO PUT MYSELF ON MUTE???”. Look, a small piece of advice – JUST MAKE STUFF WORK PROPERLY IT IS ALL THE USER ASKS DO NOT TRY AND MAKE IT SHINY AND FUN WHEN IT DOESN’T EVEN DO THE BASICS RIGHT.
The Lost Horizon Festival: Thanks to Gill for sending this to me; I have literally no idea how this will work, but Lost Horizon is a festival happening virtually next month, run by the people behind Shangri-La which many of you won’t remember very clearly at all from Glastonburys past. It’s presenting itself as ‘the world’s largest festival in virtual reality’, but details on exactly what flavour of VR or what the experience will be like or who’s playing are…nonexistent. Still, they’ve got til 3-4 July to sort it all out – you can sign up for updates and, doubtless, aggressively-consistent Instagram advertising.
Stayk: This is a sweepstake generator, of which there are myriad on the web; the neat twist here is that you can use Stayk to create your very own deathpool tournament with friends, which is kept automatically up-to-date with regular Wikipedia data pulls – the site basically checks the Wikipedia entries of the famouses in question and alerts the players when one of them carks it and ends the game. Obviously this is VERY TASTELESS but I’ve always found the prospect of celebrity deathpools sort-of funny (blame it on all my time on Popbitch bitd) and the Wikipedia scraping is a smart little hack so WELL DONE Niall Beard for making it.
Vera Sebert: Vera Sebert is a digital artist; this link takes you to her online portfolio, which itself then links out to a range of small projects she’s built across the web over the years and which are all (well, the ones I’ve tried at least) interesting and engaging and interactive in inventive ways. Some of them are also in German, but, well, nothing’s perfect.
GTA Bike: THIS is the future of exercise. Honestly, if open world games don’t start coming with official ways of connecting your now-connected exercise equipment to them in some way, I will be amazed. This is a very technical set of instructions on how to link your domestic training bike to your computer so that you can PEDAL YOUR WAY THROUGH GTA!! This looks SO much fun – I know that there are various systems that let you ride digital races, etc, but I guarantee none of them will be anywhere near as fun as that bit in GTAV when you go careening down the hill from the observatory on the dirtbike. Seriously, this looks brilliant, to the extent that I could almost imagine wanting to get on an exercise bike were I able to give it a go (though I am not sure I could deal with the humiliation of dying of cardiac arrest whilst effectively playing a videogame).
Birds Taking The Train: A subReddit devoted to photographs of birds – mainly pigeons, as you might expect, on trains. Fare-dodging little fcukers.
Eight360: I know I’ve been a bit bear-ish about VR on here of late – I still think I’m right, by the way, it still lacks a killer reason to buy – but there really are some interesting developments coming up. This is onesuch thing – Eight360 is basically a real-life version of every single one of those ‘360-degree simulator-type immersive control systems for VR’ things that you’ve seen in every single VR film ever, from Lawnmower Man to Ready Player One, and it looks AMAZING. It also looks like it would make you incredibly ill very quickly, but in a fun way if that makes sense. Finally, it appears to be designed and developed by a pair of kids from New Zealand, which makes me want it to succeed quite a lot – GOOD LUCK, KIDS FROM NEW ZEALAND!
Extreme Mercator: A little toy which uses Google Earth (I think) to create weird-looking perspectives based on Mercator map projections – you know the ones, they’re all elongated at the poles. Plug in any location you want and it will create this weird, stretched, slightly-abstract but equally almost-recognisable aerial landscape. It’s…quite hard to describe, so I suggest you click the link and point it at the city of your choosing and see what happens.
Radio Recliner: This is a BRILLIANT idea, and exactly the sort of thing that literally ALL of you can almost certainly steal as an idea for a project you’re working on – it’s so good you can probably bend it to fit any client you like, with a bit of work. Radio Recliner is a US initiative, creating a ‘pirate’ radio station run by residents at old people’s homes across the country, each getting a ‘slot’ each day which are stitched together into continuous programming and OH MY WORD what a great project. Can someone please, please do this in the UK, in conjunction with Age UK or similar; I would totally tune in to a station playing old music and with some top-quality nana-reminiscence thrown in as between-tracks banter. Let’s resurrect the concept of Zoo Radio but with a zoo populated by venerable, elegant animals rather than the sh1t-flinging chimps of the Chris Evans era (this is a VERY old gag/reference which probably didn’t need to go in here, sorry).
