Webcurios 04/03/16

By Michael Pederson

LET’S KICK OFF WITH SOME SUPERQUEER HIPHOP COURTESY OF THE ‘FAGGOT’ EP BY MR WALLACE!

THE SECTION WHICH BELIEVES THAT THIS WEEK’S REPORTING OF APPLE OPENING A TWITTER ACCOUNT AS ‘NEWS’ IS AN ABSOLUTE NADIR FOR JOURNALISM, NOT THAT ANY OF YOU CARE:

• More Stuff About Facebook At Work: Despite it appearing on Product Hunt as an ACTUAL NEW THING the other week, it seems I might have been a *touch* preemptive in announcing the OFFICIAL LAUNCH of [email protected]
  – looks like it’s still in only semi-open beta, according to this piece at least. Anyway, the BIG NEWS here is that apparently it’s going to go paid-for pretty quickly, which sort of makes sense – after all, given the amount of cash companies spaff on nightmarishly unweildy intranet-type systems, a few quid for something which you know people will use is probably pretty reasonable. Look, I know that this is a staggeringly dull piece of ‘news’ to open with, but it’s a slow week on the s*c**l m*d** front, thank Christ.

• FB Launches Spotify / Messenger Integration: Interesting less because of Spotify than because of the broader implications, Facebook Messenger now lets users share links to tracks on the music platform directly – like SO: “Inside the Messenger “More” section in chat threads, all iOS and Android users will now find a Spotify option. Tap it and they’ll be shuttled into Spotify’s app where they can “Search for something to share.” Once they select a song, artist or playlist, they’ll be popped back to Messenger with the option to share the photo of the cover artwork. When a friend taps that photo, they’ll be bounced over to Spotify to listen.” The fact that there’s no playing tracks straight from Messenger is a bit rubbish, but the point here is about the growing trend of services to integrate with Messenger (or the chat app of your choice). Money people Transferwise have started the integration with WeChat in Asia to let people transfer cash on the fly via Messenger – obviously that’ll come to Facebook to pretty soon. Basically you should all be thinking about how you can use this stuff – here’s a really smart piece of writing about why that’s the case, should you need more convincing than me just repeatedly shouting “CHAT INTERFACES ARE THE FUTURE” at you.

• Your Business Story: FB this week launched a service helping small businesses pull together simple-but-shiny (and oddly soft-focus) videos about what their businesses sell and why they are awesome. Basically it uses the same sort of mechanics used to create the ‘Your Amazing Year of Joy & Fun’ photocompilationthings, which means the end result is marginally better than you might make on your own but still oddly and slightly creepily budget in finish. Still, if you’re strapped for time and money it could be useful.

• How To Make FB Canvas Ads: Remember those? CHRIST IT WAS ONLY LAST WEEK, PAY ATTENTION. Anyway, this is a wonderfully comprehensive and helpful step-by-step guide to taking advantage of Facebook’s new IMMERSIVE AD UNIT THINGY – the good thing about this is also that it sort of forces you into thinking “Hm, actually, do I have enough decent assets for that?” which will hopefully prevent too many stock photography-packed horrors from coming into being.

• How Live Video Works In The Newsfeed: You hear that? That’s the sound of the bottom of the Facebook newsbarrel being given a very thorough scraping indeed. This explains that Live Video on Facebook will be prioritised when it’s actually live (shocker) – so might be worth playing with it now to see whether it gets you that EXTRA ORGANIC CUT-THROUGH you need (it probably won’t, FYI).

• Instagram’s Stopping People Linking To Other Social Profiles: Really not that interesting or noteworthy at all, other than to those who are attempting to cross-promote their Snapchat presence via Instagram (or their Telegraph presence, but really). Also interesting in terms of the fact that those are the platforms which Instagram considers enough of a threat to link to – poor the inconsequential Twitter.

• Snapchat Debuts Live Stuff On Web For Oscars: Snapchat moving further towards positioning itself as a LIVE PLACE FOR LIVE THINGS with the extension of the ability to check of-the-moment feeds on desktop rather than just through the app; steps towards the mainstream, albeit baby ones. Here’s the TechCrunch blurb on it, and here, more interestingly, is a really rather good piece on the platform as a business which is worth a read if you’re still trying to get your head around it.

• Whatsapp Launches Document Sharing: Combine this with the web version (still hugely underutilised, I think) and it starts to become quite an interesting internal comms option, not to mention the obvious customer services angle. THRILLING, EH? I’m sorry, this bit is almost over I promise.

• Slack Launches Video Calling, Etc: Despite the fact that we all decided this week that we’re OVER Slack, it continues to launch new features – this, allowing for video and audio calls from directly within the platform, is a pretty big thing (if you’re doing internal comms stuff). If you’re not, it’s just another way to waste time at work.

• Mountain View Playable Prerolls: SUCH a clever idea, even if the execution is inevitably a bit shonky – this is a really, really smart use of YT annotations to make ‘playable’ preview ads, in the classic ‘YT choose your own adventure’ YouTube game sort of way. Thieve this QUICKLY.

• Reebok Speedcam Billboard: Feels like a bit of a cheat featuring two case study videos, but this is another great piece of work. Not really internetty, but fcukit – to launch a new line of pseudo-scientifically designed overpriced athleteslippers, Reebok set up a billboard in Stockholm which challenged users to run past it at a certain speed; if they hit target velocity, the billboard disgorged a free pair of kicks. SO NICE, and not a million miles away from an idea Seb had for Adidas 5 years ago which they were too shortsighted to buy. MORE FOOL THEM, EH? Oh.

• The Unicef Tap Project: I featured this a few years ago when it launched, but it’s such a nice idea that it’s worth mentioning again; money gets donated to fund clean drinking water in the developing world based on how long the site is open on people’s phones without them touching them; rewarding you ignoring your device, basically. Smart and simple and SURELY pregnant with other possibilities, no?

• Disney Is Targeting Furries: This basically opens the door to us all doing whatever we like, doesn’t it? I mean, if Disney are comfortable using a community of people who like to dress up as animals for occasionally sexual ends to market their new kids’ film, I expect to see you ALL rinsing Pr0nhub for your next campaign.

By Lina Scheynius

HOW ABOUT SEGUEING (SEG-WAYING? RUSS?) INTO SOME SUPER-80s STYLE SOUNDS WITH PRINCE RAMA? HERE!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK REMEMBERED HOW MUCH HAVING A SEMI-REAL JOB MESSES WITH READING ALL THE INTERNET AND WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT IT WILL HAPPILY ACCEPT DONATIONS TO ALLOW IT TO DO NOTHING MORE THAN WEBMONG ALL DAY, PLEASE, THANKYOU, PT.1:

• Google Trialling Hands-Free Payments: As we move rapidly towards a point where we consider any effort greater than, say, wobbling our left eyelid a great and injurious degree of effort to have to expend to get stuff we want, so Google announces its trialling hands-free payments in California. Basically it links a photo of you with your bank details, with the idea that eventually a camera placed above the till will recognise your unique facial physiognomy and release funds based on that recognition. Which is all well and good until someone kidnaps you and basically does the FACE/OFF thing with you and WHAT THEN, EH, GOOGLE???

• All Roads Lead To Rome: Whilst I could get all pedantic and start talking about how all roads will eventually lead everywhere if you just keep on walking them enough I figure that I’ve already tested your patience enough here today. These are a really nice series of images, available as static graphics, interactives and posters, which show the arterial nature of major routeways around the world. Aesthetically pleasing and GREAT if you’re some sort of…er…motorway obsessive, I guess.

• Kiddle: Are you worried that Google Safe Search isn’t quite…safe enough for your children? Are you worried that they may end up learning about troubling concepts like, I don’t know, DEATH or SEX or SUICIDE by typing those words unguarded into our 21C oracle? Would you prefer to shield them from such concepts and pretend that, you know, the BAD STUFF (or just the stuff that you find a touch uncomfortable) doesn’t exist? Well GOOD FOR YOU! Let’s not dwell too long on the potential long-term effects of that sort of mollycoddling (EVERYONE DIES, CHILDREN – Christ, I would be a dreadful parent) and instead head straight to Kiddle, a bespoke kid-friendly search engine which combines Google Safe Search with a host of other filters to stop kids from seeing anything ‘icky’. Or indeed from learning about, say, their bodies or drugs or a whole load of other stuff. STAY IGNORANT! STAY SAFE!

• Emoji Life: Want to find out what your MOST USED EMOJI on Twitter is? No, I didn’t either, and yet here we are.

• Logo Dust: Need a logo but strapped for cash, and don’t fancy exploiting the second world through Fiverr? Logo Dust may well be of use, then. This site takes a bunch of unused logo proposals by design agency Fairpixels and places them online for others to use, for free, every week. SUCH a nice thing to do, well done them.

• Just Not Sorry: A Chrome extension which analyses the text of your emails as you write them and alerts you when it thinks you’re not being assertive enough. Sounds like a nice enough idea, but from what I can tell it just seems to berate you for using works like ‘just’ or ‘sorry’ or basically anything which doesn’t make you sound like some sort of intensely type-A arsehole. I say this as a man whose email style is so utterly passive-aggressive and self-deprecatory that it basically consists of little more than pre-emptive apologies for potential future fcukups, but what of it.

• Billskip: This seems like a really good service, which probably means that there’s a hidden vig of vertiginous proportions buried in here somewhere. US-only at present, Billskip basicaly pays your bills for you and then gives you 6 months to repay the debt, at a fixed rate of interest of 4%. Which, if this is actually true and not a massive scam, is a BRILLIANT rate and should be done over here asap (feel free to tell me why it couldn’t work).

• Serial Reader: I love this idea. Serial Reader is an app which takes classic works of literature which are out of copyright (basically the ones you can get free on Amazon) and repackages them as short, bitesize chunks, delivered to you on a daily basis for a short shot of story each day. I think there’s a lot in this model, not least the way it harks back to the serialisation which allowed Dickens et al to write so much of their output and would be really interested to see whether it worked as a publishing model (so, er, if someone wants to try it out and let me know that would be great, thanks!).

• Fileship: Basically, holding your work to ransom. Made something digital but the client is withholding payment? NO MATTER! Just chuck it up on here and it won’t be unlocked until they’ve paid a specified amount to you via PayPal. There doesn’t appear to be a detailed Ts&Cs page explaining what the deal is if the service is actually used for proper extortion, so, you know, ABSOLUTE LEGAL WILD WEST HERE. Actually now I’ve typed that I can think of a host of really unpleasant scenarios for this – erm, please don’t do that, any of you.

• I Am Cube: Ever wanted a digital version of a Rubik’s Cube that you can play with to your heart’s content? OH GOOD! Sadly with this one there’s no option to peel all the stickers off and then put them back on again in completed configuration, thus giving yourself the classic shameful feeling of the CHEAT. Ah, such sweet, sweet nostalgia.

• Galaxy Science Fiction Archive: Rather wonderful archive of Galaxy Magazine, a US scifi title which ran from 1950-80. Not just interesting from the point of view of the stories (and the concomitant shifts in what we imagined the future would look like which they point out) but also the cover art which is a treasure-trove of pulp-art aesthetics.

• Phil’s Book: Have you ever lain awake at night dreaming of a website which pulls together a series of photographs of recording studios around the UK in the 60s-80s? I KNOW, RIGHT? If you’re a certain type of muso bloke / sound engineer, this will be THRILLING. If not, then I concede that its charms may be a touch harder to discern, although it’s quite fun imagining some of the debauchery that went on in the otherwise staid-looking brown-panelled rooms.

• Puppy Name Generator: Perhaps I don’t really understand pets, but I would humbly suggest that if you’re struggling so much with what to name your dog that you require the assistance of a name generator then you’re possibly overthinking this. Still, stealable if you’re a Pedigree Petfoods functionary – my preferred use for this, though, is to bookmark it and to use it when having baby name conversations with expectant parents. “Have you considered “Freckles”? What about “Button”? I’M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU”.

• Guess The Karma: Simple but super-addictive Reddithackgame which takes two pictures posted to the site, displays them side-by-side and then asks you to guess which got the most upvotes. Careful, this is a bit timesinkish – if nothing else, it’s an excellent way to nick POTENTIALLY VIRAL images off Reddit for use on your brand’s moribund social channels when you’ve run out of your own tedious content to foist on people.

• Plane: Another week, another unwanted social app designed to somehow address the crushing and persisting feeling of loneliness which seeps from the screens of our magical internet boxes and into our eyes and souls every minute we spend gazing at the world through pixels. Ahem. This one’s called ‘Plane’ and it’s specifically marketed as an icebreaking app – the idea being that you’re in a new place, you want to meet people, you fire up Tind…oh, no, sorry, you fire up Grin…oh, no, sorry, you fire up Plane, leave a slightly needy message (“I am new to the city and alone, please do not kill me and wear my skin as a dressing gown I just want to be friends”) and then wait for the offers of companionship to flood in. The kicker is that it’s anonymous until both parties choose to share details, making it safe(ish). Launched in Denmark about a month ago I think, and doing surprisingly well. I’m going to Copenhagen in a few months so will give it a go and, if I don’t die, let you know how it works.

• Gifbattle Zone: I rather like this. Based on the premise that the best thing about Slack is the ENDLESS GIF CONVERSATIONS, this strips interaction back to just that – two people compete to out-gif each other over the course of a minute, whilst others can watch and vote on who’s won. Add this sort of thing to Snapchat and you would have a KILLER THINGY (technical term) on your hands, I reckon.

• Unreddit: Apparently, according to the creator of this site, Reddit is a HOTBED OF CENSORSHIP. Hm, anyone who’s spent any time on any of the more contentious threads might argue that that’s pretty patently false, but regardless – this site lets you input the url of any thread of your choice to show you all the comments which have been deleted from it by the THOUGHT POLICE or whoever. Your mileage will vary depending on how much of an internet tool you are, I get the impression.

• DUNSÖNs & DRAGGANs: A Twitter account mining the rich comic territory which exists between dungeons and dragons and IKEA furnishings. Almost certainly the geekiest thing on here this week, which is saying something.

• Thimble: We’ve all sort of given up on the ‘everyone must learn to code NOW’ utopia, haven’t we? If you’re still hoping to learn your way around HTML et al, though, this from Mozilla is a pretty useful set of tools which basically let you edit a variety of web templates on the fly with a pretty simple WYSIWYG interface. It’s not going to teach you to code in a day (SPOILER: NOTHING WILL) but it’s a decent way of learning some basic principles about which things do what.

• A Map Of The Internet In 2015 (And Before): So pretty!

• Science Combat: A rather wonderful series of gifs imagining what some of the world’s greatest scientists would look like were they characters in an 16-bit videogame circa 1996. The Stephen Hawking one is GENIUS – wonderfully, the game is actually being produced by the fantastically-named ‘Super Interessante’ magazine – more details (minimal and in Spanish) here.

• Whatsapp Stats: Have you ever wanted to get a whole host of largely pointless information about your Whatsapp conversations – average length, most Whatsapped friends, how often you start chats vs your mates, etc? No, I can’t imagine you have, but just in case there exists this website – NB Web Curios isn’t 100% certain that this one’s not a touch dodgy, so caveat emptor as ever.

• QAlizer: Not the first playlister for online services I’ve found, but a really easy to use interface which lets you queue up videos from YouTube along with tracks / playlists from Soundcloud into one continuously playing chain of SOUND. Is there a better / more comprehensive version of one of these out there anywhere? Do tell if so, enquiring minds need to know.

• Visual Dictionary: Such a great language learning app from the British Council to help people learn English. Take a picture of anything you like – the app uses image recognition tech to work out what it is, and then tells you the word for the thing in English along with a guide to the word’s pronunciation. SO helpful, and should be available in every language under the sun. Were I the Japanese tourist board I would be ALL OVER this (although on reflection this is exactly the sort of thing that the Japanese tourist board probably brought out 4 years ago and which is now on its 17th hentai upgrade, so perhaps best to just ignore me).

• Vandelay Industries: I’m not really sure to what extent Seinfeld is a ‘thing’ for any of you, but on the offchance this is a Slack bot which contains every single line of dialogue ever uttered in the show and which will post gifs of said lines of dialogue to Slack on your command. I like this idea, but am slightly worried about the fact that the basic extension of this is that we will eventually be able to conjure audio and video from every single tv show ever at the press of a few keys, meaning that those dullards whose idea of comedy is to mindlessly repeat catchphrases over and over and over and over again, those who think Little Britain was the zenith of comedic achievement, will become intolerable digitally as well as in person. Another reason to look forward to the future there – you’re welcome!

• Vibby: A service which lets you easily link to specific bits within a YouTube video, with annotations – particularly useful if you’re discussing potential edits, etc, with a wider team of people (although, and you can have this for free, for most videos produced by agencies and brands the only thing you need to bear in mind is “It doesn’t matter because noone is going to watch this outside of the client and this agency!”).

• Huffduffer: Neat little tool to make your own podcasts simply and easily – effectively it’s sort of like Pocket for audio (I mean, it’s not really, but) insofar as you can just feed it links to audio files and it will bundle them up into one for later listening at your convenience, or for you to create your own roundup of found sounds from around the web. If you’re interested in doing a podcast version of Curios, for example, this would be quite an interesting tool to start playing around with (also, YOU OWE ME).

• Insta-Trump: Look! Markov Chain-generated Trump speeches! Just as appalling  as the real thing! What’s astounding about these is quite how well they replicate the cadence of The Donald’s delivery, although that suggests less of a coding genius at work than it does the fact that the source material is less than sophisticated. Oh, and if you like that then you might like this Twitter bot which does much the same thing based on a neural network feeding off Trump speech fragments. While we’re here, have a Chrome extension which changes the Facebook Reaction buttons to Trump’s face. And a Trump buttplug. Are we done with the idiot for this week now? Yes, yes we are.

• Stock Images Of Women Using Computers: You may want to bookmark these for future presentational use. Vintage shots which frankly could easily have been taken from office–based bongo of the 70s and 80s (not sure that that observation reflects that well on me to be honest, but let’s move swiftly on).

• Anime Maru: The Onion, for anime. If you’re into Japanese cartoons and the culture which surrounds them then you will TOTALLY get this; if you’re not, it will make little to no sense and you should probably just move on.

• Beacodes: Not the first of these, but the first I’ve seen positioned in this particular way – Beacodes is a service which broadcasts data over inaudible audio frequencies – effectively like a silent QR code. That’s a really shonky description, I realise – imagine that you’re a retailer and you want to send discount codes to people in your shop, for example, to incentivise purchase of a particular line. Get it? Obviously only of use if people adopt it, but I could imagine this sort of tech becoming baked in to a whole host of other things and becoming quite popular (and also, just parenthetically, really quite intrusive – unstoppable silent push notifications, you say? How delightful!).

• The Most Dangerous Writing App: Exactly like the Flowstate app from the other week (forces you to keep writing; deletes your output if you pause for more than 5 seconds before hitting your word goal), except this is web-based whereas that was Mac only. Go on, SCARE YOURSELF when writing that RFP.

• Awesome Pictures of Iranian Architecture: The most impressively geometrically beautiful Instagram feed you will see all week, no doubt.

By Aaron Tilley

LET’S HAVE SOME DJ FOOD MIXING NOW, AS AN ANTIDOTE TO ALL THAT SLIGHTLY DAYGLO STUFF!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK REMEMBERED HOW MUCH HAVING A SEMI-REAL JOB MESSES WITH READING ALL THE INTERNET AND WOULD LIKE TO REMIND YOU THAT IT WILL HAPPILY ACCEPT DONATIONS TO ALLOW IT TO DO NOTHING MORE THAN WEBMONG ALL DAY, PLEASE, THANKYOU, PT.2:

• The Butter Sprayer: End-times Kickstarter of the week comes in the form of this already-funded piece of crap, which will take a piece of butter and atomise it into a sprayable mist at the touch of a button, thus eliminating the tedious requirement to a) ensure the butter is warmed to the point of spreadability; b) make that oh-so-onerous spreading motion with your wrist which is the bane of so many otherwise pleasant breakfast times. LOOK, RIGHT, LET’S GET SERIOUS FOR A SECOND. What is WRONG with you all? Leaving aside the laziness of the sodding idea, this will NEVER achieve the sort of consistent butter-on-toast coverage that a discerning consumer would require. Have YOU ever tried getting consistent coverage on a surface using a spraycan? Well QUITE. I have no idea why this has exercised me so much, sorry about that.

• TLC K-9 Services: If you had a teenage child who you suspected of using drugs and stashing them in the house, would you a) talk to them about it like an adult; b) observe their behaviour leaping to conclusions; c) hire a sniffer dog to case the joint before sending them to reform school? If you answered c) then CONGRATULATIONS, this is the service for YOU. Included not just because of the slightly mad nature of the service offered, but also because of the agency’s logo – seriously, WHO thought that up? I’d perhaps get the sniffer dogs round to their place, is all I’m saying.

• DSCOVR_EPIC: A Twitter bot sharing gorgeous photographs of the Earth from space, taken by the DSCOVR spacecraft. A lovely thing to occasionally have pop into your feed, this.

• Evertoon: Do you remember a few years back there was a service which let anyone create really crap videos with voice synthesisers and a stock cast of poorly-animated CGI characters? Like this sort of thing? Well, for reasons known only to the creators of this app, that is BACK! Except now you can record your own audio rather than relying on the Hawking-voiced synths. It still looks INCREDIBLY pony, but you might get some low-grade lols from it if you can script something half decent.

• Remote: Kickstarter of the week #1: Remote is a work-in-progress play by Coney (DISCLOSURE – they are friends of mine, but they pay me no money, honest guv) which blends storytelling and tech in a really fun way, creating something halfway between a Choose Your Own Adventure story and a piece of theatre. It is FUN, and they are already nearly halfway funded, and they only need £3k, so if you have a couple of spare quid then I urge you to chuck them at it. THANKS!

• Sweatt: The neverending cavalcade of niche dating apps continues apace; this time, one which lets you match people based on your shared love of musclepain, lycra and isotonic sports drinks. Tell it your workout regime and it will apparently pair you with someone similarly obsessed with fending off death via the medium of exercise. I would imagine that this is some sort of crazy hotbed of narcissism, and that conversations are simply a succession of escalating shots of people’s ‘guns’, but then, as previously explained here, I am confused by the desire to exercise in much the same way as others are confused by the desire to experience most of life through a screen rather than through actual interaction with other human beings (no YOU’RE weird).

• Dylesxia: Really nice bit of code which simulates the effects of dyslexia on the text appearing on the page. Were I a charity dealing with dyslexia and related issues I would TOTALLY pay this person to turn this into a Dyslexify plugin for Chrome – go on, please, someone do that, it’s a really nice little bit of PR I think.

• Go Cubes: You’re a BUSY PERSON! You have SO MUCH TO DO! YOU NEED CAFFEINE TO FUNCTION! But, and this is the rub, you’re too BUSY to waste those seconds making a coffee or, more probably, waiting for the bemoustached Australian to do something incomprehensible with a fancy coffee machine andsome milk (seriously, you can get a good coffe in Italy in a matter of literally seconds – what the actual fcuk are you hipster idiots doing that make it takes so fcuking long?! Hm, interesting, didn’t know until I started typing that how much it in fact riles me). Well FEAR NOT, because now you can get your caffeine hit in small, chewy sweet form. These actually sound like they might be rather nice, though the potential to give yourself an horrifically jangly caffeine comedown is pretty strong – sadly they’re currently only shipping in North America, though I imagine somewhere in Peckham will stock them within a few weeks.

• Knuckle Tattoos: A gallery thereof. Shout out to the woman who has ‘Buff’ and ‘Ting’ across her hands, which is going to be a hell of a look in her wrinkly dotage.

• Windows On Earth: All the photos from space taken by recently returned astronaut Scott Kelly. So, so beautiful – the nocturnal city shots alone are just stunning.

• Cell F: This is quite insane, and I don’t 100% understand how it works, but it sounds AMAZING. Basically (VERY basically) this is a meat-based music generator – an actual biological…thing (yes, I know), using skin cells from the artists body to create a basic neurological network which then is plugged in to some music and then…er…sort of remixes it. A BRAIN IN A JAR MAKING MUSIC!!!! This is so mind-flayingly scifi I don’t really know what to make of it and so am going to just leave you to click and gawp.

• Tio: Kickstarter of the week #2: Tio is a really interesting toy project which provides users with the tools to take old toys, other objects, 3d printed bits and pieces, etc, and turn them into connected toys – effectively letting you frankenstein together a whole load of bits and pieces and then turn them into a smartphone–controlled internet-enabled THING, Lots of potential here, sort of like a Meccano with knobs on, and worth a look if you or your kids are into engineering-type toys and games.

• Klangmeister: Like music? ‘Get’ programming? You might like this then: “Klangmeister is a live coding environment for the browser. It lets you design synthesisers and compose music using computer code – without having to install anything on your own computer.” So there.

• Resting Bitch Face Test: Settle those arguments once and for all, or more entertainingly start brand new ones, by letting this rudimentary software assess a photo of you to assess whether you suffer from RBF (I don’t, in case you were wondering).

• No More Voicemail: Does anyone actually use voicemail any more other than perhaps your parents? It’s a HORRIBLE thing – that flashing light rarely if ever presages good news, like the phone ringing off the hook at 3am – which is why this service to turn it off for good is a very welcome one indeed.

• The Skateboard Soundtracks: An incredible resource, this, collectiong a seemingly infinite collection of musicc used on skateboarding DVDs (I know they’re all digital now, but it still feels right saying that) and listing them video-by-video. There’s a LOT of stuff here and the archive goes back years; as a resource for finding tracks from old vids it is AWESOME.

• Russian Rich Kids: Basically ‘Rich Kids Of Instagram’ with a narrower geographical focus, if you want to see a whole bunch of pictures of people who are younger and richer than you having a really nice time then this is the feed for you. The only consolation (and it’s a scant one) is in thinking of the inevitable incarceration / cirrhosis which awaits many of them in later life. Actually, I’ve just scrolled through some of these again, and that probably won’t make you feel any better at all. Sorry.

• The Y2K Aesthetic: One of several great Imgur collections in here this week, this is 800+ photos embodying the particular aesthetic of the late90s/early00s. Given the revivalism we’re seeing all over the place at the moment for this sort of era, expect this to become a go-to for moodboards over the next few months. Wasn’t everything shiny and metallic-looking – er, why?

• Glass Action: Inexplicable and wonderfully shonky, this Etsy retailer sells small stained glass portraits of famous people which you can use as…er…bedroom nightlights of the sort you plug into the mains. You want a really, really weird-looking stained glass effigy of David Bowie watching over you, glowing softly, as you sleep? YOUR PRAYERS HAVE BEEN ANSWERED! A great source of presents for the right person, this.

• The Adipositivity Project: A photo project celebrating the larger body. Lots and lots of naked fat people, basically – presented without judgement other than to say that there’s something really quite aesthetically interesting about the play of light and shadow on really massive people’s bodies (and there are some REALLY massive people in here). Moderately NSFW depending on your employers’ tolerance for acres (in this case literally) of exposed flesh.

• Wikipedia Nearby: One of those hidden gems of Wikipedia, this – tell it where you are, and it will present you with locations of notable interest in your immediate vicinity. TIME OUT – STEAL THIS FOR YOUR APP (presuming you still have one). This is SO excellent – worth adding as a link to your phone’s homescreen if you’re a Londoner as it’s such a good way of finding interesting curiosities in your vicinity.

• Watchmen Portraits: Truly brilliant collection of shots from the movie Watchme, both press shots and behind the scenes. Wonderful style in these.

• Miserable Men: An instagram feed collecting photos of men sitting on chairs whilst shopping, looking miserable. Absolutely an ad campaign waiting to happen, for any of you who need ‘inspiration’ this week.

• Your Past Is Part Prison: I love this art project. You call a number which connects to a phone and answering machine; you leave a message on the answering machine; the tape is then removed from the machine and buried in concrete, sealing your secret away in perpetuity (or until the concrete gets excavated and all the rotting horror of the past is exhumed). Someone do this here, please, or a variant thereon.

• Reddit 3016; An incredibly involved gag imagining what Reddit might look like 1000 years hence. Apparently several years in the making, this goes SO deep – try clicking on all the individual threads and be amazed at the wealth of fake articles, websites and the rest which have been created to back up the idea. Terrifyingly obsessional, but also quite funny in a netgeekhumour sort of way.

• The Book Of Thug: Following last week’s profile of him in the long reads section, this is an insanely detailed website breaking down Young Thug’s musical output – from tempo to key to rhythm to lyrics, every single aspect of his music is analysed to forensic and frightening degree. Interesting not only if you’re a musician – and if you are, it’s really worth a look – but also as an exercise in making a single-topic website; the navigation’s really rather nice. Worth a play, whether or not you ‘get’ the music.

• Every Playboy Playmate Centrefold Ever: Yes, ok, so this is just an incredibly large collection of photographs of naked women BUT it’s also a really interesting cultural document. No, hang on, wait! Starting back in the mid-50s and going all the way through to February 2016, this presents all the Playboy centrefolds in chronological order – it is FASCINATING. Witness the first full nude, the changing trends in pubic topiary, the point in the 80s where the models stopped looking like women and instead started looking like terrifying shiny sex robots (seriously, there’s a point in the 90s where there is so much photoshopped sheen on the skin that they actually look like CGI versions of themselves, it’s horrid), the slow encroaching of bongo-level standards of aesthetics into the world of cheesecake…it’s a compelling journey through all sorts of stuff. Also, and let’s just be very clear about this for the avoidance of doubt, it’s a collection of hundreds of pictures of naked women and as such is pretty much entirely NSFW. By way of balance, here’s a link to loads of naked men too.

By Yolanda Dominguez

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC WITH THIS RATHER NICE INSTRUMENTAL HIPHOP ALBUM BY QUELLE CHRIS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Git Animals: This is a whole load of animal-based gags around coding that I really don’t understand at all.

• Ensalada De Lengua: An EXCELLENT collection of gifs culled from film and TV, amongst other things.

• Wing Manning: Photobombing people who kiss in public. Childish and yet consistently a lot funnier than you think it ought to be.

• Victorian Humour: A collection of ‘gags’ from the victorian era, drawn from the digital archives of the British Library. Proof positive that we are funnier than our great grandparents.

• These Boots Are Made For Walking: Do you have a strange and unshakeable obsession with the Nancy Sinatra classic? Would YOU like a collection of 200 covers of it, all in one place? OH GOOD!

• Short Fingers: I lied, sorry – more Trump. This is dedicated to propagating the ‘short fingers’ meme, about whose origins you can read more here. “Short fingered vulgarian” is a timeless cuss, fwiw.

• Glitch News Network: I featured the Twitter bot here last week; now Shardcore’s made a Tumblr collecting the output of his Glitch News bot, scraping the Buzzfeed News homepage for images and turning them into sickmaking gifed collages demonstrating exactly how mad the world is. Sort of dizzyingly brilliantly horrible.

• Clinton Loves Pizza: Baffling collection of pizza-related STUFF.

• Vintage Occult: Brilliant collection of tacky occult-related stuff from the 70s,80s and beyond. It’s amazing, judging by this, how often ‘occult’ seems to be a synonym for ‘featuring a naked large-breasted woman and maybe a goat skull or two’ – moderately NSFW for those very reasons.

• Gifs of the 80s: An AMAZING resource of clips from old music promos and adverts and stuff – if you’re looking for source materials from the 80s to splice into things, this is a GREAT place to start.

• Gabber Eleganza: Comfortably the most aggressive music ever invented (death / black / speed metal is just a bit too camp, even with the murder and church burning side of it), Gabber’s never celebrated for its style so much as its relentlessly pummelling audio aesthetic. Which is a shame, as there are some SWEET THREADS on display in this wonderful style Tumblr. BONUS! Why not put this on LOUD for the rest of the day and then lock your computer and leave the office? GO ON!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH OFFER YOU THIS YEAR’S BEST FILM OSCAR SCRIPTS AS A BONUS!

• The Chris Rock Oscars Transcript: Worth reading even if you’re bored to the back teeth of the whole celebrity shebang – the whole bit is really very good indeed, and a little more interesting and nuanced than the pull-quotes served up by the media suggested on Monday.

• Please Don’t Get Murdered At School: Another great piece by the inimitable McSweeney’s, this time imagining a monologue from an American parent to their child exhorting them to please take care not to get all shot up in the classroom. It’s funny because it’s practically true!

• The Deactivation of the American Worker: The ‘American’ in the title is redundant – the issues apply to any developed economy, pretty much. Taking as its starting point the practice of notifying employees of terminations by severing their Slack accounts, the piece examines how changes in company tech usage mean that in fact workers are more expendable than ever, and how knowledge no longer guarantees utility as it’s such an transferable commodity. Hugely reassuring! (not really reassuring at all, sorry).

• Weird Facebook: It’s been underexplored, I think, but it’s worth remarking what an astounding job Facebook’s done of turning perceptions of the platform around in the past 2 years. You may recall a couple of years back the spate of ‘IS FACEBOOK DEAD?’ articles, opining that it had lost its cool and that the kids were all going elsewhere – now witness this piece, talking about how it’s THE place for hot digital takes on the big cultural issues du jour, and is supplanting ‘Weird Twitter’ as the place for all of the freshest memes, etc. The truth is somewhere inbetween, but I personally reckon that FB Groups have made all the difference to the platform’s success. So there, it’s TRUE.

• The Propaganda of Pantone: Partly interesting and partly ridiculous essay looking at the subcultural appropriation inherent in Pantone’s selection of Rose Quartz and Serenity as the colours of the year for 2016. Basically looks at how brands find subcultural tropes and then RUIN them through appropriation (WE FOUND THE CONCH!). Contains an awful lot about Seapunk and Vaporwave, so your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for both those concepts (and a bit of light cultural theory).

• A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon: They’re not lying when they say ‘complete’, I promise you. Exhaustive, and to this reader at least exhausting, but a certain type of geek will adore this.

• Analysing US Presidential Campaign Websites: A really interesting piece looking at the different design choices taken by the sites of each of the major players in the US Presidential race, notable less for the politics than for the really smart thinking about audiences, UX and the like. Worth reading for any of you who do comms-y type stuff, honest.

• An Exception Occurred: Startlingly clear-eyed and honest account of the author’s serious bipolar episode, which (based on what I know from dealing with people going through this sort of thing) is pretty much bang-on in terms of describing the delusional end of the condition. Remarkable not only for the dispassionate clarity with which its presented, but also for the positive tone – had this happened to me, I will happily confess I would most likely still be terrified.

• The Architect of the Reich: Fascinating profile of Albert Speer, whose designs were intended to immortalise the eventual victory of the Third Reich and who got away with it an Nuremburg. It never ceases to amaze me that they imagined on such scale – the dimensions of the planned buildings are just mind-buggering. Interesting on the extent to which it can be now shown that Speer was entirely complicit in the final solution – it’s also really good on some of the madder bits of Nazi obsession (I appreciate ‘madder’ is a relative qualifier in this context), including the stuff about them placing concentration camps based on how they would give them access to more marble; such a terrible combination of mad and dreadful and high camp.

• A Girl’s First Date: Preparing for your first date as a 14-year-old American girl. I know I always say this, but it looks AWFUL being a teen right now. Poor the kids :-(.

• MFA vs CIA: What it’s like being interviewed, and then offered a job, by the CIA. Spooky, basically.

• The Conspirasea Cruise: What would it be like being stuck on a boat with a bunch of people who believe 9/11 was an inside job, that MMR jabs cause autism, and that we are all hurtling towards a moment of cosmic enlightenment as predicted by grand masters from ages past? Pretty mental, is the answer – this is a surprisingly kind-hearted look at some of the…*ahem* esoteric folk aboard the recent conspiracy theorists’ seabound jamboree.

• The Simulated Battlefields of the US Army: Did you see the photos this week of the tube disaster simulation exercise? Imagine that, but extended to cover a whole living village in the Middle-East, going on for EVER. This is a really, really interesting picture of how these simulations work, complete with wonderfully surreal pictures of tourists wandering through the faux-villages and slightly shattering the illusion. If you’ve ever read ‘Remainder’ then you will find a lot to love here (and if you haven’t, you ought to).

• Minecraft’s Most Obscene Server: I confess that much of the technical stuff here meant nothing to me as a non-Minecraft person, but as a portrait of a weird online subculture / community this is GREAT.

• The Final Hours of Chariots: Perhaps unsurprisingly I had no idea that Chariots Shoreditch had shut down. This is a lovely portrait of the place, it’s place in gay culture, its patrons, and the sauna scene in general – a really good and elegiac read whether you’re gay or straight (or bi-, or a-, or pan-, or tri-, etc etc etc).

• A Guy Walks Into A News Cycle: The second McSweeney’s link of the week, this time to absolutely the only dissection of the way modern media works that you will ever need to read, ever. SO GOOD! SO TRUE! SO DEPRESSING!

• The Accident: A lovely essay looking back at a car accident involving teens in a small town, and how it changed the author’s life and outlook and STUFF. Brilliantly evokes that first time that someone you’re at school with dies – you all had it, whether it be car accident or drug overdose or just unexpected embolism or whatever – and all of a sudden everything is just DIFFERENT.

• Why Your Music Is Worthless: Absolutely kilometric essay on the music industry and creativity and art and economics and the market and all sorts of other things besides. Eminently readable, whether or not you’re someone with an interest in the future of the industry, and frequently very funny, this is a brilliant read which will make you smarter if you read it or your money back (but pay me first, eh?).

• By The Time You Read This I’ll Be Dead: Wonderful and sad and hopeful and brilliant essay by Canadian John Hofsess, who before taking his own life in Switzerland last month had helped 8 other Canadians take their own life gently and peacefully. Excellent on the mechanics and morality of assisted suicide, and contains a lot of rather useful information if you’re interested in this sort of thing.

• Why You’re Not Quitting Twitter: Finally, a very, very funny piece (again) by Sam Kriss, on why none of you (ok, US) will be quitting Twitter anytime soon. GOOD LUCK ESCAPING, -ISTS OF THE WORLD.

By Louis Debelle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, INCLUDING LINKS TO ALL THE OSCAR NOMINATED SHORT FILMS!

1) First up, that kinetic sculpture / rube goldberg machine / musical instrument thing involving marbles which I’m sure you’ve all seen and which will almost certainly be ripped off by Maltesers some time soon:

2) Next up, ageing rockers Devo do the 360 video thing – the song’s tripe (IMHO), but I like the fact that the video actually makes proper use of the format – there’s a real invcentive to rewatch it a few times to clock everything going on (possibly with the sound off, mind):

3) This week’s slice of female-fronted indie-schmindie comes in the shape of the VERY lovely ‘How’ by Daughters. This is gorgeous, I think:

4) This sort of sounds like a cross between all sorts of stuff – Iggy and the Velvet Underground and a bit of Lou Reed and some other things thrown in – and it is a GREAT song. Parquet Courts with ‘Berlin Got Blurry’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Another Curios favourite returns – this is the ever-excellent and sadly under-famous Manga St Hilare, with the rather lovely emogrime (my appellation, not his) ‘GPRS’:

6) Next up, music made to be performed underwater. This is called Aquasonic, and someone somewhere should steal this for an ad or an installation or something:  

7) It’s always nice when I get to refer back to C86 and ‘TWEE AS FCUK’ and that sort of stuff – if that means anything to you then you will LOVE this track. ‘Is It Possble’ by Frankie Cosmos:

8) Penultimate thing this week is this intensely awkward-sounding song by AS Chingy, which is accompanied by a really odd and uncomfortable-making video apparently made using a PS4 and Oculus Rift. Whatever it is, it gives me the right heebies:

9) Last up, the campest thing you will see all day. SO SILLY, and yet so fun – this is called ‘Turbo Killer’ by Carpenter Brut. BYE HAVE FUN SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!