Webcurios 07/03/14

By Ben Sandler

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THE POINT WHERE FACEBOOK STARTS DEMANDING THAT BRANDS PRESENT THEIR CHIEF EXECUTIVES NAKED AND TIED TO A STAKE AND COVERED IN GOATS’ BLOOD AT ITS PALO ALTO HQ IN EXCHANGE FOR BEING ABLE TO SPEAK TO THEIR SUPPOSED ‘FANS’ ON THE PLATFORM (I’M ONLY BEING A LITTLE BIT FANCIFUL HERE): 

• FB Organic Reach Drops AGAIN: A fairly tedious and technical post which is nonetheless worth a scan if only to give you more ammunition when you next go to your clients cap in hand and begging for more adcash. You can read it yourself (what, you want me to do EVERYTHING for you?), but the precis is that a) organic reach dropped by about 40% as of the end Jan; b) videos do quite well still; c) Facebook prioritises Pages which promote their own content rather than 3rd Party content. So all those pictures of pugs in party hats? WORTHLESS. There’s a sentence it’s gratifying to type. 
• In Fact, We May Be Moving Towards FACEBOOK ZERO!: I love the apocalyptic-sounding language being used here by Ogilvy (anyone would think they were a bunch of advermarketingpr shills). There’s a whole White Paper you can read if you’re so minded, but basically its premise is that it is INEVITABLE (their word) that Facebook is moving to a point where it will eliminate organic reach for Page Posts entirely, meaning that brands will have to pony up cash to get anyone to see, and fail to care about, their pointless wittering on the platform. You know what, right? THIS COULD ALL STOP IF EVERYONE AGREED THAT 99% OF ALL ADVERMARKETINGPR ACTIVITY ON FACEBOOK IS A POINTLESS WASTE OF TIME WHICH SERVES ONLY TO KEEP PEOPLE LIKE US IN EMPLOYMENT, MOVING MONEY AROUND IN SEMI-CIRCULAR FASHION BETWEEN AGENCIES AND CREATING CONTENT WHICH NOONE OUTSIDE OF THIS BLOODY INDUSTRY COULD POSSIBLY EVEN BEGIN TO GIVE A FIG ABOUT. Erm. Did I mention I’m available for part-time hire as a digital consultant? Thanks. 
• Peopple Don’t Trust Retailers On Facebook: Seeing as we’re sticking the boot in…YouGov research published last week (I know, SO TARDY) which suggests that over half of UK consumers trust a retailer less when said retailer has a presence on Facebook. Interestingly (I’m sort of quoting verbatim here), it’s younger people who seem most disinclined to disintermediate their shopping from their social activity online. HMMMMMM.
• A Guide To Using New Facebook Ad Bundling Structures: Following last week’s SEISMIC announcement about Facebook recategorising its ad bundles ever so slightly into Campaigns, Ad Sets and Ads, this is a handy short guide as to what that practically means. 
• FB New Newsfeed Layout: This has no importance beyond the cosmetic, but, you know, STILL NEWS. 
• Twitter Brings Amplify Ads To Films: I’m going to confess that I’m not 100% clear what this actually means, largely because the article linked to here is, even by the standards of social media business reporting, an absolute dog’s dinner of a piece of writing. I think what it means is that Twitter’s partnering with a cinema ad network to make some advertorial-y content using Twitter data which advertisers can buy partnership with, which will run in films and online and be promoted on Twitter to relevant people through ads. Anyway, if you work in film this may mean more to you than it does it me.
• Twitter Ads ‘Voting’ Mechanic To Cards: They trialed this for the Oscars last weekend, using the tech to let users vote for the famouses they thought most deserving of a gold-coloured statuette. Obviously there are LOTS more potential uses, most more interesting than that one. 
• No More Bongo On Vine: The only surprising thing about this is that it took so long. You can now OFFICIALLY be suspended from Vine for posting pr0n. I don’t imagine that, as brand people, this should trouble too many of you, but just in case. Will be interesting to see how far people try and push the apparently allowed ‘clothed sexually suggestive dancing’, though.
• Pinterest Allows Unlimited Secret Boards: Not new new news, but just FYO – secret boards on Pinterest work a little like Facebook Groups/Pages insofar as you can limit access and visibility. Which obviously opens up all sorts of potential game/competition mechanics for brands and their SUPERFANS (ugh), should you wish to explore that sort of thing.
• Getty Images Allows Free Embeds Of Its Images: For non-commercial use, that is. You can find a decent explanation of what that means, how it works and what it means for photographers here, should you wish.
• Kellogg’s Accepts Its Agencies Are Crap: Obviously that’s not true, OBVIOUSLY. Still, though, the fact that Kellogg’s is apparently looking to ‘crowdsource’ (SO 2008!) marketing ideas to revitalise its entire brand made me chuckle somewhat. There are a few big brands seeming to do this at the moment, all using eYeka; am I the only person who sees terrible, wonderful potential in Pringles’ ‘You Don’t Just Eat ‘Em’ strapline? Eh? Oh. 
