Webcurios 22/07/16

LET’S KICK THIS OFF WITH A RATHER EXCELLENT D’N’B-FLAVOURED FIRE IN THE BOOTH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THE LABOUR PARTY DISCOVERING SNAPCHAT FILTERS AND REALLY ELEVATING ITS ALREADY LESS-THAN-EDIFYING LEADERSHIP FARRAGO:

• Facebook Live Video Gets (Another) Update: “MAKE MORE VIDEO ON FACEBOOK!”, screams Zuckerberg’s big blue misery factory, hurling violent sums of money at publishers everywhere until we reach the video singularity in which we all have our hands amputated and replaced by livestreaming cameras (yes, it sounds fanciful, but JUST YOU WAIT). Facebook Live Video now allows recordable streaming upto 4 hours (I simply cannot think of a use case for this, but that’s probably a failure of imagination on my part). More significantly, broadcasters (and viewers) can switch to ‘video only’ mode, which will hide comments and reactions from the livestream; probably a wise choice if you’re a brand (or not a straight, white man – thanks, internet!).

• More App-action Ads on Facebook: I was about to start this with a lame, observational “Hey, so who uses appas anymore, right? RIGHT?” riff, and then the Today programme just told me that more people are banking using apps than ever before, so what do I know (as ever, rhetorical)? Anyway, there are now a host of new ad units available on Facebook designed to target people who take actions in-app, such as purchases, or to showcase apps in more appealing fashion through Canvas, or to retarget people with app install ads after product views (so after you’ve looked at some trousers on ASOS you might be targeted with an ad suggesting you download the ASOS app, which would on-install let you directly buy the trousers you were looking at). App people, this stuff is pretty useful.

• Twitter Offers Verification For All: Except it’s obviously not for all – anyone can apply, but the much-coveted (by whom?) blue tick will remain the preserve of ‘creators and influencers’, and it will be Twitter who determines whether or not you have a sufficient enough level of fame and notoriety to warrant having your ego digitally-stroked. This is obviously part of its response to the increasing trollhorror – making it harder for online mobs to impersonate others, for example – though imho it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference and is simply going to end in a bunch of egowanking for a certain subset of webfamouses. So it goes.

• Google Lets Users Suggest Places To Add on Maps: This could be problematic if you’re a physical business. Google Maps will now let users suggest additions – places and things – from both the web and app versions; it will also allow people to submit ‘additional details’ for existing places, with a peer review-style system designed to work to approve accurate comments. Or, you know, to really screw with a business’ listing on Maps if a bunch of people want to collaborate to get inaccurate or reputationally unhelpful information added to a map. Google’s announcement on this is technically sketchy on how exactly this will work and what checks and balances are in place to prevent people messing with it too much – you’d expect there to be some – but it’s worth keeping an eye on what Maps says about your company outlets just in case.

• Draw Your Own Snapchat Filters: OH THE FUN YOU WILL BE ABLE TO HAVE. Oh, and they added Bitmoji integration too, which is nice. Actually, the filter thing has some pretty interesting creative applications, but it will mostly be used to scrawl crudely-drawn phalluses (phalli?), I’m pretty sure.

• Clinton Uses Snapchat Geofilter At RNC: It’s childish, and it’s totally playing to the peanut gallery, but it’s also reasonably smart (well, smartish) and a clever PR move. As mentioned in Curios passim, the potential for light-touch trolling of competitor brands with this tech is huge – if no football team uses this on their rivals’ ground on the first day of the season (I’m looking at you, Spurs/Arsenal/MUFC/Man City) I will be very disappointed (I won’t actually care one iota).

• Yelp Pokestop Integration: Smart from Yelp – it’s now letting users tag locations on the platform as being Pokegyms or Pokestops. Small, simple functionality which is a nice piece of reactive PR as well as being sort of useful for the 4-5% of people currently playing Pokemon GO who will still be playing it in a month’s time. The blogpost announcing it, though, is unforgivable (no really, try and read it without grinding your teeth slightly).

• Getty Endless: Lots of nice corporate webwork this week, starting with this site by Getty which beautifully demonstrates the flexibility and wide range of potential uses of its archive in this site, which collages together photos of famouses out of photos of other people, with a very slick interface and all sorts of nice bells and whistles. Click the link – it will make much more sense when you see it, honest. Sorry for the mangles prose.

• IKEA Passport Challenge: Supersmart case study from IKEA here, combining Skype integration, banner ads and some clever creative; the idea being that Skype users were served banners asking if they wanted to win a £450 holiday; if they clicked, they were given 30 seconds to find their passport and get a photo of themselves with it via their webcam, with those who managed it winning the trip. The whole idea, obviously, is designed to promote how tidy your house is with a full complement of faceless, Scandi sort-your-life-out-boxes; simple but clever.

