Webcurios 03/06/16

SHALL WE KICK OF THE MUSIC WITH THE DJ KICKS SET BY DAM FUNK? YES, YES WE SHALL (IT’S A SPOTIFY LINK, THIS ONE, FYI)

THE SECTION WHICH IS WONDERING WHICH HIGH-POWERED BUSINESSPEOPLE ACTUALLY GET THEIR NEWS FROM THE CITY AM WEBSITE ANYWAY:

• Twitter Launches Support For 360 Video: Continuing the recent and in no way share price-destroying trend of Twitter launching features several months after all the other platforms, they are now apparently supporting 360 degree video. I say ‘apparently’ – it’s not like there’s an official announcement, so I’m having to link to some third party report on this. FFS, TWITTER!

• Comment Moderation Comes To Periscope: Well, sort-of. Rather than streamers being able to, say, block comments based on tracking word usage or similar, comments on a livestream can instead be flagged as offensive on the fly – these comments will then be put to a random panel of viewers, who will determine whether the comments are or are not offensive; if they are decreed to so be, the poster will get bumped from the stream for a bit and the offending screed removed. Which sounds not only like a pretty clunky mechanic, but one RIPE for abuse; all you need is to organise a pile-on to a stream by a group of individuals who share a certain worldview and boom, you’ve skewed the makeup of the panel judging what is and isn’t offensive. FFS, TWITTER!

• Twitter Apparently Not Giving Up On Commerce: After the news the other week that the in-Tweet buy button had been mothballed, Twitter’s Head of Commerce Nathan Hubbard took the time this week to Tweet some #REALTALK (still by MILES the best hashtag ever, parenthetically) about how he sees the future of commerce on the platform. Basically, there will eventually be some sort of in-stream commerce solution, just not NOW. So that’s ok, then. What this showed most of all, though, is that Twitter’s a pretty bad place to post BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS – I don’t care who you are or what you’re saying, the whole Tweetstorm thing is not particularly readable. FFS, TWITTER!

• Snapchat Discover Possibly Getting Minor Redesign: You may be able to tell that we’re a little light on actual platform news this week, thank Christ. This SEISMIC RUMOUR suggests that the Snapchat Discover function, where PREMIUM CONTENT PARTNERS get to punt a selection of their stuff through Snapchat at eager MILLENNIALS salivating for TOP CONTENT, will soon be able to, er, choose a cover image for their Discover streams. Yep, that’s basically it. Nothing more to see here.

• Snapchat Inks Wimbledon Deal: God knows what the money was on this, but Snapchat will be broadcasting (is that the word? We probably need a new one) stuff from Wimbledon this year, featuring Stories from the Championships incorporating punter footage of matches along with BEHIND THE SCENES FUN. No doubt a whole host of players will be co-opted into signing up for this, and it makes sense – it’s the perfect setting for Snapchat to showcase how good it is at in-the-moment LIKE YOU WERE REALLY THERE fun, whilst at the same time allowing them to recoup some of the doubtless eye-watering fee paid to the tennispeople by selling ads against the Stories. I am intrigued to see how the numbers on this stack up against the Twitter / NFL partnership announced a few months back.

• Instagram Finally Launches Business Tools (But Not In UK)(Yet): THEY ARE FINALLY HERE! In the US, Australia and NZ, at least. As discussed in previous Curios, these will let Businesses have dedicated Instagram Pages, with their own ‘contact us’ buttons, proper analytics telling you how many people actually saw a post, etc, and, perhaps most interestingly, the ability to promote individual posts on Instagram, basically bringing the ad offering in line with that on Facebook rather than the rather clunky FB adjunct that it currently is. Coming to the rest of the world ‘this year’, apparently. I CANNOT WAIT.

• Reddit Launching Own Image Hosting: Basically you’ll imminently be able to upload images and gifs directly to Reddit rather than using Imgur – which is interesting mainly in terms of the effect it’s likely to have on Imgur’s viability and the fact that this may (note the very tentative nature of this statement) begin to usher in the possibility of more ads on Reddit in the form of preroll, etc, on stuff uploaded to the site.

• You Can’t Build Giant Ads In Minecraft Any More: Or indeed pay other people to build Minecraft versions of your product or whatever for commercial gain. Which I think is A Good Thing, but then again I probably would.

• City AM Goes Full Advertorial: If you do PR, this is BIG NEWS. Well, moderately big – it’s only City AM, after all. Basically they’re dropping the Chinese Walls between commercial and editorial, and thereby moving towards a model whereby anyone can write stuff for the website – to quote the piece, because frankly I can’t be bothered to rerwite it, “City AM will no longer be produced solely by the staff team (the company is 69-strong). From now on, articles will also be generated by a raft of new ‘contributors’, paid according to the number of page views they generate, and – most controversially – by corporate brands and their advertising and communications chiefs, who will be given direct access to the content management system (CMS) of the newspaper’s website.” The world doesn’t need another HOT TAKE on what this means for journalism, but can we all agree that ‘pay based on the number of clicks’ probably isn’t likely to be a mechanic through which the best quality journalism is delivered? Good. Anyway, as we await the transformation of City AM into the UK’s very own Breitbart (seriously, I can see this), let’s enjoy the raft of SPONSORED CONTENT coming our way.

