Webcurios 21/02/20 – webcurios

Reading Time: 33 minutes

HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! I am slightly demob-happy this afternoon; I am going to the seaside (looking out of the window as I type suggests that this may not be the sunshine paradise that I might have hoped) and I am granting myself the boon of a WHOLE WEEKEND off the internet – meaning there won’t be any Curios next week. Sorry about that, but occasionally one needs to decouple (or, more accurately, spend some time reminding oneself that spending the entiretly of one’s life face-to-monitor is, perhaps, sub-optimal, and taking steps before I become an entirely binary creation).

Still, I like to think that there’s enough goodness (oh, ok, fine, enough ‘-ness’ – the ‘good’ bit is, I concede, subjective) in here to keep you happily clicking and reading and laughing and crying for the full fortnight til I return – and if there isn’t, you can still buy issue 2 of Imperica Magazine for a mere £3 here, which will DEFINITELY keep you in prose til I’m back.

Regardless, know that whilst I won’t be with you next week, I will be thinking of you – don’t worry yourselves with exactly what I’ll be thinking, for that way madness lies (or at the very least a sense of creeping discomfort and the growing knowledge that it’s probably not ok)., just rest assured that I will.

I am Matt, this is Curios, and I bet you miss it a little bit even if you’d never admit it to yourself.

By Natalie Foss

FITTINGLY THIS WEEK’S MIXES KICK OFF WITH SOME ANDY WEATHERALL – RIP

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS ‘INFLUENCERS PIVOTING TO SHILLING LIES FOR POLITICIANS’ IS VERY MUCH THE FUTURE WE DON’T NEED SO THANKS FOR THAT (AND EVERYTHING ELSE) MARK!:

Facebook Launches Creators Studio Mobile App: You know the Facebook Creators’ Studio, right? OF COURSE YOU DO OR YOU WOULDN’T BE BOTHERING WITH THE OPENING SECTION! Anyway, you can now get it on mobile – iOS and Android – so you need never, ever stop creating MORE CONTENT to feed the Big Blue Misery Factory’s ceaseless appetite for datapoints. If you’re in the invidious position of having to produce stuff for, and post it to, Facebook all the time, this is obviously hugely useful – it seemingly contains all the desktop gubbins but, well, smol and phone-sized. Humans, it seems, have become like sharks now; much as they will die if they stop swimming, we will seemingly expire if we cease even for a second creating fresh new material to sate the beast. NEVER STOP CREATING. NEVER.
Facebook’s Regulation White Paper: When I found this at the beginning of the week, I thought that I’d have to read through the whole thing in punishing detail to bring you the very BEST bits of it – then, though, the European Union went and rejected it all out of hand and so, whilst we’re technically no longer bound by their assessments, I’m inclined to agree with them. Basically, the line here is ‘self-regulation is great, and, by the way, we’ve got this independent oversights board so frankly that’s probably all we need to do, right lads?’ – conveniently, much of what Zuckerberg calls for (or what his expensive team of legal enforcers calls for, perhaps more accurately) is stuff that Facebook is already doing, making the burden on the platform (surprise!) relatively light. On the one hand, everything outlined in here is nakedly self-serving and designed both to limit the actual amount platforms like Facebook need to submit to any sort of meaningful regulatory scrutiny; on the other, it’s not like the UK Government’s ‘don’t worry, we’ll get Ofcom to take a look at it’ line from last week was hugely robust either. Basically this is another in the series of slightly cross-purposes utterances from one of the major players in the regulatory debate which doesn’t really serve to bring us any closer to a resolution; I did, though, enjoy this piece by ex-Chair of the Culture Media & Sport Select Committee Damian Collins – a man who’s perhaps enjoyed the international oxygen of publicity afforded him by his former position a bit too much – in which he argues that one of the problems with Facebook’s position is that it would require a degree of international cooperation that ‘would never happen’. Damien, mate, one might argue that that’s not exactly the sort of can-do attitude we like to see from our lawmakers.
Facebook Changes Ad Rules Re Politics & Influencers: I DONE GOT A PREDICTION RIGHT! Waaay back last year when Facebook implemented its rules around what constituted ‘political’ advertising I wrote something about how this was likely to lead to a weird future in which politicians and parties circumvented the rules by paying influencers to shill on their behalf instead and thereby not needing to declare the promotion as ‘political’ at all and thus managing to circumvent inclusion in the ad library and, conveniently, making it harder to track spending, etc. AND LO IT CAME TO PASS! What’s particularly interesting is the question of whether the lack of scrutiny over the veracity of political claims on Facebook/Insta will apply to this stuff too. You’d imagine it will, meaning not only will politicians be able to lie with impunity on Facebook and Insta – they’ll also be able to pay others to lie on their behalf, with the only sign that it might be a paid endorsement being the oh-so-easy-to-miss ‘#spon’ tagged on the end of the post. Nope, no way at all that this could possibly get messy or complicated, right?
Facebook Dataset Available for Academic Use: In my head I like to imagine that there’s a shadow readership for Curios that consists of scholars and academics rather than bored advermarketingpr office monkeys – I know it’s not true, but, well, it adds a small veneer of meaning to this otherwise pointless endeavour. Anyway, for this entirely fictional coterie of highbrow Curiofans, here! “The dataset itself contains a total of more than 10 trillion numbers that summarize information about 38 million URLs shared worldwide more than 100 times publicly on Facebook (between 1/1/2017 and 7/31/2019). It also includes characteristics of the URLs (such as in which country they were shared and whether they were fact-checked or flagged by users as hate speech) and the aggregated data concerning the types of people who viewed, shared, liked, reacted to, shared without viewing, and otherwise interacted with these links. This dataset enables social scientists to study some of the most important questions of our time about the effects of social media on democracy and elections with information to which they have never before had access.” You’ll need to apply for access to it – there’s a link to an RFP document which explains the criteria and process – but if you’re in any way connected to research around questions of online influence and political persuasion then this seems significant and very much worth checking out.
It’s Now Easier To Add New Tweets To Old Ones: This is a very cosmetic little update which makes it marginally easier to attach a brand new Tweet to an old one from your account, meaning it’s simpler to create threads with sporadic updates, say, or, if you’re a business account, to have long-running threads about product updates or customer service enquiries, etc. It’s a small change, but one which might save you a few seconds in the future which you could then spend scrolling mindlessly through content.
TikTok Introduces Parental Controls: On the one hand, A Good Thing; on the other, exactly the sort of stuff that any halfway-smart kid will be able to get around in about two minutes flat. Still, parents who create a TikTok account and link it with their kid’s account “will be able to control how long the teen can spend on the app every day; turn off or limit who the teen can direct message; and choose to turn on TikTok’s “restricted” mode that will limit inappropriate content.” Do we all see the small-but-obvious problem with this approach?
TikTok Tips: Another new feature, TikTok Tips is a new, platform-owned account which exists (and you’ll like this) to “promote privacy, safety, and positive vibes” – and who doesn’t love those things? NO FCUKER, that’s who! It’s effectively a community-fronted channel in which popular TikTokers will post videos talking about a range of issues including the app’s safety features and how to use them, the importance of, y’know, being nice, and, wonderfully, reminders that occasionally kids might want to turn the program off and get some sleep every now and again. I know I always say this, but does anyone else find the idea of an app presenting you a neverending stream of video designed specifically to be compelling, entertaining and a bit addictive, all algorithmically-curated to appeal to YOU and all your SPECIAL PERSONAL SECRET LIKES, performed by a succession of often impossibly-attractive and talented and funny and clever kids, and then interspersing that with occasional messages from the same kids saying things like “but don’t let us make you feel inadequate or untalented, we’re all special!” and “maybe don’t keep watching our beautiful faces until you start to bleed from the eyes and lose bodily function from starvation!” a little bit fcuking rich? No?
Leveraging TikTok For Growth: Or, an incredibly-comprehensive rundown of exactly how the TikTok algorithm works – or how this article’s author thinks it works – and exactly the things you need to to do give yourself the best chance of being this week’s ‘man who can do the tablecloth/wineglasses trick using his buttocks’ (and we can all agree there is no position on this earth more exalted). Really interesting – if you’re trying and struggling to gain traction with your TikToks (I am so sorry for writing that phrase; it’s a nadir, and it’s only 734am) then this is definitely worth reading.
Google Analytics Breakdown of Get Mark: I know that YOU all know exactly how Google Analytics works and the basics of what it can tell you; this may not be true of all your colleagues, though, and as such this Twitter thread by Dan Barker, in which he analyses the traffic to last week’s Valentine’s web sensation Mark Rofe (the bloke from Manchester who offered a date with himself via a billboard and website) to see what it tells us. Obviously if you’re an SEO or website person then this will all be very much beneath you, but for people who are a bit more like me – pathetic, hopeless generalists, bluffing their way from one meeting to the next through a mixture of Googling and talking very very fast – it might be useful.
D.I.C.E: This is A Good Thing. Various advermarketingprland people have gotten together to come up with DICE (I can’t be bothered to do the full stops every time, sorry) which stands for Diversity and Inclusion at Conferences and Events – the idea being to take practical steps to ensure that our industry’s events are always as representative and diverse as possible. They’ve come up with a voluntary charter that event organisers can sign up to and measure themselves against, and offer the opportunity for events to get DICE Certified to prove they’ve made an effort to ensure representation of diverse groups, and generally this is an excellent initiative that we should all get behind. Unrelated, but I spoke at an event a few weeks ago where they had live signing on stage; I didn’t see this, but apparently the person who was signing along with me was at several points seen to just sort of wave her hands exasperatedly as she struggled to keep up – sorry, sign language interpreter, I will do better next time.
Pearl Jam Moon: Big fan of Pearl Jam’s new weirdly-80s-inflected sound; equally, I am a fan of this web app designed to promote their new single, which co-opts the moon as a QR code – load the site on your phone at night, point it at the moon, and get to enjoy Eddie Vedder’s distinctive rasp just like it was 1995 all over again. This also works with other, non-lunar light sources, by the way, though that’s cheating.

By Ed Fairburn

IN FACT LET’S HAVE SOME MORE ANDY WEATHERALL AS HE WAS SO ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK YOU HAVE ANY MORAL HIGH GROUND ABOUT ANYTHING IF YOU READ THE MAIL, SORRY, PT.1:

These Lyrics Do Not Exist: I could quite easily just drop this here and leave you to it this week; I CAN’T STOP MAKING IT CREATE SONG LYRICS THEY ARE JUST TOO GOOD. The latest in the now year-long trend for single-serving websites presenting AI-generated…stuff, this uses GPT-2 and a few little mood sliders to allow you to generate the lyrics to a whole song in under a second with just the push of a button. Give it a word, give it a phrase, give it a name, see what comes out – honestly, some of these are GREAT. I just fed it “your tears taste sweet”, and it took moments to throw out something whose chorus reads: “I need your lips, I need your kiss / I wanna trust you with my heart, my head, my soul / See your face everyday in the mirror / Tearing down the photographs when we were alright”, which I think we can all agree is the soft rock/emo crossover we all need right now. As an added bonus I just typed in my name and told it to compose a neutral song in the ‘rock’ style based around it; the resulting first verse is so painfully real that I might have to take a moment: “Matt still told me Matt loved me when Matt packed up / But how could Matt ever know what I knew already / Matt said Matt wanna save you / But you know I want you all too much”. MATTROCK!
Chaf: Perhaps, looking back, we should have paid more attention to Chatroulette – the neverending stream of strangers keen to either insult you or wave their genitals at you was, maybe, exactly the sort of warning metaphor for the modern web which we all should have heeded. Still, time moves on and as we are now all far too aware of exactly how much of a bad idea connecting random strangers on the internet can be someone’s come up with a way of doing chatroulette but SAFE – welcome to Chaf, a website which does exactly the same as Chatroulette (to whit, connecting you with another stranger currently on the site) except with the difference that there’s no video feed and you can ONLY communicate via gifs. Which, obviously, makes it totally pointless as a communications tool, but which means you can have some genuinely odd and pleasingly-oblique interactions with strangers as you both try and construct the semblance of meaning from a series of low-quality gifs of Ryan Reynolds (seemingly it is ALWAYS Ryan fcuking Reynolds). I think it’s probably impossible to be cruel or to solicit sex through this, though don’t let that stop you from trying (please don’t try).
The Financial Freedom Movement: Or, “Pay $20 a month so that YouTuber Jake Paul can tell you to quit academia and make content instead!”. Yes, what you’ve doubtless been waiting for – YouTube notoriety and dead-eyed grift-monkey Jake Paul this week launched his online academy, the Financial Freedom Movement, through which he promises to teach kids how to pursue their goals of…er…earning money by wanging around on video? It’s not exactly clear what advice it is that Paul purports to be offering here, but I’m willing to bet that there is going to be a heavy emphasis on the vital importance of ‘content’ as THE single most valuable and important commodity in the world right now (depressingly there’s an angle from which that’s sort-of true), repeated use of the word ‘hustle’ and a strong recurrent theme of how you should believe in yourself and ignore the haters. If nothing else – even if you don’t really know who Jake Paul is, and care even less – I beg you to please click this and scroll to the bottom and read the ‘letter to parents’ which I confess made me feel a degree of almost grudging admiration. I mean, here’s an excerpt – the chutzpah is astonishing: “If you’re already paying for Netflix or Hulu or Amazon Prime, then this is a no brainer. Those things aren’t helping your child or their future are they? Whereas for only $19.99 per month your child has access to world renowned experts who have taught and impacted over one million students around the globe. This is your chance to show you are truly committed as a parent to giving your child access to the best resources and education they can have to live a great life on their terms.” I don’t think this needs saying, but just in case – DO NOT GIVE THIS MAN ANY MONEY.
The Davos Collection: Best artwork of the 2020s so far, this – I don’t care whether it’s real or of it happened or not, the idea alone is enough. The Davos Collection was apparently auctioned off in NYC yesterday at a secret location. The contents of the auction? A selection of material from the World Economic Forum, all liberated from parties and restaurants and hotels and cafes, all dirty, and all carrying the genetic material of some of the gilded attendees of Davos 2018. The link takes you to the auction catalogue, but the project press release can be read here; I love the ‘meh, who knows?’ attitude to the legality of all of this, and the slight uncertainty as to whether there in fact was an auction; still, even if purely conceptual the piece asks interesting questions about wealth and achievement and status and ability, and if it means that one day everyone will be able to own their personal pet plutocrat then I think we can all agree it’s a winner.
Giggle: If you were going to launch an app in 2020 that was guaranteed to cause a massive, toxic online fight, what sort of app would you launch? Take a moment to think on it – now click the link and learn about Giggle and see if your invention is more or less likely to end in shouting. Giggle, you see, is an app for women and girls – and only women and girls – to enable them to form communities and interest groups within the app in a space free of men. Which is, obviously, totally fine and great – except then they went and did something weird and decided to implement some sort of facial analysis software into the app which will assess a potential user’s physiognomy and determine whether or not they are in fact a ‘biological woman’ based on their proportions, etc. Which if you’ve spent any time at all online in the past three years or so you’ll realise is…contentious at best. The app says it;s inclusive and supportive of the wider LGBTx community and that users who are (they believe) erroneously rejected by the app can apply to be manually vetted, but one does wonder at what point the makers looked at this and thought ‘yeah, that’ll be good for the discourse! That’s a massive online fight I really want to have!’ It feels well-intentioned but, Christ.