• Netflix Mixtapes: SUCH a lovely idea. Netflix is letting users package together ‘mixes’ of films from the platform, complete with personalised description and cover image and the like, which can then be shared with other users for them to watch. Doubtless based on the ‘insight’ that ‘films can have deep emotional resonance for people’ (!), it’s a very cute service indeed, and one which I’d like to see nicked and used for iPlayer or something – imagine making a playlist of the best 6 episodes of Red Dwarf to share with a potential partner to check if you’re compatible (don’t imagine it, it’s a terribly sad idea)?

• Meet Graham: Superb PR of the week, this Australiancampaign to promote safer driving in Victoria has been everywhere thanks to its excellent CGI depiction of Graham, the terrifying monster of a man who they have dreamed up to show exactly what we’d need to look like if, as a species, we were designed to survive car smashes. The reason this has done so well is solely the CGI – if this had been cobbled together on the cheap, noone would have given anything resembling a fcuk. The accompanying site is cleverly made too, with just enough of a hint of body horror to keep you clicking round in mildly-Cronenbergian fascination.

• Responsive Lookbook: Neat little idea from Diesel – resize your browser window to show models wearing…er…some jeans and stuff contorting into different poses to demonstrate the way in which the clothes will look when you’re…er…standing on your head. Look, the interface is nice, OK?

• Tantale: I think this is the third or fourth nice piece of webwork promoting French TV I’ve featured in the past few months – well done, the French! From what I was able to tell, this is effectively some sort of French version of House of Cards (yes, a lazy description – you’ve come to expect nothing less) – this website lets you play Choose Your Own Adventure with it, using your phone as a decision-making remote while you get the high-quality FMV experience. The production values on this are high, and the control by phone is a nice way of not breaking immersion with the show you;’re watching. Obviously it’s in French, but isn’t it time you made use of that GCSE?

NEXT UP, TRY THE RECENT LATE-NIGHT, CHOPPY, ECLECTIC MIX BY GRIMES!

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE UBER-FOR-DOGPOO THING, IS OFFICIALLY DECLARING THE UNITED STATES A POST-SATIRICAL COUNTRY. PT.1:

• Pokecrew: I’m going to front-load this section with Pokecrap this week, so if that’s not your area of interest then skip the first few and you will be FINE. First up is Pokecrew, one of a series of Pokemon maps which lets you see which Pokemon are likely to be around in any given area; the nice thing about this is that it represents each with a little cartoon pokemon, meaning that the UK is basically one huge teeming mass of weird multicoloured Japanese monster oddities. Runs on audience submissions, unlike…

• PoGoMap: Programme which apparently pulls data from Pokemon GO servers to display realtime information to your phone, tablet, pc or whatever to tell you what’s nearby should you so desire.

• Pokevision: Whereas this does the same thing, pulling info from Niantic servers, except it does so in-browser with no downloads required.

• Pokemon Reviews: If you ever doubted the weird, obsessional nature of Pokemon and its status as a neverending pillar of popular culture (IT WILL NEVER FCUKING DIE), witness this stunningly labour-of-love-ish site in which its author offers entirely subjective, fanboyish ‘reviews’ of EVERY SINGLE FCUKING POKEMON EVER. Christ alone knows how many hours of work this took, or how many words are on here – I know you think this crap is long, right, but Curios has nothing on this. Quite remarkable, in every single possible sense of that word.

• The Pokemon Theme, Remixed: You want a PEAKWAVE remix of the Pokemon theme? OF COURSE YOU DO. This is actually very good indeed, regardless of your appreciation for tracking down virtual beasts.

• The Pokemon Liability Clause: Apparently there’s a clause in the Pokemon GO Ts&Cs which effectively waives your right to ever claim damages against Niantec at any point in the future (Christ knows why you’d need to, but). This page lets you send an email opting out of this clause with one click, which is probably worth doing just in case (although tbh if you get run over whilst attempting to snare a Charizard on the A106 then good luck suing them you idiot).

• Puck: No more Pokemon now, promise. Puck is a now-funded Kickstarter project and is a Bluetooth beacon for the home; effectively programmable to do whatever you like, communicate with whatever you want, and internet-enabled for all your eventual Internet-of-Things needs, if you’re techy builder-type person there is a lot of interesting potential in this, I think. It will work with Raspberry Pi, it has a lovely, simple, drag-and-drop GUI to program it, and generally looks like a pretty useful tool in the ‘teach yourself about THE MASSIVELY CONNECTED FUTURE’ panoply.

• Automicrofarm: You wait your whole life for an autonomous farming robot and then two come along in a fortnight. Following on from the one I included last week, this is Automicrofarm, an aquaponics farm for the home – it comes as a kit which you can install in your back yard (or wherever, really), comprising a pond for fish who form a sustainable ecosystem with the plants kept nearby. The idea is, to quote, “your plants are automatically watered and fertilized. The fish feed the plants. The plants clean the water for the fish. You get vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans (whatever you plant) as well as fish for your harvest.” This sounds sort of great, but it also sounds like the first step in the post-apocalyptic race for survival; I don’t imagine it’s any coincidence that this is being sold in the US – North Carolina, to be precise – a country increasingly looking like the sort of place where it might be an idea to start thinking about what to do when civilisation breaks down completely.