• Google Website Tester: Another website by Google which tells you how good another website is on mobile vs desktop, and how quickly it loads on both. Useful primarily as a scaremongering tool through which you can, if you’re not totally dreadful at your job, sell clients with rubbish websites marginally less rubbish websites.

• Find YouTube Influencers: Well, allegedly – Peg is a service which lets you search for people who MAKE CONTENT on any given subject (and I mean any – I had NO IDEA there were so many woodwork influencers just WAITING to be thrown money by Ronseal). Could be useful, could not. THAT’S THE SORT OF INSIGHT YOU COME HERE FOR!

• It’s Meeker Time Again!: Another year, another collection of 200+ incredibly ugly slides (so unfair; and I get panned for verbosity) on THE STATE OF THE WEB AND STUFF by Mary Meeker. You can go through it yourself – you’re not paying me enough, or indeed at all, for me to do it for you – but there’s a whole load of data and stats about STUFF in there, not least the stagnation of the growth of the web as developed markets reach saturation, the growth of video as a communications medium (whodathunkit?) and the changing shape of search from text to image-based. Christ, though, can someone please give her a new template ahead of next year?

• Snickers Hungerithm: You’ve probably seen this, but in case not – smart promo from Snickers in Australia, linking the price of the bar in 7/11 stores across the country to how upset Twitter is at any given point – Twitter gets angry, the price falls (tying into their BRAND TRUTH about people getting angry when they’re hungry). At any given point during the diurnal RAGE CYCLE, users can print out a voucher redeemable at any of the stores which will let them buy the nutty glucoseturd at the price dictated by the app. Simple, clever, trackable – this is just really nicely done. Not sure how long this is going to be up for, so here’s a writeup in case it’s finished by the time you get to this.

• Cornetto Commitment Rings: A brilliant gimmick being wasted in a nonsensical brand promotion, this. These are rings which are designed to only let you stream certain shows on Netflix when they are proximate to each other – the idea being that you and your partner wear them to ensure that one of you can’t skip ahead in whatever faux-highbrow idiotbox marathon you’re currently in thrall to. Which is SUCH a lovely idea that I was genuinely quite angry when I discovered that it’s a promo for Cornetto. WHY?!?! What does this have to do with Cornetto? Aside from anything else, WHO eats Cornetto at home? NO FCUKER, that’s who. Actually getting pretty riled about this as I type, which is prettybleak for 737am on a Friday morning. Breathe, Matthew, breathe.

• This Was Louise’s Phone: Absolutely heartbreaking, this one. Louise is the name of a French girl who killed herself last year, following a concerted campaign of online bullying by her peers. This site, made with the approval of her family and in conjunction with anti-bullying charities, displays the abusive messages she was subjected to, with voicework by her dad. This ruined me. Lovely website, fwiw.

• Swiss Army Man: Promo site for the forthcoming film, which is included solely for the fact it lets you toss a ragdoll of the farting corpse of Daniel Radcliffe around the screen.

• Ogilvy Pipe: A N Other WPP Agency Ogilvy are doing an ACTUAL GOOD THING here. Pipe is the name for a programme they are running to offer access to the creative careerpath in advertising  to people who might not otherwise be able to access it. Anyone can apply for a 6-month internship, remunerated with the London living wage, as a creative with them – the only criteria is that applicants have to be over-18, but otherwise there are no caveats about level of education, experience, etc. If you know someone who can stand the soul-flaying horror of advermarketingprland, who wouldn’t be spun into a neverending cycle of existential angst by the fundamentally empty nature of the whole business, but who might not be able to get in via more traditional means, send this their way. It’s a lovely idea, and, my own cynicism about the industry left aside, should be applauded. More of this, please.

HOW’S ABOUT A NICE SELECTION OF NEW MUSIC SELECTED BY EXCELLENT GERMAN SITE NERDCORE? YES HERE YOU ARE THEN!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE JAPANESE KID HAS GONE FULL RAMBO OVER THE PAST WEEK IN THE FOREST, PT.1:

• Flow XO: The best description I can come up with for this is ‘IFTTT for bots’, which hopefully gives you a vague idea of how it works. It’s a SUPER-SIMPLE system which effectively lets you cobble together chatbots which launch or react to certain triggers you determine – so for example if someone tweets @ an account, or if you receive an email, etc – and can then be instructed to respond and react to basic inputs and queries. The interface is VERY easy to use, and a cursory play suggests you can cobble together some pretty useful things with little-to-no experience with this stuff whatsoever. Obviously not the solution if you want to build something truly fancy / revolutionary, but if you want to have a fiddle with chatbot tech in a safe and easy way, this is a good place to start.

• Build Your Own Go Robot: Seeing as we’re starting with bots, here’s another one. To quote, “BetaGo lets you run your own Go engine. It downloads Go games for you, preprocesses them, trains a model on data, for instance a neural network using keras, and serves the trained model to an HTML front end, which you can use to play against your own Go bot.”. I imagine that setting these all up to play each other in a tournament would be a beautiful and terrifying and possibly infinitely recursive spectacle. Someone please try it, whilst simultaneously not engendering the singularity. Thanks!