• Adobe Gets Behance Artists To Redesign Its Logo: Included because it’s nice to see a brand going to actual proper communities of creatives, and because I like the freedom with which Sagmeister & Walsh have been allowed to approach the challenge. 
• Pornhub ALSO Crowdsourcing Ads: So this is officially this week’s TREND, then. Anyway, this one looks by far and away the most creatively interesting of the three branding challenges available to creatives who want their work exploited for minimal remuneration. 
• Some Nice Vertical Scrolly Branded Websites Which May Be Of Inspiration If You Make These Sorts Of Things: Here’s a really nice one promoting the food and wine of Southern Australia (unusual in that there’s a lot of information here which doesn’t always work with this sort of layout but which does here); this one for 12 Years A Slave is also very good, as you’d expect, and with its focus on the actors suggests it was designed as part of the whole ‘for your consideration’ pre-Oscars promomageddon to the film industry; this one for some car or another is particularly slick when it comes to animations and stuff; and this from Google is very simple but does the ‘multiple layers in front and behind’ thing in subtle fashion which pleases me. Oh, and this isn’t vertically-scrolly, but it is a brilliant integration of HTML5 video with ecommerce – Adidas / Nike, steal this now (by the way, your sockboots are RIDICULOUS).
• Make Your Own Snowfall: On a semi-related note, this is a really useful guide to the tools available for people who want to make their own Snowfall-y vertically scrolling multimedia webpage extravaganza but who don’t have the NYT’s web design team to help them. Really, really good collection of tips and resources which you’ve probably got about 3 months to play with before this style of page becomes horribly passe’. 
• On Commissioning Animation: Really good piece on the steps involved in commissioning an animation. Useful to read if you’re likely to ever have to do it (by Wes West).
• VANS As Patron: DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE? Admittedly this particularly lame pseudo-gag will only work if you remember me wanging on about the concept of brand-as-patron from Web Curios passim, but still. This is a lovely site and some lovely filmmaking commissioned by VANS all about the LA punk scene. Works not only because of the technical stuff in the webbuild, which is admittedly very good, but because there’s a lot of love there and it’s not trying to sanitise anything too much. The videos are legitimately interesting despite the fact that it’s advertising by stealth – recommended. 
• A Slideshare On Web Design Trends For 2014: Useful for non-specialists; I imagine any ACTUAL web designers will find this all terribly facile, but for a dilettante like me it proved rather interesting. 
• A Clever Oil Promo At SXSW: No, I’m not going to Austin. SHOCKING I KNOW. Anyway, if you are can you please try and get a go on this REAL LIFE MARIOKART (!!!!) which has been set up on a hacked gokart course by some oil company or another to promote the AMAZING BENEFITS its oil gives to drivers. A really clever idea (although the line from the marketing person which states that this is a development in oil technology that he ‘really needed the 18-24 year old kids to know about’ made me laugh quite a lot and then cry a little bit. 
• Oscar Meyer’s Bacon Alarm Clock: Oscar Meyer is a US brand of pig-based products (I’d say ‘pork’, but I get the feeling that there’s probably more than just meat in some of their stuff). To promote their bacon, they’ve commissioned a limited series of iPhone plugins which work with the phone’s alarm to dispense the scent of bacon when the alarm goes off. This is internet catnip – well done them. Also, additional points for the fact that the application process to get one of these things involves the completion of a tie-breaker, which is wonderfully old school. A nice twist on the ‘let’s make a fragrance!’ thing which no brand should ever do ever again ever.
• Bloody Flappy Kitty: I’ve staunchly avoided mentioning the bloody 3 ad with the bloody cat in it (after spending millions of quid on promo, they don’t need my help), but this is annoyingly good – their version of Flappy Bird, with a cat’s head, is not only nicely put together and addictive, but features GREAT sound effects and incredibly evil end-game button placement meaning it’s almost impossible to finish the game without clicking through to one of their websites. The ad, by the way, is still nowhere near as good as the one which featured the singing cherry which looked quite a lot like you were being serenaded by an anus, though. 
• Goldman Sachs Really Are Bastards: THIS is living your brand in one single Tweet. I sort of doff my cap to the vampire squid on this one. 