The Internet-Connected Candle: It’s taken a month, fine, but we now have the first truly preposterous Kickstarter of the new decade – take a bow, creators of ‘Candle Touch’, the world’s FIRST smart candle!! I’m basically of the opinion now that Kickstarter works in only two ways – as a funding route for actual independent artists (great!), and simultaneously as a place in which people see exactly how stupid people online are when it comes to saying “I WANT I WANT!” to ridiculous design concepts. 42 days left and less than $1k short of full-funding, this is going to be become reality – WHY??? WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT A CANDLE THAT YOU CAN LIGHT FROM YOUR PHONE??? Fine, ok, the first time you show someone they’ll be amazed. You can probably fool your kids and pets into thinking you’re actually magic. After that? You’ve got a 50 quid lighter that won’t work if your WiFi is fcuked or your battery runs out. YOU FCUKING IDIOT. Some of the copy here is also beautiful – I mean, this is basically art, right? “Candles are magical. They have existed for thousands of years and they are considered to have mystical and relaxing benefits.” YES THEY FCUKING ARE MY FRIENDS YES THEY FCUKING ARE.
Below The Surface: This is mobile-only, but it’s a surprisingly powerful piece of AR work from New Zealand designed to communicate the devastating impact of certain fishing practices on dolphin populations in the country’s seas. The ‘you’re underwater, look around’ mechanic is effective, and I was honestly a little taken aback at quite how…er…visceral the effect is of seeing all these trapped dolphins bleeding in the sea around you. Not cheery, fine, but very nicely done indeed (and I say that as someone who’s got very little time for AR in general).
The Year in Greta: I’m sure Greta Thunberg will be fine and doesn’t need middle-aged men worrying about her; that said, I can’t imagine it’s particularly fun being so young and such a visible, singular figurehead for a global movement. This site captures a bit of what weirds me out about it; it’s really nicely made, don’t get me wrong, presenting the story of 2019 and how the climate change movement and XR in particular, led by Thunberg, rose to global prominence, but equally the presentation of Thunberg as some sort of godlike figure at the centre of it all seems…unhelpful, and, based on my (limited) dealings with them, very much sort of the antithesis of what XR (and by extension I imagine Thunberg herself) are all about.
Loly: Do you want to join THE FUTURE OF DATING? “I don’t know”, you might reasonably reply, “what does this ‘future’ look like? What does it entail? Will it be ROBOT DICKS???” It might be, eventually, but right now the slightly disappointing answer to ‘what does the future of dating hold?’ is, sadly, ‘THE FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN!’. Yes, that’s right, you can now date ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! This is VERY crypto – a whole lot of icons, a whole lot of jargon, a White Paper (because every cryptoscam in the world needs a White Paper, it is The Law), some spurious features including ‘AR Partner Finding’ and a ‘Heat Index’ (no, no idea at all), and a whole lot of impenetrability. Why does the dating app need to be on the blockchain? How the fcuk does the inevitable promise of an ICO fit in with attempting to find ‘love’? Why has noone involved in any of this stuff learned that simply putting a ‘consent’ contract on the blockchain doesn’t necessarily make any subsequent sex consensual by default? This screams MASSIVE CRIMINAL SCAM at decibels, I tell you.
Walnut TV: A N Other player which pulls popular videos from Reddit and streams them through a nice, easy-to-navigate interface. There doesn’t appear to be anything NSFW here, meaning this is a potentially GREAT way to just sort of zone out for a few hours while you wait for hometime.
Face Facemasks: You’ll probably have seen these, but the site’s worth looking at – this is by Danielle Baskin, who had a smart idea for a bit of a joke and ran with it – you can, though, theoretically sign up to get one of these when the global facemask shortage is over (presuming it ever is). The gimmick is that they are offering to make you a facemask onto which is printed a photorealistic depiction of the lower part of your own face – enabling you to unlock your phone with FaceID whilst still keeping your nose and mouth covered. Which, as the designers point out, is unpleasantly apocalyptic and also sort-of useful.
The Wearable Jammer: This also got a lot of traction in the media this week, indicative of the very weird tension we’re living through as a society; on the one hand, we love our Alexas! On the other, stuff like this gets shared everywhere, with that now familiar air of Anthropocene ennui and accompanying ‘bring me the sweet release of freedom from the digital panopticon’ commentary. Insert your own ‘shrug’ emote here. This is a prototype for a portable piece of kit which can be worn (albeit bulkily) on one’s wrist to stop microphones in the vicinity, whether from home assistants or smart devices, from working; this is a clunky joke now, but is exactly the sort of thing which protesters will be deploying en-masse as part of whatever the next large-scale urban resistance movement is, mark my words.
The Universe Sandbox: Normally I don’t feature stuff in here which you have to pay for, but I’ll make an exception for this, mainly as $30 seems like a small price to pay for software which will literally let you simulate the birth, life and death of entire imagined universes. Play with gravity! Smash planets! Unleash supernovae! Explode your computer by attempting to get it to simulate the Three Body Problem! Honestly, this looks mesmerising and if my laptop wasn’t basically held together with string and matchsticks I would totally lose myself to this.