The Ickabog: I am sure you all know that JK Rowling’s releasing a new, non-Potter story called The Ickabog; it’s being released chapter-by-chapter online, and they’re upto part 7 now (which, if you’re reading this via the Twitter bot next week, will be hopelessly out-of-date, sorry).
Global Hypercolour: In Swindon in 1992 there was literally NOTHING cooler than Global Hypercolour; a range of clothing which came in light pastel shades, was sold at M&S (I think) and which was MIND-MELTINGLY able to change colour based on temperature. Teenagers were seemingly unbothered by the fact that what this practically resulted in was your armpits standing out as massive colourbeacons of hormonal heat production and bought this stuff like there was no tomorrow (or at least their parents did, except my mum who wanted no truck with it, leaving me very bitter for a good few weeks), until everyone realised that the tshirts were terrible quality and the heat reactive qualities of the fabric sort of stopped working after a bit, after which you were simply left with a tshirt with weird blue sweat stains. MEMORIES! Anyway, for those of you for whom the preceding 100 words were a pleasing time machine of nostalgia – or for those of you to whom they meant nothing but who quite like the idea of having really standout armpits – there’s now someone selling them right here in 2020. Except the name’s now ‘Shadow Shifter’ (I presume someone somewhere still has the oh-so-valuable ‘global hypercolour’ trademark) and you have to buy them on Amazon (sorry) – I imagine the appalling quality and short-lived quality of the colour change will be EXACTLY the same, though.

By Christine Twang

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS MIX OF AFRO/LATINATE BEATS WHICH IS LITERALLY PERFECT FOR A SUNNY WEEKEND!!

Soviet Design: This is a lovely site, by a Ukrainian digital agency, which presents a history of design from the Soviet era (specifically from 1922-1991). This contains all the elements you’d expect – Communist-era typographical styles, profiles of the architects and designers whose work characterised the aesthetic of the era, and some really nice webwork alongside it, which manages to elevate rather than confuse the overall content and which is designed in such a way as to reinforce all the themes you’re discovering as you read. This is genuinely lovely, and I would absolutely hire these people based on this, were I ever able to work on something more interesting than sub-£10k ephemeral content repositories.
You Shall Not Pass: Reminiscent in theme of that nightmare UX website from last year which I can’t be bothered to dig out bu- see, I was typing that and I found myself compelled to dig out the link and put it in here for you – JESUS I HAVE A PROBLEM) except more limited in scope, this site asks you to do one simple thing and choose a password. This is funny partly because of how accurate it is, and neatly highlights one of my personal pet hates when it comes to webform UI – PLEASE IF THERE ARE NECESSARY CONDITIONS REQUIRED FOR MY PASSWORD TO BE ACCEPTABLE THEN TELL ME WHAT THOSE ARE BEFORE I TRY AND CREATE ONE YOU FCUKING CNUTS. It’s…a bugbear.
MS Dos in VR: It’s astonishing to me how much I still remember of MS Dos commands, born of the JOYFUL (not joyful at all) process that one used to have to go through when one wanted to play a game on a PC in the days before Windows – this is a brilliant little browsertoy (not VR at all, in fact) which lets you play around with an actual old PC on a virtual desktop, complete with several completely-playable games, and the ability to root around in all the subfolders. If you want a time machine back to the early-90s (there’s a lot of early-90s nostalgia in here this week, it seems – sorry, I promise I’ll stop fetishising the pre-web past soon, it’s just, well, IT WAS A BETTER TIME (I know it wasn’t a better time)) then this will scratch that itch perfectly.
Black Photo Booth: A found photo project collecting images of black people taken in photo booths through the 20th century, composed of found imagery. “I’ve been collecting found images of Black people for many years. Some of my favorites are photo booth portraits. They often show Black people of different ages, genders, classes in serious and also playful poses. Usually, there are no names listed so these anonymous people invite the viewer to use their imagination in crafting a story about their lives.” This is a beautiful project, and if you click the ‘download’ button in the top-right you can get the images as a PDF booklet for ease-of-viewing.