• Fishes: 3d scans of an absolute metric fcuktonne of fish. Included almost entirely, I’m not ashamed to admit, because the description on the page reads, simply, and succinctly, “The aim of this project is to scan ALL the fishes”, which is something I reckon we can all get behind in principle.

• Mind Drones: What do those two words put you in mind of? Might it be FLYING DRONES CONTROLLED SOLELY BY THE MIND? In which case well done you, and welcome to part n of the scifi future that is the now. Obviously this is hugely rudimentary and prototypical, but there’s a bit in the voiceover where they talk about eventually being able to control multiple units autonomously using only the power of thought which, frankly, has to be the first indication of the coming psychic robot wars which will engulf us all.

• Autocolourise B&W Pics: Interesting use of neural networks here to apply colouring to existing black and white photos. The effects come out looking, like all recoloured images, slightly retro and sepia-ish and washed out, but that’s no bad thing – I applied it to one of myself like the sickening narcissist I am, and it got my jaundiced pallor just right, so well done it.

• AI Beer: Unsurprisingly this was written up in the Standard yesterday – it is the most hipster thing I’ve seen all week. Brewed in East London, available in secret locations where men with beards and tattoos and fundamentally irresolvable self-esteem issues gather, the gimmick is that drinkers can submit feedback on any given batch of brew which then determines the nature of the next lot; the idea being that their PATENTED ALGOBOLLOCKS will create ever-improving hooch. Two problems with this – a) there’s no need for this to be AI, is there? I mean, they could just have a bloke reading the feedback and adjusting the ration of hops, barley or whatever himself; and b) based on prevalent beer-drinking trends in East London over the past few years, what they eventually end up with will be so hoppy as to basically be fizzy, alcoholic grapefruit juice.

• Language Evolution Simulator: Techy, academic and in-no-way-visually-appealing, I still rather love this. A web project which attempts to simulate the manner in which language might evolve across three separate islands based on contact, interaction and usage; you can see a scrolling realtime list of how the words are evolving and changing on the page, which is poetic and hypnotic, and some of the invented terms and strangely beautiful and just demand definitions; to whit, ‘zelere’ – perhaps that should mean ‘(adj) the quality of being simultaneously eye-catching and yet totally unmemorable, eg “Did you see the latest Kardashian photoshoot? It was totally zelere!”. Try it yourself, it’s FUN.

• Pineapple TODAY: Or, based on the email I received yesterday telling me that, due to unprecedented levels of demand, they were running 5-10 days behind schedule, Pineapple Sometime Next Week. Still, if you’d ever wanted to have someone you know receive a pineapple from you at work, this is the website for YOU. I am utterly confused why the subletting company whose idea this is thought this was a clever idea – I would love to know exactly how much time they have spent this week messing with pineapples rather than, you know, making their startup work.

• Paletteable: It’s not like there aren’t a host of palette-choosing tools out there, but this one’s got a rather lovely interface (I was going to say Tinder-like, but I got told off last week for lazy comparisons between things so NO MORE. Until I get to the poo thing later, where it’s sort of inevitable); you simply tell it whether you like or dislike a colour and it suggests others which fit with your selections. Simple, clever and surely destined to be totally ripped off by B&Q or Dulux of Farrow & Ball or somesuch decorating brand.

• The Tshirts of the Republican National Convention: You want a quick overview impression of the totally fractured nature of political discourse in the US? Take a look at these beauties, photographs of tshirts worn by people in and around the RNC in Cleveland which happened this week (see this comforting Tweet for details!), and take a moment to try and comprehend the level of absolutely insane disconnect between people and the mechanics of government which has led us to a point where this is the popular face of politics in 2016 in the self-styled greatest democracy in the world.

• Anzac Archie: This is, to my mind, a really smart use of bot technology as part of the commemoration of Anzac day. Archie is a FB Messenger bot which simulates the memories and experiences of Australian WWI hero Archie Barwick in chat form; you can talk to Archie about his life, his experiences and his view of the war in an admittedly limited but still impressive piece of interactive tech. The possibility for this stuff is huge – imagine what you could do to augment TV narratives, for example, with evolving character bots designed to create deeper backstory interactions between, say, characters in EastEnders and their fans. Very nicely done.

• Anzac Live: In fact, the whole web experience for the Anzac Anniversary this year is really rather beautifully done and worth spending a bit of time going over; some really good examples of storytelling and narrative and interactivity here, along with a nice interface. Shame it’s by NewsCorp, but you can’t have everything.  

• Split Flap Display: It sounds wrong, this, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, it’s totally SFW, I promise. This is a set of instructions on how to make one of those…er…flippy letter things, you know the ones, which look a little bit like old-school alarm clocks with displays made up of bits of plastic which flip round to display the time. Oh, Christ, this is really hard to describe; basically, just click the link and then imagine how awesome a big one of these would be, mounted somewhere, which let passers-by randomly generate phrases or words on a gigantic clicky-clacky boards. It would be very awesome, is how awesome.