• Microsoft Flow: Another IFTTT thing (I’m presuming you all know what that is by now), this one really does seem to be a pretty straight rip of that service, offered this time by everyone’s favourite cuddly software behemoth. As far as I can tell, the main draw is the fact that you can make pretty complicated workflows which integrate into Salesforce and oh god I’m boring myself here.

• 1-855-LADYFUN: One of my favourite concepts of the week, this is SUCH a fun idea. 1-855-LADYFUN is a project by artist Joe Veix where he’s basically created a massive Choose Your Own Adventure-style story using automated phonelines – you know, the ones with the decision trees which fork based on you pressing ‘1’, ‘2’, etc, which takes you down a weird wormhole of twisted corporate presences, fictional companies and the like. I’m sort of amazed that more people haven’t done more of these – it’s a brilliant component in the whole TRANSMEDIA mix (do people still say transmedia, or have I just outed myself as being completely out of touch? Rhetorical, please don’t tell me).

• Anypixel: A really interesting code initiative by Google, which has open sourced script which lets you take any massive array of physical objects – say, LEDs or switches or buttons of whatever you fancy, in theory – and assign them pixel status, which means that you can create big, physical installations which can effectively behave like display screens, which is pretty cool I think. There’s a video on the site which explains all this far better than I can, fwiw, so go and look at that instead if you’re feeling upset and confused about this particularly mangled lump of prosedescription.

• Playfinders: Launched this week by former colleague of mine and FRIEND OF CURIOS (we have so few we like to capitalise them) Paul Drury-Bradley, Playfinders is a lovely project which seeks to create a digital archive of play and games from around the world – the idea being that anyone can upload details of a game played in their part of the world, thereby helping preserve the traditions of play for current and future generations. Such a nice idea, and potentially pretty useful if you have small kids and are feeling guilty about just sitting them in front of Minecraft over the past half term week.

• Eat, Sleep, Sh1t, Fcuk: After last week’s ‘HAPPY MAP OF TWITTER’, I was sent this by its creator Stuart Witts – it shows conversations on Twitter featuring mentions of any of these core fundamentals of human existence. Tells you literally nothing at all about anything, which is pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned.

• US Commuter Maps: Yeah, OK, so I appreciate that the data here is…er…niche, given my likely readership, but I really like the interface and the way it’s displayed, so there. Select the state you want data on, and the county, and the map displays where people are travelling to and from on a daily basis – fine, not thrilling, but it just works, which is, sadly, not always the case with this sort of stuff. Good use of public data.

• HobbyEarth: A social network for people who love hobbies – which cannot help but remind me of Fist of Fun and its hobby expert Simon Quinlank, King of Hobbies and weak lemon drink aficionado (a reference which will be lost on almost all of you, I fear, but try this if you want a taste). Anyway, destined to never really take off, but if you have a particular niche interest (NOT LIKE THAT) and would like to see if you can find anyone who shares it on here then you may want to have a click around.

• Facebook Sixth Sense: I imagine that there’s a whole raft of comedians who have a ‘bit’ these days about how one of the BANES OF THE MODERN AGE is the ‘…is typing’ dots on messaging apps, which provide the delicious anticipatory thrill of FRESH ENGAGEMENT whilst at the same time leading to all sorts of second-guessing and anxiety about WHY ARE THEY DELIBERATING SO MUCH OVER THIS MESSAGE?!??! Facebook Sixth Sense is a Chrome plugin which takes this to the next level for Facebook and Messenger, alerting you not only to when someone is typing on the platform, but doing so EVEN BEFORE the chat window or message pops up. Which means, if you’re quick enough, you can scare the bejesus out of people by sending them a Whatsapp? Message asking ‘why are you messaging me on Facebook?’ before they’ve even sent their communication, guaranteeing that your more gullible friends think you are actually magic. It needs a build which automatically sends a “WHAT DO YOU WANT???” message to anyone who starts writing to you, just to scare them.

• Mouth Mover Animal Masks: Do you want a horrifyingly realistic animal mask whose mouth moves in time with yours when you speak? OF COURSE YOU DO.

• Central American Import/Export Maps: NO, WAIT, COME BACK! This is a simple little visualisation of imports and exports from Central American nations, which shows trades in a neat little map overlay animation (you need to actually tell it to display the map and start playing the data, otherwise it just looks like a blank screen). Not superoriginal or anything like that, but just shows that even the most ostensibly tedious information can be made internet friendly for basically no money these days. I’m pretty sure that none of my useless part-time colleagues read this, so I feel fairly safe here in saying “LEARN, YOU BOVINE DULLARDS”.

• Algodoo: This isn’t a new programme, but has recently been made COMPLETELY FREE – Algodoo is a pretty powerful and actually rather fun 2d physics simulator, letting you set up all sorts of Heath-Robinson-esque sequences involving falling sand, water, levers and the rest in virtual space. Aside from anything else, physics toys are just FUN – but as a modelling tool or educational resource it could also be pretty useful, I think.

• Explore Campaign Finance: A site which lets users delve into who has paid what to which US politicians to fund their campaigns – effectively aggregating a load of publicly available information on which lobbyists have their hooks into which politicos. The way the information is displayed and can be delved into is nice, and it would be quite interesting to see something similar based on, say, the Register of Members’ Interests here in the UK.