SafeDM: SafeDM is a Twitter plugin which is designed to stop people receiving unsolicited filth in their DMs; whilst it’s obviously gender-neutral, it’s clearly aimed at women who are, it’s fair to say, more likely than men to receive a glistening-yet-disappointing cockshot unbidden. Is…is this common? Do lots of you get unsolicited cockshots on Twitter? Is this really a thing? Do (and this is something I’ve just thought about, and which I am now compelled to share here) flashers look down on cockshot senders as somehow inferior perverts, do you think? I am baffled.
The MSCHF Box: Insert the usual disclaimer here about being bored of featuring MSCHF stunts already in 2020 – this week’s is a box which you can buy for an as-yet undisclosed sum which MAY contain something worth upto $7k or MAY contain something worth about a quid, and which you COULD open or which you COULD keep for 100 days and then return for a guaranteed return of $1000. WHAT WILL PEOPLE DO?!? Genuinely interesting psychological experiment and another superb piece of attention-grabbing by the very best attention grabbers grabbing attention right now.
Signed, Sealed and Undelivered: I don’t know if there’s a particular Dutch quality that enables this, but I keep finding lovely web projects about archivial history from Holland (there was that beautiful one from a couple of years back about all the stuff they found when dredging the canals – you remember, this one). Anyway, this is another: “In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk of letters was bequeathed to the Dutch postal museum in The Hague (currently Beeld en Geluid Den Haag), then as now the centre of government, politics, and trade in The Netherlands. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmaster and post mistress of the day, Simon and Marie de Brienne, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. The chest contains an extraordinary archive: 2600 “locked” letters sent from all over Europe to this axis of communication, none of which were ever delivered.” I LOVE THIS – so much fascinating stuff.
The Music Lab: The Music Lab is a series of small projects, presented as games, designed to help investigate the human response to music and the underlying psychological and neurological reasons for its species-wide appeal. There’s an awful lot of academic material in here, but there are also a bunch of fun little music toy/games in there as well which are an excellent way to pass some time whilst at the same time contributing to the progress of human learning. Oh, and they’re currently accepting applications for Summer interns in 2020, should you know anyone who’d be interested or suitable.
Biolinky: A service which lets you attach a bunch of URLs to another, single URL – basically letting you put all your various links to your various hustles and projects in one place so you can link everything from your Instabio. Might be useful, might not.
Facelift: A really interesting project this – not without its potentially problematic side effects, but conceptually-fascinating. Facelift basically uses machine learning and image analysis to assess urban scenes for ‘beauty’ based on photos; the idea is that humans assess imagery to create a dataset on which to train the machine, which is then set loose on a city (in this case Boston) to map it on the basis of urban aesthetics and (and this is the amazing bit) to imagine what those ugly bits might look like if they were beautified. Look, here: “The team assembled 20,000 images of Google street views that volunteers had labelled as beautiful or ugly. They then fed all these images into a computer running a deep learning framework – a kind of algorithm that mimics the human brain by processing data in neural networks. In so doing, the algorithm learned what humans thought was ugly or beautiful and, based on that, it was asked to improve an ugly scene, which it did using a generative adversarial network – a relatively recent class of algorithms that is currently used to recreate “fake” yet realistic human faces. The resulting images were then matched to the most closely corresponding images of real spaces. Finally, the algorithm explained how the addition and removal of specific urban elements had made the scene more beautiful.” That is MENTAL.
Young Planet: FULL DISCLOSURE: my friend Rob Blackie is involved with this in some way. Still, I’d cover it regardless as it seems like a useful and good thing. If you’re a parent and either looking to dispose of kidstuff that you no longer need, or if you’re a parent looking for kidstuff that’s used rather than new, Young Planet is the swapping marketplace you have potentially been searching for. This is probably only going to work if you’re in London judging by a cursory look at the listings, but it seems in pretty rude health and there’s a decent spread of stuff available to pick up. Smart, useful, worth a look.
TinkerSynth: Online synth toys are, fine, ten a penny, but this is a nice variant on the genre – TinkerSynth is more artsy than most, presenting all the controls in abstract fashion and giving no real indication as to what’s going to happen when you press the buttons so it’s all basically an unknowable mystery which may or may not produce something halfway-listenable. WHO KNOWS! It’s lovely, fun and very nicely-designed indeed.
Gammon: It’s a shame that this didn’t make an appearance before Christmas, as it would have been the perfect stocking filler for that uncle that you really don’t like – Gammon is a seemingly entirely-real fragrance produced in Germany by a company with seemingly no designs at all on expansion into the Anglo-Saxon market; no idea what it smells like as the site’s all in German, but WHO CARES? This is the sort of thing you should absolutely buy now, safe in the knowledge that it will make n HILARIOUS present for someone at some point in the future (or which you’ll forget about and then find in 20 years time and be incapable of recalling what it was about the word ‘Gammon’ that was so side-splittingly funny way back in history.

By Vincent Desailly

NEXT, WHY NOT EXPERIMENT WITH SOME BORDERLINE-UNLISTENABLE REMIXES OF OLD MIDI TRACKS WHICH ARE SIMULTANEOUSLY SORT-OF AWFUL BUT ALSO REALLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK YOU HAVE ANY MORAL HIGH GROUND ABOUT ANYTHING IF YOU READ THE MAIL, SORRY, PT.2:

Art 42: Art42 is a project by German (I think) artist and coder Valentin Vieriu which presents an infinite stream of AI-generated artworks; you can apply a bit of personal curation by selecting and keeping your favourites, and each is available to order as a print; as a way of curating the art in your office, this is a potentially nice option (if you don’t mind your art being entirely abstract and a little on the derivative side).
What People Say About This Website: A website which does nothing else but collect and embed Tweets which are about it, making it possibly THE most perfectly recursive digital object in existence. Obviously totally pointless and yet because of this potentially the purest and most perfect website I have ever featured in Curios.
The Glitch Gallery: In fact, it’s a particularly good week for digital art; this is the Glitch Gallery, which presents a series of wonderful, digitally-fcuked images drawn from software bugging out. Every image on here is a result of some piece of software or another glitching in aesthetically-interesting ways, to produce odd, weird, angular…things. This is effectively the Curios aesthetic in a website, fwiw.
Made by Mistake: In case you’d ever wondered what to buy me by way of thanks for selflessly summarising the internet for you each week for FREE and with NO EXPECTATION OF THANKS (although the faint hope does, despite my better judgement, still linger), here’s an idea. Made by Mistake is a Dutch company which does one thing – it makes models. Architects models, museum dioramas, presentation miniatures…if you want, say, a perfectly-realised scale model of your business park, or a nice, golden wooden representation of the London skyline as of 1963, these are your people. I have no idea at all how much this sort of thing would cost – I’m guessing that getting a bunch of people in Rotterdam to spend six months making a castle out of matchsticks isn’t cheap, though – but if you fancy a whipround then mine’s a 1m sq representation of Vauxhall Gardens complete with miniature model village, please.
Facefilters: Dinamo is a Swiss design agency; they’ve created this offshoot page to showcase some of the work they’ve been doing using Insta’s Spark AR studio to create face filters for the platform. These are so much fun – I do think that there’s a lot of creative potential with this stuff that’s not currently being exploited, mainly as trying to find someone to make the damn things for you is harder than it ought to be. Still, plenty of inspiration here if you want to suggest these to your clients – why Microsoft hasn’t already leapt to sponsor the one that basically turns your face into a giant floating letter against the backdrop of the Windows XP homescreen is a mystery to me tbh.
Europe is Not Dead: I confess to feeling a genuine pang of loss at this; it may not be dead, but it feels DEAD TO US. Still, if you’d like a reminder of all the ace stuff that the continent has to offer, and which is still on your doorstep, and which you can still visit (albeit with longer queues at passport control than before), then this site is excellent – it’s a genuine, proper ‘wow, I had no idea they did that in Hungary – and with the whole sausage!’-type site with all sorts of fascinating things to visit and look at, and should you or anyone you know be planning an oh-so-on-trend pan-European train holiday this Summer then this is the perfect digital companion to it.
How Big Is A Billion?: Another in the long line of ‘websites designed to help communicate exactly how mind-bogglingly large some of the numbers we deal with every day are’, this one lets you see exactly how long it would take you to scroll through a billion…actually, it’s not quite a billion pixels due to constraints of web architecture, but it’s LOTS and it gives you an idea of what a mind-flayingly large figure a billion in fact is (which might, maybe, lead you also to think that anyone having a billion of anything is perhaps a touch on the excessive side – SEE, EVERYTHING IS POLITICS).
Quorum: Whilst most of the time I’m firmly of the opinion that we have TOO MANY messaging options already, this one looks like it could be reasonably useful. Quorum is a platform which lets communities organise, fundraise, etc, within closed and limited parameters; effectively it’s a mobile messaging app with integrated payments and subscriptions and some light community analytics, seemingly perfect for small clubs or membership organisations who want a place to congregate. For most, fine, I can imagine Whatsapp would work fine, but I can envisage instances where it might not quite do everything you want, in which case Quorum might be worth a look.
The Ethical Litmus Test: You wait a decade for people to start taking the concept of ‘ethics’ in a business context seriously…2020 very much feels like it’s going to be THE YEAR for people doing stuff on this, even if only cosmetically, and the Ethical Litmus Test seems like a decent attempt to at least try and make people think a little more carefully and critically about what it is that they are doing with their business, both in terms of its product and its organisation. It’s eventually going to be a card deck, a la ‘oblique strategies’, and you can pre-order that now, but there’s already a downloadable checklist-type-thing to help you start thinking about this stuff in a structured way; if you work in startup land this might be worth a look.
Bookshop: AN ONLINE BOOKSHOP THAT DOESN’T NECESSARILY SCREW INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS!! I know, I know, it seems to good to be true (and maybe it is), but this at least seems like a good idea, and generally anything that takes away from MechaBezos’ empire is ok by me. The model’s a bit complicated, but shops can either sign up to be affiliate sellers through the platform, or can simply benefit from its promise to distribute 10% of its profits to independent bookshops every six months. It’s imperfect, fine, but honestly it’s not like anyone’s come up with a better idea for how to save publishing and book sales and stuff. I think this is currently only a thing in North America, but keep an eye on it and see how it develops and whether it expands internationally.
Jazz With Bob Parlocha: Do you like jazz? Would you like access to an archive of old radio shows hosted by a guy called Bob Parlocha in which he plays jazz? GREAT!
The Map of Maths: Look, I’ll be honest with you here – I don’t understand maths, I find it confusing and a little scary, and I resent it for being one of the (many) things which punches neat little holes in my self-constructed armour of projected intelligence. Still, even a mathematical refusenik such as myself found something to enjoy in this – look: “Here is a map of mathematics as it stands today, mathematics as it is practiced by mathematicians. From simple starting points — Numbers, Shapes, Change — the map branches out into interwoven tendrils of thought. Follow it, and you’ll understand how prime numbers connect to geometry, how symmetries give a handle on questions of infinity. And although the map is necessarily incomplete — mathematics is too grand to fit into any single map — we hope to give you a flavor for the major questions and controversies that animate the field, as well as the conceptual tools needed to dive in.” REALLY interesting although I don’t understand much more about numbers than I did before if I’m totally honest. Oh, and seeing as we’re on maths, here’s a bunch of problems and puzzles which are all far too hard for me but which you might be able to do something with.
40 Concepts To Understand The World: This is an unnecessarily and slightly-irritatingly hyperbolic, but it’s also a really interesting Twitter thread giving you a quick rundown on 40 concepts or ideas that are potentially useful in helping you understand the world and the people in it. Simple and clear explanations on a bunch of ideas such as Simpson’s Paradox and the Streetlight Effect – this is honestly useful and the sort of thing I rather wish I’d read when I was a kid.
The Belgian Celebrity Magnet: WHO IS THIS WOMAN? WHY DID SHE KNOW ALL THE FAMOUSES??? I love this story, not least because at the time of writing I’m yet to see any explanation at all for this; it’s nice to have mysteries sometimes.
Wordweb: This is FUN – put in any word that you want, it will present you with a selection of thematically-linked words; click on any of them, and the process repeats. As a way of exploring linguistic connections and, potentially, coming up with ideas, this is quite lovely; if nothing else it’s an excellent way of developing creative writing exercises if you feel the need to flex any of those muscles.
International Landscape Photographer of the Year: Congratulations Oleg Ershov, winner of the 2019 award – all of the images here are stupendous, though; take a look at the flipbook at the bottom of the page for the full, glorious selection.
Lover: As an English man, I am terrible at sex. This is a fact; it is impossible for the English male to be anything other than at best awkward and at worst risible when it comes to fcuking; this is an OLD TRUTH. Still, thank heavens for things like Lover, an app which promises to help me improve my skills as a lover through a variety of app-based instructional tutorials and exercises. Set your sex goals and get a personalised self-improvement programme delivered through the app which will guide you towards the promised sunlit uplands of erotic nirvana – yes, that’s right, with this app you can turn the physical act of love in to ANOTHER tedious rote task you need to get better at in order to succeed at the never-ending, intricately-scored game of LIFE! It’s iOS-only, and – SURPRISE – there’s a subscription tier ($10 a month, $60 a year)! Maybe I’m being cynical – quelle horreur! – but I wouldn’t exactly be amazed if it turned out that you couldn’t accede to the final tier of lessons and sex guides without shelling out for a sub. “Sex is no different to any other lifeskill. To move forward, you need to practice” – practice and pay, it seems.
Hidden Cats: Finally this week, a very gentle little game about finding the right cats. There is nothing else in here this week that will make you feel this cosily relaxed, I guarantee.

By Whitney Hubbs

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS LOVELY LOUNGE SET BY LIFESTYLE DIVISION!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS THIS WEEK EMPTY AND ALL THE CLOWNS ARE GONE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

Food Bites: The Insta account of a former adland person from Holland (I think – big week in Curios for the Dutch, imagine there will be some form of national celebration over the weekend to mark it) who creates lovely, cute images with food. Literally just that, but SO charming.
Liz Sexton: Papier mache art – honestly, these are amazing and the cutest animal heads made of old newspaper you will ever see (this sounds like faint praise but I promise you it’s not).
Sau: This person is 19 and from Toronto and they draw the loveliest anime-inspired characters and illustrations and they deserve a follow, whoever they are.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

The Cabinet: James Butler in the LRB writes on the UK Cabinety reshuffle and what it might mean for the political direction of travel of the country; it’s particularly good on the ‘ideological’ dimension which it might indicate – I use the term cautiously, but there’s some good stuff in here about the indicators towards a more overtly polarising Government position on lots of things and more obvious sense of taking sides in the ‘culture wars’ which, well, doesn’t feel great. This was obviously written before ‘eugenicsgate’ this weekend, which didn’t do much to countermand the ideas here presented.
The Angry Young Left: Another LRB piece, this time by William Davies, reviewing the book ‘Generation Left’ by Keir Milburn but also taking a more discursive look at the resurgence of strong left-wing ideology amongst the young on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s an excellent overview of where the left is now in terms of its broad appeal to the young, and where this generation might end up politically as it matures – “Generation Left remains, for the time being, disempowered and defeated. A Conservative government, tirelessly cheered on by a 20th-century newspaper industry, has been voted in by the massed ranks of the over-fifties. The question is whether, despite its recent successes, the Conservative Party is sitting on a ticking demographic time bomb. Culture war tactics may work in the short term, and may shore up support on the margins, but they are essentially defensive. They don’t offer much to a generation whose values are already cosmopolitan, internationalist and liberal, who despise Nigel Farage and what he stands for, regardless of whether or not they went to university.”
Deepfakes In India: I think I was probably pretty bullish last year about the extent to which digital techniques would be used to manipulate the Indian elections – I was, as with so many other things, somewhat off-beam with my prediction of deepfakes everywhere and FAKE NEWS and all the rest, but it has sort-of eventually happened – this piece looks at the recent use of Deepfake tech for the relatively-benign purposes of producing real-looking English translations of videos originally produced in Hindi, complete with realistic-looking mouth movements. The interesting stuff here, aside from the ‘where will this end up?’-type questions, is the reaction from voters exposed to it – this stuff works.
The Australian Fires: A really nice piece of Snowfall-ish (do we still call them that? Is there a new go-to example for this type of thing? It’s been a decade ffs, surely we must have moved on) content by ABC, using satellite imagery from the past few months to tell the story of how the bushfires developed and spread. It’s beautifully-made, and more importantly does a better job of anything I’ve yet seen of communicating the incredible spread and scale of the devastation.
Italy’s Malaise: It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to have to move to Italy this year, so it was nice to read this and be reminded of exactly what a mess my motherland is. This is a typically clear-eyed piece of journalism in Der Spiegel – though I get the impression Italians are a bit annoyed at the Germans always treating them as some sort of anthropological curiosity, like a petri dish of economic fcukery – looking at some of the reasons for the current Italian malaise; the sad thing is that there are no obvious solutions to the economic and social problems plaguing the country and which are irreparably entwined with its strange, fractured genesis in the mid-19thC.
Yuval Noah Harari: Having surpassed Malcolm Gladwell as ‘the intellectual everyone has to have read and have an opinion on’, Harari’s attained a near-unprecedented degree of global fame and recognition off the back of ‘Sapiens’ (which obviously I haven’t read) – this profile in the New Yorker looks at his life now, and the weird intellectual-industrial complex that he’s built – or which has been built, it’s sort-of hard to get a handle on that bit – around him, and what it means to be the global mega-rich’s idea of what a smart thinker looks like. What, seemingly, it looks like, is spending a lot of time making slightly gnomic pronouncements on whatever you fancy; look, Harari’s obviously an order of magnitude smarter than me and I am in no position to criticise him (especially since, again, I’ve not read significant portions of his output) but, well, I can’t help but feel that he’s Alain de Botton with a broader readership and more photogenic appeal.
What People Thought of YouTube at Launch: Literally this – a look back at some of the commentary and thinking around the now-inescapable online video juggernaut from the time of its launch 15 years ago. Imagine trying to go back in time and explain Zoella and Pewdiepie to these people.
Reading de Sade in the age of Epstein: Fascinating piece in the New York Review of Books about looking back at the writings of de Sade in an age in which we are far, far more cognisant of – and critical of – the idea of self and agency and what the denial of those things does to people and society. The parallels the author tries to draw between the appreciation of de Sade as a thinker, a position common through much of the 20th C, and our tacit acceptance of figures such as Epstein, don’t always land in my view, but it’s fascinating to consider whether we’ll still be considering Sade an author worthy of serious consideration rather than a worrying deviant with access to a pen and enough money to pay off his victims in a few years time.
Growing Old in Hollywood: A lovely little essay by a Hollywood screenwriter in their early 50s, about what it feels like to get older in an industry obsessed, more than any other, with appealing to youth, and how the new media landscape might provide as much of an opportunity for older voices as it does for other diverse narratives.
An App Can Be A Home-Cooked Meal: A lovely little piece of writing about building an app for a tiny group of users, and what that enables you to do in terms of design and usability that you wouldn’t be able to do if you were designing for an unknown potential infinity of others. There’s something in this idea, I think, of creating ultra-bespoke digital experiences; honestly, were I a brand with a proper digital existence I would seriously consider the development of bespoke versions of apps or software for specific influencers or groups of people.
Nearly K-Pop: When we were in our mid-teens my mate Richard was scouted by someone putting together a boyband. Or at least that’s what he said happened – nothing ever came of this, and we were basically convinced that he’d been tricked into taking a bunch of slightly risque shots by a middle-aged pervert with a camera and one of these business cards you used to be able to get printed by the dozen in larger train stations. I’ve never seen the musical machine up close, then, but this article all about what it’s like almost-but-not-quite becoming a K-Pop star suggests that it grinds incredibly small – this sounds AWFUL, and makes me think a bit less of all the stans who don’t see these people as human beings and who ignore the fact that they are treated as interchangeable meat robots in a neverending pop-Voltron.
TikTok Couples: Are you in a relationship? What do you think would bring you closer together? Do you think it would be committing to a punishing schedule of content production in an attempt to please and appease the unknowable algogods of TikTok? No, I don’t either, and yet this is exactly what these couples have seemingly committed to do – does this sound healthy? ““Moriah was pretty sick during her first trimester, so we had to repost a bunch of old content every day,” Scott said. “It’s hard to make videos when you have to go to the hospital seven times in one month, but we didn’t want to get behind with the algorithm.” “I don’t think people wanted to see the pain I was in,” Moriah added. “We like to post pregnancy videos, but we like to keep them light and fun.”” It does NOT. What I find most interesting about this is the lie it gives to the idea that these people are ‘self-employed’ – you are not, you have a boss, and it is the algo.
The FikFok: After the first ‘it’s too addictive, I’m quitting’ letter to TikTok from last week, this week we have the pivot to the ‘fake’ TikTok account, where kids can post silly things that they actually like rather than the things that they think will make them famous. If you can read this and not feel a deep, deep sense of soul-sadness at the idea that something ostensibly fun and frivolous has very quickly become a stress-inducing form of labour for lots of these kids then, well, you’re a cheerier person than I am.
Baby We’ll Be Fine: This is what it’s like to get stabbed. With pictures. It’s a hell of a piece of writing – clear and dispassionate and also quietly frightening, particularly just how easy it all seems.
The Chaos of the Dice: This is OLD – 7 years old, from 2013 in fact – but its subject died recently and so this piece resurfaced and OH MY GOD IT IS BRILLIANT. Meet Falafel, the self-described ‘best backgammon player in the world’, total ‘character’, inveterate hustler and semi-religious figure in the annals of gambling. This profile follows him to Vegas and beyond, introduces some truly wonderful characters from the slightly sketchy demi-monde he inhabits, and is generally a brilliant, funny piece of writing full of people who I would happily describe as ‘larger-than-life’ were it not a horrible cliche. Superb.
I Am Being Unmade: Finally this week, one of the best things I have read in years, online or off. Paraic O’Donnell is a writer who I have followed on Twitter for a while but whose work I confess to not having been hugely familiar with; this piece, about his MS diagnosis and gardening and death and mortality, is honestly the best thing I’ve seen so far this year, and possibly last year as well – for various reasons there are bits of this that are…unpleasantly resonant, but even without any sort of personal connection I challenge you not to be moved by the prose (you will fail). I mean, look: “And then, when S. had left, I couldn’t see straight to strip the bed, to bundle the sheets into the wash. Because the crying had started. I hadn’t even noticed, but when I did I couldn’t stop. And this crying, it was not fcuking around. It wasn’t the decorous glistening you see in films. No, it was epic, this performance, it was unrestrained and operatic. This was crying in the high style, the heroic mode. This was a balls-out Wagnerian tempest of sorrowing that suspended all other functions and went on for a week. I fell through myself, under myself. All the way down.” I would literally kill to be able to write like that.