By Kaija Straumanis

WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE THIS NEXT BIT SOUNDTRACKED BY SOME PROPERLY SHOUTY D’N’B MCING? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE LENGTH OF THE BORING ADVERMARKETING PR BIT THIS WEEK – IT GOT OUT OF HAND, SORRY – AND HOPES THAT YOU WILL IN SOME WAY BE MOLLIFIED BY THE SMORGASBORD OF DELIGHTS (OR AT THE VERY LEAST DISTRACTING RUBBISH) IT HUMBLY SPREADS BEFORE YOU BELOW, PT.1:

• An Imminent Televisual Nadir: Not content with bringing us RudeTube, the televisual equivalent of your old schoolfriends’ Facebook feeds, endlessly promoting ‘virals’ 3 months after you early adopers have seen them (yes, I am aware of how hideously snobbish that sounds, but it’s also sort of true), commercial TV is preparing to foist an even worse-sounding spectacle on our eyes. ITV will imminently bring Viral Tap to screens – that NAME, Jesus. Basically it’s You’ve Been Framed for FUNNY videos – they’re asking people to upload stuff they’ve made, with a potential £1000 prize for stuff that gets used. This is going to end badly, I can feel it – the fact that the explanatory promo short explicitly calls out ‘crazy stuff from your trip to Kavos’ and ‘crazy pranks you’ve played on your mates’ (KERRAZY!) just screams ‘casualty’. I’m just glad I don’t have to sift through the submissions. TV PRODUCERS – here’s a bunch of stuff I came up with for a production company in 2006 which is all dreadful but which you can have for free if you’d like. I still think the ‘how to lose a guy’ one is GOLDEN, despite it being dismissed for being ‘too cruel’. NO VISION. 
• The Lent Abstinence Tracker: It’s Lent. Some of you might be giving things up. You might want to take a look and see what the most popular things people are abstaining from around the English-speaking world are through this completely un-scientific Twitter-based list by Openbible, a website which invites users to ‘remix bible data’ (oh dear God the opportunities). There’s a THING here – ooh, Cadbury’s, why don’t you run some sort of encouragement / reward programme for people abstaining from chocolate? Or, better, just find someone who’s said that they are giving up chocolate for lent and then tweet pictures from the Cadbury’s factory at them EVERY SINGLE DAY. I’m really bad at this, sorry.
• The Modern Twilight Zone: My favourite Twitter account of the week, this gives 140-character plot synopses of Twilight Zone episodes set in the modern era. Like this sort of thing: “A woman ventures to find who’s been tampering with her head when she comes across a live stream that appears to be her own point of view”. 
• All Of The Japanese Emoticons: Emoticons in Japan are MENTAL. The vast array of characters available across alphabets means you can create some truly elaborate symblos to connote all sorts of emotions far beyond the banal 🙁 type stuff we’re stuck with – this is an insanely comprehensive list compiled by some obsessive somewhere. If you’re feeling bored, why not spend the rest of the day responding to emails using these and nothing but? ー(￣～￣)ξ
• VICE News: Vice has launched its own news subsite. It’s excellent – the design and layout and the way you can tweet fragments with links back to the articles in particular make me very happy indeed. 
• Death Of The Second Screen: Well, obviously not yet. Interesting prototype, though, of a service called InAir which effectively draws relevant data from the web based on a natural language-based understanding of what’s going on onscreen and allows users to access it as an on-screen overlay through their TV. It almost certainly won’t be this tech which makes the first ‘this could be mainstream’ breakthrough, but it’s an interesting look at how it could function in the future. Surely this is the sort of thing that the BBC’s RED BUTTON (does anyone actually really use that?) would be perfect for, no?
• Soundtracks To My Life: This is pretty horribly designed site (sorry, person who made it) but the premise is actually really nice and the sort of emotional connection / resonance thing that, if it gets big, I could see a larger player buying into and integrating into its catalogue interface. It’s a simple premise – users pick a song and write about why it’s special to them. There are some really rather lovely stories on here if you care to have a look through.
• The Forbes Billionaire List: I’m basically including this only so that you can feel as momentarily depressed by this as I did. Look, everyone, the 0.00000001%! What’s amazing about this is how far down this list goes – I got into the low 1000s before I had to go and take a soothing walk yesterday to convince myself that no, really, I wasn’t a complete failure (although on many levels that’s EXACTLY what I am!). 
• The Horse Head Squirrel Feeder: We may not be billionaires, damnit, but we can still LAUGH! *cries*
• See Yourself Browsing Websites: A clever little hack from Us Vs Th3m which uses your webcam to shoot you whilst you browse the web and displays the footage back to you in place of the images on any website you visit – basically so that you get to watch yourself as your laptop sees you. OBVIOUSLY the first thought that crept into my head was the ‘art’ (my inverted commas) project which could be undertaken here with bongo sites, watching people as they watch pr0n – I honestly think that would be a really interesting project. Anyone want to volunteer to make it happen? No, thought not. 
• Crowdsource Your Humour: If you ever needed proof as to why comedians are skilled, talented people and writing jokes is HARD, then Howwlr (look, I don’t name these things) is that proof. A ‘collaborative joke writing site’, Howwlr provides the first half of a one-liner and lets users fill in the rest to predictably ‘mixed’ results. I would like someone to cross this with a 3d animator thing like the now-defunct Xtranormal to create hideously awkward animated standup microfilms, please. Thanks.
• The Fake Hoverboard Thing: If you were taken in by this then SHAME ON YOU. Nevertheless, very good work by Funny or Die which shows what you can do with shedloads of money, celebrities on board and a very, very good VFX team. 
• Transparent Textures: Probably the least exciting link of the whole week it might nonetheless be useful to some of you; a website featuring a bunch of free transparent patterns which you can choose the colour of and then grab the CSS for. If you’re a webdesignery person than this could be useful and if you’re not, well, just skip to the next thing. That’s how this works, you see.