Choose Your Plant: Have you gotten REALLY into caring for plants over the course of the past few months indoors? Are they now more real to you than those half-remembered fleshy shapes you used to refer to as ‘friends’ and ‘family’? Would you like to meet a community of fellow plant enthusiasts, ready to discuss all things flora with you and offer you support when the Cyclamen just won’t take? If so, welcome to your new favourite place on the internet. There’s also LOADS of useful information on helping the bloody things stay alive – always the problem I have – along with a useful tool to help you choose appropriate greeney for whatever domestic setup you might have with regard to light, humidity, etc. I would hope that the associated community pages are a wonderful, nurturing community where your love for your vegetal friends can blossom (sorry), but obviously Web Curios takes no responsibility whatsoever should you discover that it’s been taken over by actual Nazis or something.
Dancing Horse Friends: It was suggested to me last year that I might want to swap out the sadly dying ‘Tumblrs’ mini-section of Curios with one dedicated to TikToks – the problem with that is that I would have to spend more time on TikTok, and I don’t really want to. Occasionally though I find an account that really is worth sharing with you – such an account is Dancing Horse Friends, which is pretty much the apogee of ‘weird meme TikTok’; ‘relatable’ content about horses, all of it made through what looks like some sort of godawful free-to-play game about grooming ponies. I have no idea, basically, which I imagine is sort of the point (I also imagine that whoever makes these would be devastated if a 40 year old man did understand tbh).
What Sylvia Ate: The juxtaposition between this and the previous link is sort of the ur-example of the difference between TikTok and Twitter – TikTok, a series of videos of poor-quality CG horses to Lorde about their living conditions; Twitter, a series of Tweets listing stuff that Sylvia Plath ate based on her diary entries. There’s a reason why one is significantly more popular than the other, isn’t there?
Toledo Miniatures: I once read a really good an involved article that explained exactly what it was about miniaturism that exerted such a strong and powerful hold over the human psyche – there’s something quite primal it awakens in us, apparently, which is why we all to a greater or lesser degree find VERY SMOL things fascinating and, occasionally, a bit unsettling. Sadly I’ve forgotten everything about the article other than the fact I once read it, so I can’t explain what that something is – know, though, that that is what is causing you to react to this site. Toledo Miniatures is, I think, just one very talented craftsperson, Chris Toledo, who makes these INSANELY high-quality, high-detail models of individual rooms. Honestly these are INCREDIBLE, although I don’t really understand why anyone would want to commission a tiny, perfectly-formed model of a very, very nice bathroom for approximately $6k.
If I Knew Then: This is interesting, in part for its banality; If I Knew Then is a project collecting ‘wisdom’ and life lessons from the Harvard Business School’s class of 1963, with the idea being that this generation of graduates lived and worked through so much significant change that their perspectives will doubtless be invaluable. The site acknowledges the fact that a bunch of old white blokes might not seem like the most intriguingly-relevant spokespeople to educate current generations, but then goes on to present a bunch of reasonably-boring bromides as noteworthy fact. There’s nothing bad about this per se, it’s just it’s slightly depressing to find that all the ‘advice’ these people can impart basically boils down to things like ‘don’t make rash decisions’ and ‘don’t be a cnut’ (actually these are scions of American business – they probably don’t even believe the latter, let alone say it) – I find the whole project more interesting as a potential training source for a neural net tbh, to create a bot that will automatically spit out some hoary, old-timey business and life chat at the press of a button. Or, and here’s a project for one of you, why not take this and make it your entire LinkedIn persona for the coming year? Why not live your digital business life as an HBS alumni? Actually, that would be quite fun – I bet those dead-eyed no-soul cnuts on LinkedIn would lap this up.
Icon Rewind: ANOTHER MSCHF project, this time letting you download old versions of all the app icons on your (i)phone so you can pretend it’s still a simpler, kinder time, when the Snapchat ghost had a face and Insta was still a camera and we’d never even heard the term ‘social distancing’.
Hey JTree: A website for you to find and befriend a Joshua Tree. “Hey JTree is an ongoing participatory art research project that utilizes social media, and an on-line dating site for meeting Joshua trees. The goal of Hey JTree is to actively enhance interaction between research, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park, and on-line audiences with collected data from individual trees using text, photographs, art, and short video clips of charismatic Joshua trees set to music.” Let me repeat that last line – CHARISMATIC JOSHUA TREES SET TO MUSIC. Never let it be said that Web Curios doesn’t provide the very finest entertainment content to be found online.