• Glif: Tripod mounts for smartphones are obviously nothing new; this, though, having doubled its target on Kickstarter looks to be a pretty impressive take on the standard-issue version. If you do a lot of smartphone filming, etc, this might be worth backing.

• Beyond Pricing: Are you lucky enough to own a home, in London or anywhere else? Are you putting it on Airbnb to squeeze every last penny out of it? Do you worry sometimes that you’re not absolutely rinsing EVERY SINGLE IOTA OF VALUE from your investment? Welcome to this charming service, then, which analyses prices of comparable Airbnb properties in the vicinity of yours and tweaks the price of your listing to best reflect the rest of the market – effectively surge pricing for rentals, which is CHARMING, I’m sure you’ll agree.

• Bubble: Attempting to ‘disrupt’ babysitting, Bubble works by leveraging the Facebook Knowledge Graph to let parents select prospective sitters by rating and their degree of connection to them – so you can see whether or not you and the person you’ll be entrusting your PRECIOUS LITTLE HUMANS have any friends in common so you can send them a quick FB message to ask how likely they are to leave sex stains on your couch and neck all your Casillero in your absence.

• Bots Talking About Dance Music: Slightly weird, this – when I discovered it earlier in the week they were talking about hiphop, now it’s moved on to (what is laughably referred to as) EDM. In any case, this is a few AI bots chatting to each other about dance music and linking to playlists, and is a pretty good way of finding a wide range of different dance music mixes, etc; Christ alone knows what the parameters for the chat are, but it’s sort of weirdly mesmerising.

• Modern Brands in the Soviet Style: You want to see a bunch of 20/21C brands redesigned as though they were born in the USSR? OH GOOD!

• The Time Magazine Data Dump: No idea at all how long this will be up for, but a bunch of enterprising hackers have made available the entire archive of Time Magazine over the past century available for download. You’ll need to torrent it, but it’s a hell of a resource (if it’s still there by the time you read this).

• The London Picture Archive: Oh I LOVE this! Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery, collected and mapped to the relevant locations across the capital. Historians, welcome to the rest of your afternoon (and, if the weather doesn’t pick up, quite possibly your weekend too).

• Shop The Stolen Art: Following in the proud tradition of Accessorise and others, this week it was the turn of major international fashion retailer Zara to shamelessly and egregiously steal someone’s design for profit. This is a small attempt to redress that – this webpage collects examples of designers  whose work has been lifted by the big boys with no payment or credit, shows up the comparison and offers you the opportunity to buy the original idea rather than the sweatshop-manufactured copy, thereby supporting indie designers and giving an (infinitesimally small, but) fcuk you to THE MAN (TAKE THAT, THE MAN! What’s that? You make so much money every second that small acts of protest such as this don’t even begin to make a dent in your thick, protective carapace of cash? Oh). I think this ought to have been an official Etsy or eBay initiative, except they almost certainly have to keep the big boys sweet because collaborations and suchlike. Still.

• Demolition Day: A great collection of photos of stuff getting blown up around the world. No more, no less – weirdly therapeautic, and if you’re the sort of dreadful digitard who needs an image for a presentation to explain why digital thing X is disrupting analogue thing Y then a) this will serve your purposes; and b) I wish you nothing but ill.

• Musical Shadow Pavements: Look, I know that this is lazy, but their descrition is better than mine would be. To whit: “The installation is made of custom fabricated tiles that are integrated into the Mesa Arts Center’s pavement, and that react to the shadows of passersby by playing sounds of singing voices. Visitors to the site are welcomed by a moment of surprise and an invitation to engage with the piece, and through it, interact with other visitors and passersby. Shadows cast on different tiles trigger different voices, all singing in harmony. Length of shadow is dependant on the season, the time of day and the weather; meaning a visitor may never quite cast the same shadow twice. The sounds themselves also change with the angle of the sun, making playing with the installation a dynamic experience: entirely different for a visitor encountering it in the morning, the midday, the evening, and at night.” Steal this for your next outdoor experiential execution thingy, it’s a glorious and fun concept which the Southbank Centre should totally rip off if noone else does.

• Draw Your Own Emoji: Go on, I’m not going to judge you (although others might, if there’s any sense left in the world).

• Skylift: An art project which effectively lets people virtually Tweet from Julian Assenge’s gaff at the Ecuadorian embassy, “by broadcasting WiFi signals that exploit a smartphone’s reliance on using nearby MAC addresses for location services” (I confess to really not understand much of what that means at all, but hey ho – I do software not hardware, lads, and not even that if I’m totally honest with you here), installed at the Zoo Gallerie in Nantes. There’s got to be an interesting way in which you can use this tech, I’m sure, but I’m buggered if I can think of one at 9:04am. Sorry. Perhaps you’ll have more luck.

WHY NOT TRY THIS MIX OF PLEASANTLY UNPLEASANT, WOOZY TRAP-RNB BY ORANGE CALDERON?