• Another Week, Another Live Feed Of Pr0n Searches: This one doesn’t seem to be attached to any particular site, and rather than making it a clickable list it instead presents the terms appearing and fading against a soothing background image of hot air balloons. Why not set this as a colleague’s homepage next time they’re away from their desk? NB – Web Curios and Imperica strongly advise against ACTUALLY doing this, and will in no way be held accountable for any disciplinary proceedings which may or may not result from said colleague getting offended at seeing phrases like ‘yoga booty’ and ‘boy sex gsy’ (no, me neither) float up onto their screen.
• Air PNP: Like Airbnb but, er, for toilets, this site allows users to nominate venues as toilet facilities. Primarily envisaged as a solution to the problem of toilet provision at large-scale public events, the potential for trolling the everliving fcuk out of people / places with this is surely huge, no? 
• Colourised Photos Of 1920s Russia: These are rather beautiful – my favourite by far is this lady, who is either trying to be alluring or so drunk on homemade potato spirit that she can only focus on the photographer with one eye closed. 
• Making Manhattan In Minecraft: Minecraft is basically shaping up to be what people sort of thought Second Life could be in the mid-00s, isn’t it? Well, perhaps not exactly (less sex, for a start), but you know what I mean – its flexibility and accessibility are enabling virtual world creativity on a massive scale. The latest in the long line of ‘wow, they’re doing THAT?’ things from the Minecraft ecosystem comes in the shape of this project, whereby a user’s seeking to import map data from a variety of sources and convert it into the game’s engine so that he can produce a 3d, navigable, in-game Manhattan. It’s frivolous at heart, but the potential implications / applications are very interesting indeed. 
• Wolfram Alpha Search Bot: Wolfram Alpha is HARD, and I freely admit to having no real idea of what you can do with it aside from creating graphs of famous people’s faces – this is a Twitter bot which you can use to ease the pain of getting your head round it; tweet it questions and it will Wolfram Alpha them (doesn’t really work quite like ‘Google’ as a verb, does it?) and return the results. 
• Chinese Factory Workers And Their Amazing Hair: You need to click through page-by-page (I know, ANNOYING), but these photos of factory workers in China are not only fascinating due to the small personal anecdotes attached to each but also because of the amazing hairstyles sported by each person. This is just ITCHING to be recreated as a photoshoot in Another Magazine or somesuch fashiony spaffrag.
• Good UI: Tips for building a good user interface. Helpful, if maybe a little niche. 
• Throwback: After the time capsule app from a few weeks ago, Throwback is a similar but simpler version; it only allows for the sending of photos rather than larger filebundles. Still, though, the potential for really fcuking with people’s heads is GREAT. Or actually, on a less evil note, for people who are dying to schedule messages to loved ones from beyond the grave. Is that really creepy? I think it probably sort of is. Sorry
• Artists As Architects: Lovely series of images imagining what sort of houses famous artists might have built were they architects rather than…er…artists. The Mondrian house looks genuinely brilliant – does this actually exist somewhere?
• Look At All Of Us: I could stare at this for hours and hours and hours and hours. A simple hack taking pictures from Reddit’s popular humanporn thread (in case you’re not familiar with it, it’s nothing to do with actual pr0n at all) and running them fullscreen with a strummy acoustic backing. So many good pictures and so many amazing faces. 
• Reporter: An interesting and low-friction approach to the whole idea of the quantified self, Reporter is an iPhone app which asks you a few randomly-timed survey questions each day to build up a picture of who you are, how you feel, what you like, etc, and draws correlations between them. Now obviously correlation is not causation as we all know, but I think that the idea of the sort of conversational feel of this makes it marginally more appealing than the slightly more MEASURE EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW-type quantification apps which are out there. Also, it might make it feel like there is someone who really cares about you and wants to know about your life, which may mitigate against the all-encompassing feelings of alienation you’re probably feeling most of the time. 
• Poet Or Bot: A piece of verse is prsented to you – was it composed by a human or by a bot? YOU DECIDE! Depressingly this can occasionally be much harder than you think it ought to be, although whether that’s down to increasingly clever text generation software or the fact that they’ve used some truly stinking poetry on the site is open to debate. 
• Humans Of The Third Reich: Quite an odd Facebook Page, this; it takes images of people from Nazi Germany and pairs them with quotes and fragments of dialogue about…well…about life and friendship and stuff. It’s actually very effective and sort of affecting, reminding you that these were actual people rather than the two-dimensionally monstrous caricatures we’re often presented with. Sad.
• Desktop Images From North Korea: It may not surprise you to learn that computers in North Korea don’t run Windows – instead they run their very own OS called ‘Redstar’. These are some of the background images users can choose – one of these is their equivalent to the Windows hill which is burnt onto so many retinas worldwide. Art meets propaganda meets tech.
• AcousticStream: Such a clever idea, this is a Kickstarter for a piece of kit which acts not only as a guitar tuner and wireless recorder but which also allows users to wirelessly stream their acoustic performances to the web. I have no idea how that works, but WOW. Seriously impressive concept, this one, and one which I might be interested in had I not made the mistake of learning classical guitar rather than rock guitar when I was younger (I did it because I thought, not unreasonably, that girls might fancy a boy who could play guitar – I was about 10; turns out this doesn’t hold as true when you have no natural ability and your repertoire is confined to 16th-century tapestries picked out at 1/4 speed). Oh, and Kickstarter reached their $1billion pledged milestone this week, for which they made this nice little page if you’re interested.