• 2d/3d Furniture: Tables, chairs, stools and the rest which you can hang on walls so that they look like 2d icons of themselves. Really clever design which I am rather taken by.

• Magenta: It’s one of those times when it seems that Google’s doing LOADS of cool stuff to counteract (or, depending on your point of view, augment) the creepiness of its day-to-day business. Witness Magenta, a programme backed by the Google Brain team, which is looking to explore, and shift, the boundaries between machine learning and the creation of ‘art’ (my inverted commas there), both visual and musical. Basically, they are teaching machines to make work – MENTAL. Want to have a listen to an original composition by a neural network? HERE YOU ARE! It’s, terrifyingly, almost-listenable.

• The Emoji Bible: As we progress towards a society where the written word is but a memory, and we all communicate using FCUKING EMOJI, the latest step in the inexorable march towards a totally visual culture. Props to the person who did this – sort of compelling as a weird webart project, though if you’re a believer I’m not 100% certain that it adds much to the general themes of the Good Book.

• First Voices: An interesting project designed to help preserve ancient native languages of peoples across North America, First Voices provides a comprehensive guide to Native American languages, and a selection of native language keyboards for people to download. If I were writing something about Native Americans this would be an invaluable resource for nailing language, etc, and as a general resource for linguistic scholars and the like this is pretty great. Also, the keyboads can help you learn, say, Inuit, which is pretty cool if of limited utility in London in 2016.

• Project Soli: More Google magic, this time coming from their Advanced Technology and Projects lab featured last week. Soli is a piece of kit which is working on purely gestural interfaces, to get us to the point where we will be able to control, say, webpage navigation simply by rubbing our fingers together in the manner of an old Jewish tailor fingering the shmutter. Is that a good thing? Who knows? GOOGLE KNOWS. GOOGLE KNOWS BEST. DO NOT QUESTION IT.

• Pessimizely: As anyone involved in online publishing knows, A/B testing gives THE BIG NUMBERS – trialling different headlines or webpages layout to different audiences simultaneously and then rolling out the ones which deliver the best traffic over a defined test window, is what pretty much all publishers do these days; this Chrome extension will tell you if a website you’re visiting is doing that to you, and display the different content you could be seeing as well as showing you how this differential content is being used to create custom audiences, etc. Won’t work everywhere as it’s only usable on sites running their A/B testing through Optimizely, but hugely interesting nonetheless.

• Grow Slow: Tweeting a picture of a fig tree, growing, once a day. The Slow Web at its finest.

• A Brilliant Ad Idea Based on Shadows and Graffiti: STEAL THIS SOMEONE IT IS GENIUS.

• Beautiful Old Colourised Photos: Marina Maral has done a gorgeous job here of taking old photos and imagining what the colours behind them were. This stuff often looks tacky and poorly photoshopped, but these are very well done indeed.

• Project Callisto: Well this is depressing – not the fact that it exists, but that it’s necessary at all. Callisto is a project deisgned to use digital to improve the rate of reporting of sexual assaults on US campuses – letting people who’ve been the victim of harassment or assault, regardless of gender, report the time, location and detail of the incident safely and anonymously. Whilst there are obvious concerns about the potential for false-blaming, it seems overall like an eminently sensible idea which you’d imagine being the sort of thing which will over time become the de facto way of reporting this sort of stuff.

• A Directory of US Payphones: Because you never know when you might be a bit fcuked and think “I know, I want to call a payphone in Nebraska and see who picks up”. Basically analogue chatroulette with fewer penises.

• The Ringer: Born from the ashes of Grantland, the Ringer is a new US site collecting writing on sport, pop culture, music, tech, data and all those sorts of things. Early days – it only launched this week – but the lineup of writers is strong and there’s already some decent writing on there.

• The Crisis Text Line: Basically the Samaritans, on text. Something that I know the Samaritans are working on delivering, being done already in the US. They’re actively looking to launch in other countries too, so if you’re reading this in a place you think might benefit, get in touch.

• Making Invisible: Inspired by a general sense of ennui with the use of the phrase ‘making the invisible visible’ this Twitter bots spits out pleasingly aphoristic statements along those lines – “making the unable able”, for example, or “making the ineffable effable”. You can probably find a strapline for your startup here should you need one.

• Civil War Tails: It’s rare that I think “You know what? That museum needs more cats”. This is probably why I am not considered a visionary in the same way as the person behind this INSANE museum in the US, which depicts some of the major conflicts of the US Civil War through the medium of carefully-constructed dioramas featuring…er…small, model cats, in uniform. Sort of like ‘The Life Of Christ In Cats’ of VIZ fame, except with Custer and, er, not a plate.

• The Universe of Miles: I’ve featured these Plygon visualisations before, but this one, exploring the impact of Miles Davis on culture of all stripes, is another wonderful piece of work. They do this stuff so, so well – fine, they obviously have a CMS which makes it relatively simple, but it’s so slick.