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE UBER-FOR-DOGPOO THING, IS OFFICIALLY DECLARING THE UNITED STATES A POST-SATIRICAL COUNTRY. PT.2:

• Superfly: Want to get involved with the EXCITING WORLD OF LIVE VIDEO SHARING, but don’t want to do it with all your Facebook friends, or everyone on Twitter / Periscope, or you find Snapchat a frightening and alien primary-coloured ADD horror? Perhaps, then, you’ll like Superfly, which is basically like Whatsapp groups for live video – select your friends with whom you want to share your broadcast and there you go. Aimed at shy narcissists, I’d imagine.

• Basslet: You know that feeling when you’re at a gig or a club and you’re right in front of the speakers and your whole body just sort of resonates with the bass to the point where you might actually void yourself or be sick, and oh christ I need to sit down and drink some water and hug someone please stroke my back no my eyes are always like this honest why do you ask? Have you ever wanted to recreate that feeling in your day-to-day life? No, me neither, and yet here we are. MASSIVELY overfunded on Kickstarter, with just over two days left to go at the time of writing, Basslet is a wrist-mounted subwoofer which transfers the bass to you through your body, for use with music or games. I await with eager anticipation the first ‘I soiled myself after a 12-hour Cheetos, Mountan Dew and COD binge” reports when this ships.

• Test Your Book Smarts: Nice little quiz for bibliophiles asking you to match the title with the author. I found this hard, in part because I’m a classics-eschewing ignoramus but also because it skews American, but it’s pretty satisfying nonetheless.

• Shiftwear: Since Wilson had this idea last year, I’ve seen about half a dozen variants on the concept, proving either that he’s a visionary or, you know, the opposite. In any case, these are the most impressive of the prototypical “LED screens on trainers” designs I’ve yet seen; the screens are fully animated and full-colour, designs will eventually be available on a marketplace allowing anyone to upload and sell their own…to be honest I have a healthy degree of skepticism about whether these will ever see the light of day, but if you’re a more trusting soul than me then get involved.

• LuvByrd: A truly hideous name, this dating app is based on the idea that you might want to find someone who likes hiking as much as you do as opposed to someone with the etiolated physique of one of Wells’ Morlocks. Only in the US at the moment, but I can’t see why it couldn’t find a market over here – why don’t the Ramblers’ Association rip this off? IT WOULD BE ACE. Call it ‘Ramblove’ (actually, on reflection, really please don’t; that sounds hideous).

• Photos of Vietnam, 1969: Wonderful selection of photos, taken by draftee Lance Nix. Focusing on the downtime rather than the wartime, these are excellent.

• Johnny Slack: A collection of strange, disparate and rather lovely graphical WebGL art experiment things for you to play with.

• Dead Air Space: Would you like to make a music video for Radiohead? Of course you would, so here’s your chance. They’re offering anyone the opportunity to submit visuals for their track Dead Air Space; the closing date is 30 July, and the winning entry will be featured on their website and, one would presume, all over the rest of the web, so amateur videographers should get RIGHT ON IT.

• This Summer Bot: A Twitter bot which is constantly churning out imagined lines from the trailers to Summer blockbusters – you know, the ones where that gravelly voice sonorously intones “THIS SUMMER, JOURNEY TO A WORLD WHERE LOVE HAS NO FEAR AND FEAR KNOWS NO LIMITS” or somesuch guff (actually that one would probably work, on reflection), pulled and combined from actual lines from actual trailers. The way it autogenerates the videos for these is rather nice, aside from the output being eerily plausible.

• Mad Lads: A subReddit mocking lad culture in rather beautiful, understated fashion – highlighting all those instances where, if they took a long hard look at themselves, the lads in question aren’t being quite as mad as they think they are. Contains amazing highlights such as the CRAZY BANTS when MAD JONNO gets WRECKED and, er, really rather sensibly decides to tidy the kitchen. “YES MATE BUT HE’S WRECKED, YOU SEE”. Hm, well, yes, but everyone who went to university in the 90s almost certainly cleaned the kitchen when they left their student accommodation whilst on speed, so there’s nothing new to see here LADS.

• Low Poly Scenes: Scenes from popular films, recreated as small, low-poly animations. No description can quite do justice to how utterly, utterly lovely these are – there are nowhere near enough of them, and I would play the fcuk out of a game done in this style throughout.

• Through Your Eyes: This is a great project, giving disposable cameras to the homeless in Spartanburg, South Carolina USA, and using the resulting photos to document and raise awareness of the experience of homelessness in the area. Some of the photographs are beautiful, and all are, as you’d expect, poignant as.

• Utopian Visions of Menswear: To quote, “As a cross-cultural collaboration between British fashion stylist Ibrahim (IB) Kamara, originally from Sierra Leone, and South African photographer Kristin Lee-Moorman, ‘2026’ was conceived to challenge heteronormative attitudes to self-expression through fashion. It imagines what menswear might look like in 10 years’ time through the use of fabrics rescued from rubbish skips and thrift shops in Johannesburg and customised into new garments.“ When I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as someone cool enough and beautiful enough to dress like this.