By Ben Foster

THE SECTION WHICH APOLOGISES FOR THE LENGTH OF THE BORING ADVERMARKETING PR BIT THIS WEEK – IT GOT OUT OF HAND, SORRY – AND HOPES THAT YOU WILL IN SOME WAY BE MOLLIFIED BY THE SMORGASBORD OF DELIGHTS (OR AT THE VERY LEAST DISTRACTING RUBBISH) IT HUMBLY SPREADS BEFORE YOU BELOW, PT.2:

• GTAIV In B&W: I’ve featured game screenshot art site Dead End Thrills before, but this new collection of black and white photos of GTAIV are really quite beautiful. 
• Tetris Business Cards: For a certain type of person this will be the greatest business card ever – made so as to constitute an in-built playable game of Tetris. They’re going to be releasing other ones over time with different game. I’m not sure how they’d work as a chat-up mechanic, guys, but in terms of keeping you amused while you stand in the corner of a party, alone, they’re probably unbeatable. 
• 19thC London Maps Vs Google Maps: Fascinating mapping of late-19thC map data over Google Maps, letting you zoom in and see how areas have changed in the past 120 years. Nice interface and the older maps are wonderfully detailed.
• World Leaders As Drag Queens: It’s been one of those weeks in global politics where you just sort of want to bury your head in the sand at the idiocy of it all. Don’t do that, though – look at these wonderful gifed images of world leaders from across the globe and through the ages being reimagined as transvestites! Obama looks HOT, but I think Putin wins out. 
• A Reddit Thread All About The Largest Dildos on Amazon: Look, don’t pretend you’re not curious. 
• The Interactive Sound of the Smiths: This is a great piece of work by Warner Music. An interactive guide to the history and discography of The Smiths, presented in gorgeous 2014 scrollomultimediavision. There’s a lot of stuff in here – I’m sure if you’re a Smiths obsessive you’ll know it all already, but as a more casual fan it was very fun to trawl through for an afternoon. 
• The Cocksman Club: I hate hate hate hate the name of this; it makes me think of swaggering fratboys, which on reflection is probably completely the right target audience and means I should shut up. Anyway, it’s a very simple condoms-by-post subscription service, but the packaging is really slick and the initiative in itself is praiseworthy – although, er, don’t they give out free condoms at Colleges in the US? Not sure there’s necessarily the need here, but would be interested to see a brand picking this up and giving it a go – actually might be interesting for Lynx if they wanted to diversify a bit, maybe. 
• Lammily: Wow, this moved fast. 3 days ago this was about $5,000 in – now it’s more than doubled its funding target. Anyway, this is the funding page for Lammily, the latest in the near-infinite line of toys for girls which aim to dispel the false body-image myths perpetrated by Barbie, Bratz et al. I’m all for the concept, but the doll does look a bit…well…dull. I’m all for feminism, but I don’t necessarily think that means that girls should only be allowed toys dressed in a utilitarian polo shirt and George At Asda jeans combo. 
• The Hipster Music Index: A brilliant project which looks to correlate a bunch of data around Pitchfork review scores and number of Facebook shares to create the ultimate list of hipster bands. This really should be integrated with Spotify or some sort of online radio service to create the official Hipster FM radio station (actually that’s a GREAT idea). 
• Death Is Wrong: Oh Ray Kurzweil, you have SO MUCH to answer for. Fascinating futurologist and peddler of all sorts of amazing and ridiculous theories, Kurzweil’s popularisation of the Technological Singularity hypothesis is one of the most contested (and derided) examples of internet utopianism. Derided because it can often lead to stuff like this, a kids’ book currently seeking crowdfunding which looks to inculcate children with the belief that death is WRONG and unnatural and that man should CONQUER IT AT ALL COSTS, AND WE WILL! Because this is going to help little Johnny deal well with the inevitable death of his pets, grandparents, parents, friends, etc, JESUS, PEOPLE, THINK. 
• To Be: A website which lets you make your own weird collages of gifs and images and audio and STUFF – sort of like Moviemaker for obscure webart projects, basically, and a lot of fun to play around with. 
• Biscnuts: Biscuits available to order with VERY RUDE WORDS baked into them. PR AGENCIES: why not subvert expectations and SURPRISE AND DELIGHT prospective clients t your next pitch by eschewing cupcakes in favour of some shortbread which reads, say, “I HATE YOUR FACE”. Just a thought.
• Anti-Normcore Extension: So I included a piece on ‘normcore’ last week and this week it’s been EVERYWHERE, proving without a doubt that Web Curios is read by the 7 people who really matter in MEEJA (Editor’s note: we refer you back to the ‘correlation is not causation’ point above, you hubristic tool). Anyway, now that it’s been namechecked on Radio4 it is officially OVER – this is a Chrome extension which will work to block out the damn word from everything. 
• True Detective Graphicalised: I am aware that this is not a word. Nonetheless. I am told by PEOPLE IN THE KNOW that True Detective is AMAZING; I’m yet to see any of it, so can’t really comment on that. This website, though, in tribute to the series really IS amazing, though – the design and layout is gorgeous, and it seems very comprehensive. Probably contains massive spoilers, but it’s worth a quick look just for the layout and aesthetic. 