• GWBPLARP: A catchy title, sure, but I am only prepared to type ‘The George W Bush Memorial Library AR Project” once. Love this, though – such a clever use of AR and SUBVERSIVE TACTICS. Ellen Chenoweth has, using Layar, set up an alternative information trail through the GW Bush Memorial Library – users who have the app and are aware of the project can scan certain objects in the collection using Layar and will be given an alternative reading of their meaning and context, one which presents a different perspective from that given by the museum. SO SMART – I wish I’d thought of this, both as an art project and as a way of fcuking with an existing THING. This is eminently stealable as an idea, and can be applied to almost anything – there’s a GREAT piece of brand hijacking waiting to happen here for the right campaign organisation, I think.

• The Trump Chain: Trump as a blockchain expert. A single-gag Twitter feed which is sort of funny and weirdly plausible, which doesn’t say great things about blockchain zealots tbh.

• Simpsonwave: Combining the vaporwave glitch aesthetic with clips from The Simpsons and some sweetly wavey music, this is a rather wonderful playlist of YouTube videos which will almost certainly be projected onto the wall of some hipster houseparty this weekend while a bunch of people far cooler than me fall into their own private kholes.

• Islamophobin: Beautifully this is ACTUALLY FOR SALE – Islamophobin is chewing gum packaged up to look like a drug designed to combat Islamophobia – buy some today, and hand it out to anyone you see behaving like a racist prick (shout out the trendy-looking bloke in Holborn Sainsbury’s on Tuesday yelling at the woman in a burqa who was in the queue with him to “go back to her third world country”, this is for YOU).

• Text & Chill: File under ‘Should have been developed by Netflix’, this is a Facebook Bot which you can talk to to get film recommendations. Reviews I’ve read suggest it’s pretty good, and understands normal-ish language – you just tell it some films you like and why you like them, and it gives you suggestions of stuff along similar lines you might want to watch.

• Atelier Iwakiri: Click the link. Scroll down. Then MARVEL at these awesome leather handbags shaped like all sorts of rather wonderful animals. The hippo ones are AWESOME – it’s all in Japanese, so I have no clue at all whether they are a) mind-fcukingly expensive (but probably; b) shippable outside of Japan. Still, though, very cool.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR A COLLECTION OF EMINENTLY SAMPLEABLE FRENCH BOOGIE FROM THE 1980s? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE JAPANESE KID HAS GONE FULL RAMBO OVER THE PAST WEEK IN THE FOREST, PT.2:

• Berghain Trainer: I get the impression that notorious Berlin techno’n’piss spot Berghain probably isn’t cool anymore among the cognoscenti, what with even people like me having known of it for a decade or so now. Still, if you want to experience the palm-dampeningly tense “WILL THEY VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE BY ALLOWING ME INGRESS?” moment when you confront notoriously judgmental doorman Sven, this website lets you do that very thing. Features VOICE RECOGNITION and all sorts of modern gubbins, but is actually pretty simple. Nicely made, though fails to capture the urea scent.

• Young Thug As Paintings: Classical paintings which look a bit (and I mean this loosely) like famously unintelligible rapper Young Thug (except mostly with fewer tatts).

• Screeners: A real-life art project rendering of the Ju Janta Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from Hitchhikers (which, you will recall, went completely black at the first hint of danger, stopping wearers from seeing whatever it was that they ought to be scared of and thus helping them remain calm); except they don’t go dark at sight or peril, they go dark at sight of SCREENS, thereby stopping wearers from immersing themselves in the digital when they should be enjoying the physical. Or something. Anyway, this is an artgag, but I do like the idea of applying this tech to, say, restaurants – imagine a booth fitted with cameras which dims the lights to the point of blindness at the first sign that either companion has their phone out. It would be GREAT (terrible).

• Kineman: BRILLIANT little web app which gives you a 3d model of a skeleton for you to pose however you like. Partly, obviously, a useful anatomical tool for demonstrating skeletal anatomy, but also a great way to make a picture of a skeleton, say, fingering its own bottom.

• The Der Sturm Archive: Scans of one of the preeminent journals of the expressionist movement in the 1930s, if you’re an art historian this is probably pretty cool, though you’ll need to speak German to read any of it.

• The Puff Up Club: I love this – my favourite online balloon-based participatory artwork of the week, which is saying a LOT. Part of an installation at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, the piece consists of a balloon in a box which is inflated by people clicking on the ‘blow’ button on the website, which also features a livestream of the balloon; eventually it will be inflated enough to burst, at which point a new, larger balloon is fitted. Taking inspiration from those clicker games that were all the rage last year, I have no idea what the high concept is here, nor do I care.

• Rynkl: I basically stopped looking in the mirror about 9 years ago when I realised that the view simply wasn’t getting better, however many animals I sacrificed to the dark lord. If, though, you spend time scrutinising yourself in the vanitypool, watching for the inevitable signs of ageing to show and crying at the inexorability of time, then you may appreciate this – Rynkl is an app which basically tracks the development of wrinkles, sags and other signs of your body’s decay, and lets you measure them over time. WHY??? It doesn’t seem to be linked to a cosmetics brand or clinic, though that would be the obvious link. The list of feature benefits is GREAT – check these out: “keep a log and track the “wrinkleness” [sic] in vital areas of your face”; “evaluate the beneficial effects of multiple treatments”; “track how young you look compared to your friends and age group in general” – all guaranteed to make you feel FABULOUS!

• Fly By Night: It’s a FACT – pigeons are the new hotness. After LBI doing its pigeon pollution tracker gimmick earlier this year, we now have this initiative from NYC which is going to involve strapping a load of LED lights to pigeons to create lightshows when they fly. To whit: “Friday through Sunday evenings at dusk, a massive flock of pigeons will elegantly twirl, swoop, and glide above the East River, as Riley orchestrates a series of performances occurring regularly throughout late spring. At the call of a whistle, thousands of birds will emerge from their home in a grand, converted historic boat docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The pigeons will circle above the river as the sun sets over Manhattan, and small leg bands, historically used to carry messages, will be replaced with tiny LED lights, illuminating the sky in a transcendent union of public art and nature.” HOW AMAZING IS THIS???? Brands with a unique colour signature, GET ON THE PIGEON BANDWAGON.

• The Instamuseum: Turn your Instagram feed (or indeed any public one) into a 3d virtual art gallery thing, which features your ‘Grams hanging on the walls like the beautiful works of art they most surely are. I reckon there’s an INFLUENCER-LED DIGITAL CURATION FAN REWARD project you can spin out of this, probably, though having reread this phrase I’m no longer sure what, if anything, those words mean.

• Turkmenistan Is Empty: Mesmerising photoessay taking you, the reader, on a tour of the capital of Turkmenistan – Ashgabat is VERY shiny, but also very bereft of people, and looks like an insanely creepy place to visit (and, almost certainly, to live).

• Highscore Money: Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? Ten years on, we have a new version, and I am so, so bitter I didn’t think of it. The premise is simple – there’s a leaderboard, which anyone can be on – you pay money, and your donation determines how high up you rank. Simple, but it’s already netted the creator a few thousand dollars for doing NOTHING AT ALL. If you’re a funny brand with deep pockets there’s probably actually a bit of fun to be had here, probably.

• The Hotspot Poet: My favourite idea of the week, this – an art project which sets up dummy wifi hotspots whose names change every 10 seconds, through doing presenting line-by-line renderings of various works by various poets. SO MANY APPLICATIONS for this, not least as a cool Easter Egg in bars or galleries or theatres; chuck this in your next DECK (WHY IS IT CALLED A DECK NOONE HAS ADEQUATELY EXPLAINED THIS TO ME, STILL????) of ‘inspiring ideas you will never do anything with but which are arty and leftfield enough to make you feel momentarily clever’.

• The Sentence Tree: I love this. Type any sentence into this tool and it will break it down into its constituent parts, identifying the grammatical status of each word (noun, adverb, preposition, etc). Such a great teaching resource and if you’re a language nerd who’s surprisingly crap at knowing anything about English grammar (*ahem* me) genuinely fascinating.

• Music Map: A WONDERFUL ‘Taxonomy of all the musical genres’ map which combines far better UX/UI than I’ve seen in one of these before with beautiful curated playlists for each genre on both YouTube and Spotify. So, so nice, and makes me quite angry that Amazon never listened to me when I told them to build something like this 4 years ago to sell more digital records. WHY DOES NOONE EVER LISTEN? Again, rhetorical, please don’t tell me, I’m feeling fragile.

• Dolio: Right, I get it, we are ALL CYBORGS NOW (or Centaurs, if you’re a chessplayer). Still, I can’t be the only person who gets a very real frisson of horror at this, a so-called ‘Autonomous Self Agent’ which you can plug into your Facebook account and which, it promises, will do a really good job of behaving like you on the platform – liking posts, commenting, replying to messages, etc, all without you having to lift a finger. Can we take a moment to think on exactly how little engagement we have with our ‘friends’ when we feel the desire to outsource even the most light-touch of our interactions with them to a robot? Also, the strapline here – “You can be sure that the people you care about get the personal attention they deserve” – manages to be simultaneously so cold and SO CHILLING. And what if Dolio decides it knows better than you about who you should be friends with? What if it alters your social graph beyond all recognition? Actually there’s an interesting art project here about giving this control and seeing who notices, if anyone, and where it leads you, but it doesn’t make it any less FCUKING CREEPY.

• Teviot Tale: A comforting, human, interactive fiction hug to finish with, hopefully banishing memories of that HORRIBLE BOT. Teviot Tales is a project by artist Hannah Nicklin, exploring the people and places of the Teviot estate in Poplar through a story built on Twine. Lovely, charming and wonderfully personal in feel, this is beautiful digital art.

FINALLY ON THE MUSIC FRONT, SHALL WE GO WITH A SUMMERY MIX OF HIPHOP, GRIME AND ASSORTED OTHER SOUNDS BY MOF GIMMERS? WE SHALL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Faces Of Louis Theroux: All of his lovely, confused, awkward faces. Do you think they are ever going air the Savile one again? I mean, I can see why they might not want to, but man would that make for fascinatingly grim forensic viewing now.

• Conversations With My Fake Boyfriend: Hollywood actors with imagined things that they might say if they were actually your boyfriend. They’re not, though, whatever you might tell yourself and whatever you decide to call your dildo.

• The Bright Side of Awful Things: Finding the joy is an important quality in life, one which I singularly lack. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of this site’s book, which brings nuggets of HAPPY INFORMATION about ostensibly rubbish things like, er, starvation.

• Arrested Westeros: GoT screencaps with Arrested Development captions. Literally NO IDEA whether this is funny or not, based on my ignorance of GoT, but anything to do with Arrested Development is generally pretty great.

• Bad Character Design: Taking apart bad character illustrations from comicbooks and videogames.

• 70s Scifi Art: You really don’t need more of a description than that, I promise you.

• You’re Gonna Die Here: I was convinced I’d linked to this before, but a cursory trawl of the archive suggests not – this Tumblr ‘celebrates’ the creepier listings on Airbnb, the ones that give the impression that the person listing the apartment might also be the sort of person to hide, naked, in the airvents, masturbating at you while you wash the dishes before dropping silently behind you to skin you alive and make your epidermis into a nice pair of monogrammed slippers. You know the sort.

• Redesigning the United States: New designs for the flags of each US state. A nice project which still can’t prevent the Dakotas from being almost entirely pointless.

• I See Bees: Just a whole LOAD of bee-related pictures and stuff, for all the beekeepers out there who I know follow Web Curios religiously.

• The World Cup Draw: Brilliant, beautiful drawings of footballers.

• Dads Are The Original Hipsters: Retro dads, looking cool. Nice pictures, and a nicely done variant on the standard Tumblr layout for all you styling aficionados.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Erotic Servers of Neverwinter Nights: NO, WAIT, COME BACK! Look, you don’t have to have any sort of interest in virtual sexplay in a virtual world to enjoy this piece, honest. The writeup of the author’s one and only visit to a ‘sexy’ server in original MMO Neverwinter Nights, this starts off as a general AHAHAHA LOOK AT THE FURRY WEIRDOS piece and ends up being something a lot more thoughtful about the nature of relationships and social interaction in virtual spaces. Also an excellent opportunity for me to remind you to read My Tiny Life, if you haven’t already, for what is STILL the best take I’ve read about the psychology of online communities.

• On Piaf: Review in the LRB of a recent biography of Edith Piaf, which does an excellent job in itself of presenting a picture of the artist-as-malleable-entity (/pretentious) as well as a total mess. How many car crashes? Oh Edith!

• The Afterlife of Polaroid: This is a great essay, looking at how Polaroid has managed, through the Impossible Project, to carry on its existence, and exploring the strange bridging point that it created between the old world of analogue photography and the existing immediacy and ephemerality of the photograph as unit of communication.

• The Bot Power List 2016: Included less because it’s fascinating per se, and more because this is potentially a sort of “Year 0” moment for the INEVITABLE RISE OF THE MACHINES. Are these the founding fathers of the coming bot imperium (no, no they are not).

• The Voice Actors of Videogames: It’s weird to consider that Nolan North is more famous than many actual, proper Hollywood actors and yet noone really knows what he looks like; what’s less weird and more unfair is the discrepancy between what actors such as North get paid for their v/o work in videogames compared to what they’d get for screentime. This is a fascinating piece looking at the strange world of demi-stardom inhabited by the pro game actor, with all of the perks and drawbacks it entails.

• Trump and the GOP Machine: Inevitable Trumpian long read #1 of the week, this piece looks less at the man (though the interview portion of this is pretty illuminating, I think) and more at the party which is struggling to work out how it can harness the juggernaut without destroying itself in the process. You don’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Republican Party mechanics to find this interesting, honest, and the questions it raises about how to ‘do’ political mobilisation on a mass scale in the modern era are as germane to us as they are to the US.

• Chatting With A Trumpboi:  Inevitable Trumpian long read #2 of the week, here we have a really interesting chat between the author, a left-leaning liberal, and a 22-year old male Californian who’s firmly intending on voting Trump. Intelligent and articulate on both sides, the crazy thing for me was the voter’s insistence that a vote for Trump was almost entirely borne out of what he sees as a need to rail against the insidious forces of political correctness. Do young, white men really feel so constrained in what they can say and where that they feel the need to rally behind an old white man famed for saying the unsayable (and often unthinkanble)? Well, yes, it would appear so. Scary stuff.

• The Racial Bias In Our Sentencing Machines: You think THAT was scary? Check this out! Software is being widely used in the US in order to help triage the criminal justice process by looking at an offenders demographic profile and using statistical analysis software to make predictions about the likelihood that an offender will reoffend, what sort of crimes they might be likely to commit inthe future, etc – which analysis is then being fed into the sentencing system. The only problem is, the software seems to be displaying an inherent bias against black and minority ethnic offenders within the system. GREAT!

• How The Internet Works: Super long, very technical but pretty exhaustive look at the actual hardware tech which underpins my ability to write this in the cloud and send it to the ether, and you in turn to read it on a phone. MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.

• Playing Golf on Acid With Hunter S Thompson: It’s a good anecdote, this one, and ends, as all good anecdotes should, with some geese being worried with a shotgun.

• We’re Looking For Writers…: McSweeney’s once again nail the modern age with this piece on the great opportunities being afforded to young writers to create CONTENT. CONTENT! WE LOVE CONTENT!

• Betting Shop of Horrors: Pretty horrible depiction of the risks run by staff in modern high street betting shops in the UK, which also takes in a broader look at the state of the market, why they proliferate so on UK high streets (a side effect of the way Fixed Odds Betting Terminals work, apparently, which means you need lots in different locations to turn a profit), and a happy reminder of exatly what a filthy, grubby industry the bookmaking one is (and I say that as someone who’s worked with bookies, to my shame).

• We R Cute Shoplifters: Lifting the lid on the Tumblr Bling Ring, those teens on the platform sharing the tales of their ‘lifts’ – the shoplifting hauls they share as a community.

• The Madman as a Painter: Fascinating portrait of little-known (to me, at least) artist Richard Dadd, who painted pretty dense, weird pictures and who by all accounts was totally and utterly mad. Not only interesting in terms of content – Dadd really was something of a character, albeit a slightly murderous one – but also in terms of the questions it raises about whether the value of the art means that it was better that Dadd wasn’t treated with modern pharamceuticals, etc, which might have made him significantly less, well, stabby, but would also have stifled the impulses which led him to create.

• Hillary Vs Herself: Back to US politics, and another profile of a Clinton – this time, though, it’s Hillary, profiled by someone who confesses to never have really warmed to her and who ends the piece by seeminly just sort of feeling sorry for the woman and her seemingly insurmountable challenge connecting with audiences at scale which is costing her in the campaign.

• Being John Hinckley: You may not remember who John Hinckley is – I certainly didn’t before reading this. He’s the man who tried to shoot Ronald Reagan bitd, and this is the story of what happens to someone after they’ve tried to kill the POTUS. Really sad, actually, in the way that portraits of the deeply ill and lonely always are – turns out you pretty much screw your life when you attempt to pop the most powerful man in the world, so, er, DON’T TRY IT, KIDS.

• 13 Right Now: Another in the seemingly interminable list of pieces examining the lives of teens in the connected age – this one again is a white American girl, so par for the course, but as with all the others it’s grimly, bleakly fascinating (although if you already have a 13 year old of your own you can probably skip this).

• Being The Hot Felon: Remember Jeremy Meeks, the mugshot that launched a thousand ships? He’s out now, though still not totally free, and making his first tentative steps into the world of modelling. This is a weirdly sad piece, painting a picture of an awful lot of predatory people around him looking to profit from the 15 minutes and possibly not having quite as much care for Meeks as one might wish – the whole deal about the man wanting to get rid of his tatts to break with his criminal past, and his agent’s reaction to that (vis a vis his bad boy appeal) is about as cheering as you’d expect. Good luck Jeremy, you beautiful bastard.

• Juarez Returns To Life: Finally in the longreads this week, a wonderful piece looking at Ciudad Juarez, the Northern Mexican town which in the past decade became a byword for all that was wrong with the country – one of the world’s murder capitals, a place from which women and girls were regularly disappeared, inspiration for a whole section of 1666 by Roberto Bolano, it turns out that Juarez is now practically a paragon of civic order (practically). Loads of interesting stuff here, from the photography to the practical steps taken by the city’s governors, to the throwaway line about one of Juarez’s major problems being its proximity to a neighbour with a near-limitless appetite for drugs and inadequate anti-gun legislation (that would be America). A great piece of foreign reporting, this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS AN ACTUAL PRO-GUN ADVERT AND NOT SATIRE!

1) First up, a beautiful and slightly glacial track with a beautiful video of digital foxgloves. Give it a few minutes – it goes all interestingly chopped and screwed halfway in. This is ‘Take A Chance’ by Flume:

2) Next up, the most stylish video I’ve seen in a while – this really is absolutely beautifully shot, and a perfect accompaniment to another slightly cold-feeling track by Son Lux, this called ‘Cage of Bones’. There’s some ‘artistic’ female nudity at the end, in case you care about that sort of thing one way or another:

3) I really, really hate this song, but can’t not include the video because it’s so brilliantly internet – as one of the comments describes it, it’s like the final boss of some fashion catwalk dance videogame thing. The song really is GARBAGE, though – it’s by Danny L Harle and it’s called ‘Ashes of Love’:

4) Eskimo Snow by Why? is still one of my favourite albums of all time, and as such I will happily follow anything lead singer and driving force Yoni Wolf does – this is his latest project, a collaboration called Yoni & Geti, and this is ‘Madeline’ which I promise will reveal itself to you as a perfect, melancholic pop song after a couple of listens. The video’s super-hipster, but then it was always going to be:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! The world of English language hiphop’s not exactly overflowing with Asian rappers; this is Dumbfoundead with ‘Safe’, an excellent rant against the lack of representation for Asians in Hollywood and a good video to boot:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! Is this the first anti-Donald track since he secured the nomination? Probably not, but it’s the first one I’ve heard and it’s actually halfway decent in a sort of ‘Dear God, it’s all fcuked’ way, by way of the early 2000s. This is called ‘Goodnight America’ by Until The Ribbon Breaks:

7) NEW AVALANCHES! As pointed out to me by Rishi, it’s 16 years since Frontier Psychiatrist which makes me feel SO OLD. Anyway, this is Frankie Sinatra, featuring hipster favourite MF DOOM and gaptoothed rap oddity Danny Brown, and it’s generally excellent:

8) Finally this week, the best animated tale of animal infidelity and murder you will ever see. This is SO DARK, and I really do mean that – the atmosphere is poisonously oppressive in the best possible way. It’s called ‘Chaud Lapin’ – ENJOY! BYE HAPPY WEEKEND BYE!!!!