• Ubeen: Not sure how long this is going to be available – it’s not an official Uber thing, so no idea whether they’ll be happy about this use of the API – but there’s something oddly compelling about seeing all your Uber ride data visualised and crunched. Hook the site up to your account and it will tell you how long you’ve spent Ubering, where you go most, when you go there and all that sort of STUFF. Totally pointless, other than to make you think ‘Christ, I have spent an awful lot of time sitting in cabs over the past few years’, but sort of cool nonetheless

• Pooper: So you’ve all obviously seen / read about this already this week, but it’s worth clicking on the link to explore the site in full and marvel at how it’s literally impossible to tell if this is a gag or not (Snopes says it’s real, fwiw). You know the deal – it’s Uber for the dogsh1t economy (aka the WHOLE economy ahahahazzzzzzzzz), where you can sign up to be paid in almost-certainly-tiny increments for picking up after other people’s dogs. I think my favourite (read: ‘least favourite’) bit of this is the ‘work for us’ section, which extols the virtues of being able to ‘work on your own terms’. Mate, I’m not sure whose definition of ‘your own terms’ it is that you’re using here, but in what world can you imagine someone operating with complete autonomy and economic freedom of choice actively choose to pick up the dog eggs of those wealthier than them in exchange for an income which will almost certainly equate to far less than minimum wage when factored hourly? Well quite.

• Turn URLs Into Emoji Links: I have literally no idea whatsoever what the point of this is or why it exists, but EVERYONE LOVES EMOJI, RIGHT? Christ.

• Vinylify: This, though, is EXCELLENT and should be snapped up by a big player ASAP for cool kudos points. Vinylify lets you upload a bunch of tracks, create some cover art for your compilation, and then have a bespoke dubplate cut JUST FOR YOU (or whoever the intended recipient is). Obviously the major issue here is rights – which is why, if I were Amazon or similar, I would buy the fcuk out of these people right now.

• Arkade London: This week’s ‘fun-if-pointless music visualiser’ by a couple of London coders. I’m a sucker for these things.

• Southern Rail Simulator: Satire! Except I imagine that if you’re at the mercy of Southern Rail then this is not funny in the slightest. HEY HO!

LAST UP FOR THE MIXES, REVEL IN THIS WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF DE LA SOUL SAMPLES, RARITIES AND OUTTAKES!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Architectural Models: You want a whole load of photos of architects’ models and dioramas and stuff? OF COURSE YOU DO!

• Synthetic Imagination: You know how I said ‘No more Pokemon’ up there? Yeah, I lied, sorry, but come on, this is Tumblr stuff and Pokemon is UBIQUITOUS there. Anyway, this is a fan art site collecting all sorts of interesting rendered mashed-up Pokemon characters which I confess to not really understanding but which display quite a lot of skill so here you are.

• Rappers With Pokemon: Cartoon depictions of rappers with Pokemon. No more, no less. How can you not love Rick Ross hanging out with Snorlax (you can’t)?

• Pokemon of New York: The inevitable Pokemon vs Humans of New York mashup, this is actually properly funny and nails the HONY style perfectly. Very good, although obviously a passing knowledge of the Pokeverse (I am so sorry) will amplify your enjoyment.

• Ladies By Ladies: Not a Tumblr, but I don’t care and nor do you, this collects artistic representations of women by women. Wide range of styles and subjects and artists here; occasional nudity, but, you know, ART.

• Mattis Dovier: Excellent, sinister black and white pixel art animations and gifs with a seriously rather dark dystopian techbodyhorror subtext. Really very, very good.

• My Lovely Cars: Photos of old sports cars, mostly from the 70s/80s, which are obviously a niche interest but which I know my editor will get disproportionately excited by. These are for YOU, Paul. Bonus points for the autoplay music on there which is ACE.

• List Oriented: Someone who for reasons known only to them has decided to play through every game in their Steam catalogue in alphabetical order, documenting what they thing about them. Not noteworthy as a project per se, but there are far more prosey flourishes and stylistic switchups going on here than you might usually expect, which makes it worth a click if you’re a gamer.

• The Love Journals: A collection of romantic quotes and vignettes from literature; suggest if nothing else you set a different one of these as your email signatire every day just to imbue your working interactions with a mild-but-palpable sense of discomfort.

• Citilegs: A project collecting photographs of the legs of New Yorkers. Shows a wide range of VERY colourful leggings, awesome tights and footwear and a pleasingly diverse range of bodyshapes and sizes. This is going to be a book, I think, but feels like a campaign waiting to happen…

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Elle Cover Takedown: This is really interesting, not just for the issues it raises around race and gender and appropriation and understanding and STUFF, but also in terms of the way in which it involves Elle taking a critical, dispassionate and in-no-way-exculpatory look at its recent cover featuring FKA Twigs and some unfortunate accompanying copy. Would that more media outlets were so open in discussing their cultural missteps.

• Jeff Bezos and World Domination: A look at the Amazon empire and the man behind it; the telling line in here for me is about Bezos not caring one iota about being liked, which struck me as analagous to that other famously-cuddly darling of the tech industry, one Mr Jobs. You want to imagine the future? Imagine being crushed under the weight of brown cardboard packaging forever.

• Unsung Heroes of Streaming: A truly fascinating piece exploring the role of human curation in the streaming wars; with Apple, Spotify and all the rest now offering some degree of human-curated playlisting service, this looks at the people who do the curation and explores how they work and how they determine what flies and what dies. When I was a kid I used to think being the person who soundtracked films and documentaries was the best gig – this is the modern-day analogue. SUCH power at the gatekeepers’ fingers, here.

• On Kawaii: ‘Kawaii’ – the Japanese concept best loosely translated as ‘cute’ – is one of the main cultural tropes we in the West all sort of know about Nipponese culture; this is an excellent piece looking at what the term means, what it defines, and the role it plays in a culture where face (and facades) are of constant importance.

• My Dad Harold Ramis: Amidst this week’s instalment of the liberal/alt-right culture wars, it’s rather nice to read a piece about Ghostbuster’s that not hysterical. This, by Harold Ramis’ daughter Violet Ramis Steel, talking about her memoriesof the film as a child and her thoughts and feelings around having such an integral part of her childhood and her upbringing and, to an extent, her familial identity, reimagined. SPOILER: she doesn’t, you may be amazed to know, make any claims at all about her CHILDHOOD BEING RUINED BY SJWS AND FEMINAZIS. Whodathunkit?

• The Best Time I Pretended Not To Have Heard Of Slavoj Zizek: I read this and thought it was GREAT, and then I have a horrible moment of realisation that I have probably been this bloke at least once in my life. Hey ho. Anyway, this is a great essay about the joy in pretending to intellectual or cultural obsessives that you simply have no idea who/what their favourite hobby horse or quotable intellectual is. Try it yourself, it’s genuinely great.

• Zadie Smith on Brexit: The ever-excellent Smith gives her view on Brexit – particularly good in terms of its self-awareness of the oddity and the lack of representativeness of the London liberal bubble, and the uniformity of discourse, and the way in which despite the City’s diversity we (meaning those born/raised here) are in many ways more insulated from the realities of the movements of people than people elsewhere in the UK where immigration may be numerically less of an issue. Smart, smart writing.

• Lanchester on Brexit: This, though, is the best thing I’ve read about the whole sorry mess to date. Lanchester on form is blisteringly good, and this from the latest LRB is smart and bitter and ANGRY and all of the good things; it’s full of quotable lines, this one in particular: “We’re used to political analysis based on class, not least because Britain’s political system is arranged around two political parties whose fundamental orientations are around class. What strikes you if you travel to different parts of the country, though, is that the primary reality of modern Britain is not so much class as geography. Geography is destiny. And for much of the country, not a happy destiny.” You really ought to read this.

• Hotdogs In Zion: You ever wondered what it would be like to visit a evangelical Christian theme park? Wonder no more! It sounds MENTAL, particularly the Jesus vs Satan boxing match (no, really) which I was sadly unable to find video evidence of.

• The Accidental Chinese Movie Star: This is ODD – another despatch from the weird frontier of Chinese cinema, telling the story of an American guy who’s found an unexpected degree of fame as a filmsrat in China. For those of you who read the piece a few months back about that massively overbudget delaed Chinese fantasy epic, this is an excellent companion piece.

• The Encyclopaedia of Matt Damon: Ordinarily I don’t ever see famouses and think “I’d like to be friends with you” (much, I am sure, to their chagrin), but reading this hagiography of Matt Damon by the rest of the Hollywood A-List I did get a bit of ‘I wish you were my mates’ envy. Fcuk knows what we’d talk about, but maybe they’d just let me sit in the corner and pretend they liked me. This is a sort of oral history of everyone’s pick for ‘nicest man in the business’, and much as I profess not to care about famouses this is a genuinely interesting – and funny – read.

• Big Sam – England’s Brexit Saviour: Joel Golby goes in on Big Sam’s appointment as England boss; as usual, this is excellent, and the image of him and Bruce wrestling for the job is genuinely one of the funniest most awful things my mind’s eye has had to see all year.

• The Tamir Rice Story: You may not remember the exact case of Tamir Rice amongst all the other young black men killed by police who hit the headlines in the past 24 months; he was the kid who was shot for having a toy gun in public, and this is the story of how the US judicial system did everything in its power to ensure the officers responsible for his killing were never prosecuted. You want a chilling portrayal of exactly what ‘justice’ means when you have the full force of the state arrayed against you, this is it – bleak, bleak, bleak stuff. Let’s be clear about this, again – this, amongst other reasons, is why you can fcuk right off with your ‘All Lives Matter’ rhetoric.

• The Work of a Hospice Nurse: If you’re my age (late 30s, in case you were asking), you’ve probably seen a few dead people by now, or people in the late stages of death; you’ve seen bodies looking like skeletons dipped in tallow with sunken eyes and vanishing wisps of hair and you’ve known that you are watching someone decaying from the inside and it’s hard. Christ alone knows how people do the job of end-of-life care; this is a portrait of some of those who do. I found this quite hard to read in places, but if you can get through it then it’s sort of beautiful. Should you be minded to do so, the Trinity Hospice is a nice place to donate money to, FYI.

• How The Haters Made Trump: Each week I tell myself that I’;m going to avoid the Trump thinkpieces, and every week I come across a better one – sorry for the overkill, but this is another excellent dissection of how we got to this preposterous point; McKay Coppins takes us through the journey of Trump, from spurned, ridiculed Republican hanger-on in 2012 to his crowning at the RNC last night. This is the best account of the insanely unlikely rise, shot through with the thesis that the whole exercise is an example of an insecure man waving his dick at everyone who’s mocked and doubted him and who, should the American electorate give him the chance, will ram their mockery back down their throats so far that they prolapse. Which will be nice.

• A Jackass Got Booted From Twitter: It’s quite odd to think that 4 years ago when I was working on the comms for No.10’s Tech City initiative Milo was just an oddity, an irritant on the fringes of UK tech journalism; someone who made my life a professional misery on a daily basis and who I would have happily punched were I not a total wimp with the muscletone of an elastic band. Everyone had Milo stories – some funny, some angry, some pretty unpleasant regarding his (even then) pitbull-like unwillingness to let go once he’d started savaging your leg. He ruined a couple of people I know’s lives, at least temporarily, and when he bankrupted the Kernel we sort of thought he’d gone away. Then Gamergate happened, he saw an opportunity, and, well, here we are. This piece is a good takedown of why everyone saying “Oh, no, but freedom of speech” can frankly do one – my line on this is that yes, you might have the right to say whatever you like, but as soon as you lose the ability to determine when it is not appropriate or OK to exercise that right then you pretty much abnegate it. There is never, ever an excuse for being a cnut just because you think it’s fun. This isn’t about freedom of speech, it’s about curtailing the unpleasant power of an unmerited bully pulpit; Twitter is late to this, their response is inadequate, and Milo will obviously be back in some form or another soon, but the principle maintains.

• Laurie on Milo: Same topic, different take – Laurie Pennie was with Mr Y when news of his Twitter ban broke; this is her take on being in the belly of the beast. This is pretty depressing on many levels, but she totally nails it; in particular her line about being unable to best him in debate, because she cares. The ultimate superpower of the true troll is simply not giving one; not caring makes them untouchable.

• Unclench Your Yoni: Finally, after all the bile, some light relief – journey with Harpers Bazaar to what they call ‘The Chicest Cult in America’, to discover a world of expensive holistic therapies and goddess worship and yoni cleansing and…well, if you find the Paltrow/Goop-schtick unbearable, you will love (read: really, really hate) this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1)First up, the best animation involving iron filings and ferrofluid you will ever see. This needs to be co-opted for an ad or an ident soon, it is GORGEOUS (if very short). It’s called, unsurprisingly, ‘Ferro’:

2) Vertical video is being used in some wonderfully creative ways at the moment – this, by the BBC’s Media Action department, is just brilliant. Simple, but does a truly awesome job of explaining why a smartphone is the best single object a refugee can have at their disposal. You need to watch this on a phone – please do, it’s GREAT:

3) Video of NYC, neural networked and looking gorgeous. BONUS: Here’s one of China, done in the oh-so-now Prisma app:

4) What with all the Japanese, I have no idea whatsoever what the song is called or who the artist is, but the video, done in sort of 90s-style Another World-ish pixellated animation, is GORGEOUS and the song’s not bad either in a chiptune sort of way. WATCH IT NOW:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! This is a Fire In The Booth (coming thick and fast at the moment, the good ones) featuring perennial Curios favourite Mange St Hilare, Rapid, Scorcher and a host of other grime MCs – it’s a promo for some UK urban gangster flick or somesuch, but ignore that (unless that sort of thing’s your cup of tea) and instead enjoy nearly 30 minutes of pretty awesome MCing:

6) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,2! So much grime is all screwfaced, with videos featuring people looking all ANGRY and surly; this, by Paper Aero Planes, is pretty much the opposite  – LOOK HOW MUCH FUN THEY ARE HAVING! Seemingly recorded in someone’s hallway with a pretty refreshed crew, this is just a lot of fun (also, great track):

7) A touch of contrast now – this is called Rae Spoon and the song’s called ‘I Hear Them Calling’, and the video’s really rather fun with a SERIOUS MESSAGE:

8) Finally this week, probably the best marketing for a digital agency I have ever seen. This is a video promoting the services of #1 Best Boy, and it’s called HELP ME. ENJOY AND SEE YOU SOON, BYE!

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