• BANTER! THE APP: I hate the word ‘banter’. It makes my teeth itch, and puts me in mind of the sort of braying morons who think Top Gear’s the acme of entertainment (sorry, Top Gear fans). Anyway, this app is actually not as appalling as the name would suggest; instead it allows for the creation of anonymous, themed chatrooms based on interest topics.
• LIVR! THE APP: This can’t be real, can it? It can only end badly. LIVR is an app targeted at exactly the sort of PARTY HARDY fratboy tossers I allude to above, which allows access to itself based on a plugin breathalyser test (you have to be a bit pissed to use it) and from there suggests dares, bars to go to, etc etc. Launching ‘soon’, apparently, this has disaster written all over it, and will no doubt be the subject of at least three outraged mainstream media features in the next month or so. 
• Twitch Shouts Pokemon: So they finished Twitch Plays Pokemon. And then started again. This is the latest hack of the project which is, to my mind, the most unbearable yet – Twitch Shouts Pokemon plays soundfiles for every command inputted by the community, turning the whole thing into one confusing and slightly upsetting set of repeatedly barked orders. Coming soon to a Guantanamo torture cell near you. 
• HTML5 Font Editor: Design fonts in your browser, if you’d like to.
• If The Moon Were Only One Pixel: The latest in the long line of ‘let me show you quite how mind-buggeringly large the universe is’ visualisations, this one’s described by its creator as ;tediously accurate’, as in it takes you AAAAAAGES to scroll through to anything interesting because space is BIG. Apparently designed by the maker in order to demonstrate to his daughter why daytrips to Mars weren’t currently possible, which is a lovely rationale for its existence. 
• Revealr: Has Tindr killed the dating app market (it’s certainly causing young men in London to have some truly appalling conversations on the tube, if the past few weeks are anything to go by)? What do I know, I’m just some webmong. This is an interesting twist on dating apps, though – Revealr lets users record short voice messages which other users can listen to – the twist being that noone sees a picture or any other info about a user until both you and they have liked each others message. Obviously this is hugely ripe for trolling, or just for slightly surreal stoner comedy depending on your worldview.
• What Is The Colour Of The Internet?: Averaging out colour palettes on major websites. Man, we’re unimaginative. 
• Jurassic Systems: Have you ever wanted to play around with the computer system used in Jurassic Park? OH GOOD!
• Beautiful Murmerations: Gorgeous pictures of starlings swarming. If you’re having a tough day, spend three minutes looking at these (and then go to the pub. Christ, it’s not like anyone’s going to missyou). 
• GifGif: Basically like Hot Or Not for gifs, this site pits two gifs against each other and asks users to decide which best fits the definition they place next to them – for example ‘which of these best expresses frustration?’, that sort of thing. Weirdly compelling, and you can jsutify wasting time on it because you;’re contributing to some sort of ultimate gif dictionary somewhere. Probably. 
• Colourised Australian Mugshots: More amazing faces. Any game designers reading this, steal some of these features, they are VERY STRONG .
• The Reflect Project: From old criminals to modern ones, Reflect is a powerful photoproject in which photographer Trent Bell takes portraits of inmates from Maine and merges them with the text of letters which they have written to their younger selves. As poignant and sad as you’d expect, there’s some rather beautiful ones in here – take some time to scroll through and read.
• Seinfeld In Oculus Rift: One of the best things about living in an era in which amazing, space-age technology is more accessible than ever before is that you have NO IDEA how this technology is going to be applied when it intersects with people’s other interests. Which is why it would have been a true seer who predicted that one of the most complete projects yet for the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality helmet software thing is a full recreation of the apartment from Seinfeld. No, no idea why AT ALL, but it’s technically very impressive. 
• Unified Unicorn Tshirts: You want a psychedelic tshirt featuring a pair of…*ahem* conjoined unicorns at play? OH GOOD!
• Pinterest Fails: Recreations of elaborate cooking projects, mainly cakes, done by real people from recipes on Pinterest. It may not surprise you to learn that they don’t always look like the example pictures. 
• A 404 Page With Lemmings: You will not save them all, and you will feel guilty for failing. 
• XRays of Mutant Frogs: You may not know this yet, but you really NEED to see a 6-legged frog in xray form. 
• Share Spoken Messages With A Url: There’s no serious practical application I can think of for this site, but it lets you type whatever you want into the window and then generates a URL which, when clicked on, will take the end user to a url which plays back your message in vocoder fashion. The best bit is that there’s no clue in the url as to what the message being delivered is, which must have trolololololol applications somewhere. 
• Waste The Rest Of The Day With This Game #1: A twine-based roleplaying game about SPACE and stuff. Fun, and sort of ZX Spectrum-ish.
• Waste The Rest Of The Day With This Game #2: This is called MinMetro, it’s about planning a subway system, and it is the most addictive thing I’ve played all week, no contest. Truly brilliant (but wave goodbye to the rest of the day). 
• My Favourite Terrible Website Of The Week: For a ‘restaurant’ called The Heart Attack Grill. Nice restraint on all counts here. 