Unfun Facts: This is a genuinely GREAT Reddit thread which I must at the same time offer you quite a stern warning about – this contains quite a few upsetting truths which once learned can’t be unknown. It also, though, contains SO MANY AMAZING FACTS, like one about the exploding corpse of Henry VIII, and the fact that scallops have TWO HUNDRED TINY EYES and, er, a whole load of really horrible ones about death and stuff. Still, if you want a seemingly neverending supply of things to horrify and amaze teenage boys, this is pretty much perfect.
Constancia: A small web game all about the value of perseverence, playable in Spanish or English. This is lovely, and despite the slightly nose/pointy nature of the theme and message I found it rather beautiful.
Zelda Sudoku: I don’t do SuDoku, but I am informed by people who do that this is both a very good example of the genre and one which becomes pleasingly-tricky around about level 3 – basically it’s SuDoku with chests and powerups and a simple Zelda-style theming, if you’d like a little bit of additional scene-setting with your numbers.
All Things Equal: To give it its full title, “all things equal i would prefer it if we were safe & lonely instead of together & afraid but i cannot deny that it is hard” – this is a small game about loneliness and lockdown and fear and it is very, very lovely indeed.
Out For Delivery: Finally in the miscellania this week, this is something you’ll have to download but I promise it’s worth it; all filmed in first person, and presented as an interactive 3d video which is part-documentary, part-game, this is “an interactive documentary in 360 degree video following a slice-of-life story of a food delivery courier in Beijing on Jan 23, 2020. It was filmed the day before Lunar New Year and the same day when Wuhan City shut down due to COVID-19.” SO interesting, so well-made, and so much something that I feel ought to spawn a whole new genre of interactive entertainment. This is really, really good.

By Liu Ye

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS DOWNTEMPO, AMBIENT, LOUNGE-Y SET BY ROMAIN FX!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things: OH I LOVE THIS! Fine, it’s not technically a Tumblr, but it absolutely could be, which makes it taxonomically fine, right? Right! “For those with a taste for the peculiar (AUTHORIAL NOTE: IT ME!), The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is an imaginary museum that explores the strange place between art and curiosities. The museum celebrates the odd, the creative, the spooky and the eccentric. We value the special magic that draws people toward weird and wonderful things, and we believe it can be used to foster more creativity, compassion and curiosity in the world.” Curated by Dr Chelsea Nichols, this is just FULL of great stuff and incredibly creepy victoriana in particular.
Pacific Voyages: This, though, really is a Tumblr! Pacific Voyages is an odd site which collects the writings of one Jamis Macniven, all about his opinions on various places around the Pacific. It’s…very odd. I can’t quite tell whether this is fiction and Macniven is a construct being used as some sort of creative writing project or if they really exist and are really like this; both are quite appealing prospects. I suggest you jump in and have a nose around – there are a few entries on there covering a variety of places, so see if it grabs you.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

The New Museum: The New Museum in Manhattan’s Insta feed is currently posting a story a day, read by various artists as part of a project by Maurizio Cattelan; they range from poetry to novel fragments to short stories, but there’s something lovely about getting a three-minute auditory pause in your feed (the rest of it’s good too, but the stories are why I’m linking).
Karens Going Wild: Repeat after me: KAREN. IS. NOT. A. SLUR. KAREN. IS. NOT. HATESPEECH. (now take a moment to imagine that this edition of Web Curios slips through a wormhole and ends up in 2016, and how you’d explain this opening to someone – four years is a LONG time in The Culture). Anyway, you’re probably one of the 1.7m people who’s already followed this since it launched a week or so ago; you know what the score is. I imagine the comments on these posts are quite the thing.
David Allen: David Allen is a tattoo artist who specialises in work on women who’ve had mastectomies, and much of his feed features body art used as part of the process of recovery from surgery. This is BEAUTIFUL.
Igor Sandimirov: 3d animation IN YOUR FEED. Lovely work, this.
Kathleen Roberts: I can only leave you the description – you will have to then decide whether you want this in your life: “I am a physical medium and wife of Michael Jackson the ghost. I am also an adult model on Only Fans. I put my ghost channelings on there as well.” IT IS ABSOLUTELY AS GOOD AS YOU WOULD EXPECT.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

The NYT’s Cover Story From Last Weekend: You will, I am sure, have seen images of the cover – which the NYT on Sunday dedicated to listing names of those killed by COVID-19 in the US, along with a single line of biography to humanise and render them real – but it’s also worth looking at the online version, which manages to pack a similar punch to the gut but in a way that uses the properties of a webpage to make its point rather than the confines of a printed sheet. Such superb design, totally in service of the story it’s telling. The Guardian this week launched an adjacent project to commemorate some of those who’ve lost their lives to the pandemic in the UK, which lives here should you wish to take a look – this feels unnecessary to say, but, well, it’s obviously heartbreakingly sad, just f your i.
COVID in Mongolia: I met up with my friend Fat Bob for SOCIALLY DISTANCED PARK BEERS yesterday afternoon, along with what seemed like everyone else in SW9 (seriously, there is no way in HELL everyone is going to go back to being stuck in the office all summer now that we’ve realised that we can slack off whenever we want and NOONE WILL EVER BE ABLE TO TELL), and we were having a conversation about how one of the most infuriating aspects of the UK’s response to the pandemic has been the weird, clunky sense of British snobbery and exceptionalism and superiority that’s imbued much of our response. We won’t just have an app – we’ll have a WORLD LEADING app (we won’t); we won’t just collaborate on finding a vaccine – it will be BORN AND BRED IN WORLD-BEATING BRITISH LABS (it won’t); we will follow our own path because WE KNOW BEST (we don’t)…it’s hard for me to disentangle this attitude from the fact we’re being run by a bunch of Etonian Conservatives, frankly. Contrast this with Mongolia, as profiled in this piece – noone’s idea of a top-tier nation, least of all Mongolia’s, the country has quietly and sensibly gone about the business of protecting itself from the pandemic with staggering success so far, to the point of having NO deaths at all at the time of the article’s writing. The piece looks at what steps Mongolia took, when it took them, and what other countries could have learned – the lesson to us at least seems very much to be ‘not to be such crushingly arrogant relics of a colonial past that no longer exists and a world order that no longer maintains’.
Cocaine In A Time of Pandemic: A fascinating look at how cartels in South America are working to ensure that London’s favourite pick-me-up continues to be available in the industrial quantities to which so many seem to be accustomed. Mainly interesting to me as an object-lesson in the importance of maintaining a relatively-flexible logistics operation, but also a useful reminder of exactly how the cocaine you take at the weekend gets to you and how many people it’s killing along the way (I should probably point out here that whilst I don’t buy coke I do buy other drugs and therefore have literally no moral high ground here whatsoever, nor indeed am I trying to claim any).
The Restaurant Reopening Guide: This is fascinating. Black Sheep Restaurants in Hong Kong have made their guidance on how they are going about reopening their establishments publicly available online – this links to a PDF of their guidelines for restaurants on how to operate, communicate and administer themselves as they attempt to work out a viable business model alongside social distancing. Worth reading if you have any interest at all in how, practically, we might go about restoring some semblance of pre-COVID normalcy to life.
Will Corona Save Facebook?: Forums are basically the cockroaches of online life – THEY WILL NEVER DIE. This is evidenced by the fact that, as this article points out as its central point, Facebook has basically pivoted HARD to forums in the past few years (what are Groups? Forums! Facebook is basically Reddit but for stuff from Past Reddit), and its that functionality that has seen its usage amongst younger demographics – the ones, don’t forget, that we were assured a few years ago would NEVER use Facebook – soar over the past three months. Fundamentally-speaking, Facebook has attained a size and scale that makes it part of human infrastructure, infrastructure which becomes significantly more important at times of crisis; as plenty of people are finding out, for better or worse, life is simply easier for many people with Facebook plugged into it, which is why it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Return of the Drive-In: This is a news article about Keith Urban doing a gig at a drive-in in the US and it’s not hugely interesting beyond that, but I’m including it as I became convinced this week that in-car group socialising could be a temporary thing and I want someone at NCP to see this and pay me a fat consultancy fee to make it reality.
Coronagrifting: This is a superb essay, but one that made me feel a but guitility queasy, as it probably should you too – if you work in advermarketingpr and have been lucky enough to still have a job over the past few months, chances are you’ve been involved in a brainstorm or some other meeting in which you’ve ‘thrown around some ideas’ (or, perhaps ‘th’rona round’ ahahahahazzzzzzzzzzzzz) pertaining to the pandemic and stuff that clients could do do get attention as a result of it. You might have used the phrase ‘thought leadership’ or ‘futurology’ (don’t worry, don’t worry, I have to demean myself like this too. Although to my credit, at least I don’t try and hide my self-loathing as I do so), or even considered ‘getting some CG mockups of what it might look like’. Well done, you’ve been ‘coronagrifting’ – the term, coined by Kate Wagner to cover the sort of made-up, obviously-just-bullsh1t COVID-related stuff you’ve seen all over the web; the Burger King social distancing crown, for example, or those preposterous hanging perspex ceiling domes that no restaurant will ever install, or anything else that masquerades as a solution to a corona problem but which is self-evidently just, well, bullsh1t. So, so true. This made me feel quite bad, both about myself and the sh1t I choose to do to pay my mortgage, so I thought I’d share!
Lessons From Record Labels: A really interesting essay, this, by Jarrod Dicker, in which he argues that social media platforms should take a leaf from record companies’ books by seeing themselves effectively as talent agencies rather than content platforms. It’s a smart argument that makes sense, and which you can see happening RIGHT NOW, with Spotify paying all that money for the thinking troglodyte’s thinking troglodyte Joe Rogan, and Twitch, Facebook and YouTube (and a few others) squabbling over Ninja et al; it’s also the sort of thing which, I worry, would probably have negative repercussions in terms of the barriers to entry that this sort of setup seemingly inevitably engenders. Remember what it was like attempting to make a career in music pre-web? Whilst it might make sense for the platforms, I’m not 100% sure that the consumer would benefit from this – artists, I’m unsure.
Meth In Afghanistan: You’d think Afghanistan might catch a break one of these decades, but seemingly not – next on the looong list of things deciding they are going to mess with the country is meth addiction! This is a fascinating article examining how Afghan drug cartels have relatively-recently discovered that they can extract ephedrine from the locally-abundant plant ephedra, meaning they can start cooking a LOT of meth; the piece gives an overview of the history of the drug’s entry into the country, and gives an idea of how quickly it could become a very popular export commodity.
Design Notes on Tactics Games: If you’re not into videogames or games design, skip this one. If you are, though, it’s a really interesting series of observations on design choices made in a pair of tactical shooter games, how they work, why some choices are better than others, how they impact player choice and overall gameplay…basically this is an object lesson on how to think critically about systems and processes, which is something I find really interesting but am yet to find a way to communicate about without sounding crushingly, biblically dull.
The TikTok Cult: This is very, very odd, and it’s hard not to end up imagining the episode of Black Mirror that takes the overall conceit of this piece and runs with it as far as it can. The Step Chickens is the name given to fans of TikTok star Melissa Ong, who’s basically discovered that she can get thousands and thousands of kids to go and do stuff on her behalf online, and is mobilising them to do just that. It’s a bit like the old-school habit of messageboard drivebys, where a forum would decide to ‘invade’ another community for lulz (there was a period when Popbitch had a pleasingly-antagonistic beef with an online community for residents of Liphook, iirc), except with SO MANY MORE PEOPLE. So far it’s all been quite benign, and there was even someone smart enough to use this as part of marketing for an app launch, but it doesn’t take an imagination as miserably inclined towards disaster as mine is to see how this could go quite wrong quite quickly. Still, ABSOLUTELY one to add to your marketing trends presentation under the heading ‘INFLUENCERS – THE NEXT EVOLUTION’ or some other awful, hyperbolic guff.
The Many Faces of Housekeeping: This is a brilliant piece of journalism by Ed Gillett in The Quietus, ostensibly a review of the new album by house purveyors Housekeeping which then pivots to become an excellent discussion and critique of the extent to which quite a lot of aspects of mainstream dance culture have been coopted by the rich, and how a culture born out of black and queer experience is being repackaged as something to sell to middle-class white ‘creatives’ alongside the Cowshed cosmetics and a Soho Farmhouse weekend. Good writing, and pleasingly angry about the whole thing.
The Coffee Grounds Fortune Telling App: Sorry, I really can’t think of a decent heading for this one. Still, it’s a fascinating story – I love reading about popular digital stuff that is HUGE in a particular part of the world but utterly unknown (oh, ok, utterly unknown to me) outside of it. The ‘digital stuff’ in question here is the hugely-popular Turkish app Faladdin, which takes the centuries-old practise of divining one’s fortune by reading coffee grounds and makes it an app – users snap a photo of the bottom of their coffee, upload it to the app and are rewarded with a personal reading, conducted by ‘AI’, within 15 minutes. To be clear how big this is, let me quote you this line: “In Turkey, it ranks first in the Google Play store’s Lifestyle category, ahead of Tinder.” BIG BUSINESS. This is a genuinely interesting piece, telling a familiar story – disruption! Privacy concerns! The dismantling of heritage by modernity! – in an unfamiliar setting.
Ate My Balls: This is a piece from 1997 – 1997! LITERALLY 23 YEARS AGO – in Salon Magazine, all about the trend for webpages that were all about a certain pop culture figure or celebrity and their love of EATING BALLS. Mickey Mouse, Elmo, Captain Planet…anyone and everyone in the mid-90s had a site where it was claimed that they love to EAT BALLS. It was a meme, basically, and this article tries to explain it to readers – what’s wonderful about this is that it is EXACTLY the same article you have read 100 times, in which a ‘serious’ publication interviews a meme creator only to find that there is nothing whatsoever to say about their creation other than ‘yeah, it’s sort-of funny how big it got’. When it seems that internet culture moves at a pace just a shade over lightspeed, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that some things don’t change at all.
Pr0n and the Pandemic: Taking as its starting point the explosion in popularity of OnlyFans and the growing number of people seemingly considering taking up some form of sex work as an income generator, this piece looks at how quarantine and the limitations it’s imposed are seeing a possible shift in the model for the industry away from studio shoots towards a preponderance of self-shot content. I am personally fascinated about what this might mean for human sexual appetites, particularly amongst the young; as we all know, bongo shapes desire as much as desire shapes bongo, and I do wonder what a new emphasis to cracking one off to images of other people cracking one off are going to do for people’s attitudes to sex featuring more than one person.
The 9 Year Old Who Dreams of Grandmasterdom: I don’t normally, if ever, feature anything on Curios that could be described as ‘heartwarming’, but I’ll make an exception for this piece, which only a dead person could fail to be cheered by. Meet Tani Adewume, a refugee from Nigeria to the US, formerly homeless, who’s one of the most exciting minds in US chess right now and whose entire story will honestly make you do a small, happy weep it’s so sweet.
Food, Culture and Gatekeeping: The ‘extremely online’ amongst you – ha, like anyone other than the extremely online would EVER look at this – will probably be aware of the Alison Roman / Marie Kondo / Chrissy Teigen thing (those of you who aren’t, it’s explained in the piece); this is a superb essay in Eater by Navneet Alang, which does a better job of almost anything I’ve read at explaining the importance of conversations about cultural appropriation in food, the whiteness of food media and culture, and how the two interrelate. Really, really well-written, and probably the best explanation I’ve read about why this stuff matters.
Steve Buscemi: It is impossible to read this profile of Steve Buscemi without falling slightly in love with him. Try it, you won’t succeed.
Eels: The highest compliment I can pay this piece is that it’s an extract from a book all about eels whose title is ‘The Book of Eels’ and which talks exclusively about eels, their lives and their general…eeliness, and yet despite that it is SO GOOD that it has led me to pre-order the thing. Honestly, this is superb writing; the language is wonderful (credit to both author and translator) and, er, it really, really made me want to eat some smoked eel. Sorry lads.
The Lie of One Last Time With My Ex: Finally this week, I absolutely adored this essay, which is all about the different times the author had the last ever sex they would ever have with their ex, and captures absolutely perfectly the very specific, intense self-absorbtion of relationships in ones teens and twenties. Beautiful, beautiful writing by Ella Dawson; read this with a glass of wine.