By Brian Finke

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Laurie J Proud: A collection of Laurie’s art which is all sorts of 1950s cheesecake creepy, like Ralph Bakshi in a certain light.
• Pizza Feminism: Quotes from famous feminists, slightly altered to contain more pizza than they might originally have done. 
• Will It Beard?: One man’s apparent quest to put everything in the world inside his (admittedly impressive) beard.
• Kota Iguchi: Another tumblr showcasing beautiful looping animations. These are rather more colourful than usual and are just generally pleasing to the eye. 
• The Pancake Oscars: Nicely done from Tefal, who used their ‘Put Your Face In A Pancake‘ tool thingy to create this tumblr showing what Oscar nomineed would look like as fried batter.
• Great Catch: Probably my favourite one this week, this showcases pictures the curator has seen on Tinder of men posing with fish. Ye,s fish. Sexy, sexy fish. 
• Beyonce Vs Zombies: Beyonce lyrics as applied to the zombie apocalypse and illustrated in very cute style indeed. 
• Corpus LIbris: Doing that ‘hold an album cover over your face LOLS’ thing, but with book covers which OBVIOUSLY makes it better.
• I See 5C: Aside from a few iTunes music accounts on Twitter, this is Apple’s first foray into social media marketing stuff, which means it probably ought to be up there but it’s a Tumblr and that takes priority in the crap taxonomy of Curios. Anyway, it’s Apple so obviously it looks lovely and slick and stuff.
• Brandon Boyd Eating Subs: The lead singer of Inclubus, photoshopped so as to look like he’s eating long sandwiches. 
• The NYC Crying Guide: A guide to the best and worst places in which to cry in NYC. I hope that this is a creative writing exercise rather than a real person’s thing, as that would be too sad for words. 
• Fcuk Yeah Hover Hands: ‘hoverhands’ is that phenomenon where awkward people in photos, usually men, put their arm around another party, usually female, without making any sort of physical contact with them whatsoever. This is a tumblr celebrating that. 
• Interngram: VERY late to this, but this is an Instagram-based comp which allows people to apply for a Nivea internship with AKQA using Instagram. Closes today, so you can still enter if you like. 
• Prosthetic Knowledge: I love this. Tumblr collecting instances of things we cannot know ourselves but can keep track of through technology. CYBORG NATION. 
• Judgmental Maps: Maps of US cities showing the stereotypes which apply to each area. I would LOVE to see this done of London, but fear it might be a bit more angry than funny.
• I Too Am Harvard: Collecting portraits of black Harvard students along with phrases which have been said to them questioning their right to be at the institution, or things that they have wanted to say in response to others’ attitudes. Sort of horrifying really.
• Naked Pics Of Horses: PURE FILTH.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH AGAIN I PROBABLY WON’T HAVE TIME TO DO JUSTICE TO IN TERMS OF THE DESCRIPTIONS BUT WHICH YOU SHOULD HUNKER DOWN WITH AT SOME POINT SOON BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL WORTH READING IN THEIR OWN SPECIAL WAY, ESPECIALLY WITH A NICE GLASS OF HALF-DECENT RED WINE AND MAYBE SOMETHING INSTRUMENTAL AND SOOTHING ON THE STEREO, NOT THAT I’M TRYING TO DICTATE TO YOUR OR ANYTHING:

• The Popular People Of OKCupid: Or at least, the popular people in New York. This is a portrait of the 4 people in the city who got most messages over a week long period – a straight woman and man, and a gay woman and man. Interesting read if you’ve done or are doing online dating, or if you’re just curious about what hits people’s buttons when they’re trawling for love/sex on the internet. As an aside, is it just me or does the straight bloke sound like a complete penis? Albeit quite a photogenic one, I concede.
• The Mail’s Financial Model: Longform writing from Popbitch of all places (they’ve just launched their app, so presume that this is acting as a teaser for the sort of stuff you’ll get should you subscribe – it’s a monthly magazine-type number), but this is a really, really interesting look at how the Mail makes money and why many of the things you (and me) thought about it might be wrong. Sort of essential reading if you work in MEDIA, as it’s got lots to say about the whole ad-funded model overall, particularly online. 
• A History Of Everything, Including You: A short story, written in a day, about love and life and death and EVERYTHING and it made me cry a little bit when I read it and I AM NOT ASHAMED OF THAT. 
• Being An Uber Driver: UberX is the low-cost arm of cabbie app Uber – it’s not available in the UK yet, I don’t think, but inevitably will be soon. Anyway, this is a great piece documenting the author’s experience of being an Uber driver for low-cost fares for a week in LA. Fascinating, particularly in terms of what it makes you think about how cabbies relate to their passengers and what you would / wouldn’t do in certain situations. 
• The Hell’s Angels of Disneyland: Well not quite Hell’s Angels, but still. All about the gangs of Disneyland – loosely affiliated groups of adults who roam the parks together, enjoying and enforcing the Disney spirit. Quite remarkable, and not a little sinister in places. 
• An Interview With The Young Man Removed From Vine For Attempting To Mate With A Toasted Snack: 10 days or so ago, some kid in the US filmed himself putting his penis inside a toasted snack called a Hot Pocket. His Vine account was suspended. He became a minor internet celebrity for about 10 minutes. Now, he speaks. I’m including this mainly because it’s a terrifying window into the sort of fame which kids appear to want in 2014 (and yes, I am aware of exactly how old that makes me sounds and I don’t care).
• Minecraft’s Teen Superstars: Sorry about the Mashable link, but this is actually surprisingly decent. A look at TeamCrafted, a bunch of YouTubers who have become superfamous through making Minecraft vids and are now being courted by brands all over the place. These kids sound TERRIFYING, frankly – you can almost see the Scrooge McDuck dollar signs where their pupils should be. 
• The Man Behind Bitcoin (Maybe): Newsweek tracked down an ageing Japanese man who may or may not be the person behind Bitcoin. The piece is interesting less because of the content and more because of the increasingly uncomfortable way it will make you feel as you begin to ask yourself ‘why are Newsweek hounding this bloke?’.
• The Sanitary Towel Superstar of India: This has been everywhere in the past 24h, but if you’ve yet to read this BBC World piece about the Indian man who’s revolutionised the production of affordable sanitary towels in rural India then you should do so NOW. This is being turned into a film as I type, mark my words. 
• The Unstoppable Spread Of ‘Trigger Warnings’: On the inexorable rise of the use of the term ‘trigger warning’, and how it’s becoming increasingly meaningless, pointless and irritating. WHAT HAPPENED TO CAVEAT EMPTOR? And yes, I know that there are legitimate reasons for occasionally using the term, but really, please, can people really not accept agency for their own feelings and emotional wellbeing? Oh, no, sorry, of course we fcuking well can’t. Jesus. 
• Notes On An Exorcism: Tied as the best piece of writing in here this week, this is a great article from Esquire US about the author’s experience of being exorcised in Senegal as a cure for depression. The slightly deadpan style elevates this beyond the ‘innocent abroad’ subject matter.
• IBS In New Orleans: The OTHER best piece of writing this week is an uncomfortably candid but laugh-out-loud funny account of one woman’s experiences of living and dating in New Orleans with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The amount you will like this is probably directly proportionate to how much the sentence ‘A look in the bathroom mirror revealed I did in fact look like a woman who’d just shat in a bar and left alone’ makes you laugh/cringe. 

From MAD Magazine

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up this week, a compilation of clips of the men from sword-enthusiast YouTube channel ‘Cold Steel’ (seriously, when you have a moment do take a look – it’s MENTAL), demonstrating said enthusiasm with gusto. Simultaneously ridiculous, funny, and really quite disturbing if you think about it too hard:

2) This may be the week when the Emoji music video becomes a THING. We featured this one last year, which I think was the first of its ilk and was by Oneohtrix Point Never – this one, though, is for (it’s fair to say) the significantly more popular ‘Drunk In Love’ by Beyonce and as such will be BIG. It’s well done, in any case, although if you’re interested in the ‘copy/theft’ aspect of this then the comments underneath the vid on Vimeo, and the artist’s response, are also worth a look:

3) This isn’t cool AT ALL, and the video’s just some people playing the song live in some log cabin, and it’s frankly all a bit cheesy, but I heard this yesterday and it MELTED me completely, and her voice gave me ASMR tingles, and the violinist is really rather gorgeous and it’s by Alex Winston and it’s called 101 Vultures and you should listen to it, you might like it:

4) Just to mix it up a bit, this is really quite disturbing and I don’t know what to make of it at all. It’s a video called ‘Asylum Of The Birds’ and it’s a videodiary by a South African photographer called Roger Ballen which documents how and where he took photos for the book of the same name. It features real communities of outsiders and transients on the outskirts of Johannesberg, and I was made a little uncomfortable about the photographer’s relationship with them (amongst other things). It’s pretty uncomfortable viewing (and features a chicken being killed, just in case that upsets you):

5) Following on the photography theme, this is the band Rivver with their song ‘Lamu’, which takes 25 portraits and creates short stories around them. Beautiful pictures:

6) Like Massive Attack? Like Roots Manuva? Like Tricky? You’ll like the latest from Ghostpoet, then – this is Dial Tone:

7) A strange juxtaposition of cheery-sounding song and seemingly upbeat animation which is actually all about a deadly game of musical drums. The music’s not really me, I must confess, but the animation’s lovely and for some reason this stayed with me quite a long time after I stopped watching. This is The Daily Drumbeat by Happy Camper:

8) This has absolutely EXPLODED this week, from a few thousand views to 2million+. You may have seen it – if you haven’t, prepare yourself for a TREAT. This is Babymetal, a manufactured pop outfit from Japan who combine typical Kawaii! schoogirl outfits with, er, fairly heavy (if uninspired) metal riffing. No, no, come back! You HAVE to listen to this – it really shouldn’t work at all, but it’s totally brilliant – and given the fact that none of the women involved had any sort of familiarity with metal at all, apparently, before being coopted into the outfit, shows that Japanese (and indeed Asian) music producers and svengalis are the sorts of evil geniuses which Simon Cowell can only dream of one day becoming. They are singing about chocolate, by the way:

9) Finally this week, Akira The Don announced that he’s retiring the name soon before heading off to explore EXCITING NEW PROJECTS elsewhere soon. This is the first track from the ‘final’ ATD mixtape, ATDRIP – it is called ‘Rain In England’ and it is a thing of strangely elegiac beauty and I suggest you listen whilst watching the rain stream down your windows and drinking cocoa. HAVE FUN: