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Webcurios 10/04/20

Reading Time: 37 minutes

Ordinarily I don’t do these on Good Friday, what with the fact that, in my head at least, the only audience for Curios is people so terminally-bored at work that they’ll deign to read even this poorly-birthed mess of stuff if it means that the time in front of the Powerpoint will pass quicker. This year, though, given noone has any idea what date it is or what day it is, and given we are all desperately trying to pass the time in any way we can (NOT LIKE THAT THOUGH FFS), I thought I would make an exception.

BREAK OUT THE SIMNEL CAKE! NAIL THE SON OF GOD TO A TREE! IT’S THE SPECIAL, PASCAL EDITION OF WEB CURIOS!

Yes, that’s right, much like Jesus I too have spent this morning traipsing up my own personal calvary; fine, he might have been burdened with a massive wooden cross that was to be the final instrument of his mortal death, and, fine, he might also have been burdened with the not-insignificant psychic load of his simultaneous status as a tripartite deity and an actual human, but did HE have to wrangle over 100 links into some sort of semblance of order and coherence? DID HE FCUK! Also, I have outlived Jesus by seven years and counting, and therefore I am better

(NB – let me here briefly apologise for the blasphemy; to any of you of the Christian faith who might still be reading, I wish you a very happy Easter and intend no offense. Rest assured that my Italian grandfather is condemning my mortal soul to hell as I type). 

Anyway, here we are again. IT is still happening; we are all increasingly bored of IT, we will get through IT together. Now, though, find a quiet place, get comfortable and prepare to have a moment of transcendental joy as I once more attempt to fit all of the week’s internet into your head via the medium of what increasingly feels like some sort of word-sledgehammer. 

I, as ever, am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios; please take care and have a nice weekend and try not to behave like a total selfish cnut should you leave the house.

***OH AND ONE MORE THING PLEASE CLICK HERE AND SPEND THREE QUID TO PURCHASE A COPY OF THE EXCELLENT NEW IMPERICA MAGAZINE WHICH CONTAINS LOTS OF EXCELLENT WORDS, ABOUT ALL SORTS OF THINGS LIKE ART AND DESIGN AND MUSIC AND FEMINISM AND AI AND WHICH FRANKLY IS SUCH GOOD VALUE YOU’D BE MAD NOT TO***

By Nancy Fouts

FIRST UP, A TYPICALLY-MEANDERING AND ODDITY-PACKED NEW 80-MINUTE MIX FROM BERLIN-BASED VINYL-TICKLING INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH APPLAUDS JACK DORSEY FOR HIS CHARITABLE DONATION – NO, REALLY, IT IS A GOOD THING – BUT WHICH WOULD EQUALLY LIKE TO EXIST IN A WORLD WHERE IT’S NOT NECESSARILY IN ONE MAN’S GIFT TO DONATE $1BN AND THAT STILL BE ONLY 25% OF THEIR INCOME, OR WHERE THIS HAPPENS INSTEAD OF THEIR COMPANY PAYING, YOU KNOW, REASONABLE AMOUNTS OF TAX ON ITS GLOBAL OPERATIONS:

  • Facebook Expands Data-for-Good Offering: It’s really hard on me, all this ‘write nice things about the companies you’ve spent the past decade slagging off’ stuff. Facebook, again, continues to behave like a big, responsible corporate, now expanding all the datastuff it makes available to include (anonymised, obvs) location change data from across the world, to help researchers analyse how factors such as human movement within defined geographical areas are contributing to the spread of COVID. Genuinely useful, although I would like to point out that this is just a benign application of the fact that YOUR PHONE AND EVERYTHING ON IT KNOWS WHERE YOU ARE EVERY SINGLE SECOND OF THE DAY, which is still creepy enough to be worth mentioning if you ask me. Still, anyone working in or around data will find this stuff interesting – I also wonder to what extent this sort of information is going to be used as a slight punitive/shaming mechanism in the washup, with countries or peoples which can be shown to have been less stringent in their adoption of travel restrictions and social distancing being somehow censured post-virus. SO many interesting things to look forward to and speculate on!
  • FB Launches Quiet Mode: Odd in some ways that Facebook chooses to launch a ‘turn off notifications for a set period’ setting for its main app just as literally everyone earth has decided to stop caring about how long we’re staring at our screens for because the alternative is looking out of the window and that is simply too miserable to contemplate. Anyway, that’s what it’s done – perhaps worth looking at if you’re worried that your parents are getting a little bit too into that “5G COVID VAMPIRES STOLE MADDIE!” Facebook Group. It’s not necessarily new stuff – these are all features that have been more-or-less available in the general ‘time spent on Facebook’ settings of the app – but it’s had a refresh and a bit of a PR boost so, well, here it is.
  • Facebook Launches Tuned, for Couples: Are YOU in a couple? Are you perhaps distant from each other? Do you want a channel where you can send each other messages and gifs and photos and lovenotes and those unpleasantly-sticky videos that you know it would be disastrous to ever allow to be seen by the eyes of another human? Quite possibly, and yet it’s unlikely that that you need another one, because this is what literally every single other chat or messaging app lets you do! Still, that hasn’t stopped Facebook’s experimental NEP skunkworks from punting this new product out of the door this week; I have literally no idea why anyone would choose to engage with this, unless they had a very specific desire to share literally all the data about their romantic interactions with Mark Zuckerberg, but perhaps that thought adds an extra frisson to your filthy exchanges. You perverts.
  • Facebook Gaming Launches Tournaments: Another week, another feature added to Facebook which feels like an aggressive move towards one of its theoretical platform rivals; last week it added all that ‘series’-type autoplay collection gubbins to Watch in a play for some of YouTube’s creators; this time it’s a boost to its Gaming offering, with Facebook users now able to create eSports tournament infrastructure within Facebook, with all the associated assistance for seamless streaming of said competitions. The quality seems very good, though that might be because it’s currently massively undersubscribed vs Twitch; if you’re doing online gaming and want a seemingly-simple way of managing tourneys, you could do worse than this.
  • WhatsApp Limits Message Forwarding: You will have heard about this, I presume, and it’s another move that can only be seen as A Good Thing; it is worth looking at it a bit closely, though, as a) it’s a pretty limited limit, kicking in only when an individual message has been forwarded 5 times previously, and even then only introducing a degree of friction to sharing rather than stopping it entirely; and b) that still allows for an awful lot of sharing of absolutely mad rubbish before any sort of slowing measures kick in. I’m personally waiting to see one which makes a spurious Corona/Koran link, at which point I might declare us done as a species and go and do a self-immolate or something.
  • COVID-19 Mobility Data from Google: Not unlike Facebook’s data, linked above, but a bit more user-friendly from Google; you can download datasets by country and then get information about the change in movement over time among the populace on a city-by-city level. Might be useful for coming up with some reactive, tactical comms ideas to send to your clients to remind them that you exist but that they will probably ignore because, well, *all this*.
  • Cannes We Not: I like this initiative. Cannes We Not is a simple idea – can all agencies doing stuff with clients around the current pandemic thing please all agree not to make awards season capital out of it when this is all over, please? I think this is a sensible and good thing – it doesn’t really feel quite right that work done in the face of a significant number of people doing quite a lot of a die should then be subsequently used as part of an inter-agency p1ssing contest or an excuse to get back on the gak again (“we deserve it”). Also, and I’m not going to name names because that would be VERY MEAN, but a special shout out to the agency which recently did quite a lot of proud boasting about the fact it had been using 20% of staff hours during ‘these exceptional times’ to develop little TikTok stickers about clapping for the NHS. It’s cute, it’s ‘nice’, but if you try and pretend to me that that’s anything other than a self-aggrandising bit of autofellatio basically showing off that you can MAKE A DIGITAL then, well, fcuk off mate and pull the other one.

By Christopher Espinosa Fernandez

NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB FUNK AND BREAKS AND BEATS MIX BY MIKE ‘MARCELLUS’ WALLACE!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.1:

  • The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: No apologies for featuring this again; it’s a growing and fabulous selection of resources now being collaborated on by people from literally across the world, and which this week got official endorsement from NESTA as being A Good Thing. Seriously, there’s stuff in here for almost everyone, from tips on homeworking, resources for parents and teachers, information about local initiatives around the globe, stuff on how to make masks, distractions and mental health tips…If you’ve yet to take a look at it, please do – whether or not it’s something you can add to, there’s almost certainly information linked to that will be of use to you or someone you know. Huge props to the team at Newspeak House for kicking it all off.
  • Donate Your IT Equipment: This is a nice idea – a campaign to get people to donate old or unused IT to hospitals in London to help patients who might not have access to devices to be able to maintain contact with their families and loved ones. The link here’s to an online form to share details of what you’re able to donate – thanks to Kate Bevan at Which? who pointed out that donating iOS stuff is mostly fine, but old Android kit should be researched a bit based on the fact that it can constitute a not-insignificant security risk. This article gives you a bit of a rundown on stuff that is likely to be more or less safe to donate, should you have any to hand. Or you can put a sticker on a TikTok. It’s basically the same thing.
  • CovidSounds: A research project being undertaken by Cambridge University which is asking people – both those with COVID-19 and those without – to record the sound of themselves coughing to help researchers develop better methodologies for determining infection from sound data. I mean, if you’re coughing anyway you may as well; I look forward to this not only helping to halt the spread of infection, but also being used to create ‘This Cough Does Not Exist’, a website which will generate realistic-but-totally-AI-imagined sounds of mucal distress.
  • The COVID-19 Consumer Data Tracker: That SOUNDS pretty grandiose, doesn’t it? It’s probably not quite as fancy and all-encompassing as the name might suggest, but it is a really interesting overview of how consumer habits and interests are being impacted by virageddon. It’s by Glimpse, which is a data platform and is annoyingly opaque about exactly what signals its using to gauge its assessment of shifting levels of consumer interest (I imagine it’s slightly more complex than ‘we just pull in Google Trends’), and presents a selection of graphic visualisations of consumer interest (at a global level) in topics such as ‘paintbrushes’, ‘jigsaws’, ‘sourdough’ and ‘creative ways to masturbate once you have basically reached the end of w4nking’. You can filter it by stuff trending up or down, and by broad category, and frankly if your job involves making largely-spurious-yet-serious-and-analytical-sounding predictions about WHAT WILL HAPPEN and WHAT STUFF MEANS then you can probably get at least three hour-long webinars out of this. Oh, if you like this sort of stuff then you may also like this, very similar, dashboard thingy by Pulsar too, which offers the same type of information across a different set of topics.
  • All The VirusNews From Google: Not from Google, fine, but aggregated by it. Probably won’t be too much use if people you know have gone full Icke about this sort of thing, but if you’d like to direct friends and family members to a reasonably-well-fact-checked source presenting verified information from a range of outlets then this probably isn’t too bad.
  • Open Source Recipes: See, this is the collaborative effort I like to see – the COVID Cookbook! Ignore the slightly-weird, tie-dy psychedelia of the homepage – click the web link and it takes you to a Google Sheets document which anyone can contribute to via email; submissions are vetted by a central team and then added to the cookbook on approval. I think this is AMAZING and should one day be in libraries everywhere; there are about 80-odd recipes in there, up from 40-odd when I found it, and whilst they are VERY American (how many flavours? WHY???) they’re also a really interesting mix of styles and levels of complexity, and are nicely-divided by recipe type. Ooh, seeing as I’m here, have a cocktail recipe I sort-of invented last week: blend some (look, measurements are TOO HARD) coriander stalks with lime jiuce, lime zest and caster sugar til, smooth; pass through a sieve or muslin into a shaker with ice, vodka, st germain and a pinch of salt. Shake, strain & serve and imagine you are somewhere better. CHEERS YOU FCUKERS!
  • LikeLike Online: Oh oh oh this is so lovely! LikeLike is, apparently, a sort-of arcade in Pittsburgh, specifically dedicated to indie and artgames; under lockdown, they have built this virtual version of their arcade, in which users pick an 8-bit avatar and a name and are then dropped into a smol, gamelike arcade world, with different rooms containing different – playable! – little games, and with the ability to see other people’s avatars wandering around, and chat to them if you like. It’s so simple, but perfectly-formed; it genuinely does feel a bit like stepping into a small, unfamiliar arcade in a new town (a sentence which I appreciate will mean nothing to people below a certain age), and is a properly charming way of passing an hour playing tiny games by some stars of indieworld (Porpentine’s got some stuff in there, for example).
  • I Miss The Office: Do you? Do you really? I know that the whole chat about ‘HOW THE WORLD WILL CHANGE AFTER…ALL THIS’ is long and overblown and almost-entirely based on a series of personal biases and prejudices and fears and hopes rather than anything resembling rational analysis, but one thing I think we can all probably agree on is that, unless you’re fcuking someone you work with, going to work is crap (and even then it’s still not the best use of one’s time). It’s been fascinating watch people realise ‘hang on – if I don’t spend two hours a day travelling to a place where I dislike almost everyone and where there is no actual practical need for me to be, I actually have…quite a lot more free time!’, and I can’t see fulltime office attendance coming back in the same way. Still, if you find that the sepulchral silence of your own doubtless-beautifully-arranged home office is a bit lonely, and that you miss the aural smorgasbord of working like, you might like this site – a lovely, minimalist little audiotoy which lets you toggle various sounds of the workspace off and on at a whim. Special shoutout to the art style here, which is quite lovely, and kudos to agency The Kids who built it.
  • Google Stadia Is Now Free: For a bit, at least. For those of you who don’t know, Stadia is Google’s VERY FUTURE videogames setup, which lets you stream console games to your TV using nothing but your phone or laptop and your internet connection. In theory, this is incredible; in practice, the experience hasn’t always been hugely whelming; I do wonder whether this is going to work at all given the increased strain on domestic bandwidth being caused by literally everyone now being online all the time at present. Still, if you or anyone you know has half-decent internet and isn’t able to permit themselves a fancy games machine, this is definitely worth a try – he might not thank me for saying this, but I know James Whatley has been using this for months and might be a useful person to ask if you want to know the pros and cons. GO ON, ASK HIM! (sorry James xxx).
  • Digital Fashion: Of course, perhaps After All This Is Over we will no longer want to go outside into meatspace at all, preferring to stay within our hypoallergenic, hermetically-sealed bubbles and interacting only via the medium of haptics through fullbody suspension suits (or something). In which instance, we’ll become far more invested in the development of our digital avatars – which is where Leela (or Digital Fashion – the website’s a bit confusing) comes in! Let the site take a photo of your face – it’s a bit picky, you might need a few goes – and then watch as it creates a genuinely-hideous Lawnmower Man-style avatar for you, with a terrifying, early-00s videogame face, which you can dress in a series of very, very silly digital garments which all look rather too much like ‘what George Lucas seemed to think everyone in space would be wearing circa 1977’. Honestly, I can’t stress quite how unsettling the results are – please, do make one of these of yourself and let me know what you look like. This, for example, was me. I PROMISE I DON’T REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT.
  • Integration Loop: A collaborative art project by Robin Sloane, itself based on the decade-old work ‘Disintegration Loops’ by William Basinski, which originally took a recording of a found piece of music and played through its gradual digital disintegration as a sort-of elegy. It’s worth reading the full text of Sloane’s explanation about his own interpretation of the work, but this version involves the collaborative recreation of the melody contained in the original loop by an anonymous choir of individuals from around the world. Anyone can contribute – just record the melody snippet and upload it, and your recording will eventually form part of the completed piece, which will layer the constructive voices of human collaboration over the original, degrading deconstruction of the melody brought about by digital decay. Which, I know, sounds w4nky as you like, but I promise it makes sense if you read the description. I think this is lovely.
  • Modern Day Jobs: Or, HUSTLE HARDER! Sorry, maybe I’m being unfair, but there’s a piece in the longreads this week about the ‘hustle’ and how it’s going to become even more encoded as a way of life in a post-COVID landscape and how that’s actually quite sh1t, and this rather speaks to that. This site is ostensibly a good idea, offering a selection of ways in which individuals who might need income can earn money online; from research gigs to remote customer service jobs, freelancer portals to piecework sites, there’s a lot of stuff here, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is very much the bottom of the employment barrel and that even these jobs are going to go before too long because, honestly, there’s not a fat lot of work here that you imagine will still be a human gig in
  • An Old French Guide To Drawing Animals: This is a whole kids illustration guide from (I think) 19th Century France; honestly this is superb, with clear guides on how to draw a vast range of animals, including peacocks and rhinos and monkeys…if you’ve got an artistically-inclined kid, there’s definitely an ‘animal a day’ drawing task you can eke out of this, with the added bonus of them learning how to say ‘anteater’ in French.
  • The COVID Shopping List Generator: I can’t vouch for the measurements on here, so caveat emptor, but this site lets you input the number of mouths you have to feed, how long you have to keep them fed for, with toggles for specific elements that you may or may not want to include; it then spits out a series of quantities of stuff you might need to buy to be able to stay full of tum and clean of bum for the duration of your specified lockdown period.
  • Dyson’s Challenge Cards: James Dyson – another talented man who’s seemingly revealed himself to be a bit of a prick over the course of the past few years. Still, this is a nice idea by the company that bears his name, with the Dyson website making available a bunch of STEM-y challenges for kids to complete whilst on lockdown and bored, using the sort of things that you probably have lying around the house (this is a guess – do people with kids just sort of randomly have balloons and pipe-cleaners knocking about?). “Dyson engineers have designed these challenges specifically for children. Ideal for home or in the classroom, they encourage inquisitive young minds to get excited about engineering” – whether or not your ‘inquisitive minds’ will pay a blind bit of notice to your exhortations to ‘put that fcuking phone down’ is, however, outwith my control.
  • Paper Polyhedra: MAKE BEAUTIFUL POLYHEDRAL SHAPES OUT OF PAPER!! Perhaps one to save for Week 22, when the evenings are starting to draw in again.
  • TableTopia: I know I featured another boardgame site on here a few weeks back, but that one’s been getting absolutely slammed with traffic and so you might want to check out this alternative instead; a slightly smaller collection of games, but the interface seems to work well and there’s a matchmaking facility so you can find games to join with strangers should you so desire. Also, there’s a game on there called ‘Secret Hitler’, which may well be famous and a classic of the genre but which also made me laugh quite a lot.
  • The Other Art Fair: Art fairs – something else perhaps unlikely to survive after all this. At least not the smaller ones – you imagine Basel and Frieze will be fine, because money finds a way, but stuff like the sub-£500-a-piece Other Art Fair might struggle to make it. This year’s Fair was scheduled to be on in London soon-ish, but, for obvious reasons, isn’t – instead, the website offers a nice rundown of all the artists who were due to be featured, with examples of their work; you may not be in the market to spend money on art right now, but even to browse it’s a rather soothing experience. As ever with this Fair there’s a really nice range of styles on display here, and if you’re someone who’s put ‘get back into painting’ on their ‘list of improving activities to undertake whilst mouldering away indoors’ then this could be an excellent source of thematic or stylistic inspiration.
  • Bookshlf: I can’t remember the number of variants on this particular idea I’ve seen over the years I’ve been doing Curios, but here’s the latest – curate your interests and your selections within specific categories on your VIRTUAL BOOKSH(E)LF and share these curations with your friends to demonstrate exactly how erudite you are! Why the fcuk you wouldn’t just use Pinterest or any number of other extant platforms which have actual, established userbases already is beyond me, but if you’d like a shiny new space online for you to use to showcase exactly how many of THE CLASSICS you’ve burned through whilst also perfecting your yoga and your ab curls and your startup idea then this may well be for you (now fcuk off).
  • The Wildeverse: If you’ve got little-ish kids I reckon this looks ACE. The Wildeverse is an AR game-type-thing which basically lets you explore a jungle via your phone, and find and help wild apes within said jungle via the magic of augmented reality. It’s a project by not-for-profit organisation Internet of Elephants, and is designed to raise awareness of conservation efforts to protect endangered species, in this specific case simian ones, in jungle habitats, and it’s really very cute indeed. The AR is, as with all AR, a bit hit-and-miss, but the models of the apes themselves are charming, and the didactic stuff is very light-touch, and it works without needing to go traipsing around outside, If you’ve got kids who are familiar with Pokemon Go or Minecraft’s AR offering, this is worth a look.

By Rebecca Storm

NEXT, THIS MIX OF AMBIENT-Y, CHILLOUT-Y STUFF BY THIRD ATTEMPT IS JUST PERFECT FOR A SUNNY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.2:

  • Beautiful Photos of Jupiter: I confess that I am not 100% that these are real, so mind-screwingly gorgeous are they; is Jupiter’s surface really that iridescently-beautiful? Let’s, for the sake of this weekend at least, agree that yes it is.
  • The Girl Museum: Got daughters? Try this! “Girl Museum is the first museum in the world dedicated to girlhood. We are a virtual museum for exhibitions, education, and raising awareness about girls and girlhood globally. We are also an information platform for social/cultural dialogue and investigation. We research and collect cross-cultural historic and contemporary images and stories from and about girlhood around the world. Through exhibitions, publications, and projects, we explore and document the unique experience of being born and growing up female.” This is less po-faced than that rather staid explanation might suggest; browse the collections and you’ll find lots of themed ‘exhibitions’ that take you through the achievements of women and girls across various fields, throughout history. If your kid(s) devoured that book about awesome female role models a few years back, they might well find this a nice place to deepen that knowledge.
  • Dispatch: Thanks Jay for drawing this to my attention; Dishpatch is a service for Londoners which helps you find local restaurants which are still open for delivery or takeaway across the city; tell it where you are and it will tell you all the independents who are still delivering to you. You can search by category, and it’s a genuinely useful service – not least if you’re interested in helping to keep local restaurateurs in business. It’s hard, though, with these things; you can’t equally help but see this as a classic example of how money, as always, can buy you out of this. If you can afford to pay £20 for an organic chicken you can get one tomorrow; if you can only afford a 3-quid battery bird, see you next month. Turns out it’s not only the future that isn’t equally distributed, it’s the apocalypse too.
  • You Probably Need a Haircut: I don’t – I let my girlfriend loose with the clippers, safe in the knowledge that with this face the aesthetic damage was done a long, long time ago – but you may do; if so, this is a GREAT idea. The website matches ‘world class barbers’ (their words) with people who need a haircut; for a fee, they’ll videochat you through how to cut your own hair (or perhaps more sensibly, they’ll videochat someone else through how to cut your hair). This is a US thing, so I’m not sure if there are any timezone-friendly hairdressers on this, but I quite like the idea of staying up til 4am just so I can get a slot with some bloke in LA telling me how to do my fade (NB I don’t actually know what a ‘fade’ is, I just know it’s a hair term).
  • Laterdate: OH I LOVE THIS. Laterdate is sadly only available as a thing in LA or NYC, but the premise is so, so beautiful. I’m going to copy the whole statement thing here, as it’s a neater description than I’d probably manage: “I THINK ONE DAY WE WILL BE ABLE TO GO OUTSIDE AGAIN. HONESTLY, I AM FANTASIZING ABOUT THIS LATER DATE. SEEING YOU. REACHING OUT AND TOUCHING. SHARED SURFACES. BREATHING, TALKING, ANYTHING REALLY. THIS IS A PERFORMANCE IN TWO PARTS. IN THE FIRST, WE WILL CHAT ONLINE. WE WILL IMAGINE TOGETHER OUR FIRST MEETING. WHERE WE’LL GO, WHAT WE’LL SAY, WHAT WE’LL DO. THIS FUTURE PLAN WILL BE SAVED AS A SORT OF SCRIPT. ONE DAY, WHEN WE ARE ALLOWED OUT AGAIN, YOU WILL RECEIVE A REQUEST TO MEET AND WE’LL ENACT THIS SCRIPT. THAT WILL BE PART TWO OF THE PERFORMANCE.” Whilst obviously this could turn out to be a terminally-bad idea, I really hope it isn’t; I would watch the fcuk out of these meetings, and I think there’s a lovely, wider penpal-type project to be found in something like this; the idea of creating an anonymous connection with someone via writing or photography, with a commitment to meet, just once, when this is done, is quite, quite beautiful to me.
  • How Low Can Your Logo?: Designers! Have you ever wondered ‘what is the sh1ttest logo I can design?’ WONDER NO MORE! This is a project – entirely legitimate and a real competition, it seems – inviting designers from around the world to present their worst-possible response to a design brief, to be assessed by a panel of actual, proper design professionals. There’s a Pinterest mood board, a creative brief, and the wonderful, terrible designs are already beginning to pile up. Glorious – if you know any designers, send this to them as I reckon it could be a fun thing to fcuk around with for a couple of hours. Also, you can buy all the designs on tshirts, which could be an interesting and bold direction to take your wardrobe in in 2020.
  • Tapebooks: I featured a Kickstarter last year which involved pictures woven from discarded cassette tape; this is another one from the same team, this time selling notebooks whose covers are woven from old musical tapes. The poster I bought was genuinely great, and I have no hesitation in recommending this which is a charming way of reusing old plastic and might make a lovely present for someone should you be in the market for such a thing.
  • Beepbox: I think ‘web-based synthtoys’ run at a rate of about one a month here on Curios – still, there always fun and this one’s a nice example of the genre, with your compositions saved in the URL meaning they’re easy to share – and, actually, which makes them perfect for a back-and-forth compositional game, where you send the track to each other with instructions to add 4 bars at a time and see what happens. LOOK I JUST INVENTED A GAME! Admittedly a bad one which will lead to the creation of a LOT of unlistenable music, but still. Everything comes out sounding chiptune, but if you’re ok with that then this is a reasonably-complex little soundtoy to play with.
  • Whichbook: I barely know where to get book recommendations these days – I tend to just burn through the ‘books of the year’ lists from the Guardian, NYT and a few other places,supplementing this with whatever interesting-looking bits I can find from charity shops – but this website seems surprisingly good if you need a non-algorithmic or non-media recommendation. There are a selection of sliders on the left, letting you choose whether you want the recommendations to be more or less ‘funny’, ‘disturbing’, ‘romantic’, ‘bleak’, etc; adjust the sliders, hit ‘show me some books’ and VWALLAH! A host of recommendations based on your spec. I obviously turned all the dials all the way to ‘miserable, sad, violent and deviant’ just to see what would happen, and the resulting selection included some old favourites (hello, Stewart Home!) and some stuff that I had never heard of before, which is a reasonable sign that it works at least halfway-properly. Worth a look if you’re struggling to pick a new novel.
  • Primer: Stuff you are probably doing now – hoping against hope that your partner doesn’t get it into their head that ‘now’s a really great opportunity for us to do that extensive remodelling work on the house that we’ve always talked about!’. Honestly, can you think of anything more miserable than embarking on a massive domestic renovation project when you’re stuck inside?! You’d be homicidal within hours. Still, Primer might be a way of pretending to do the work without actually having to do it – it’s a neat little interiors-AR-toy (if we didn’t have houses to redecorate virtually, would AR ever even have existed?) which allows you to see swatches of wall in different finishes and fabrics, all from actual, proper retailers like…er…actually I’ve only heard of Farrow & Ball, but I presume the other ones are real and posh too. Save yourselves the pain and keep it virtual, eh?
  • Eating Utensils: Who doesn’t want an entire website dedicated to the unique and fascinating history of eating utensils throughout history? NO FCUKER, that’s who! Honestly, I know I am possibly feeling a bit fragile right now, but there’s something just heartbreakingly sincere about all of this, and the section on ‘facts and statistics from the world of utensils’ which I clicked on just now caused a very real lump in my throat for reasons that I don’t adequately understand (it may be because the syntax is oddly reminiscent of Latvian Jokes, possibly).
  • CollabVM: This is, I’m sure, designed for a serious purpose, but I have no idea what it is. Click the page and you can choose from one of 5 actual computer desktops which you can control remotely via your browser; Christ alone knows why you would want to mess with a virtual desktop, but, should you desire, you now can. Users’ IP addresses are all logged, so please bear that in mind should you have a vague idea of using one of these machines to do something very illegal – you can, though, just do small, gentle things to improve the lives of future users, which I would very much encourage – when I checked it earlier, someone had added a gigantic Ainsley Harriot, peering malevolently from over the green hills of the Windows XP background – see, that’s what this is for!
  • The Daily Mailer: Random comic panels from The New Yorker, combined with comments from below-the-line at the Daily Mail. These are almost entirely perfect, and surprisingly-unhateful (there’s also an excellent secondary game in trying to imagine the headline of the story that elicited the original comment in the first place).
  • TV Too High: A beautifully-specific subReddit dedicated to photographs of wall-mounted televisions in people’s houses which are clearly mounted far, far too high for anyone to comfortably watch. What is the psychological explanation for all these men (look, of course it’s men here) wanting to be looked down on by their telly ffs?
  • Nature Relaxation Films: I can’t promise that these will be the anxiety-removing panacea that you’re searching for, but it’s hard to imagine not feeling a bit better after putting on a 12-hour video of a beach in the Maldives. Two hours of lovely tropical turtles swimming? An hour-long panoramic fight over the fjords and coastlines of Norway? It beats trying to count your neighbours’ toilet roll mountains, I guarantee you.
  • Impressions: Remember at the beginning of the year, when this Chinese app did the rounds which let you transform yourself into a limited number of famouses via some slightly-shonky GANfoolery? Well, that! Except this is by a different outfit – although as with all of these I wouldn’t particularly trust anyone making this sort of app with your face data – and features a different roster of famouses, with the app promising to add new people who you can morph yourself into every Monday. Your mileage with this will be limited, but they have Jennifer Aniston and Morgan Freeman and a bunch of other proper celebrities loaded in (which makes me wonder whether it will be legalled into oblivion within days, but still), which means that you can have ‘fun’ acting out sketches from Friends or Shawshank (ha!) to your heart’s content.
  • Today’s Day Today: A Twitter bot which reminds you what day it is today, because that apparently is what we are reduced to.

By Antonio Lopez Garcia

NEXT, ENJOY AN EQUALLY BANK HOLIDAY-ISH MIX OF HOUSE AND TECHNO COURTESY OF ASH LAUREN!

THE SECTION WHICH DURING ALL THE CLAPPING LAST NIGHT LOOKED OUT OF THE WINDOW AT ONE OF THE MOST ASSIDUOUS CLAPPERS AND SAW THAT THEY HAD A BATHROOM LITERALLY STACKED FLOOR-TO-CEILING WITH 12-PACKS OF TOILET PAPER AND, WELL, WOW THE MENTAL GYMNASTICS THERE, PT.3:

  • The Ninja Tune Thread of Online Concert Footage: There was about a five-year period during which I bought literally everything I could find put out on Ninja Tunes (which I imagine gives you a pretty good sense of exactly the flavour of ‘tedious w4nker’ I was for a good swathe of my late-teens/early-20s), and this Twitter thread reminded me of why I love the record label; there are a literally HUNDREDS of gigs linked to or embedded in here (not their own artists – ALL the artists!), featuring a huge range of musicians from Massive Attack to Kraftwerk to Nina Simone to Fila Brasilia…honestly, this is a fcuking treasure trove, and you should bookmark it NOW (and, er, maybe start ripping some of the YT vids in case they get copyright-fcuked).
  • Cryptohack: On the one hand, this advertises itself as ‘a fun platform for learning modern cryptography’; on the other, there’s nothing to say that it’s not a secret kiddie recruitment portal for GCHQ. Still, whether you want to get a gentle introduction to the principles of codebreaking or whether you’d like to embark upon a superficially-exciting but fundamentally sedentary career as a government cryptowonk, this site should see you right; it’s quite hard and a little technical, and requires some small familiarity with coding concepts, but, equally, it’s approachable enough that even someone as code-inept and anti-mathematical as me can vaguely understand what’s meant to be going on (although, to be clear, I could not decrypt myself out of a paper bag).
  • Better Zoom: Has there ever been a product arc like that enjoyed by Zoom over the past fortnight – from ‘hot new videochat sensation’ to ‘probably spyware’ in circa ~12 days! Still, the company’s response to all this has largely been pretty good – certainly faster and more responsive than, ooh, almost any instance of Facebook being called out for being a massive panopticon, for example – and there are now services such as this popping up around the platform. It’s called ZMurl, and offers a few different features including a nice invite card for your meetings and, most importantly, improved security which helps prevent anyone from jumping into your meeting with their wank a-swinging (amongst other potential pitfalls). Alternatively, if you prefer using Gchat (or Hangouts, or whatever the fcuk Google has decided to call its videochat software this week) then you might like this plugin which gives you the opportunity to use it in Zoom-style grid view.
  • Towel Animals: A subReddit devoted to celebrating animals crafted from towels, in the manner of the sort of thing they do in a certain type of hotel. It’s a weird mix of high-end towel elephant design and some quite baffling collisions of towel art and obscure meme culture, but it’s not about virus or death and as a result is eminently-worthy of its place.
  • Morse Typing Trainer: Stuff you can do with all this time on your hands – learn Morse Code so that you can leave helpful, mysterious or vaguely-erotic messages in coded language across your city to baffle, confuse or arouse other Morse-literate passers-by. Or, er, you could make your whole family learn it and move all domestic communications from now until the end of lockdown to a purely dots-and-dashes-based system; this last idea is improved immeasurably if you exclude one family member from the project, fyi.
  • The Museum of Portable Sounds: God I love a single-interest online museum. Except this one exists in the real world too, and it is TINY, and in non-lockdown times you can go on one-on-one visits where someone will take you (ONLY YOU!) around the museum and explain it all to you, and now you can do the same online and OH GOD THIS IS SO CUTE I MIGHT DIE. “In these extraordinary days of social distancing and isolation, our original guidelines for visiting the Museum of Portable Sound – in person, listening to our sounds from a single shared mobile phone – are no longer feasible. Therefore, we have decided to rethink the way we engage with our audience and share our collections with the world. Beginning today, anyone in the world with access to an internet connection and a web browser will be able to visit our museum – via video chat. Simply fill out our Contact Form and we’ll get back to you to schedule your visit and provide you with info on exactly how it will work.” Fine, so they lose points for the use of ‘extraordinary times’, but, well, it’s a minor quibble. Go on, book yourself in for a guided tour of the history of portable sounds – this sounds like a truly lovely way of spending an hour, in exchange for a small donation to the museum.
  • Routehuffle: I was totally convinced I’d featured this before, but Google suggests otherwise; even if I have, though, I can’t imagine it’s ever been more useful than this. It’s a really simple idea – tell it your starting point, what your method of transport is (walking, running, biking), and how long you want to travel for, and it will spit out a circular route for you to take that covers that specific distance. Even better, it will create a new route EVERY TIME, meaning you can maybe do a little bit to limit the crushing boredom of doing laps around your local park each day. I have to say, whilst my lack of physical exercise throughout my life will almost certainly condemn me to an earlier grave than I might otherwise expect (though, come on kids, does this currently look like an experience worth prolonging? I posit that it does NOT), it’s been a blessing over these past few weeks in terms of not now missing my 15k runs and my squat-thrusts and bench-pressing. I am obviously going to be fcuking jealous of everyone who emerges from this all hench though, obvs.
  • Opera Vision: You might have ‘get into opera’ on your ‘list of improving activities’ – if so, try this out, which currently has 30 full operas available to view online, performed by different companies from across the world. Were it not for the fact that I genuinely can’t stand it (cloth-eared philistine that I am) I would absolutely check a few of these out, not least to see how production styles vary from nation to nation. The costumes in opera inevitably bang too, in my limited experience, should you want an additional reason to take a look. Oh, hang on, here’s MORE opera – honestly, I’m spoiling you.
  • The Retro Learning Pack: SO GOOD! This is 667 old MS-DOS educational games, available to download via torrent, and including such classics as Oregon Trail (“You died of a snakebite”) and Carmen Sandiego and Mavis Beacon and OH MY! It’s not hugely user-friendly to set up, and it’s obviously designed for people who are already a bit familiar with torrents and stuff, but this could be a GREAT bundle of software if you’ve got kids with a high tolerance for shonky graphics and explicit didacticism (and WHO DOESN’T, right?).
  • 60 Logic Puzzles: Everyone’s nana, and my friend Mo, loves puzzle books – so here’s one for lockdown. PDF’d and printable, this contains 60 logic puzzles and, ok, whilst I haven’t done any of them I am going to trust that that is exactly what they are, that they are benign and kind and not secretly hiding awful racism or scat-bongo or anything like that in the numbers. If you have access to a printer and a nana, this is pretty much a match made in heaven – they are all very much of the Su-Doku style, though, rather than verbal, just so’s you know.
  • Chesses 2: Pippin Barr, Curios favourite, returns with a new series of small games riffing on the concept of chess – each of these is a tiny, lovely variant on the standard game, and each of them is worth trying out to see what the tweak or the joke is. My personal favourite is ‘Musical Chess’, in which the position of the pieces on the board determines the melody being played in the background which shifts and modifies based on the ebb and flow of the game, but all of these are inspired.
  • Let’s Go Build A…: A daily LEGO building challenge on this website, which every day offers you a new building challenge – make a certain thing, as specified by the site, with a maximum of 20 LEGO blocks: GO! The idea is that people share screenshots of their creations with the community on social media each day – I don’t have the level of visual creativity required to be anything other than tediously-mediocre at this, but more artistically-minded people could find quite a lot to enjoy here.
  • Strange Key World: Oh, this is very smart. A simple platformer, where on each screen you can only use the controls that are presented; you might be restricted to left and right, you may not be able to jump, and you have to work out how to navigate the obstacles and hazards. Very simple, very clever and very satisfying to work out.
  • Crittermound: Finally this week, a clicker game! If you know what that means, you’ll know what to expect; if you don’t, then this is a simple, process-driven toy which will slowly progress without you needing to do much to it but which will, I promise, suck you in like few other things after about 30 minutes of having it on in the background. This one’s about breeding insects, except, as with all these games, it’s not actually about that at all. So, so good – now, let me get back to my hatchery.

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, MINIMAL TECHNO FOR OUR NEWLY-MINIMAL LIFESTYLES, COURTESY OF PACH!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH THIS WEEK IS IN FACT JUST TUMBLRS!:

  • ArtStreetechture: Thanks to the lovely people at Present & Correct for sharing this Tumblr of Brutalist & Modernist architecture as seen through Google Streetview.
  • Cozy: Tumblr is curating this specific new, er, Tumblr, pulling in all sorts of homely, ‘cosy’-type stuff to provide comfort and succour in these EXCEPTIONAL FCUKING TIMES DEAR GOD NO MORE. Ahem. Sorry. It’s fine, if very much at the Kinfolk/Airbnb-aesthetic end of the ‘cosy’ scale, but after three weeks of this I do rather wish that ‘twee’ wasn’t the prevalent coping aesthetic of much of the web.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Dave Towers: A London-based stencils-and-spray lettering artist, doing rather cool-looking work and also taking commissions.
  • Manhattans Project: I think this is a cocktail bar in Margate – regardless, right now it’s a bloke doing cocktail recipes from his kitchen, and I love him immoderately. It’s not fancy at all, but it’s very charming nonetheless and frankly there are worse things to do with your time than getting into cocktail making.
  • Piecework Puzzles: Jigsaw puzzles as Instagrammable lifestyle accessory. Presented not necessarily as an endorsement, but more to ask the question ‘is there anything that can’t be fitted in to the Insta aesthetic? Could I make photos of colostomy equipment *POP* with the right filter and a shot-from-above framing?
  • Objects of my Isolation: Not an account but a hashtag – this is collecting people’s 3×3 Insta grids of nine objects that are defining their lockdown. A lovely project and something I think could be taken and reinterpreted and remixed in a variety of interesting ways.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Year Zero for Britain: I’ve features lots of stuff by Clive Martin in here before – there was a time a few years back when I was convinced he was very much a ‘next big thing’ in British journalism, but it never quite transpired and he’s fallen slightly off my radar in recent years; he’s still a fantastic writer, though, and the way in which he writes about modern Britain and its culture and cultures is without peer. This is him looking at how the country is transforming, and may yet be transformed, by The Events – “Part of the reason we haven’t properly been able to grasp climate change in this country is because we don’t really know what it looks like, how it feels on our skin. But what the coronavirus has done in no time at all is give us a sneak preview of the end; of the language and aesthetic of disaster, of the formats we’ll use to call out the dead, of the technology, the uniforms, the tone used by HR directors as they cull the workforce and the made-up laws the police will use to keep us still.” Superb.
  • Pandemic Stories: Another link to Jason Kottke after last week – this time, he collects emails he’s had from his readers across the world, sharing their experiences of the pandemic. As he points out, these necessarily skew to people who can read and write in English and who knew about his website already, meaning it’s a selection of stories dominated by middle-class experience, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful collection of stories, some more hopeful than others but all offering a unique perspective on what we are all going through. When this is all over (phrases I must ban myself from writing), I would love to see a narrative exhibition of the Corona stories, weaving fragments of story and audio and news and images and video together to paint an ever-changing picture of the world’s response to the crisis.
  • How Coronavirus Misinformation Spreads: Or, more specifically, how it avoids moderation by social media platforms despite their apparent commitment to removing lies and deliberate untruths around the pandemic. More excellent explanatory reporting from Bellingcat, and an unwelcome reminder that just because I never see his crap on my Timeline it doesn’t mean that P*ul J*seph W*tson isn’t still peddling his unique brand of damp-lipped sub-Alex Jones lunacy to credulous millions worldwide.
  • The White House Corona Briefings: David Eggers writes for McSweeney’s – I’m including this mainly as it’s very funny, but also because, from an anglo point of view, reading this does make one feel marginally better about the current situation over here. Until, that is, you pause and remember that whilst the language is Eggers’ own in this piece, the actual things that the principles are saying are all broadly based on actual transcripts of actual press conferences, which all of a sudden might make you feel a tiny bit worse.
  • Gendered Domesticity and COVID-19: My girlfriend and I are lucky insofar as we both like cooking, are both about as good as each other at it, and are both reasonably tolerant of filth, meaning that, so far, the chores have mostly been shared equally (obviously that’s just my perspective; she might have a totally different opinion)(please don’t ask her). This piece suggests that the current domestic situations being experienced by families worldwide are serving in many respects to reinforce and entrench established gender roles when it comes to domesticity, and that in fact women are shouldering a disproportionate burden of labour when childcare, etc, is factored in. Obviously I’ve got no data to bring to this at all, but I can certainly imagine a lot of women I know nodding in stony-faced assent as they read this.
  • This Was Supposed To Be An Introvert’s Paradise: I half-agreed with this article, but am also including it as part of my lockdown mission to collect articles by every single fcuking niche self-selecting group of people on the whole fcuking internet describing how this is particularly bad and painful for people like them (honestly, if this sort of event proves anything it’s that we must all stop characterising millennials as the age group obsessed with its own precious and privileged status – we are all like that, always). This is the introverts, complaining that actually there are now all these people filling up their calendars with VIRTUAL DRINKS and how it’s impossible to make up excuses so now you can’t refuse and and and and…look, on the one hand I am very much here for ‘the normies are ruining online for people like me’ chat; on the other, look, NOONE is enjoying this, just suck it up ffs. I did like the stuff in here about the edge-limitations of videochat, though, and how people will start to get frustrated with them sooner rather than later – I wonder whether this is going to see innovation in terms of low-latency emoting or similar as an adjunct to video?
  • Musicians Flock To Twitch: Apologies, it’s a Kotaku piece and so not brilliantly-written; still, though, another interesting example of a new set of artists moving to Twitch as a potential avenue for digital versions of their real-life output. I particularly enjoyed the musicians’ frustration and bemusement at some of the odder community aspects of the platform – the baffled reference to foot fetishism in particular is lovely – but overall this does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that Twitch is the most interesting of the platforms to keep an eye on right now in a ‘future of entertainments’ sort of way.
  • Coronart Virus: I’m really sorry, I couldn’t resist. This piece is about the pandemic’s likely impact on the art world – specifically, fine art – and how it will likely affect events and the market in the coming year or so. As I mentioned up top somewhere, it’s likely to kill art fairs; small galleries are likely to suffer too, whilst online portals will benefit from the removal of onsite sales. What’s harder to gauge is the extent to which this will be beneficial for smaller artists; I’ve never been clear, and artist friends of mine have never seemed certain, whether the ‘gallery, show, fair’ cycle actually works particularly well for them, so perhaps its dismantling or reimagining will prove a boon for the people who make work.
  • Photographers, Inside: How some of the world’s top photographers are responding to the creative challenge of not being able to leave the house. For those interested in this sort of thing, Rankin’s running weekly simple photography challenges on Instagram at the moment, details of which you can find here if you fancy it.
  • Hong Kong Protests Come to Animal Crossing: It’s fascinating to remember exactly how much stuff was still happening worldwide before we shut everything down; Hong Kong was still a city in the grip of popular protest, and whilst that’s obviously stopped in meatspace now the pandemic’s in effect, if we’ve learned one thing in the past month it’s that there’s nothing that you can’t do offline that you can do online. In this year’s most bizarre crossover event to date, Hong Kong kids are congregating inside popular cutesy-farm-type simulator game Animal Crossing to carry on their protests against the Chinese regime in digital space – as ever with this stuff, I am in awe of the lengths people go to to bend digital space to their will, and at the flexibility and malleability of said space to enable that to happen.
  • Vittles 2.3: I am including this because I imagine there are possibly some of you for whom cooking is less a fun activity and more ‘something I need to do so I don’t die’; if you fall into that camp, and you are a regular, high-volume consumer of instant noodles, this article – all about how to pimp them to the nth degree – will basically be your new bible.
  • Quibi Reviewed: Quibi, the new, mobile-only hyper-funded, Jeffrey Katzenberg-helmed entertainment platform launched in the US this week, with a star-studded roster of new programmes, each shot to be viewed on your phone in landscape or portrait and each clocking in at
  • Eating Casu Marzu: If you’ve spent any time at all around listicle internet, you’ll be aware of Casu Marzu, the (in)famous Sardinian cheese which has all the maggots in it. This article is more interesting on the subject than most, delving a little more into the history of the cheese but, more compellingly, that of the island itself, speculating as to what it is that makes it the sort of place where people will still, even in 2020, break the law to produce a foodstuff that pullulates with larvae.
  • Stone Age Life: You might have seen this one already this week – it’s had a viral moment, which was perhaps to be expected of a profile of a modern-day cavewoman shaman-type person called ‘Lynx’ – but, if not, it’s a really interesting read. Lynx, the protagonist, is a fascinating subject, obviously committed to the lifestyle she lives but equally not averse to getting on a plane to run ‘caveman retreats’ around the world, and not exactly un-self-aware about her image and, I get the impression, how to use it. Also (and I know that this makes me less of a good person – HA!! – but I couldn’t help it), I did rather get the whiff of ‘child of minor European aristocracy’ from her backstory, though that might just be me. Regardless, this is a really good read and an excellent piece of profile-writing.
  • Imaginary Legal Systems: Far more interesting and thought-provoking than the title might suggest, this is Slate Star Codex, AKA Scott Alexander, writing about some alternative legal systems he has imagined. I promise you, this really is so, so interesting – each of these is plausible and sort-of logical, and yet leads to such interestingly divergent outcomes. It does rather force one into thinking about all of the radical and often-times unconsidered effects of the systems and strictures we’re used to – MAYBE IT’S TIME TO RIP EVERYTHING UP AND START AGAIN???
  • The Wolves of Stanislav: I have read everything Paul Auster’s ever written, or at least I’ve tried to; there are a few missteps, but overall he’s a consistently beautiful writer and this article, written about a visit to Ukraine a few years ago to investigate his family history, is a wonderful example of his instantly-recognisable style, intimate and familiar and conversational and old and weirdly avuncular. I could have picked this out of a lineup within two sentences; obviously your tolerance for Auster will determine your response to this, but if you’re unfamiliar with his work I’d urge you to give this a go.
  • We Are Living in Ballard’s World: If you know JG Ballard you can, probably, imagine what this piece has to say and can probably skip it (though being reminded of his work is always a pleasure); if, though, you’re not, then you owe it to yourself to read this piece, explaining exactly why he’s the most relevant author to RIGHT NOW other than perhaps Gibson or Chiang that there is (yes, I know, there are others). Honestly, there’s probably never been a better time to get right into late-period Ballard; this feels like the perfect weather and weird ambience to get right into Super Cannes, Cocaine Nights and Millennium People, if you’ve not already.
  • Breaking Bread in Lyon: This is, on the one hand, an absolute grab-bag of ‘Anglo in rural, foodie France’ cliches (no matter that the anglo in question is on this occasion a yank) – the decision to ‘follow the dream’ and move to France (Lyon, in this case); the unfriendliness of the locals, the difficulty in assimilating, then one day the breakthrough, and the understanding, and the local acceptance…so far, so tediously-Mayle, but the piece is redeemed by truly excellent writing, a focus on cookery rather than the cliches of a certain type of imagined-Frenchness, and the final quarter of the piece which becomes something rather different, sadder and far better. Honestly, this is a beautiful piece of writing.
  • The Prophylactic Life: Thanks to Katie for sending this to me; it’s a New Yorker short essay by Gary Shteyngart (by the way, if you’ve STILL not followed my recommendation and picked up a copy of Super Sad True Love Story then WHAT THE FCUK ARE YOU WAITING FOR??) on his current pandemic experience in the US. Wonderful, mainly because of how he says what he says than what he says.
  • The White Man’s Liberation Front: A superb short story by Bernadine Evaristo; imagining the poor frustrated male victim of a gender-switched society in which it’s the male academics who are bullied and passed over for tenure and whose achievements are ignored and deemed insignificant. Except, of course, for many men like the male lead in this story, this isn’t a satirical gender-switch at all, but instead a clear-eyed portrayal of How Things Really Are. Superb, and very funny.
  • Nostalgia Is A permanent Condition: Finally in the longreads this week, a jaw-droppingly good piece of near-fiction writing, imagining a slightly changed (but still very recognisable) post-Corona world. It’s part of the Indoor Voices project for fiction writers which I featured last week, and it’s…honestly, it’s so, so good, and the most interesting and, oddly, sad thing I have read about all this all week. Which I appreciate might not appeal to you, but this does that very rare trick of managing to combine Transmetropolitan-style ‘that’s practically already here’-type future=imaginings with a poignancy that’s a slight punch in the gut. Read this, and then save it to read again in a few months’ time.

By Anna Maghradze

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. Do you want an entirely fan-made recreation of Back to the Future 2 made by 88 different filming teams? YES YOU DO! I’ve only scrubbed through this at pace,but it looks like a lot of fun:

  1. Perfume Genius is great. This is great. It’s called ‘On The Floor’:

  1. This was sent to me by some strangers on the internet, called Little Hands of Asphalt, because my friend Ben has a very short cameo in it; it’s called ‘No Reception’, and it’s unexpectedly really rather lovely, in a slightly whimsical indiepop sort of way, and the video is lovely and made me wish I was spending this weekend in a field by a lake rather than in a flat in Oval:

  1. THE INEVITABLE FIRST EVER MUSIC VIDEO FILMED ON ZOOM! The song’s not really to my taste, but all the kudos for the invention in the choreography here; this is called ‘Phenom’, and it’s by Thao and The Get Down Stay Down:

  1. I don’t know if I 100% like this, but it feels oddly appropriate for now – it’s called ‘21st Century Failure’ and it’s by the Prefab Messiahs:

  1. Last up this week, thanks to Shardcore for pointing me at this newly-unearthed Bill Hicks gig. NEW HICKS!!! Some of the material was familiar to me, other bits less so, but a newly-unearthed Hicks routine is always cause for celebration. Cue it up – it’s what Jesus would have wanted! Probably! Also, THAT’S IT WE HAVE MADE IT TO THE END AND WE ARE SAFE AND SOUND AND NOW ALL THAT IS LEFT FOR US TO DO IS ENJOY THE BOUNTY OF THE EASTER WEEKEND AND TO PLEASE TRY AND STAY SAFE AND TRY AND BE NICE AND CONSIDERATE TO OTHER PEOPLE ESPECIALLY THE ONES LIKE ME WHO DON’T HAVE GARDENS AND AS SUCH ARE LIKELY TO BE FEELING JUST A SMOL TOUCH OF MURDEROUS ENVY THIS WEEKEND ALTHOUGH I PROMISE NOT TO TAKE IT OUT ON YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 03/04/20

Reading Time: 40 minutes

Jesus, even by my standards that was a big one. 

I am spent – seriously, I have been typing almost solidly since 640am and my fingers and my back hurt and I can’t imagine for one second that any of you woke up this morning thinking “Yes, I really can’t wait to hear Matt’s tediously-cynical meanderings about The Current Situation In Which We Find Ourselves” and as such I am not going to offer you any. 

I hope you are ok, and not anxious or scared or hungry or cold or in penury. If you are any of those things, let me know if I can help. Most likely I probably can’t, which is why, as per usual, I instead offer the freshly-slain carcass of this week’s internet for you to worry at instead; get your nose right in there and sniff the entrails while they’re still warm and faintly-steaming, or alternatively leave them to mature over the weekend to get really ripe. 

Oh, and if this isn’t enough, IMPERICA MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 IS OUT NOW!  A mere £3 or equivalent, available in all major digital formats, and full of loads of genuinely good writing by a bunch of talented authors (none of whom, as per, are me). It really is worth a look, I promise, and I’m saying that even though I don’t see a penny.

Anyway, it’s that time again – settle in, brace yourselves and drink in the apocalypse in one heady draught; I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and I think that once again I have managed to break the 10k word mark for which I am genuinely sorry. 

Oh, hang on, two small points of order:

  • There is a LOT in here this week – noone’s expected to click on everything, unless of course you want to, but maybe instead just have a gentle browse and see what takes your fancy; there really is something for everyone (and if you can’t find anything, I promise you you have some fcuking niche interests)
  • I’ve tried to keep it relatively-upbeat (well, the content at least; the writing is what it is at this stage, sorry), so there shouldn’t be anything hugely sadmaking – but generally-speaking, the first half-dozen links in the miscellenia are more ‘serious’ on the ‘rona, and the same for the long reads. Otherwise, you should be fine with everything else being reasonably gentle

RIGHT FFS GET ON WITH IT.

By David Bray

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES, ANOTHER BANGING SELECTION FROM BERLIN-BASED VINYL-MONKEY SADEAGLE AND WHICH THIS WEEK IS FULL OF EXCELLENT HIPHOP AND HIGH-QUALITY MIXING!

THE SECTION WHICH IS LOOKING AT THE TOTAL NUMBER OF LINKS IN THE CURIODUMP THIS WEEK AND IS HONESTLY FEELING A TOUCH DAUNTED AND SO IS JUST GOING TO CRACK ON AND TRY TO GET THROUGH THIS FIRST SECTION AT PACE IF THAT’S OK WITH ALL OF YOU:

  • FB Launches Corona Help-Matching Service: It feels a bit weird to make observations about business-type stuff during something so, well, serious, but it’s remarkable the extent to which *gestures* all of this has really been the thing that has cemented s*c**l m*d**’s status as a genuine part of necessary human infrastructure rather than just ‘that thing we are all addicted to’. Facebook, with its status as ‘the most popular thing in the world that isn’t food or sex or sleeping or something necessarily biological’, has been quietly-impressive in the way in which its been tweaking its platform to better-leverage its scale; this announcement, whereby the platform’s set up a dedicated section to help those offering assistance with COVID-19 and those requiring it, is just one example. When this is all over, for better or worse we will all be slightly more in hock to Mark’s Big Blue Misery Factory than ever before.
  • Facebook Watch Becomes More YouTube-ish: I know that that’s a terribly-written descriptor but, look, I have a lot to get through and it’s probably worth me admitting now that the quality of the accompanying prose is likely to be variable at best. Anyway, this is Facebook’s recent tweaks to its Watch functionality (the bit where it wants publishers to put their videos instead of YouTube) which make it far easier for content creators (ugh) to arrange, organise and promote their content, and which seems explicitly designed to promote and privilege episodic content. Another reason why you might as well put everything you make on every single available platform because, well, why the fcuk not? It’s not like you’ve not got the time on your hands now, after all.
  • Messenger Gets A Desktop App : As a Messenger refusenik I was convinced that this already existed – turns out that til this week it didn’t, but now you can use Facebook’s proprietary typing-and-videocalling software as your preferred means of keeping up with people on your desktop as well as your phone. Do you want Zoom shadily sending all your call data, etc, to Facebook, or would you rather just kneel before the Zuckerbergian Godhead and hand them all over directly? Choices, choices.
  • Businesses Can Now Display Temporary Service Changes: Business Pages on Facebook are as of the now able to display temporary services that they are now offering as a result of lockdown, etc – so takeaway, for example, or home delivery, or ‘we now sell online’, etc. I have literally nothing bad to say about this at all, for a change.
  • Facebook Makes Marginal Improvement to Data Transparency: I presume that this is a long-planned, scheduled stop on a product development roadmap, as otherwise there’s no reason at all for them to be announcing an (admittedly minor) additional tweak to FB’s data transparency policies at a time when literally noone in the world is bothered about this sh1t any more (STEAL MY DATA, ZUCKERDADDY!). Anyway, Facebook users are, in addition to the patchy information they can see about their presumed interests and the like, now able to see some detail about both the ‘additional information’ from around the web that Facebook’s using to optimise one’s browsing experience, and the ‘inferences’ that Facebook makes about our preferences to determine specific elements of content delivery. It’s not a bad development at all, to be clear, but the company’s commitment to radical transparency is underlined by the final lines in the announcement where it directs users to where to find this ‘easy to understand and transparent new information’ and then offers them a largely-unintelligible link soup spread across approximately 8 different Pages.
  • FB Tweaks Livestream Options: Because everyone has to stream their lives now to a greater or lesser degree (it’s the LAW – no, seriously, it is! Over the past week I have seen a staggering number of people across the socials breathlessly announcing that they are GOING LIVE later that day and exhorting people to tune in later and, look, honestly, I know you’re lovely and compelling but, really, we’re living in an era in which people already felt overwhelmed by the quantity of high-quality professional entertainment available to them so why the FCUK do you think they are going to choose to watch you lipsync in your kitchen when they could finally be getting round to watching the Sopranos?), Facebook’s now making it easier – you can now stream audio-only, there’s automatic closed-captioning, and its donations mechanic is now open to museums and other cultural institutions (though currently I’m unsure as to whether that’s global) so they can try and monetise their efforts. Useful and helpful updates, certainly, but it’s not going to make you a compelling live entertainer, John.
  • Snapchat Launches Stories API: If you can’t beat them, infiltrate their websites! That’s right – Snap has finally bitten the bullet and decided that it might as well just accept the fact that other platforms are just going to keep stealing Stories as a format, and now offers the ability to use the original tech wherever you like. Want to build a Stories function into your app? Use Snap’s! Want to pull public Stories from Snap straight into your app or website? Amazing! This is really interesting, though it also feels potentially like it might also be approximately four years too late; still, I’d be fascinated to see some side-by-side comparisons, analysed TOO HARD by Mel or similar, of how quarantine is playing out on Snap vs TikTok.
  • Pinterest Launches Verified Merchant Programme: BLUE TICKS FOR (SOME) SHOPS ON PINTEREST! FREE! APPLY NOW!
  • The WHO Call To Creatives: The World Health Organisation has issued a brief (well, a series of small briefs) to creatives worldwide to come up with campaigns to educate people and boost public awareness of the steps needed to contain and slow the spread of the virus – anyone can submit work, use the assets and share their outputs on social, with the WHO selectively promoting those examples it considers to be particularly good. On the one hand, my initial reaction to this was ‘THANK GOD! THE CREATIVES ARE HERE! WE ARE SAVED!’ – then, though, I realised that I was being a total pr1ck and noone should ever mock or criticise people for trying to do something good, regardless of one’s own opinion of its likely efficacy. So I slapped myself around a bit, mentally and emotionally, had a small, conflicted cry, and then put it back on the list. There – that was a small insight into the link-selection process that goes on every week, and the rollercoaster emotional journeys I embark on every seven days. Fcuk me, it’s like Open House inside my mind.
  • Did They Help?: Another repository of examples of companies doing good, or not doing good, in the face of pandemic; this one’s searchable by region, with a specific UK breakout, and features famouses as a separate category to businesses, and is a useful way of keeping tabs on this stuff.
  • The Antioxidant Plum: Just because the world is going to hell in a handcart doesn’t mean that everything has to change – for example, we can still enjoy preposterously overengineered websites for products or goods or services that don’t really warrant the fancy webwork. Here, look, it’s a website for a plum – that’s the literal fruit, by the way, but not just any plum, oh no, this is the Queen Garnet plum, with antioxidant properties and whose powder sells for a frankly astonishing $50 a bag (fine, that’s Aussie dollars, but still), and which has a website which is designed with all the care and attention to detail of, I don’t know, a Farrow & Ball, or similar bastion of overpriced class signifiers. Particular joy comes from the copy, whose use of italics I’ve chosen to liberally mimic in my own writeup. As ever, immense fcuking kudos to whoever it was who sold in ‘a website, but for a fruit, but that will cost you upwards of £30k

By Toni Hamel

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS GENUINELY SUNSHINEY AND HAPPILY BOUNCY MIX OF ECLECTIC WORLD/JAZZ-TYPE CUTS BY JUPITER & JUNO!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.1:

  • All The Coronadatasets: Only of practical interest to those of you who do actual data-crunching; if you do, though, Google’s collecting all the publicly available datasets it can lay its hands on and putting them here for people to analyse and play with.
  • Corona In The Commandline: I can’t remember if I told you about the Slackbot which Shardcore built for us, pulling the latest global ‘rony stats on command – anyway, this is a Github repo for code that will let you build exactly the same thing, drawing the latest info on cases and deaths and recoveries worldwide, along with the ability to pull country-specific data of your choosing. A gentle warning – turns out, the ability to get (relatively) up-to-the-minute information about a deathtoll that’s ticking upwards with a certain sense of inexorability isn’t hugely relaxing!
  • Infotagion: This is an interesting UK initiative; Infotagion is intended as an easy-to-digest series of little infobites on COVID-19, designed to debunk myths that might be circulated online and specifically aimed at younger people or those who might not be receiving their information through more ‘official’ channels (an aside – I was talking to Iain Laurie on Twitter the other day, and it turns out he has no idea who Dominic Raab is; imagine! What bliss! What purity of soul and spirit! Didn’t stop him doing a lovely sketch of him, though). It’s been put together by former Chair of the DCMS Select Committee Damien Collins, and the people behind the YOOF MEDIA juggernaut that is Joe, and might be worth a look if you want stuff to fwd to people who are spouting bullsh1t about chemtrails or secret Chinese plots.
  • CovidPause: You don’t need me to tell you this, obviously – you’re all grown-ups, or I hope you are (Curios is probably suitable for the mature teenager, so I’d probably rate it a 15) – but it’s obviously totally ok to ignore the news a bit. There’s so much of it, and it’s all so boring and so dreadful! This is a bit of code that you can install on your laptop or desktop which will block all the news about the ‘rona from your browser – I imagine it would render your browsing experience somewhat light, but that’s perhaps no bad thing. Actually, there’s part of me that thinks there’s a nice, short little arty video to be made showing what it looks like doing a normal day’s browsing across the web, but with all the pandemicnews blocked out – webpages swiss-cheesed, mostly-whitespace with the occasional, solitary bit of legacy-normality news marooned on the page. Can someone make that please and set it to minor-key piano music? Ta.
  • Conference Call: What everyone’s life is now like for several hours a day – experience a browser-based recreation of the wonder that is group video chat! This is very good, not least because the jiggerypokery under the hood means that everyone’s experience on the site is subtly different. Bonus points for anyone who just streams this on their next Teams ‘experience’.
  • An A-Z of Funny Lockdown Content: Regular readers will know that ‘heartwarming’ and ‘the lighter side of life!’ are not, were I to use content tags, the sort of content tags that would ever find a home in the right-hand sidebar of Curios (again, were such a thing to exist – this…this isn’t working well, this description) – still, I’ll make an exception for this thread, compiled with professional Twitter funnyperson David Levin and which pulls together some genuinely…nice examples of gently funny Twitter content which will make you, hopefully, do a smol smile (and will give you something to contribute to the seemingly neverfuckingending memechains on WhatsApp DEAR GOD WHEN DID WE ALL BECOME OUR FCUKING PARENTS PLEASE STOP FORWARDING EVERY FCUKING INANE THING THAT YOUR AUNT SENDS YOU PLEASE GOD).
  • The Virtual Mall: Wow. This would be a quite remarkable undertaking at any time, but to make and release it when we’re all in lockdown and perhaps need the ability to wander through the wide corridors of a shopping precinct, even if only virtually…well, this is some next-level public service. It’s also INCREDIBLE – this person (I don’t know who made it, sorry) has built an entire virtual mall experience in Google Sheets. It’s oddly-reminiscent of a certain type of browser game from a decade or so ago, which may well be the point, and contains SO MUCH STUFF; it’s basically a bunch of interconnected Excel docs, all designed to look like the map of a shopping centre; clicking on different shops (or signs, or features) takes you off in weird different directions, with links to actual online retailers, internet games, bits of weird content…honestly, this is a total warren of wonderful, silly stuff, and is made near-perfect by the sincerity of the message on the homepage which apologises for the mall not being editable and blames the lockdown on ‘immature’ people who added some bongo to it. So pure, so beautiful. Thankyou Lauren Epstein for sending this to me – Lauren runs a WONDERFUL newsletter called ‘Essential Ephemera’, which you should all email her and ask her to subscribe to (she’s on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
    ).
  • Voleflix: I’ve featured Matt Round’s ‘Vole’ project on here a few times now, but make no apologies for doing so again – he’s just launched ‘Voleflix’, which is basically a bunch of great, full-length, public-domain films on YouTube (stuff like ‘The Man With The Golden Arm and other such classics), all compiled on his site with a nice interface and some bonus ORIGINAL CONTENT which is slightly-sillier but no less good. If you ignore the wrapping, this is a genuinely-useful thing to send to anyone you might know who might want a simple way of finding and watching about 50-odd old films for free whilst stuck at home.
  • Harry Potter At Home: As part of the Great Content Bonanza of 2020, Pottermore (the online Harry Potter universe which I almost certainly don’t need to explain to anyone) has launched this section designed to give fans of Rowling’s ubiquitous series a bunch of additional ways to ENGAGE WITH HER IMAGINATION. Specifically, this is a series of resources for parents and teachers and children to help with keeping kids occupied, educated and entertained – features include ‘special activity kits from Bloomsbury to Scholastic, to nifty magical craft videos (teach your friends how to draw a Niffler!) fun articles, quizzes, puzzles and more’ -, and I can’t think of anything bad to say about it whatsoever. If you have Potter-obsessive kids to wrangle, I can think of no finer way of, er, wrangling them.
  • Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition: CAH is not, as a rule, a child-friendly game, or at least not the sort of children that you might ever want to meet or hang out with. In response to the ‘rona, though, its makers have made and freely-released a version which, they say, can safely played as a family without having to explain to little Merlin exactly why ‘prolapse’ in that context is quite so funny. Download, print, play – I’ve taken a look at the cards, and whilst potentially a touch on the scatological side, they seem broadly fine for kids; you may want to create your own versions that use British vernacular, though, unless you want to end quarantine with your children happily bandying around terms like ‘butt juice’.
  • The Sounds of COVID-19: I first featured Cities and Memory (a project which collects sounds from around the world and keeps them online, mapped to their locations, along with imagined sounds for the same places, to create a real/irreal aural topography of the planet) in Curios in February 2018 – this week the person behind it got in touch to tell us about their new tweak to the project, collecting the sounds of lockdown to create a record of the human experience throughout these ‘extraordinary times’ (sorry, promise not to use that again). “We’re inviting anyone around the world to send us a sound recording from wherever YOU are, and tell us a little about how things are wherever you live. You can listen to the sounds and read the stories so far on the map below – click on a point to listen to the sound, and hit the “info” symbol to read the story behind it.” PLEASE DO THIS – it is a wonderful project at the best of times, and this is a genuinely important piece of history-making. This project was on Radio 4 this week, lending a rare air of actual cultural legitimacy to the stuff I link to.
  • Bored Solutions: Lots of ideas for stuff to do while you’re stuck at home. Some big, some small, all eminently achievable (not sure that I would necessarily count ‘watch all of Breaking Bad’ as a ‘project’, though).
  • The Implied Gallery: I don’t know who’s behind this or when it was made – SORRY – but judging by the datestamps on some of the works, it’s new-ish. Anyway, ‘Implied Gallery’ is a…er…virtual art gallery, featuring a selection of rooms you can navigate through and peruse. The works displayed are by a selection of real-world artists, tending towards the digital/screen-based; I was surprisingly taken by lots of these, though as ever ymmv.
  • Desktop Companions: Oh this is lovely. For those of you not lucky enough to have a feline houseguest like I currently do (latest feline update: my furniture is unlikely to emerge from this unscathed), you might want to take a look at this selection of virtual companions that you can download and install on your desktop or phone, like some sort of Clippy-ish Neopet-type idea. From an AR pet shark to a more classic desktop cat which will play with and eventually bury your icons, all of digital companion life is here. There are LOADS here, including the annoying Goose from a few months back – if you’re holed up with someone and can get access to their computer, this is the sort of gentle terrorism that they’re BOUND to find hilarious!
  • We Link: Another digital art portal, this is new from the Chronus Gallery in Shanghai and presents ten ‘easy’ pieces of webart, all linked centrally from this one site. The website design’s VERY ‘oh, that particular aesthetic that all high-design people adopted for webwork from about 2018-9’, and not hugely easy to navigate, but each of the works is genuinely interesting and all but one I’d not actually seen before; most are, also, almost entirely-baffling.
  • Globe Player: It’s amazing how many people last night I saw being openly conflicted at the fact that, yes, it’s great that the National put One Man Two Guvnors online for free, and what a great play it is but, well, it’s got James Corden in it and for that reason I simply can’t watch it (fwiw, I saw it at the theatre all those years ago and it was genuinely excellent, Corden or no Corden). Anyway, if you want a pleasingly-Corden-free theatrical selection, you could do worse than checking out this from the Globe in London – I think it’s new, and it offers a selection of classic Shakespeare, performed by the river. Right now there’s a Hamlet and ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ available to stream in full, and I presume this will refresh over time, so worth bookmarking if you’re one of the few theatregoing people in the English-speaking world who still needs to see more Shakespeare (I know, I know, but really).
  • Now Play This: Now Play This is the festival of games and play that’s been happening at Somerset House for a few years and which I was meant to be going to this afternoon but which, well, I’m not now going to for obvious reasons. Still, the organisers have put a bunch of events online over the weekend for anyone interested in games design and the theory of play and related concepts to stream and participate in. Best of these is the people from White Pube interviewing one of the Goose Game inventors inside Animal Crossing, taking place tomorrow morning from 11 (the ability to understand the description neatly determines whether or not it’s the sort of thing you might be interested in). NB IF YOU ARE READING THIS VIA THE CURIOBOT ON TWITTER IT IS NOW TOO LATE AND THIS IS IN THE PAST.
  • Your Typeface: Make a font, based on the proportions of your face! This is silly and quite fun, and you get to download and keep the resulting textual mess that you produce (disappointingly, all the resulting outputs I’ve been able to create have been reasonably sober – and trust me, I have a weird-looking and misshapen face).
  • Free, Small, Game-making Tools: If you’ve decided that ‘getting into making (or at least playing around with making) smol indie games’ is on your list of ‘projects to make myself feel guilty with during lockdown’, this document, compiled by the fabulously-named Everest Pipkin(!), is a goldmine; it lists all sorts of small, free, weirdly little resources for gamesmaking, from different platforms to build on, to sound libraries and graphics repositories and, basically, everything you might need to make YOUR quarantine indie sensation.
  • Lockdown With Brian Harvey: Thanks to Rob Manuel for bringing this to my attention via B3ta. Did you know that the best person on YouTube right now is former East17 frontman and baked potato danger-fanatic Brian Harvey? You do now. Honestly, THERE IS AN 11-HOUR LIVESTREAM OF BRIAN HARVEY AND HIS MATES LEE AND MO JUST SORT OF TALKING INTO THE CAMERA AND AROUND THE 9H MARK THEY GO DOWN SOME WEIRD YOUTUBE RABBITHOLE ABOUT THE ROYALS BEING PAEDOS!!! It’s quite, quite wonderful, and makes me think that the future of streaming is perhaps far weirder than I had hoped.

By Jack Welpott

NEXT, HAVE AN HOUR OF CLASSIC PSYCHEDELIA, ALL MIXED OFF VINY BY JJ WHITFIELD!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.2:

  • Shaderbooth: A warning – please don’t try and run this along with all the other Curios tabs as your laptop might well do something of a die. Still, worth a look if you’re interested in face filters and AR and how it (sort-of) works; Shaderbooth uses your webcam to run some fairly-simple AR work using facial recognition and WebGL to map effects on your fizzog; the nice touch here is that the code for each is live an editable, so you can adjust the various values of the filters used to see how changing certain parameters can alter the visual output, which from the point of view of learning about how this stuff works is potentially-invaluable. Alternatively though it’s a neat way of obscuring your own face, if you’re like me and have reached the point where you honestly never, ever want to see your own countenance again.
  • My Lockdown Diary: Not mine, you understand (mine would be very dull and largely read “spent too long online; cooked Italian food; smoked an unconscionable amount of weed”), but a potential one for you or your kids to print out and fill in. You may not need some online stranger to help you create a fun diary-style activity book for your child’s lockdown, but, you know, gift horses/mouths, innit.
  • Music Messages: You know Cameo, that ‘pay a semi-famous a tenner in exchange for them recording a message wishing your mate a happy birthday’ site? Well this is like that, but for musicians who want to earn a few quid by singing songs on demand. THIS IS SUCH A GREAT OPPORTUNITY!!! For £20 you can get a genuinely-competent musician to sing “Fcuk You Right Back” by Frankie to WHOEVER YOU WANT!! Sadly most of the artists featured only seem to want to turn their hand to existing songs rather than performing your own compositions, but I reckon with the right inducement anything goes; if there’s a particular song that’s guaranteed to trigger a friend, this is absolutely worth doing.
  • Melee: Melee is Imgur’s new site dedicated to sharing gaming-related images and videos; basically a whole new social network just for gamers. It’s iPhone only at the moment, but it seems to be a quite light-function way of people posting screenshots and discussing titles and tactics; effectively like all the gaming subReddits, streamlined into app form. If you’re a gamer, or you work in the industry, worth a look.
  • Glimpse: REJOICE FOR GIMP IS NO MORE!! Anyone who’s ever worked in digital design-adjacent disciplines for small companies is aware f the horror that was GIMP – basically open-source photoshop (fcuk you Adobe, I refuse to capitalise or acknowledge the trademark), which had all the features of the original product but a user=interface so bad it was known to reduce people to tears, as well as the most embarrassing name in all of software. Now it’s been rebranded as ‘Glimpse’ and the UI’s been updated and, honestly, if you can’t afford photoshop (or can’t get a corporate copy, or a hacked one) this is a great piece of software.
  • Obscure PDFs: SUCH a great Reddit thread (thanks Paddy for linking to it – if you don’t already, you really should sub to his newsletter which is a bit like Curios but far-better-curated and significantly less, well, flabby). You want a rabbithole of literally hundreds of WEIRD documents to trawl through? A philosopher’s 10,000 word meditation on erotic art? The actual academic submission entitled ‘Take Me Off Your Fcuking Mailing List’? IT IS ALL HERE.
  • Hey Robot: Did you see the thing in Private Eye this week about how lovable lawyers Mishcon de Reya has issued official advise to all staff from home that they ought not have any home assistant devices in earshot when on work calls? MAKES YOU THINK, EH??? Of course, the horse has already bolted as the stablehand worries confusedly at the fastenings on the barn door; you’ve all got one of the damn things and it’s TOO LATE. So why not take the opportunity to enjoy the newly-free Alexa game Hey Robot, where the gimmick is that each player has to get the voice assistant to say a specific word or phrase to win the round. This is a really clever idea, creating play from basically nothing and actually forcing players to think rather more closely than usual to the way in which their devices work, and the information they’re pulling. Good luck getting Alexa to say “jelly dildo”, mind.
  • Old Street Brewery: FULL DISCLOSURE: My friend Ben is a bit involved with these people, and I have drunk their beer for free a couple of times. Still, this is A Good Thing – as per many other small brewing companies, Old Street Brewery has had to pivot slightly and is now selling their range of home-brewed beers with free delivery to ANYWHERE. So if you want decent beer (it really is very good, promise) delivered to your house so you can get fat and cirrhotic in peace, CLICK THE LINK!!!
  • YTMND: YTMND, as some of the older webmongs amongst you will know, was one of the original meme-generation sites; anyone could log on, upload an image and an audiofile and create a page which they could then share with the world. Simple, stupid, often very, very odd pages, but still. It got shuttered a year or so ago but now is BACK, Flash-free and mobile-friendly and with SO MUCH silly, random stuff – honestly, it’s a proper throwback to EARLIER, BETTER DAYS, and is the perfect tool to make whatever throwaway rubbish you want to share with the world.
  • NBA FM: Another week, another initiative by MSCHF – this, their latest drop, is SUCH a great idea that I am angry I didn’t think of it myself (you’d think, with the frequency with which I type that phrase, I’d be more realistic about my own creative abilities, and yet here we are). With the NBA season postponed, MSCHF has decided to do HYPERREALISTIC IMAGINED AUDIO COMMENTARY for all of the games that remained, playing through the rest of the season based solely on these made-up match reports. This is such an interesting piece of storytelling, and I wonder how scripted it is or the extent to which there’s in-commentary improv at play – with the right team of comedians, sportswriters and broadcasters there’s a genuinely fascinating idea in here.
  • Welcome To The Hunt: This is an ARG. I don’t know any other details, other than it’s connected in some way to the Emoji Mashup Bot Twitter account (which tweets, er, mashups of emoji). The Twitter thread here linked attempts to get to the bottom of it, but this is very early days and could, I think, run for a while – I have NO IDEA what is going on here, but am quite looking forward to watching from a distance and finding out.
  • Catface: I’m uncertain as to the current medical need for facemasks, but if you’re in the market for one but are…less than enamoured with the rather tedious designs available from major retailers, you may want to consider creating your own with this handy, step-by-step guide. The best thing? The resulting mask looks like a cat’s face! OH MAOW!! NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any infections resulting from the very real possibility that this mask isn’t medically-secure.
  • Google Artswap: The Google Arts and Culture App has just launched the ability to do style transfer on any photo you feed it, applying the style of a range of world-famous artists to your output. Which isn’t totally new as a thing, fine, but it’s Google and so the quality will be amazing; also, the last time anyone got excited by this stuff was around 4 years ago, meaning everyone’s probably forgotten it’s possible and therefore you can probably use this to pass yourself off as some sort of artistic savant while in quarantine. Alternatively, just make it your lockdown ‘thing’ to only post images in the style of Munch.
  • 200 Videocall Backgrounds: Pick a new one each meeting. Honestly, what the fcuk else are you going to do? Ooh, hang on, no, here’s an idea – why not start hiding one, incongruous object in the background of each call you do? A vibe in the fruitbowl, say, or a surreptitious copy of ‘Justine’ in pride of place on the bookshelf.
  • Figures in the Sky: This might just be wishful thinking on my part, but I swear that the skies over London have been clearer the past week, with stars slightly more visible than normal; is it likely light pollution levels will have fallen? Anyway, if you are in a position to see the night sky and stars, this is a lovely site which presents all the different ways in which specific stars have been incorporated into the star signs and constellations of various cultures and civilisations throughout history. Not only interesting – and, if you’re of a mystical/spiritual bent, the sort of thing that might make you spiral down a WE’RE ALL CONNECTED MAN wormhole – but also a rather nice piece of webwork.
  • Koir: Zola Jesus is one of the people involved in this, giving it immediate musical credibility: “After many conversations about the state of the music industry, we wanted to help artists feel more empowered and sustainable with their work. Though livestreaming is not intended to replace live music, it gives musicians another option to monetize and promote their music. We feel it is important that musicians have as many tools and resources as possible in a time when the financial value of music is in decline. Koir v0.1 currently consists of an event calendar and thorough guides on how to livestream, written with the musician in mind. We are looking forward to expanding and adding new features as needed, but in the meantime we hope you find this helpful.” LOADS of interesting stuff in here, and an excellent place to experiment with finding new, slightly-leftfield music.
  • iTalki: I didn’t know about this til my friend Alex mentioned it on a call this week – it’s probably really well known to those of you who’ve tried to learn languages online, but if you’re not familiar then iTalki is a platform which lets native speakers help learners get to grips with language and get paid a bit in the process. According to Alex, who til recently was living in the Far East, now is a VERY good time for native English speakers to earn a few quid by helping locked-down people improve their skills; frankly, there are worse ideas if you need cash.
  • Good Covid: A Twitter feed sharing positive news from the depths of the crisis. Just in case you need occasional snippets of light amongst the horror.
  • Free Games: Well, free boardgames, available to print – there’s a games company called Cheapass Games, an indie boardgame producer, which has made a bunch of its old titles available to print and play for free – there’s a reasonable selection here, including a few that are a bit Cluedo-esque, and if you’re all bored of the Game of Life and the LIES that it peddles about what being a grown-up’s like then you might find these a useful chang of pace.
  • The Short Story Club: This is a nice idea and I presume one that multiple publishers are doing; read a short story by an author and then join a zoom chat with said author to discuss it with them. Cory Doctorow’s the first one signed up – there’s a cost to participation, but proceeds all go to charity and overall this seems like a fascinating way of being able to discuss and debate a work with its creator.
  • Give A Sheet:Artists from around the world are creating original works on sheets of toilet paper which are being sold off through this website, with proceeds going to pandemic relief efforts. Whether or not you want a piece of art created on two-ply is of course an entirely personal question, but I do quite like some of the things on here; sadly my favourites are sold out, but it’s worth bookmarking and checking regularly as there’s seemingly a reasonable procession of work being added.
  • Stay The Fcuk Home Bar: I really, really like the idea of this – a very oldschool-style chatroom, reminiscent of the very early web, with various rooms all themed around the idea of the website as a physical bar with different areas for people with different interests…circa 1999, this would have been an absolute riot of ASL?-ing and trolling and genuinely, naive attempts at connection; now, sadly, it’s dead, and I’ve been checking reasonably-regularly to find signs of life. Still, that means that if you so choose you and your friends can TOTALLY annexe this and OWN it; have you ever wanted to be the tough, scary barflies with a corner of the venue (by the jukebox) just for you? GREAT! I think this would work loads better if it didn’t try and add video and voice; make this text-only mass livechat and I reckon it would be BUZZING (maybe).
  • Yur: I genuinely don’t understand this – can someone explain it to me? Yur is a ‘virtual fitness-tracking device’ – like a fitbit, but one which exists only in VR to track your calorific expenditure whilst in virtual space. BUT WHY???? WHY CAN YOU NOT JUST USE YOUR STANDARD FCUKING FITNESS THINGY THAT IS STRAPPED TO YOUR ACTUAL WRIST??? Is it just so you can check how many caolries you’ve burned without breaking immersion? Still, this is seemingly compatible with every single VR device, so if you want to know exactly how many calories you’re burning through whilst playing Beatsaber (lots) or masturbating to POV Hentai (none, you pervert, STOP IT) then this might be worthwhile.
  • The Global Haiku Project: This charmed me so much this week – I love it almost TOO MUCH. It’s very simple – sign up, and you’re invited to contribute an opening, a middle and a closing line of a haiku; the first is to start one of your own, the second to build on someone else’s start, and the last to complete a poem. Wonderfully, there’s syllable-tracking built in to the site, meaning it’s hard to fcuk it up and therefore the outputs are LOVELY; the site will email you when the haiku you’ve contributed to are ready, so you get these occasional, unexpected fragments of poetry throughout the day. So far, absolutely everything I have experienced through this has been delightful – well DONE, everyone!

By Abi Rice

NOW, DRUM’N’BASS, COURTESY OF GODDARD!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.3:

  • Holy Art: Thanks Rina for this, possibly the greatest and certainly the most necessary online shop I’ve seen in weeks. Holy Art sells ALL SORTS of holy artefacts, including an awful lot of Padre Pio-related tat (my benchmark for a high-quality purveyor of godly gewgaws). Given quite how end times a lot of this feels right now, Pascal’s Wager suggests you might want to start stocking up on some iconography – pleasingly much of what’s on sale here also appears to be scented, so you can keep your home holy and fragrant with just one purchase!
  • Playtronica Online Synths: Want a bunch of totally free synth toys, all browser-based, that you can play with to make music and BEAUTIFUL SOUNDS? Yes, you probably do – after all, what else are you going to use to compose the lockdown musical that we all know the world needs to hear (sample songs to include: “I Just Can’t (Eat More Pasta)”, “I Panic Bought Your Heart But Now It’s Past Its Best-Before Date”, and “What It’s Like (Knowing Exactly How Regular Your Partner Is”).
  • Gifcap: This is a genuinely useful tool; Gifcap lets you record gifs direct from your computer screen, choosing to record from a specific window or the whole view. If you’re making tutorial materials, or just want an easy way of capturing gameplay or similar, this is GREAT. Equally, if you just want to create a gif of someone slowly and deliberately typing “What you just said made me want to turn you inside out and rub the exposed flesh with seasalt” for use on social media, then it’s great for that too!
  • The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: This came up in conversation on Twitter yesterday, and I realised I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the whole thing – if you’ve not seen it before this is the Internet Archive’s repository of the very best (worst) of US military Powerpoint presentations; I recommend you go deep and long here, as this very much rewards some infospelunking; more than anything, though, is the fact that all of these are the most incredibly-concentrated distillation of a certain type of late-90s/early-00s digital aesthetic that I can only describe as ‘blue polo shirt, chinos and VERY CHUNKY white trainers’. Honestly, it will make sense when you click.
  • Human Chatbot: This is an interesting product that I’m not sure that anyone ever asked for – chatbot software that presents a human face, responding vocally to your typed inputs. Why in the name of Christ I would want to have an already-clunky and inevitably-disappointing interaction with a nested conversation tree made even slower by the need to listen to a voice reading out the information rather than letting me just read it, I have no idea – yet here we are. Although it did make me think of a future in which all of us on lockdown spin up secondary careers as live, work-from-home, videochat customer service drones for Amazon, which now I type it sounds terrifyingly plausible.
  • The Gallery of Regrettable Food: Slightly amazed I have never linked to this – if you want to see a bunch of photos of food that will make you feel significantly better about your own culinary efforts, this is the motherlode you’ve been waiting for.
  • A Tiny World: Oh this is LOVELY! “A Tiny World is a passion project. It details one artist’s experiences and discoveries in the microscopic world. What can we see with a microscope? What kind of art can be created with it? What does it teach us about the world, about life, and how can it prompt our imagination? By sharing this journey with you, my hope is that maybe you’ll be inspired to get your own microscope, or to look closer at the little objects and creatures all around you!” If you have kids who like creepy crawlies and are into nature, this is practically-perfect.
  • Colorables: FREE PRINTABLE COLOURING PAGES FOR ALL AGES! Honestly, if you have small kids it’s almost worth buying a printer for stuff like this.
  • The Earth in Minecraft: You know how the section header for this bit is all about how it’s ok to not actually be doing anything right now other than, well, coping? Just for a moment, imagine the other end of the spectrum – imagine looking at the vast swathe of time available to you and thinking ‘you know what? This is exactly the right time to attempt to create a 1:1 scale recreation of the entire Earth in Minecraft!’ And yet that is exactly what the lunatic – the glorious lunatic, let’s be clear, but a lunatic nonetheless – behind this project has chosen to do. The link here takes you to the wonderfully-grandiose announcement video; there’s a discord you can sub to to get involved, but I imagine that this is for the seriously-committed only.
  • SUSPENSE Radio Dramas: “On September 30, 1962 a major milestone in radio drama came to an end with the final episode of the long running series, SUSPENSE. Ironically, the episode was titled “Devil Stone” and was the last dramatic radio play from a series that had its roots in the golden age of radio. What began as a “new series frankly dedicated to your horrification and entertainment” took on a life of its own mostly due to the talents of some outstanding producers and adaptations and original stories from the cream of mystery writers of the time. The golden age of radio was truly the golden age of SUSPENSE as show after show broadcast outstanding plays which were “calculated to intrigue…stir [the] nerves.” 911 radio plays from the 40s, 50s and 60s! SO MUCH STYLE! Honestly, I’ve listened to a few of these now and they are wonderful; great stories, great acting, and proper time travel – wonderful, and a perfect bedtime story if you’re in the market for such a thing.
  • Colours LOL: Colourpalettes, named from an adjective list of over 20,000 words. If you were ever into the naming styles of Urban Decay back in the late-90s (so many women in their late-30s/early-40s now reminiscing about their burnt roach eyeshadow) then you will enjoy these a lot – I personally think that ‘self-respecting gold’ sounds like something that Fenty could reasonably bring out next week tbh.
  • The Papercraft Jukebox: Print and fold a jukebox to house your phone in. Look, you’re going to run out of stuff to do soon, don’t scoff.
  • Text Adventures: ALL OF THE TEXT ADVENTURES! Oh my days! Zork! Zork 2! Er, ZORK 3!! So many that you’ll never have heard of! Links to new games, old games, games of every single genre you can imagine, all based around reading and typing (occasionally clicking)! Honestly, if you’re of a certain vintage then this will be a wonderful trip down memory lane; if you’re too young to remember any of these, and have no idea why anyone would want to play a ‘game’ that includes no graphics and involves you having to type stuff then, well, LEARN, CHILD! Seriously, you could pass quarantine solely by playing through everything collected here.
  • Keep On Beat: A browser-based rhythm game which is quite tricky and explained quite badly but which, as soon as it clicks, becomes VERY addictive indeed.
  • Northbound: Travel North. Stay alive. See what happens. This is very simple, but far more entertaining than I’d expected; lots of fun, especially if you’re a fan of survival/horror/postapocalyptic-type narratives (and WHO ISN’T in the year of our lord twentytwenty!)
  • Doom 3, In Your Browser: If you’re not playing DOOM Eternal – and it is very good, I promise – you might want to play this one instead. Be warned, this is another one that will make your laptop wheeze like…no, probably can’t use that analogy right now.
  • Picohot: Superhot is a very, very clever game, which uses movement and time in hugely smart ways to subvert the FPS genre quite stunningly. Picohot is that game, remarkably remade for the in-broswert Pico-8 8-bit console. This is really, really fun, though again it’s explained appallingly-badly. Fiddle around, you’ll get the hang of it.
  • Providence: Many years ago (circa 2003ish), author Max Barry wrote a novel called ‘Jennifer Government’ and promo’d it with a website called ‘Nation States’ which let you design your own little country and see how it developed based on your loose guidance (you can still play it here – it’s a lot of fun). Now Barry’s written a new novel, this one called ‘Providence’, and again there’s a game to accompany it- this a small slice of interactive scifi fiction, where you get to play a crew member taking part in a battle simulation on a spaceship. Nicely made, leaves you wanting more, and a smart piece of promo which I firmly believe more publishers should copy.
  • Mackerel Media Fish: I don’t want to tell you too much about this. Just know that it is not quite what it looks like, and it gets quite weird very quickly, and you should click on EVERYTHING and see what happens. I love this, and I love that it exists, and I really want as many of you to play it as possible; it’s part loving p1sstake of the old web, part-ARGish game, part interactive fiction, and it’s odd and very funny. GO ON CLICK THE LINK WHAT THE FCUK ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO???

By Brooke DiDonato

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, LET’S CLOSE WITH THIS SLIGHTLY-TERRIFYINGLY-HYPER MIX BY BENDROWNED!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Lim Heng Swee: Lovely, cute illustration style, often featuring animals. The sort of thing that if you’re a particiular style of person you’ll look at and think, ‘ooh, I’d love that as a tattoo’.
  • Alison Mckenzie: Papercraft and felt art. Simple, bright and very pleasing.
  • Waltz Binaire: “Waltz Binaire (Berlin) is a visual studio for machine creativity”. SO much good design-y CG animation and composition.
  • Covid Classics: You may have seen some of these clipped in web roundups this week; credit to the people behind this Insta, who’ve done amazing reach in no time with these domestic recreations of classic artworks – a bit like Low Cost Cosplay guy, but with a National Gallery membership.
  • Virtual Street Photography: I adore this. This is a hashtag rather than a single account, but it’s full of photographs taken in-game by real world photographers who are finding their ability to get out and shoot curtailed slightly by THE VIRUS. Some of the compositions in here are superb; I reckon we’ll see the first big gallery show of this sort of work by the end of the year or in early 2021.
  • Bellissimo Zine: An Instazine celebrating the very particular aesthetic (mainly: crime, Italodisco and cocaine) of the beaches near Rome – principally Ostia, Fregene and a few others. If you’re Italian, this will basically transport you; if you’re not, this will be another nail in the coffin of the concept of ‘Italians as the most stylish nation in the world’.
  • Animation Fella: Thanks to Chris Smith for this – Animation Fella is filthy and very funny and sort-of horrible, and shouldn’t be watched by your kids.

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS BUT ALSO OF THE NEWLY-RESURRECTED CONCEPT OF ‘THE BLOG’!

  • Indoor Voices: “Blogging is not a substitute for direct action. Direct action in this case involves staying home. Blogging is one thing to do while staying at home. Please wash your hands. It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.” Founded by some proper writers, including the excellent Kevin Nguyen, this has already collected some wonderful vignettes. Superb.
  • Four Each Day: Reader Scott Williams got in touch last week to tell me about this project of his, and it is unexpectedly WONDERFUL. Four Each Day is a relatively-simple writing exercise, in which Scott writes four sentences each day and posts them on this blog; each day, the sentences are inspired by or stem from that day’s events, personal or global, and as such it becomes a short, staccato series of dispatches from the now as seen through his eyes. Honestly, this is such a lovely idea; I would love to see a selection of other diaries compiled and maintained in this style.
  • Just A Day: A group of friends – one of who I used to work with, but who doesn’t read this I don’t think and therefore will have NO IDEA that I am featuring it here – have collectively decided to track their experience of THESE FCUKING TIMES WE LIVE IN via this blog, and are inviting others to submit theirs too. Less overtly-curated than Indoor Voices, but no less interesting; honestly, one of the few good things to emerge from the past few weeks is the reemergence of personal writing of this sort online, long may it persist.
  • Pi-Slices: An actual tumblr of digital animation in the glitchy style – because those still exist too, thank God.

AND NOW, LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH SELECTION DID THIS WEEK, I PROMISE, TRY AND STEER AWAY FROM THE BLOODY VIRUS BUT IT TURNS OUT THAT IT DOES RATHER DOMINATE THE CONVERSATION:

  • Four Timelines: Look; I don’t know what’s going to happen, you (unless I really have misjudged my readership) don’t know what’s going to happen, world leaders don’t currently know what’s going to happen…that’s ok! Just embrace it! Embrace the uncertainty and lack of control! Enjoy the feeling of the universe just rolling right over you as if you weren’t there, flattening you with its cosmic indifference! CRUSH ME WITH YOUR DISREGARD, EXISTENCE-DADDY! Ahem. Anyway, this is by way of intro to this rather good overview of four possible medium-term outcomes from the current…SITUATION – from the best-case to the…well, not worst-case (we’re not thinking about that one right now), but at least significantly-worse case. My precis? I don’t think I am going to be going on that holiday I booked for September, basically.
  • But How Will We Pay For It?: Expect this to be one of the big ideological battlegrounds of the aftermath – if, as we are repeatedly told, there is no way of magicking money into existence and getting it to the people or services who need it, how exactly is it that governments the world over have been able to find the funds to bail out their local economies when push came to ‘AAAARGH JESUS FCUK’? The answer, inevitably, is complicated, but this article does a reasonable job of outlining the basic concepts behind modern monetary theory, the leftish branch of economics beloved of the new-left in the US and significant swathes of the web’s armchair economicsts which suggests that government can actually print as much money as it likes without leading to the sort of hyperinflationary sh1tshow we’ve always been warned will result. I am not an economist – OBVIOUSLY – but if the past month or so proves anything it’s that anyone pretending it’s a science rather than an ‘art’ is a fcuking chancer.
  • The NHS At Capacity: OK, all the caveats here – I am not a doctor, I do not work in the NHS, I do not have access to HMT data and information about the strategic approach to nationalised healthcare over the past two decades…with all those to one side, this is a very, very good piece of journalism by Chris Cook in Tortoise analysing how the NHS has been effectivekly been traduced by two decades of underspending at a capital level, and it’s this which has left us so particularly-vulnerable to the sorts of issues we’ve seen this week in terms of personnel, capacity and material support. If any of the information, or the way i’ts interpreted, in this article is wrong, by the way, I’d love someone to point me at a substantive critique of its position.
  • Premonition: I was talking with Rob Estreitinho earlier this week – whose newsletter you should also subscribe to, by the way; it’s a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking way of looking at philosophy, rendered all the moreso by Rob’s curious mind (also, the fcuker does it in his second language, which is upsettingly brilliant) – about ‘stuff wot might happen’ after all this, and he kindly shared this article with me as a followup; it’s very good, full of smart little nuggets about how the world could maybe alter slightly post-lockdown. It’s all speculation, fine, but it’s interesting and grounded in sensible logic, and if you’re a strategywanker then it’s exactly the sort of thing you’ll read, think ‘I wish I’d written that’ and then plagiarise wholesale for the next week.
  • The White Collar Virus: This is something else that I think (hope) will alter significantly once this is played out; the two-tier (ok, so there are multiple tiers, but work with me here) nature of the way in which people are affected by this based on income and lifestyle, and the way in which it’s entirely possible to manage the cognitive dissonance of clapping for the NHS and not tipping your Deliveroo driver. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and self-awareness will have spent time thinking of the inherent inequalities built into the way in which we exist in the West, but, personally at least, I’ve never seen them quite so starkly exposed; it’s like that scene in Indiana Jones where he blows dust over the invisible cobbles to highlight them, if you know what I mean (and yes, obviously I am aware that the fact that I am saying this suggests its own uncomfortable truths about the middle-class bubble I live in). Shall…shall we rip this all up and start again?
  • The Fate of the News: I saw someone on Twitter comment that the print edition of Wednesday’s Mail contained 4 adverts, a couple of which were from the Government – whilst obviously I’ll shed no tears if that rag’s ‘rona’d into oblivion, there’s no way in hell that the wider media landscape is emerging from this in any recognisable shape. This is a New Yorker article examining how this might play out – whilst the examples it cites are North American in the main, the broad points it makes – about the impossibility of advertising as a workable method of funding a free press once again coming to the fore – are universal.
  • Smartphones Aren’t The Problem: Altogether now kids…’CAPITALISM IS!’ To be clear, this is me agreeing wholeheartedly with the premise of the article (in Jacobin, so, er, you’d expect it really) – to whit, that the real enemy was mass consumerism all along! I’m not being flippant, honestly; I think the recalibration of how we think about our relationship to technology will be really interesting here, because for the next few weeks at least it’s going to be significantly less driven by the commercial imperative and therefore we’ll be forced to reexamine what exactly it is about that relationship that we dislike. Is it the devices, or what we are using them for – and what forces motivate that usage? I FCUKING WONDER.
  • Fun Things To Do On Videochat: On the one hand, this list of 50+ ‘fun’ things to do with your friends to keep the video chat fresh might be an interesting and useful set of ideas for some of you; on the other, WHAT ABOUT THOSE OF US WHO DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ANYONE??? The company I work for – the two glorious days a week of paid employment I manage – has been doing all sorts of (genuinely nice, no sarcasm here) things for staff, such as setting up coffee dates between people who don’t know each other so they can make friends, having team drinks…look, right, I don’t mean to be a cnut, but I didn’t talk to anyone when I had to go into the office so what makes you think this has changed? WILL SOMEBODY THINK OF THE INTROVERTS????
  • Choreographing The Street: Excellent, imaginative commissioning by the New York Times, which got its dance critic to discuss the odd choreography of social distancing as we all struggle to keeping a 2m distance whilst at the same time not moving like a weird Roomba; honestly, before the past few weeks I thought I had discovered every single possible way in which I could hate my fellow Londoners, but well done the ‘rona for managing to make me discover a whole new reason to wish death on my fellow citizens!
  • Egg Cartons: The most interesting boring story of the week, which explains why, despite the fact that chickens are still apparently doing their own job perfectly well, there are difficulties buying eggs in some parts of Europe – this is all down to a crisis in the supply of egg cartons, most of which are supplied by one of four factories, one of which has been shut for a fortnight. A perfect encapsulation of the problems with massive, massively-complex supplychains, especially those that operate at the very margins of efficiency.
  • FOMO In Animal Crossing: I’ve not seen as many thinkpieces about Animal Crossing as I’d expected, perhaps because the sorts of journalists most likely to write those are still too busy playing Animal Crossing. Still, I did ‘enjoy’ this one, which basically features a bunch of people who don’t enjoy the game quite as much because they go on social media and see other players sharing photos of their seemingly-superior game experiences. I was rendered almost-speechless by this – I appreciate that the myth of the ‘fragile’ millennial is one almost-entirely made-up by people of my age writing about millennials in the media, but, well, WTAF?
  • Cock and Ball Torture: This is an article all about men who enjoy cock and ball torture – specifically, having their testicles stamped on, twisted, kicked, that sort of thing – and the women who deliver it to them. This is included partly as I had always been curious as to exactly how you learn this is what you’re into, partly because it’s pleasingly horrible (honestly, I felt slightly like I’d been slammed in the ‘nads myself for the majority of the article; you may well do so too!), but, honestly, mainly because I really like the juxtaposition of the previous article and this one.
  • An Oral History of MySpace Music: I was a bit too old to get properly into MySpace, but my friend Luke introduced me to it – his band was on there, and he taught me how pages worked and how to find interesting bands and, for a time, I genuinely enjoyed rootling around on there for interesting new sounds. This is a GREAT oral history, interviewing a mixture of people from the platform, bands who found their breakthrough on it, former users and a variety of other tangentially-related folk who explain how it transformed the music industry and the business of being an artist, forever. It is, though, weirdly silent on the frankly insane number of musicians who seemingly used it exclusively as a way of fcuking their (often very young) fans, which inadvertently sort-of caused the whole revenge-porn thing via sites like the now-infamous ‘Is Anyone Up?’.
  • Outperforming Atari: This is VERY TECHNICAL; if you saw the news this week that DeepMind’s built a new AI that has taught itself to beat 57 old Atari games, you might have been curious as to how that worked and what exactly it means. This post on DeepMind’s blog explains (in pretty rudimentary fashion, thankfully) how the AI trained itself and what that teaches us about learning; honestly, so interesting, even if I am too thick to understand more than about 15% of it.
  • An Oral History of the TMNT Movie: That’s ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’, in case you didn’t guess (also, does anyone remember how the title was changed in the UK to ‘Hero’ turtles because the BBFC determined that ‘Ninja’ was a term likely to increase violence and aggression amongst kids (a very un-80s objection, on reflection?) – this is a brilliant look back at the making of the first film, which I promise you will want to watch as soon as you’re done reading this.
  • Life Online in 2001: I’ve written about early livestreamers on here before, but never Tanya Corrin – she and her boyfriend streamed their whole life from their apartment, over 70 cameras and mics capturing everything, from fcuking to sh1tting to everything inbetween, to a curious audience. As we’re all sitting at home streaming bits of our existences across the pipes 20 short years hence, it’s an interesting point of comparison; what’s fascinating to me is how this never really progressed beyond this in the intervening two decades. Will we now suddenly discover we all have an appetite for this sort of kitchen sink voyeurism?
  • Gem Fatale: On the jewellery trade in New York. If you have seen Uncut Gems, you will adore this; if you haven’t seen Uncut Gems, you will adore this.
  • Eating For Two: Finally this week, an angry and funny and very caustic piece on what it’s like being left by your husband when heavily pregnant. Superb – get yourself a proper drink and enjoy: “The first thing I ate in 2020 was a multigrain bagel with cream cheese from Dunkin’ Donuts at 6:15 a.m. The bland mass of bread food was especially insulting because I was at JFK, a few miles from New York City, where I’d just spent New Year’s weekend eating real bagels with friends before flying back to Los Angeles. My breakfast was a choice of circumstance, or at least that’s what I told myself then. It’s what I’ve told myself almost every day since, as I made slew of impulsive decisions: moving to an apartment so expensive I had to borrow money from my sister; seeing a Reiki healer who made pained-chimp noises as she circled her hands above my heart; telling a Citibank telemarketer who asked how my day was going, “Well, Reginald, I’m seven months pregnant and my husband just cheated on me.” (To his credit, Reginald took five seconds and then responded, “I have an offer that will make your day even better.” I signed up for it.)”

By Ashley Kauschinger

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

  1. Mario Klingemann is an artist who does interesting work with GANs and faces and the odd bits that exist inbetween our imaginations and the theoretical imaginations of a machine. He’s made this video, which maps music to the facial expressions of imaginary people in realtime; it’s desperately sinister and very good:

  1. This is all Aphex Twin songs played at once. I am consuming so much internet at the moment that this is literally what it sounds like between my ears right now:

  1. This is called ‘Concatenation’, it’s by Donato Sansone, and if you see a better, smarter piece of video editing this year I will eat my hat:

  1. This is called ‘Braindead’. Give it 30s or so – I promise you, it very much KICKS IN after that point, and it features Barry off Eastenders so, well, what’s not to love?:

  1. CORONAHIPHOPCORNER! From Brazil! This is fcuking EXCELLENT; my Portuguese isn’t up to much, but it’s fairly clear rapper MV Bill isn’t hugely impressed with Bolsonaro’s handling of events so far. This makes me want to go and get VERY stoned, so I think that that’s exactly what I am going to do (after I’ve added the mixes and the images and written the intro and uploaded this into the CMS and written the social posts and christ it never stops) but not before I wish you a HAPPY WEEKEND BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE IT WILL BE OK I PROMISE AND THINGS WILL GET BETTER AND I HOPE YOU ARE WELL AND SO ARE YOUR LOVED ONES AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK, PROBABLY, DEPENDING ON WHETHER I CAN FACE DOING THIS ON GOOD FRIDAY OR NOT BUT TIL THEN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE!!!

Webcurios 27/03/20

Reading Time: 36 minutes

It’s…it’s ok, this quarantine lark. The only major downside so far was seeing a naked man performatively-masturbating for his phone the other day, but such is the packed-together nature of urban living in That London (it was almost touching how long he spent getting the angle exactly right) (look, you would have watched too, ok?); otherwise, though, it’s seemingly going ok! My girlfriend moved in, along with her cat, and neither of them have killed me or done a dirty protest yet, so I am counting that as a win.

How are YOU though? Are you ok? I do care, I promise, which is why I have once again prepared a care package stuffed to the very nines with LINKS AND GOODNESS, like some sort of intellectual pemmican to nourish you while you traverse the choppy waters of viral confinement (even by the low standards of Web Curios, that was a spectacularly-unsuccessful analogy; I can only apologise and explain to you that we’re living in straitened times and the simile aisle at the supermarket was empty. 

Anyway, enough – here’s this week’s Web Curios for you to maybe enjoy. I hope you like it and I hope you are ok and I hope the people you care about are doing alright. 

Er, you cnuts, etc etc. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and at least the clocks go forward this weekend so we lose an hour of this incarceration.

By Loribelle Spirovski

LET’S START THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH QUESTLOVE’S 7-HOUR DJ SET FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SOMEWHAT SADDENED BY THE FACT THAT AFTER LAST WEEK’S TEMPORARY HIATUS THE S*C**L M*D** NEWS SEEMS TO HAVE RETURNED WITH A VENGEANCE BUT WHICH ENCOURAGES THOSE OF YOU WITH BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT THAN MINOR TWEAKS TO PLATFORM FUNCTIONALITY TO SKIP RIGHT ON TO THE NEXT SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GOOD AND HAS SOME GENUINELY INTERESTING THINGS IN IT:

  • Instagram Now Lets Users Share Insta Posts In Video Chat: You’re…you’re bored, aren’t you? Look, don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve secretly made peace with the fact that, honestly, you don’t want to learn another language, or master the secret of a really open-crumbed sourdough, or master the floss, or read Ulysses (honestly, it’s not worth the trouble), or have that looming conversation about where the relationship is really going. Web Curios does not judge, remember – it only sees and silently logs. Anyway, for all those of you who see this quarantine as nothing more than an opportunity to go REALLY DEEP into the ‘Gram, then you’ll enjoy this new feature – you can now share Insta posts with your interlocutors over video chat, meaning you can all get together and absolutely roast that one person that you love to hate. Yes, I know that that’s not the stated aim of this, but, well, look, that’s what it’s going to be used for. I don’t make the rules.
  • Culture and Conversation on Twitter: This feels very much like a relic from a pre-Corona era; this is a bit of datacrunching by Twitter based on BILLIONS of Tweets from between 2016 and the end of last year, broken down into themes and presenting trends as to what we all really care about and how that’s changed over the years. I’m including this mainly as I have had several conversations with people in a work context where there’s been a general ask along the lines of ‘what can social listening data tell us about global themes and trends around Coronavirus and what it means for brands and businesses?’ and, reader, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. This bit of Twitter work shows exactly how bad social data is at helping you understand ANYTHING about big global trends and themes outside of the most banal generalisations; LOOK, EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT THE FCUKING VIRUS, WHAT DO YOU FCUKING EXPECT??? Also, social data is ONLY EVER TWITTER FFS, and so about as representative of the wider world as the Guardian newsroom is of the UK as a whole. A message to Directors of agencies – STOP THINKING THAT SOCIAL LISTENING DATA IS A FCUKING SCRYING GLASS INTO THE MINDS OF THE POPULACE, YOU ONLY THINK THIS BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW HOW IT FCUKING WORKS, AND JUST BECAUSE YOU EARN 100K DOESN’T MAKE YOU A FCUKING EXPERT ON STUFF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, HOWEVER MUCH YOU SPEAK WITH CONFIDENCE AND AUTHORITY. Ahem. Anyway, if you want some social trends stuff that’s largely meaningless, here it is!
  • A Guide To Hosting Virtual Events on YouTube: Seeing as I’m on a roll here, another annoying series of conversations I’ve had this week: “Matt, do you know of any creative ways in which we can host a webinar?”. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE ‘CREATIVE’? IS ‘FUNCTIONAL’ NOT IMPORTANT? FFS!! I mean, I could make everyone install a bespoke piece of conferencing software which places everyone in a VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE in which you can navigate in 3d space and visiting individual rooms to see different speakers, or maybe we could do it in Minecraft…or you could just set up a couple of streams on YouTube, or Teams, or any number of FUNCTIONAL platforms that won’t eat all of everyone’s bandwidth and which are designed to work at scale. You morons. Anyway, this is a helpful guide to doing live stuff on YouTube, should you require one.
  • WhatsApp As A Chatbot Service: This links to the announcement of the WHO WhatsApp Coronabot, but there have been local versions set up all over the place, including India and the UK (where it wasn’t working at launch). A useful reminder that, whilst the great Chatbot boom of 2017 seems like the very distant past, they can still be hugely useful in situations like this when there’s a clear series of potential questions and answers that you can predict people will need. Personally speaking I’d like to see HMT instituting some of this stuff on WhatsApp and Messenger to help triage all the people trying to make sense of their eligibility for financial support, not least to ease the burden on phonelines, but what do I know? Rhetorical, obvs.
  • #Happyathome With TikTok: TikTok cares about you and your wellbeing! Especially if you’re attractive and middle-class and definitely not ugly or disabled (see this story from the other week if these references don’t make sense to you)! Which is why it this week announced daily themed content on the platform, made in conjunction with various influencers, to promote positivity and mental health and all those lovely words that large, VC-backed companies use to pretend that they see us as anything more than numbers of a hopefully hockey stick-shaped curve. Motivation Monday, Kickback Tuesday…you can imagine the bromides. Look, this isn’t a bad idea per se, but as ever with these things there’s a large part of me that questions whether watching Arnold Schwarzenegger or AN Other shiny-haired, glow-toothed teen broadcast themselves being all fcuking #namaste about life from their palatial manse is really going to be the happymaking pick-me-up that these people think it is.
  • Snap Launches Coronavirus Mythbusting Game: I like this a lot – simple and smart, Snap’s created a simple quiz that asks users a series of yes or no questions using a Snap Filter, showing your face and a little animated Corona particle, which you can play along or with friends. Really nice execution, although it does weird me out slightly that I have to look at my own face whilst playing this. Look, can I not learn without looking at my hideous, sagging epidermis? WHY MUST THE FUTURE REQUIRE ME TO LOOK AT MY OWN FACE ALL THE TIME FFS???
  • Pinterest Launches ‘Today’ Tab: Pinterest is doing hugely well at the moment, as users flock to do imaginary home improvements and dream of what they could achieve were it not for the fact that they secretly hate DIY; it’s now launched a ‘Today’ tab, showcasing popular content each day. “The Today tab will feature curated topics and trending Pins, making it easier to explore timely ideas, Pinterest explains. That means, right now, you might find something like “Inspiring Work from Home Workspaces” rather than one focused on vacation ideas, for instance.At launch, the Today section is pulling from trending searches — like kid-friendly baking ideas, self-care tips, family-favorite movies and comfort food recipes, among other things. These recommendations will be curated by Pinterest’s team, but further down the road, some may come from guest editors. The company will also soon use the Today tab to offer expert information from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on topics like hand washing, mask usage and other safety tips during the coronavirus pandemic.” This should be live now in the UK and US, so take a look should you be so minded.
  • Reddit Introduces Polls: A new post type for Reddit! Polls! It’s quite rudimentary in terms of functionality, but as a way of gauging a community’s support for particular products or features or courses of action, it’s a useful one – particularly if you have the sort of brand which has its own little niche area of Reddit to call its own. Have to say, though, I would be fascinated to see under the hood of this and get a picture of some of the questions that are being asked here – I imagine quite a few of them would make my hair curl somewhat.
  • Spotify Introduces Podcast API: This is techy and of limited interest to most of you, but if you’re interested in building anything that uses Spotify’s podcast data to surface or analyse content then, well, you’re in luck!
  • Connected TV Market Analysis: This is slightly out of my comfort zone – I am not a media buyer (I may be scum but, well…), and I don’t do BIG AD BUYING CAMPAIGNS (what do I do? What is the point of me? It’s questions like this that assail one during this early period of churning out Curios, a sort of long, dark breakfast of the soul, if you will) – but it seems useful; it’s also a LinkedIn post, and I never link to those. The STUPENDOUSLY-NAMED Paul Gubbins (honestly, what a name) has written a very comprehensive post about the market for ad buying on connected TV, how it all works, etc – it’s very in-depth, and, at least for someone like me who really doesn’t know anything about this stuff, really quite interesting. I think there’s a real opportunity here to make some quite fun stuff based on the captive audiences we’ll all have to play with in the coming weeks and months.
  • What Businesses Are Doing About Corona: A Google Sheet containing what seems like a pretty comprehensive list of Stuff That Companies Are Doing In The Time Of Corona, both good and bad. Useful if you are one of the seemingly-infinite number of advermarketingprdrones who has been tasked with creating a rundown of WHAT THIS ALL MEANS AND HOW BRANDS MUST RESPOND – who knew that this crisis would be such a catalyst for so much strategic thinking? Honestly, if I read one more poorly-paraphrased reworking of Muir’s Laws of the Internet – here they are again, for those of you with poor memories.

By Jason Limon

IN FACT, WHY NOT ENJOY AN ADDITIONAL THREE HOURS OF QUESTLOVE? MAN THAT WAS A LONG SET!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.1:

  • The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: As long as this keeps being useful and updated, I’ll keep linking to it here. It’s growing exponentially each day, as thousands of people around the world contribute to adding new resources and helpful information, and now contains information to help parents with homeschooling, people working from home, and various helpful materials on churches, worship, online deliveries, worker’s cooperatives and unions that might offer assistance and support…look, this is just a superb resource and a proper reminder of what the open web can and should be. Kudos to everyone involved, it’s a hell of an undertaking.
  • Help With Covid: I tried to sign up to be an NHS volunteer this week, only to find that as I can’t drive I am largely useless (to be expected, frankly); I’ve offered myself up as a telephone person but quite fervently hope that noone’s unfortunate enough to be diverted towards me as a source of emotional support. Links, I can do; emotional support, perhaps less so. Anyway, this site is a list of projects that are currently live which people can assist with in various ways; they’re in the main online projects, so perfect for wherever you are, although there’s a slight US focus with much of the content. From design to coding to manufacturing and loads inbetween, if you feel you have skills that you could be using to help then this is a good place to start finding out how.
  • Covid Global Hackathon: Anyone who’s worked anywhere adjacent to tech in the past decade will hear the word ‘hackathon’ and breathe a small sigh of despair; it’s come to be shorthand for ‘look, some big business needs to look like it ‘gets’ tech and is all agile and stuff, so can we get a bunch of people with stickers on their laptops to sit in a gym with some whiteboards and pizza for a day attempting to solve a spurious challenge while we take photos for LinkedIn and then never speak of this again?’ Still, this looks like it might be rather more meaningful; it’s scheduled to take place on 30 March, so at the time of writing you’ve a few days left to register; “an opportunity for developers to build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic…The hackathon welcomes locally and globally focused solutions, and is open to all developers – with support from technology companies and platforms including AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat, who will be sharing resources to support participants throughout the submission period.” Worth a look if you do codestuff.
  • Covid Tracker: I am trying to steer clear of scary or doomy links in here at the moment – this one’s a BIT scary, so, if you’re feeling a bit fragile and the numbers are all a bit worrying, DON’T CLICK. The rest of you, though, this is the best and clearest site for seeing how the relative spread of the virus over time differs from country-to-country, and how relative progressions compare. Clear, well-designed and updated daily from public datasources, this is fascinating. But, er, it’s also quite a scary graph, so, well, caveat emptor.
  • The Remote Work Survival Kit: To be honest this may well be linked to within the larger Corona Tech Handbook up there, but if you want a useful bunch of links and resources to help you setup homeworking for yourself, colleagues or a small business then this could be hugely helpful.
  • The Coronavirus Shop: This site is selling virus-themed merch. You want a ‘Coronavirus World Tour 2020’ hoodie? NO YOU DO NOT FFS THAT IS GOING TO AGE VERY POORLY. It purports to be a charitable venture, but I can’t help but feel that the statement ‘A % of every sale is donated to charity’ isn’t quite the level of clarity I’d want from something like this – also, the charity it donates to is US-specific. Still, if you’d like a poorly-printed, very of-its-time souvenir of a major global disaster then, er, you do you, friend! NB – we are not friends, and I would like you to stop reading my newsletterblogthing right now, please. Go on, fcuk off.
  • How Is The World?: I mean, I think we can hazard a guess, right kids? Still, if you want a global tracking snapshot of how we’re all doing right now then you might like this site, which tracks what I presume is Twitter sentiment data from across the world to attempt to present a snapshot of how the world’s coping with STUFF. Obviously all the usual caveats apply – sentiment analysis is largely bunkum, no real people use Twitter, the sample size and geolocation are very iffy (Twitter’s fault, not the website’s)…still, it’s kind of interesting to look at, even if I question the veracity of a site which currently claims that the happiest people online right now are in Saudi, Iran and Pakistan. I mean, Saudi maybe – I shudder to think about what might happen to your thumbs if you were to type how you really felt about life – but not sure that Iran has that much to smile about now.
  • Zenly Launches Stay At Home Leaderboards: This feels like it should go in the top section, now I come to think of it. Oh well. Zenly is a Snap-owned app which effectively lets you track where all your friends are all the time, a la Snap Map; it’s introduced a really cute little gamification mechanic to encourage people to stay put, creating ‘streaks’ based on how long since you left your house. Such a nice way of making it a fun challenge rather than a chore; maybe something that might be helpful for your household. I’m slightly surprised that more apps aren’t doing this; after all, our phone knows exactly where we are at all times, and whether we’re leaving the house, so I’d have expected everyone to jump on the ‘let’s gamify this’ bandwagon.
  • Immersive Online Experiences: Thanks so much for Paul Drury-Bradley for pointing me at this; it’s an AMAZING resource and I encourage you all to click the link and have an explore. I’ll let them explain: “Here at No Proscenium, we’re dedicated to searching out the best in immersive & experiential work. Traditionally that has meant tracking the immersive theatre renaissance, putting a spotlight on narrative & performance driven escape rooms, and covering the growth of location based entertainment (LBE), with the occasional foray into at-home VR, alternate reality games, and the odd Escape Room in a Box. Because of the ongoing fight against the spread of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, not only are we left without a lot of new live performance and LBE based work to cover it wouldn’t be responsible of us to encourage people to go out at this time even if many of our readers were not facing curfews and other measures. So we turn to that which can be done INDOORS and ONLINE, and instead of looking at this as a bad thing, we’re embracing the idea of IMMERSIVE FOR INDOOR KIDS.” THIS IS SO GOOD!! You want interactive online experiences? You got them! You want games that can be played on the phone, using calls? You got them! You want podcasts as plays, online text games, ARGs, interactive livestreams, video-on-demand…you got them! SUCH a wonderful resource full of creative play and fun, this is probably the richest funlink in all of Curios this week and I cannot recommend enough that you explore it.
  • The National Emergency Library: The Internet Archive has for years run a slightly-peculiar sort of digital lending library, whereby it had one digital copy of a huge selection of texts which could be lent out to one user worldwide at a time (for reasons of copyright, I presume); now, though, because of these ‘extraordinary times we live in’ (dear God, I really need a new term for this – could we try ‘virageddon’? I might see if I can make it catch on, feel free to help), that restriction has been lifted and anyone, anywhere, can now access a dizzying number of texts, digitally, for free. There are 1.5million texts in here – the tagging options you can use to search them run to 50 pages. There are nearly 20,000 works labeled ‘fiction’ ffs – honestly, this is one of the most amazing online resources I think there has ever been, and I am awed at its scale and scope. I’ve just scrolled right to the end of the tags and discovered that there are 120 books dealing with the behaviour of dogs, so basically what I am saying is that whatever you’re into there’s something here for you.
  • The Boardgame Remix Kit: The experience that got me into immersive theatre play stuff was called ‘Journey to the End of the Night’, and it involved being chased across London by 100 people in weird period costume including a terrifying man on spring-stilts, culminating on the Southbank at about 2am and which involved me getting VERY scared and rather too stoned in Hyde Park whilst trying to evade a capture squad. It was great, and honestly changed my life in a few small ways; it was organised by Gideon Reeling, which was an early offshoot of Punchdrunk (you see what they did there, right?), and was run by Alex Fleetwood who went on to found Hide & Seek who, while they existed, were a BRILLIANT company exploring ways to ‘hack’ games and play in interesting and fun ways. One such project was the Boardgame Remix Kit, which they released as a product a few years back but which they’ve now made free – the idea behind the kit is that it provides a bunch of new rulesets and ways to play for existing games and toys you might have at home but which might need a refresh. Want to turn Cluedo into a zombie survival game? Want to turn Scrabble into a gambing game using your Monopoly money? SO many excellent and fun ways of tweaking stuff you already own to keep it interesting, and a wonderful resource for week three when you’ve played as many games of Settlers of Catan as any single household can reasonably be expected to.
  • Makeway: One the one hand, I came across this via an aggressive campaign of digital advertising (I have no idea what audience I am in, but MAN does this company want me to see its ads) and I am suspicious of Kickstarters that can afford that sort of ad spend as, well, couldn’t you fund yourselves in that case? On the other, this looks really fun – it’s raised a staggering £1.5m at the time of writing, off a goal of £8k, which may be the largest over-funding I’ve ever seen – and is basically a real-life physical version of the classic Rube Goldberg machine simulator ‘The Incredible Machine’ (which you can play here). The idea is that you’re buying a bunch of rails, magnets, spinners, trapdoors and the rest, which you affix to a wall in whichever configuration you desire to make wall-mounted, ceiling-to-floor marble runs of potentially crazy complexity. If you’ve ever watched one of those YouTube videos in which a ball-bearing takes a painful-but-impressive six minutes to travel around a house before finally filling a glass with lemonade and thought “I could make one of those, but I can’t be fcuked to raid the kids’ meccano box” then this is absolutely for you (though given it’s still got 20 days to run, you may well not receive this til 2021 by which point, God willing, we may be allowed to go outside again).
  • The Films of SXSW: For all those of you who were going to go to SXSW (the film and music bit, not the advermarketingpr bit) and who are sad about missing all the short films from the festival, FEAR NOT – Mailchimp is hosting them all to view for free on this site. I confess to not having watched any of these, but the cinephiles among you might find some good material in here should you wish.
  • Colourpush: A nice, seemingly-utterly-frivolous, little project by WeTransfer, which lets users spend 90s playing with a few buttons and a limited canvas to create a small, pastel-ish, slightly abstract, multicolour artwork, which you can then download and use however you wish, as well as adding it to the digital gallery of other people’s compositions. There are worse ways of making a new Zoom background, tbh, and the slightly fingerpaintish nature of the interface means that I think it could be quite a fun distraction for small kids (for about three minutes, til they start demanding more Peppa).

By Alex Schaefer

NEXT, TRY OUT DJ TWITCH’S ‘TRANQUILITY’ MIX WHICH IS ALL AMBIENT AND LOVELY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.2:

  • United We Stream: I can’t work out whether being a rabid clubber would be bad right now – on the one hand, you obviously can’t go clubbing; on the other, with the right connections you can keep yourself in medical-quality speed, ket and pills for months; with a few cheap lighting rigs from Amazon and a decent pair of speakers, you can probably create your own sweaty khole experience in the comfort of your own home (and you’re literally only metres away from the comedown couch). More seriously, the virus is obviously ruinous for many, many music scenes, not least Berlin’s infamous techno clubs; United We Stream is collecting a variety of live sets from clubs across the city, from 7-12 each night (at least at weekends), and also features a fundraising effort to keep the whole thing going. Sadly doesn’t seem to include anyone playing Thunderdome IV in its entirety, but one can always dream.
  • Online Dance Classes: New York’s Mark Morris Dance Group is putting daily live classes streaming online, and available to watch back later on its website. I am not, it may shock you to learn, necessarily an aficionado of dance; I get the impression the stuff here is probably quite serious, and it might help if you know what a plie is (I don’t, to be clear). That said, if you think Joe wossname is a bit too amateur for you and you want a workout that could quite feasibly result in a badly-torn hamstring, then some of these will be perfect for you. Alternatively, if your kid does dance and is bouncing off the walls, this could be a perfect way of exhausting the fcuker. Up to you really.
  • Six Feet of Separation: I am not, in the main, a sentimental man (unless that sentiment is ‘sneering self-regard’), but this is SUCH a lovely project and something that might be lovely for those of you with kids to try. Six Feet of Separation is a newspaper made collaboratively online by a bunch of kids aged between 2 and 19 in…oh, I have just checked and they’re in San Francisco. That figures. Still, it’s a collection of drawings and essays and games and recipes and even horoscopes, and, honestly, even though my cute threshold is VERY low, this warmed even my frozen, warty cockles. I would love to see a collection of these sorts of things in a year’s time; aside from anything else, I think they could become really interesting historical documents of kids’ responses to the…*gestures, futilely*…thing.
  • Snag Films: Another niche website for free streaming of video that I had never heard of before – the deal with Snag is that all the content is…well, it’s mainly stuff you’ll never have heard of before, leaning heavily on documentary content with a bit of an inspirational bent. Films about surfing culture, the Cuban-American diaspora, and lesbian bar owners (not the same film, to be clear) – there are 2000-odd, it’s all totally free, and whilst it’s not, it’s safe to say, ever going to trouble Netflix, if you’re after something a little more niche and you’re sick of being told to watch that show about that bloke and the fcuking tigers then this might be worth a look.
  • Reply All on Twitch: Reply All is a very popular and apparently very good podcast that I know lots of you probably like. They are now doing it on Twitch. This may be of interest to some of you (and, more broadly, I’m quite interested to see how they translate the show from one medium to another; if this works in any reasonable way, expect to see the rise of ‘Zoo TV’ as every single fcuking bloke who has a podcast with his mates where they ‘just kind of talk about random stuff and weird sh1t, you know?’ decides the it would be immeasurably better if you could see all their beards and their slightly-going-to-fat-in-your-early-30s physiques.
  • Escape The Document: I am in awe of this, both in terms of scope and execution. Did you know that you could use Google Docs to make an ‘Escape The Room’-type interactive fiction game, with fiendish puzzles and some really rather good writing? I certainly didn’t, and yet here we are. Kudos to writer and creator Anthony BL Smith, this is a quite astonishing bit of work – it does rather beg the question ‘why?’, but then again so does most of the best stuff.
  • Theme Park Rides: One of the WORST things about this – not in any way one of the worst things, but forgive me a touch of authorial hyperbole – is that I’m unlikely to get to a theme park anytime soon, meaning I am JONESING FOR ROLLERCOASTERS. If you too are finding yourself getting centrifugal force withdrawal, you might want to check out this YouTube playlist of videos of rollercoasters in first person view; most of these are Disney and not all of them are thrill rides, with various monorail videos and footage of kid-friendly rides like ‘It’s a Small World’ for those of you with particularly masochistic tendencies. Honestly these are ace and it’s amazing quite how much of an effect watching them fullscreen can have. BONUS GAME – if you’re the sort of person with a really big telly or a wall-mounted projector, get everyone in your house to stand in front of the telly and watch a few of these, and then watch as they all get jellylegs and fall over when they try and move (this works BRILLIANTLY with small children, fwiw, though there’s an outside chance they will vomit in the immediate aftermath).
  • Scratch: Scratch is a free, browser-based tool by MIT that lets users program their own games, animations and lightly-interactive stories to share with others. This could be quite an interesting way of augmenting storybuilding with your kids, or alternatively of making simple-yet-vicious animated vignettes of your quarantined life which you can share with the wider world (until your partner finds out and your life becomes very, very uncomfortable). It’s designed to be a learning tool as much as a creative one, is available in LOADS of languages, and is designed for ages 6 up; this looks like a really, really good platform to play with imho.
  • Find My Pasta: A nice idea, though only as good as its uptake and the quality of data submitted; Find My Pasta’s an app designed to help users track and report food shortages in their local area, with the idea being that you use it to flag shops that are either locust-ravaged or stocked to the nines. Might be worth a look if you’re concerned about access to supplies where you live, though I’d caveat this by saying that there’s no guarantee that enough people will be using it for it to be functional.
  • Google Learning: All of Google’s learning resources in one place. SO MUCH LEARNING! SO MANY SUBJECTS! Honestly, if you can’t find something in here that you’re interested in learning about then you may well be dead, or at the very least terminally uncurious.
  • Connected Camps: Despite my somewhat-snarky reference up top to using Minecraft as a place to do events, this is a super-smart idea; Connected Camps runs educational classes in Minecraft, specifically in adjacent disciplines such as digital object design and coding – it’s SUCH a good idea, and another example of how existing, built digital worlds can be used for pretty much anything with enough ingenuity and care. Oh, and this announcement by Minecraft from this week, about how it’s making Minecraft Education Edition (the stripped-back version that lets you do shared virtual world stuff with a lot of the more obviously ludic elements stripped out) is now free til the Summer for anyone with an Educator’s version of Office365 – which might be worth a look if, er, you are such an educator.
  • Krisp: Software that works to mute or eliminate background noise from your videocalls. Your colleagues and friends will thank you, I promise.
  • Walkie Talkie: There are a bunch of these available, but this one’s widely said to be the ‘best’ – why not turn your daily conversations with friends and colleagues into FAR more interesting walkie talkie conversations? Pick a frequency, get everyone to tune in, and enjoy the crackly goodness of faux-radio communication! Bonus points if you all invent a preposterous and overelaborate system of signoffs and callsigns to frame the experience; the temptation to refer to everyone as ‘Good Buddy’ in the manner of a US long-distance trucker will be very, very strong, I warn you.
  • Anchor Makes Podcasting Easier: Coupled with the boom in terrible novels being written RIGHT NOW, I am pretty certain there will be a parallel boom in people deciding that what the world really needs is to hear them on a podcast. It is now even easier to do co-recording and editing and all sorts of other things remotely – “with Record With Friends 2.0, currently in beta, up to 4 people can join your podcast recording from any device, on desktop or mobile, with or without an Anchor account. In order to join your recording, all your guest has to do is click an invitation link and type in their name. Like the rest of Anchor’s podcasting platform, Record With Friends is free to use and available globally.” Let me be clear – I don’t want you to do this, I don’t think it’s likely to result in anything good, but I like and care about you SO MUCH that I am including this link in here regardless of my own feelings. Fcuking hell, I deserve some sort of award for this ffs.
  • Bingo Deal: Poor the Nanas – deprived of their main social focal point (to whit: sitting on rural bus routes all day, where they always all seem to know each other), they’ve also been deprived of the bingo. Thankfully, though, this site lets you print out bingo cards which you can distribute to run games online over whatever videocalling platform you like. Why not try livening this up by creating new, Corona-appropriate caller slang? “Cupboard’s Empty – Number 20! Hungry Tum – 41!’. Or, on reflection, maybe don’t.

By Oriane Safre-Proust

NOW ENJOY SOME DOWNTEMPO BALEARIC-TYPE STUFF COURTESY OF CLASSIC LOVER!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS SIT AT HOME IN YOUR PANTS WATCHING BONGO AND GETTING FAT THEN THAT IS TOTALLY OK TOO AND DON’T LET ANYONE ELSE TELL YOU OTHERWISE OK HUN? Pt.3:

  • Wrestling: WWE is weird. We’ve spoken at length here before – or, er, I have; look, I know this is a monologue but it’s weirdly helpful to imagine it as a dialogue because, well, the alternative’s a bit bleak – about how it has generated kayfabe, the most important and culturally-significant concept of our times, but less so about the fact that at its heart it is basically The Bold and the Beautiful or Days of Our Lives with smaller pants, bigger muscles and approximately the same hair. I don’t know if you’ve seen the footage of them doing WWE in audience-free arenas because of quarantine, but if not do dig it out – it turns the whole spectacle into nothing more than a slightly camp series of over-the-top shouting matches between very, very orange wardrobes. Anyway, that’s by way of unnecessarily-long preamble to the fact that WWE has now made a bunch of its matches available to stream for free. Great!
  • Arrange Meetups Easily For many people it seems that this…situation (no, I can’t use that either, it reminds me of Jersey Shore and makes me think of the virus as a slightly-going-to-fat guido with vertiginous hair) is leading to the reinvigoration of their social lives as they do virtual hangouts every night with people they haven’t spoken to for ages (not wishing to p1ss on your parades here, kids, but this might not be quite the same when we all stop having this one thing in common again). If that’s you, and you’re finding it tricky for you and your friends to find a slot in your respective jam-packed diaries for virtual pub time, this webapp – called ‘Lettuce’, for no good reason that I can discern – might be useful; it’s basically like Doodle, but less annoying (Doodle used to be ace, but it’s UI’s gone down the toilet in recent years imho).
  • Some Good Internet Rabbitholes: Reddit doing God’s work here in this thread, which brings together various users’ favourite internet rabbitholes from over the years – in this context, ‘rabbitholes’ refers to stories which are weird and deep and strange and which investigating will potentially consume you. Examples referenced in here include the Voynich Manuscript, John Titor the time traveller, TimeCube and SO MANY MORE. Honestly, this is FULL of interesting oddness – it’s worth it for the story of the Death Valley Germans if nothing else.
  • Abandoned Tourism: Photoagrapher Noah Kalina is posting images to this Twitter thread that he’s capturing from the world’s webcams, which, per recent Curios, are a wonderful window into the empty world outside (by the way, if your kid’s 11ish and reasonably robust, this is a CRACKING book about the aftermath of an event much worse than this one); see Rome bereft of tourists, Times Square silent…eerie, but not unpleasant; things…things are just sort of nicer without us cluttering them up, aren’t they?
  • The Great Empty: More of the same – images of empty public spaces worldwide, though this time snapped by in-situ photographers rather than webcam shots. A glorious collection by the NYT; the shot of the empty restaurant by night in Myanmar is a personal favourite.
  • Taco Cat: Taco Cat is a new card game, playable with a standard deck. I don’t know if it’s any good, if I’m honest; I just really liked the name, and the fact that there’s actually a game based on a relatively minor meme from a few years back. You’ll need a printer and post-it notes to play, but WHO doesn’t have those at home? Apart from me.
  • Who Has Your Face?: It’s amazing how quickly we all stop worrying or caring about issues around digital privacy. Not surprising, I suppose, more faster than I expected – turns out that we’re actually absolutely fine with our data and privacy being compromised if it means we get streaming video and the ability to chat to our mates. WE HAVE FINALLY FOUND THE PRICE OF OUR DATA! Still, doesn’t mean that it’s not still something we should keep an eye on, as this US project shows rather neatly – facial recognition tech is more widespread over there than over here, and the laws governing the use of the data it collects are far looser, but that’s not to say that we’re not heading in the same direction ourselves. This site asks users a series of questions (based on the assumption that they’re US-based) to determine which companies and organisations are likely to have access to their facial data, based on previous behaviour and signups; genuinely a little chilling, and absolutely coming to a country near you within a few years (it’s not really the time tbh, but there’s reason to be a little wary of creeping encroachment on civil liberties buried in some of the legislation that’s been rattling through Parliament at a rate of knots).
  • Plylst: Better Spotify playlists, apparently. I barely use Spotify, but if you do there may be some good reasons to give this a try.
  • A Thread of Animal Live Cams: I bought a Google Chromecast thingy the other day, mainly so that I can throw streaming theatre onto my telly (/pseud) but also so I can put some of these webcams up there so my girlfriend can imagine she’s in some sort of critter heaven all day. This is a womnderful Twitter thread collecting links to all sorts of live animal cams from zoos around the world; LOOK AT THE PANDAS! LOOK AT THE ORANGUTANS! LOOK AT THE NAKED MOLERATS Actually, maybe don’t look at them, they might make you feel funny.
  • Quarantine Gone Wild: Ordinarily I’d have to start this description off with something like THIS IS A LINK TO ACTUAL PHOTOS OF NAKED PEOPLE, SOME OF THEM BONING, DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE AT WORK! Now, though, no need! Who cares if you’re at work? Literally NOONE WILL KNOW if you have a whole separate monitor full of scud on the go as you type! Anyway, Reddit has responded to quarantine as only Reddit knows how – with a new sub featuring people getting their kit off whilst stuck at home! This is mostly cis-, mostly-straight, and mostly-white afaics, but if you want a seemingly never-ending procession of random naked strangers to distract you from…*gestures again, more floridly* that, then maybe this will do the trick. Side note: there’s an awful lot of people showing their faces in these pics ‘because the world is ending’; Web Curios would like to cautiously advise readers that, should they choose to get involved in all this naked fun, they possibly take a slightly longer-term view of things, just in case.
  • Stock Jumper: Take any share price from any market in the world, and turn it into a very smol ski-jumping game so that you can have fun at the expense of the crashing global economy. SILVER LININGS!
  • Skynet Simulator: Finally in this week’s miscellania, a BRAND NEW and really rather good clicker game, in which you attempt to raise a world-destroying AI from a twinkle in a C64’s eye to the Terminator-birthing death-mind of the imagined future. This is suprisingly tricky – you can and will lose – and it helps to have a vague sort-of understanding of basic tech/programming principles (honestly, VERY vague is fine I know fcuk all, and still basically managed to get the hang of it), but it rewards patient experimentation and is surprisingly involving if you persist. Even better, it looks REALLY boring so this is something you can totally play whilst pretending to the kids or whoever else that it’s ‘actually a work thing and I really need to concentrate, can you maybe just shut the door for an hour?’.

By Giovanni Castell

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS GENUINELY-CHEERING SELECTION OF J-POP MIXED WAAAAAAAY BACK IN 2009!

THE CIRCUS OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT TUMBLRS AND IN FACT ARE BASICALLY JUST BLOGS – ARE THEY MAKING A COMEBACK? SHOULD I RENAME THIS SECTION NOW?:

  • Passport To Dreams: An actual, proper, honest-to-goodness blog, like what they had in the old days! This is lovely – passionate and informed and all about a VERY niche topic, to whit Disney amusement parks and their design, their rides, and the way they’ve evolved over the years. A perfect companion for those of you who decided to take on the ‘learn to design a themepark’ education challenge from last week’s Curios.
  • Apocalypse Pizza: The worst sort of pizza, I think we can all agree. Another actual blog(!), this one’s written by someone living in East London who, at least a week or so ago, worked in a pizza joint. It’s very quiet, and very small, and I like it a lot; I would love to know of anyone else doing these sorts of personal diaries right now; I know everyone’s sort-of doing this via Stories, but the problem with those is the ephemerality; I do wonder how much of the long-term record of These Times We Live In, or at least the in-the-moment experience of them, will end up vanishing as a side-effect of built-in digital ephemerality.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Darian Mederos: Superb, photo-real painting which for some reason features lots and lots of bubble-wrap. Superb.
  • The Social Distance Project: I LOVE THIS. Sharing short stories about how people are getting on with each other – or not – during quarantine. Small, human, happy, sad, intimate, impersonal and universal, this is maybe my favourite project to come out of all this so far – like PostSecret in a time of Corona, basically.
  • Ivenoven: Really cute cakemaking. Which, fine, is a bit basic, but basic is comforting and comforting is good.
  • Massimo Bottura: Bottura is chef patron of Osteria Francescana in Italy, a super-starred restaurant with a kilometric waiting list. This is his Insta feed, which is in some respects the antithesis to Jack Monroe and Jamie Oliver’s laudable ‘cook with your storecupboard ingredients’ cookalongs – Massimo, I DON’T HAVE EASY ACCESS TO FRESH ARTICHOKES YOU BSTARD – but which is SO lovely to watch in a kind of gently-escapist ‘one day I will eat in a restaurant again, but til then let me just melt at the beauty of your knifework’ sort-of way. Not sure how much practical help you’ll get with your lockdown cooking here, but it’s rather good regardless.
  • Crayola The Queen: Crayola is a drag artist from London who’s brought their act onto Insta for lockdown. Drag makeup tutorials, cabaret performances, audience interaction…Crayola is just one of many creatives finding new ways to make and engage despite physical distance, and I wholeheartedly approve.
  • Handsome Devil Puppets: Because regardless of what may or may not be going on outside, I am always a sucker for sinister, vaguely-satanic-looking puppetry.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT YOU AT THIS SELECTION OF 10 BOOKS FREE TO DOWNLOAD FROM HAYMARKET AND WHICH ARE PERHAPS A BIT HEAVY FOR CASUAL READING BUT WHICH EQUALLY ARE SOME PRETTY DECENT LEFT-LEANING TEXTS SHOULD YOU BE IN THE MARKET FOR PLOTTING THE POST-VIRUS REVOLUTION!

  • Stop Making Points: Not you, you understand, everyone else. This is a wonderful essay which neatly-encapsulates much of what I feel about the online experience right now. The author is Italian (I think this is written directly in English, which, if so, kudos to them as I wish my Italian were this good), living in Italy, and describes their experience of quarantine and the virus and their family and the world and the country and my God this is full of superb vignettes and observations and very, very real moments of interfamilial hatred and honestly, were this not about The Bad Thing I’d have considered putting this last as my favourite piece of the week. I promise you it’s not sad or depressing – it’s just a wonderful bit of prose about This Fcuking World We Live In. “As it turns out, even in the midst of dystopia you can still want to kill your mother” is my line-of-the-crisis so far.
  • Some People: Jason Kottke’s one of the originals of the small web (by which I mean, bloggers and creators ploughing relatively small furrows on their own platforms for love not money (though Jason now makes a living through his website, which, wow) – this series of observations did the rounds this week, but if you’ve not seen it yet it’s worth a look. Some People is a list of the types of experiences that people around you might be having, and a perfect reminder of the fact that you have no idea about other people’s circumstances and conditions and, as such, it possibly behooves you to be charitable about their presumed motivations. I normally abhor stuff like this; the virus is making me soft, I tell you.
  • Things I Learned in Solitary: Here, advermarketingprdrones, you can have this for free – do any of your clients have any links to prisoner rehabilitation? Get a bunch of ex-lags to do a ‘coping with lockdown’ video series; instant hit. That’s the premise of this essay, by Shaka Senghor who spent a chilling five years in solitary from 1999-2004. Their observations on how to deal with the experience are frankly the sort of things that one could reasonably apply to the general business of Coping With Life, but are particularly germane right now; if you’re finding it hard to find a light at the end of the tunnel, some of these might be useful.
  • The Black Death: I know, I know, you might not think that reading all about the greastest known plague to afflict our species would be a happymaking thing to do right now, but I promise you that it will give you a real ‘dear Christ, thank fcuk that I am alive now and not (inevitably, briefly) alive then instead’. WOW was the Black Death a bad time! I appreciate that that’s the sort of phrase that will make all right-thinking, educated people roll their eyes and mutter about extended exposure to the internet making everyone dumb, but, honestly, I had very little knowledge of the exact facts around the plague til reading this. LISTEN UP EVERYONE – IT COULD BE SO MUCH WORSE. Which, ok, might not exactly feel like a pick-me-up right now, but let’s clutch at whatever straws we can see poking out of the dungheap.
  • Quarantine Socialising: You will, I guarantee, get bored both of reading and talking about ALL THE WAYS IN WHICH THIS IS CHANGING SOCIETY – while you’re still able to contemplate such questions without your eyes rolling fully back in your head, though, this is a decent precis in the NYT of some of the different ways people are choosing to adapt their social lives to an online-only existence. Nothing in here should be revelatory to you, but there’s a slightly-wider lens than the usual ‘exercise! Cookery! The pub!’-type lists; there’s almost certainly three things in here you can use with clients, whilst knowing in your heart of hearts that literally noone right now wants to interact with a brand unless they absolutely have to (and even then, frankly).
  • Quarantine Influencers: Specifically, quarantine fashion influencers, who now that they can’t go outside and snap themselves against their favourite urban backdrops are having tyo pivot to a new, more domestic aesthetic. The crux of the piece is the question of whether this shift will persist post-lockdown, presuming there is such a post-, or whether instead there will come a backlash and a reversion to hyper-stylised, pro-looking irreality. Not, I concede, questions that ought to be keeping us up all night right now, but Curios has always been a whiplash switchback between the trivial, the even more trivial and the occasionally-consequential.
  • Corona Comes to Sing-Sing: Sing Sing, as I’m sure you all know, is a New York prison; this is a piece in Esquire, written by an inmate, about what it felt like to have Corona looming as part of the inmate population. It’s wonderfully-written piece, and if you enjoy this I recommend clicking the author profile at the top and checking out the rest of John J Lennon’s work for the magazine; he’s hugely talented and still incarcerated.
  • The Self-Quarantine Adult Activity Book: McSweeney’s does lockdown. This is funny, but also quite bleak – I did like the ‘cards to hold up at your partner in lieu of talking’ cut-outs, though (“Enough about Idris Elba now”).
  • Second Life for Crypto Bros: It was this week announced that Linden Labs, the people who made Second Life and had for years been working on their follow-up virtual world Sansar, had decided to call it quits; odd timing considering the potential boom in appetite for virtual spaces these circumstances might engender, but that does mean that the field is now clear for Decentraland to make a play to be THE virtual 3d world of choice for the future. Decentraland is a very, very odd concept – I don’t think I’ve featured it on here before, but there are other, similar projects I’ve definitely linked to – which combines the 3d virtual environment of Second Life with a real-life economy linked to the Blockchain (of COURSE), which means that real ownership of digital assets is not only possible but also encouraged as part of the fabric of the ‘world’. The knock-on effects of this mean that it’s a world with a functioning labour market, a loans market, rough market rules, and exactly the sort of pro-capitalist worldview that underpins a lot of the ‘well, if people have to die to keep the markets afloat then that’s a risk we just have to take’ madness that’s coming out of Trumpland right now. This article’s not the best-written you’ll read all week, but it does a very good job of explaining the mechanics of the world and how…odd it is. What is it about crypto that attracts all these…these…people (you can infer whatever you like from my italics here)?
  • Sim Racing: I’ve had various chats about whether eSports is going to take off in a mainstream way now that all sport is cancelled forever; I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, there is a LOT of time to fill in people’s sporting calendars, and videogames are more popular than ever, and the infrastructure’s there to support streaming as a thing; on the other, watching other people play videogames is still quite a niche pursuit, and watching other people play fast-paced FPS-type games, or MOBAs, is pretty hard to follow even for people who play the things. Also, watching other people play FIFA is boring, I don’t care if the players in question are famouses. The one exception to this, perhaps, is motor racing, a sport so tedious (look, I don’t care, I will die on this hill – I’ll make an exception for rally, but F1 is mogadon) that it could perhaps be improved by the digital gubbins streaming would bring. This is an interesting look at how the F1 circuit is seeking to use streaming to replace some of the grand prix, and how this might perhaps be the future of the sport; certainly, if this picks up traction amongst fans it’s hard to see how we can really justify the great, petrol-burning, globetrotting F1 circus in the future.
  • Half-Life: Alyx: This is a videogame review – albeit one on RPS, so it’s very well-written – so probably not of interest to everyone; I’m including it, though, from the point of view of VR and its potential tyo have something of a breakthrough moment this year. I was on a podcast in January in which I said, laughingly, that “no, this was NOT going to be the year in which people suddenly started wanting VR headsets at home” and then obviously the virus happened and Facebook started selling out of Oculus units worldwide, and now I look like a d1ck, basically. Anyway, this game is the other reason VR might get a breakout in 2020 – by all accounts it’s the first genuinely-good ‘proper’ game in in the medium. Worth a read if you’re interested in what the cutting edge of VR experiences look/sound like right now.
  • DJs on Twitch: I’m going to keep posting these articles of ‘industry X realises that it can reach fans really easily and engage them for a decent amount of time by just using Twitch’ for as long as they keep cropping up; there’s nothing specifically interesting about the way in which producers and DJs are using the streaming service to play to fans, debut new tracks and do virtual live shows, but it’s a further indication that Twitch has everything you need to pull together a reasonably-interesting livestream/tvshow/gig/lecture/talk hybrid, and that it’s only going to get bigger. Such a shame it’s owned by Amazon.
  • I, Backpack: I really enjoyed this – very smart, well-thought out, and nicely written by Andrew Kortina, the piece looks at the peculiarities of modern manufacture and supply that means that it is almost never easier or cheaper for a supplier to repair a good than it is for them to replace it, and whether or not this is something that will change for both social and environmental reasons. I reckon this is the sort of thing that really will change – I would be surprised if the next couple of years didn’t see a distinct shift towards manufacturers offering the ability to fix-rather-than-replace, a la Patagonia, and of parallel small local businesses springing up to patch-and-mend your goods. YOU READ IT HERE…probably fifteenth if I’m honest, but wevs.
  • Quarantine Gone Wild: The explainer piece to the bongo link above, this is Mel Magazine exploring what compels people to share pictures of their junk with the world in times of crisis. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!!
  • Mary Beard on Asterix: Uderzo’s death this week means that the plucky little Gaul is now an oprhan – poor Asterix (and also Obelix, though he’s probably less bothered); this is Mary Beard from a few year’s back, writing in the LRB about the Asterix books, their history, their depiction of the Roman empire and so many other things. This is delightful – Beard is never anything but a pleasure to read – and it will make you want to dig out old copies of the books and read them again. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me until well into my late teens to make sense of the embedded gag in the druid named ‘Getafix’, which shame I was reminded of upon reading this piece and which I now fear will never leave me.
  • Wounded Soldiers: A moving and sensitively-written piece which will nevertheless have you wincing on occasion (possibly even moreso if you’re in possession of a penis) as it describes the efforts made to perfect penile reconstructive surgery for soldiers wounded by landmines and shrapnel. There’s a lot of slightly, er, meaty description of war and wound, but what’s most poignant is the portraits of the soldiers themselves; there’s one anecdote in there about a veteran who has a habit of whipping out his reconstructed member in provincial nightclubs and playing helicopters with it, which on the one hand is eye-rollingly stereotypical but then also serves to remind you that these are mostly just idiot kids who’ve been blown up in faraway wars.
  • The Beach: An extract from Laura Cummings prize-nominated novel ‘On Chapel Sands’ – I read this and it made me ache for space and outside and the sea, but in a surprisingly unsad way. Such wonderful writing about nature and people and place.
  • Small Breeds: Last up this week, this essay by Jackie Connelly is about dogs and isolation and poverty, and contained so many lines that made me stop and read them back just for the joy of the prose – this paragraph, for example: “I was feeling permanent. I was anorexic and suicidal, lonely and furious, stuck in a massive concrete slab of a city, living in a centipede-infested basement the size of a Chrysler Town & Country. Everything I could want was blocks away: the Smithsonian, the café–bookstore that hosted queer open mics, the quirky bakery that sold me a honey-steeped Kouign-Amann croissant every morning, the Metro that would plummet deep into the city’s bowels before ejecting me up, up, up, over the Potomac, into deferent, cobblestoned Virginia, then backwards over the same forty-five minute course, with all its peaks and descents, eleven hours later.” Superb.

leb

By my girlfriend (it’s her cat, Lebowski, who is currently quarantining with me)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. Let’s kick off this week’s videos with Bard of the Apocalypse Shardcore’s little ditty about being stuck inside. You will particularly enjoy the faces, until you start seeing them too around week three:

  1. I know this sort of stuff is ten-a-penny at the moment, but this one really pleased me for some reason. This is a bunch of friends in Houston who all sang bits of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ from home and clipped it together into this video. It’s not spectacular, but it’s lovely and sort-of perfect:

  1. This is the latest one from Poppy, who seems to have completed the characters’ evolution into full technogoth with this latest one, which is all 303s and slightly industrial beats with a Manson-esque androgyne in the video. This is sort-of awful, but oddly-compelling:

  1. This is over an hour of all the old MTV ident animations, which as a piece of comforting background nostalgia (for those of us of a certain vintage) is basically a direct time capsule to happytime:

  1. UK HIPHOP (WELL, GRIME) CORNER! We have the first official Coronabanger! This is Psychs, with ‘Spreadin’ – it’s actually quite a lot better than it needs to be, and the Mourinho line in there is nicely delivered:

  1. Last up in this week’s videos, the latest (I think) in NPR’s ‘Tiny Desk Concert’ series features Chika, a young US rapper who blew up on Twitter early last year and whose career has quietly been going from strength to strength – honestly, she is SO GOOD and one of the most impressive new MCs I’ve seen in an age, and this is an almost effortless-looking performance. Enjoy your new favourite female rapper, and, er, TAKE CARE THAT’S IT TAKE CARE NO MORE LINKS THIS WEEK I WILL BE BACK IN SEVEN DAYS BUT PLEASE BE NICE TO YOURSELVES AND EACH OTHER AND TRY AND KEEP POSITIVE AND MAKE SURE YOU GET FRESH AIR AND STUFF AND DEAR GOD I APPEAR TO HAVE TURNED INTO YOUR FCUKING MOTHER BUT IT’S ONLY BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND I CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND I WILL MISS YOU AND SEE YOU IN A WEEK BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Webcurios 20/03/20

Reading Time: 36 minutes

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, and one thing all of us content monkeys have in common is we all hate writing this upfront bit. This week it’s…uniquely hard.

Obviously Web Curios is a deeply cynical, miserable and ennui-soaked mess of my own neuroses and deficiencies as a human, but, just for once, let me try and be positive here. This is awful and hard and will hurt so many people, some physically, some not, but, if you’re looking for a silver lining, at least it’s happening now. We – I know, I know that this isn’t evenly distributed, and my privilege is based on another’s pain, I know – live in a world in which we can have entertainments piped to our hands, the sum-total of human knowledge accessible at a few clicks, an accumulated couple of millennia of culture and learning and art to draw on, accessible to us in literally seconds, on demand…look, all I’m saying is that this had happened at almost any other point in human history this would have been immeasurably worse. 

Anyway, this week’s Curios is slightly different, with the miscellania divided into three sections rather than 2, and no videos at the end as, well, I couldn’t find any interesting ones and frankly I imagine you’re all consuming quite enough as it is, what with Netflix and Amazon and YouTube and stuff. Think of Web Curios, then, as the fibre in your digital diet as a shut-in, the chewy stuff that you may not enjoy quite as much as TikTok but which will give you a slightly easier ride next time you’re trying to sh1t some ideas out of your mouth. As it were. 

I am Matt, and as usual I am at home in my pants – the only difference is that this week, so are you. Please take care.

NB – A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM EDITOR PAUL WHO RUNS THIS WEBSITE CAN BE READ HERE, AND SHOULD BE OF PARTICULAR INTEREST TO ARTISTS AND MAKERS!

To those of youRD

By Rishi Dastidar, whose new book, Saffron Jack, you can pre-order here. 

LET’S KICK THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS OFF THIS WEEK WITH ONE OF TWO SPECIAL ISOLATION MIXES RECORDED LIVE IN BERLIN FOR YOU BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE – HE REALLY IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD DJ, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO THIS ONE AS IT IS ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO BE MERCIFULLY SHORT THIS WEEK WHAT WITH LITERALLY NOONE GIVING MUCH OF A FCUK ABOUT S*C**L M*D** PLATFORM UPDATES THIS WEEK:

  • The Facebook Small Business Grants Programme: I think it’s fair to say I’ve been…critical of Facebook in the past, but its response to all this has been genuinely good in the past week or so (I’ve read a bit of analysis which suggests it’s a result of this being an unambiguous problem and therefore easier for a data/science-leaning founder (and by extension corporate culture) to parse, which seems plausible), from its efforts to stem disinformation (see, Mark, it is possible to be better at that!) to its efforts to secure staff. This is another initiative that it’s hard to see as anything other than positive – “Facebook is offering $100M in cash grants and ad credits for up to 30,000 eligible small businesses in over 30 countries where we operate.” There are limited details about which countries, or how to go about applying, but you can sign up for updates which will emerge in due course; it won’t be a lot of money per business, but every little helps. Brief moment of sincerity here – I know several people who run businesses and are staring down the barrel at the moment, with responsibility for wages and staff and suppliers; good luck, and, if you can, try and support small companies where possible while we’re all stuck.
  • Brand Communications in the Age of Corona: Ordinarily a header like that would make my teeth itch something chronic, but this is an actually not-terrible series of principles, posted by Twitter’s comms team, which is all sensible and, based on some of the fcuking calls I’ve had to sit on this week, the sort of thing we might all want to remind our clients of on a regular basis. No, I’m sorry, this isn’t a good time to go on an aggressive customer acquisition programme for your online casino (I mean, fine, from a certain (cnuty) angle it obviously very much is, but come on ffs).
  • Reddit Metrics: Super-useful tool showing which bits of Reddit are trending hardest at any give moment. Depending on what you or your clients do, Reddit is SO worth a look as a way gauging how your customer base feel and what they might need from you right now (apologies in advance, but I’m going to try not to mention the C-word too much this week; this may well lead to some fairly unpleasant linguistic contortions but, well, you’re used to that).

By Marc Burckhardt

HERE, HAVE THIS SECOND EXCELLENT BIT OF CRATEDIGGING, ALSO LIVE FROM BERLIN, ALSO BY SADEAGLE – THIS IS ALSO EXCELLENT AND VERY MUCH DESERVES YOUR EARS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.1:

  • The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I’ll continue to plug this this week – Ed’s done a truly incredible job coordinating this, and in many respects it’s an object lesson in how to do quite difficult, decentralised information coordination at scale. It contains links and information and data about the spread of the virus, but also to lists of volunteering organisations and support groups worldwide, tips for educators and medical staff on what online resources are available to help them, and loads more besides, and it’s being added to all the time from all around the world. It’s the absolute BEST of the web, this, and the sort of thing people in the ivory towers of academe dreamed of in the early days of bulletin boards and before the normies came in and ruined everything with the cats and the bongo and the nazism.
  • Tech Support for Old People: FULL DISCLOSURE: I know Mike, one of the people behind this initiative, a little bit. But only a little. Regardless, this is a great idea and something you might want to get involved with if you’re in the UK – a project seeking volunteers to act as free tech support for older people who might need a little help navigating this exciting new reality of webcams and screensharing and NO GRANDDAD THERE ARE NO SINGLES IN YOUR AREA LOOKING FOR FUN DOWN’T DOWNLOAD THAT .EXE FILE FFS (both my male grandparents are dead and so incapable of embarrassing bongo-related fcukups, but yours might need the assistance).
  • Handmirror: There is SO MUCH I am excited to see in the coming weeks and months, not least how social attitudes around certain mores are going to shift. How will our perception of human aesthetics change as we slowly drop all standards and start appearing on conference calls in three-day pants? Is this the first step in the WALL-E-fication of our species? Will we all slowly, imperceptibly, start to drop a shade in skintone as Vitamin E withdrawal kicks in? Anyway, while we still care about things like ‘do I have a cornflake on my cheek?’ when videocalling people, this is potentially a godsend – Handmirror is a Mac-only app which puts a button on your taskbar which, with one click, lets you check on how hideous you currently are via your webcam. It seems like a small thing, but the ability to start a conference call without the initial 2s of fear when your face shows up and you see that, no, you really couldn’t get away with not coming your hair, has significant quality-of-life benefits. Oh, on this, it’s always worth remembering DFW’s riff on videocalling from Infinite Jest.
  • The Social Distancing Festival: We’ll be seeing LOTS of this in the coming weeks – I know for example that people are talking variously about 24h streaming comedy marathons with comedians doing sets from their houses across the world – but this was the first to cross my path this week; The Social Distancing Festival launched this week, and is a project by Nick Green in Toronto. Green had a new musical opening cancelled as a result of all this, and so decided to source as much upcoming artistic performance and put it on virtually through this hub – this is now a hugely-useful hub to find a huge selection of arts content, from theatres and opera houses and art galleries and people’s bedrooms – each day, with links to streams, details of timings, and basically everything you could need to enjoy a certain type of cultural life despite lockdown. So, so good, and worth sharing with anyone who’s less into YouTube videos and more into, I don’t know, Dvorak.
  • Get Vibey: Sanderson Jones founded The Sunday Assembly a few years ago – I know Sanderson a bit, and he’s a genuinely remarkable man, whose positivity and energy make me occasionally think he’s a different species from me. His latest project is this, Get Vibey, which takes the hugely popular ‘Secular Singalong’ bit of the Assembly mornings and takes it into quarantine. Starting Monday at 5pm GMT, Sanderson hopes to start a global singalong, with anyone anywhere invited to log on and belt along with whatever tune they’re singing that day. On the one hand, you might think you’d feel a bit weird sitting in your kitchen with the second wine of the day belting out “I Will Survive”, but, trust me, this will be literally only the very tip of the veritable iceberg of weird you will discover within yourself as time passes.
  • Last Year’s Rent: A hardship fund for the arts in the UK. I appreciate obviously that not everyone has any cash to spare right now, but, just in case you do, this mightn’t be a bad place to chuck a few quid.
  • The Quarantine Book Club: I think this is a lovely idea, though I can equally imagine that perhaps it might be a touch stressful for authors. Quarantine Book Club affords authors the opportunity to chat with fans over chat in Zoom – there’s a reasonable selection coming up, and whilst they’re all US and I’ve not heard of any of them, they cover a lot of bases in terms of themes of their work and diversity / representation. The individual chats are ticketed, which is an interesting approach; I suppose limiting numbers for something like this keeps it workable, and authors’ have to eat, but, equally, in the midst of lots of people doing and giving stuff away for free, this jars slightly. I do wonder how the economics of this sort of thing will develop – will we see small cottage industries of individual experts in specific things offering piecemeal training and instruction in small, closed groups like this? I obviously have no fcuking idea.
  • Become A Theme Park Designer: This…this is it! This is the moment! THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE!!!! Look, we’re all going to be at home for ages, and after a while you’re going to complete Netflix and run out of cookery hacks to watch on Facebook and you’ll need something to stimulate your brain again – why not make it learning a new profession? WHY NOT LEARN TO DESIGN THEME PARKS??? Fine, there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever be able to actually visit theme parks again – I don’t mean this, by the way, I am fairly confident I will get to go to Alton Towers – or indeed that this course, called ‘Imagineering in a Box’ and offered by Khan Academy, will necessarily mean that you’ll be the architect of the inevitable Quarantine Studios Experience, but you’ll get a grounding in the principles of ride design, character design and the rest. If you’ve got a certain type of kid, I can think of worse projects to undertake in isolation than this tbh.
  • Virtual AI: I hadn’t considered AT ALL the impact of lockdown on people who are used to attending meetings; if you or anyone you know is in AA, NA or any of the other As, you might find this useful – this site gives you a searchable database of virtual meetings happening worldwide, along with timings and the main language used by participants, so people can take the steps (no pun intended) needed to maintain their sobriety in what I can only imagine must be pretty challenging circumstances.
  • Run Your Own Social: I like to think I’m OK at social media, at least in terms of making it do what I need it to – as a result, my Twitter feed’s largely free of rage and hatred, and I only use Facebook for Groups (and to publish a link to this once a week to almost universal silence). I would imagine, though, that that might not be the same for everyone. Whilst isolation is amply demonstrating the huge benefits the web brings in terms of being able to maintain specific, discrete conversations and contacts, it’s also perhaps demonstrating that what works at small-scale doesn’t always work at large scale; if you and yours are finding that the socials are all just TOO MUCH at the moment, why not take this opportunity to spin up your own, local social platform for you and whoever you want to use as you see fit? I featured this in July last year, but it seems germane to link to it again – there’s no technical reason why you’d need to do this, unless you’re very much a big-tech refusenik, but, well, you probably need a hobby, right?
  • The Virtual Background Awards: At the time of writing you have 23h to enter (that’ll be 18 by the time you’re reading this, HURRY UP!), but if you think you can design the BEST ZOOM BACKGROUND EVER then, well, you go girl! There’s going to be a public vote to decide the winner once entries close – I for one am tumescent with excitement!
  • Talkbeat: If you’re still exploring communications options for the new world order, and you don’t have access to Teams, and you don’t like Slack (noone likes Slack – it’s tolerated, at best – although, actually, the Slack I’m in with friends now has a !covid command which pulls the latest figures on the outbreak from public data sources and is the most terrifyingly-brilliant future thing I’ve seen all week tbh) then you might want to try Talkbeat. It is, I think, free, and seems to operate like Slack but with the wonderful addition of built-in ephemerality, thereby neatly eliminating the awful Slack fomo you get when you see that you’ve got 612 messages from the past 24h to read – in Talkbeat, all content vanishes after 24. This might be a nice, easy way of getting lots of family members together in one place to communicate textually, maybe.
  • The Great Coronavirus Meme Survey: There are, I’m sure, more immediately-important-seeming pieces of academic work happening at the moment, but please let’s all take a moment to acknowledge the University of Amsterdam’s diligence in making sure that we properly track the memes that are spewing out of the culture faster than you can say “please, stop with the distracted boyfriend now”. You can’t see any of the memes here, sadly, but you can upload whatever you deem worthy of recording and analysis on this Page; fine, I know it seems silly, but I honestly think this is a really important piece of cultural work to document the creation and emergence of cultural ephemera around this. Lots of the most interesting commentary on historical events is through personal accounts and marginalia, and the famously-flaky nature of the idea of ‘permanence’ online means it’s vital to save this stuff while we can.
  • Around: Yes, we’re ALL Zoomers now! Except, well, the software’s a bit iffy (I keep hearing the word ‘spyware’ being bandied about) and it does have some slightly annoying and creepy features (did you know that bosses using it can turn on an ‘attention tracking’ feature to monitor your attentiveness during calls? LOVELY!), and you might want to look at this new calling platform called Around as an alternative. It does all the things you’d expect, but does some clever stuff with face tracking to just isolate your fizzog to display rather than showing everyone how sh1t your kitchen is (stuff I have learned this week – my colleagues seemingly have nicer houses than I do) and uses AI to, so they claim, clean up all the audio. Might be worth a look.
  • VOIP Cards: I LOVE THESE. As I wrote on Twitter: “Slightly pass-agg little notes you can load onto your phone and hold up when muted on a conference call. Please can we make this a thing? “Your complete failure to ever use the word ‘strategy’ correctly is making me murderous, Alan”. Honestly, as someone who has had to keep video off most of the week so that various people couldn’t see me mouthing “dear God you are so, so stupid” at them on calls (if you are reading this, by the way, I am definitely not talking about you), I am very much hear for this. Even if this site doesn’t have exactly what you want to communicate as an option, remember you can always use sites like BigAssMessage to create whatever you like – honestly, I am absolutely doing this later on and there’s NOTHING you can do to stop me.
  • Netflix Party: You almost certainly know about this already, but in case not – LOOK! An official, sanctioned-by-Netflix way of doing shared viewing on laptops! It’s a Chrome-only plugin, but given that’s what 99% of the world uses you should basically be fine – it lets you watch something in-sync with other users anywhere, adds groupchat, and basically turns watching films at home into a social experience. Combine with Zoom or the video chat app of your choice to absolutely ruin the filmwatching experience for yourself and everyone else involved!
  • Jqbx: Spotifysharing! Anyone can be a DJ! Jqbx lets you basically set up a stream of your Spotify, allowing anyone else to listen in and experience whatever you’re listening to as you listen to it. Perfect for listening to albums with friends while you chat, say, or for pretending that you’re running your own postapocalyptic radio station out there in the wastelands (YOU ARE NOT THREE-DOG) (hello to the three people who got that reference). Interestingly, you can also get data on what the most-streamed tracks were each week using the app – nice way of seeing how we’re all choosing to soundtrack a species-level incident.
  • Popcorn Time Is Back!!!: Obviously I never want anyone to stop reading Curios halfway through – I like to imagine that you open all the tabs as you read in a game of chicken with your computer; who’ll expire first, the CPU or your attention span? – but I would very much encourage you to take a break now, click the link, download the software and GET DOWNLOADING; Popcorn Time, the service that made torrenting easy enough that any normie can do it, is BACK (first featured in Curios way back in March 2014 – man, that is a LONG six years; why not travel back in time and experience it for a moment?)! And it’s still very illegal, and will get shut down quite quickly I think, so get it while you can. Using this you will be able to download basically any film you can think of (it skews heavily hollywood and modern, fine, but still) – yes, lots of these are on Netflix or other platforms, but for those who perhaps can’t afford 30+ quid a month on subscription entertainment this is potentially a godsend. GET IT WHILE IT’S HOT.
  • Free Audiobooks For Kids: You may have noticed over the years that I don’t like Amazon very much as a company and that I try and avoid linking to their works insofar as is humanly possible (not that far, turns out). Sometimes, though, they do good things – like now, when they’ve made a whole load of stories for children on their audiobooks platform Audible free to stream. This, honestly, is a total godsend if you’ve got kids but maybe need a break from storytime for a bit (or, er, if you want to listen to the Harry Potter series; I don’t judge, I just report).

By Jordyn Mcgeachin

NEXT, WHY NOT IMAGINE THAT YOU’RE LISTENING TO THE SOUNDTRACK OF AN AMERICAN MALL IN THE LATE-80s WITH THE LATEST INSTALMENT (#4) OF THE SUPERB ‘CVS BANGERS’ MIX SERIES!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FOCUSED SOLELY ON PROVIDING YOU WITH AS MANY HELPFUL AND INTERESTING LINKS AS POSSIBLE TO HELP YOU PASS THE TIME AND STAY INTELLECTUALLY EXERCISED AND WOULD LIKE TO EXHORT READERS TO PLEASE SHARE ANYTHING PARTICULARLY GREAT THAT YOU FIND FOR INCLUSION IN FUTURE WEEKS’ EDITIONS BECAUSE, REALLY, IF THERE WAS EVER A TIME WHEN LINKS WERE BASICALLY A CURRENCY, THIS IS IT, PT.2:

  • The Berlin Philharmonic: Another institution which has made all its output free, you can, for the next month, access the entire digital archive of all the orchestra’s recordings, complete with video and all sorts of in-depth stuff if you’re into…er…orchestral music (I, as you may be able to tell, am not into orchestral music and so struggle to describe it better than this. Sorry). Oh, and if this is your thing, here’s a list of other streams and shows being put on for free in the classical music world over the coming weeks – there’s a LOT of stuff.
  • Visit UNESCO World Heritage Sites: God, Google Earth is amazing – this link takes you to the ‘overview’ page, where you can see all of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites on the global map, and select which one you want to go on a virtual tour of. From the pyramids to Pompeii to Kew Gardens, get out of the house and stretch your virtual legs and try not to think too hard about the fact that your likelihood of ever visiting a lot of these in person is dropping by the day.
  • Google’s Museums: One of the other things that Google’s been quietly getting on with over the past decade or so has been creating virtual equivalents of some of the world’s best and most significant museums and art galleries, meaning that, lockdown be damned, if I want to nip down the road to the Tate and look at my beloved Epstein, I can! Fine, it’s not quite the same – I don’t get to experience the peculiar joy of the Vauxhall gyratory, or the view of all the cranes down by Battersea that always elicits the same question in my mind (to paraphrase John Lanchester in the LRB a few years ago, who the fcuk is going to pay £6m to live in Vauxhall?) – but it’s the best we’re likely to get. So, so much to see in here, honestly.
  • Artland: It’s not quite as impressive as the Google work, but from a more nakedly-commercial perspective Artland does a similar job, allowing you to take small, 3d tours of exhibitions currently going on at a range of small commercial galleries across the world (but mainly in the US, as far as I can tell). A perfect website to accompany a dry Martini as you sit, fag in hand, polo neck on, and decry the shameless dilettanteism of whatever concept-monkey’s currently showing at Tribeca Gallery. Just because we’re on lockdown doesn’t mean we should let standards slip, after all.
  • Quarantinechat: I got curious yesterday and checked Google Trends to see how Chatroulette is doing – there’s been an uptick in interest over the past few weeks, but what really puzzled me is that there are spikes in searches every morning – do people wake up thinking “Christ, I wonder whether that service that let me be w4nked at by strange men still exists?” Anyway, this isn’t Chatroulette, it;s QUARANTINECHAT! Actually it’s far more benign, pairing you with strangers over your phone on a voice-only basis: “Once you sign up, you’ll be subscribed to periodic calls. Your caller ID will always say “QuarantineChat” when your phone rings. After a brief moment on hold, you’ll match with another random person. You don’t have to pick up if you’re busy—your partner will be automatically matched with someone else. And you can join and leave the line whenever you’d like. It’s private. You use your phone number to sign up for Dialup, but your matches will only ever see your username.” It’s open to people all over the world – I confess not having not tried it, as I enjoy talking on the phone almost exactly as much as someone who hides behind the written word as me might be expected to, but it seems like a fun idea with only one or two VERY SMOL potential side-effects. Who knows, maybe you will FIND LOVE?
  • How Much Toilet Paper?: HOW LONG WILL YOUR STOCKS LAST??? This needs more dietary variables, to my mind, but if you want to assuage any creeping sense of bum-tissue panic then, well, great! Just as an aside, I wonder whether this will usher in the bidet revolution in the UK? It…probably won’t, will it?
  • Island Generator: All this website does is generate sweet little names for imaginary places, designed to tie in with Animal Crossing (the idea being that it will create a cutesy name for your island) but which I reckon could be repurposed for some imaginative play with your kids if you were so inclined. By the way, I realise that I am doing a lot of ‘hey, here’s a thing that you can do with your kids!’-type links this week, and I also realise that I, er, don’t have any kids, or indeed know the first thing about what it would be like to have to take care of one or more of them in these sorts of circumstances, so forgive me if I appear to have some sort of weird, rose-tinted, Swallows And Amazons-type view of what it’s like, at odds with the stark, snotty, ADHD reality.
  • Amazing Educational Resources: There is a LOT on here. Far too much to list, but, honestly, if you want an online learning resource than this website probably contains a link to it. Being updated on a regular basis, so worth bookmarking.
  • Isolated Magazine: This is an interesting idea, though I’m not 100% certain it will ever work – as far as I can tell, it’s an initiative designed to crowdsource a ‘magazine’ for isolated living, written by people all over the place from the comfort of their own isolation crawlspace; this links to a Google Doc, containing ideas for articles and details for getting in touch if you’d like to participate. Obviously projects like this are difficult because…well…people, and I have a slight fear that the community around this might end up getting a bit Mumsnet (you know what I mean – nothing to do with mothers or women, more than there’s a certain type of online community can get a bit…spiky). Still, it’s a fascinating idea and if you like the idea of trying your hand at article-writing for a magazine of the new era.
  • Photos of Shopping Carts: I popped to the shop the other day to get some milk and it was, as doubtless your local shops are too, something of a wasteland, with locust-ravaged shelves and, amazingly, a couple of people wandering about in what looked like shellshock, muttering (I am not making this up, I promise) “nah man, I thought they was joking”. I mean, WOW. Anyway, this is a series of photos of people’s grocery carts from around the world, showing the different purchases that people are prioritising as we all prepare for the Big Global Hunker of 2020 (that sounds SO much nicer than quarantine or lockdown, can we change the wording please?).
  • Flatter Me: If you’re in the market for a card game to play to while away the hours but think Cards Against Humanity might not be the best thing for your general mood and demeanour over the coming months of NO OUTSIDE, you might want to consider backing this little project called ‘Flatter Me’, which is basically a card game that involves players attempting to agree on what positive words could best be used to describe other players. Which, fine, might sound twee, but I promise you that by mid-May the idea of someone describing you as, I don’t know, ‘elegant’ will reduce you to fcuking floods.
  • Multiverse: Another Kickstarter, this one for an RPG system and ruleset which is designed to make super-flexible games playable by anyone, using videogame tech. It’s hugely ambitious in scope, but the target seems eminently reachable with a month to go – the idea is that it will combine editable game mechanics and graphics with a robust game engine and video/voice chat, to bring collaborative tabletop roleplaying to a digital age; if you’re into roleplaying, this is potentially very exciting indeed.
  • The Steam Games Festival: If you have a PC or laptop, you can download 30 indie game demos from Steam this weekend for free, which seems like a fun thing to do.
  • Boardgame Arena: This site’s struggling to cope with the traffic at the moment, but persist – it’s SUPERB, and, honestly, one of the most useful things I’ve seen this week; it’s basically EVERY SINGLE BOARDGAME EVER (well, 175 of them which is practically the same thing) available to play online, either with local or online competition, for FREE. These are all modern boardgames, or seem to be, so it’s more ‘Carcassone’ than ‘Game of Life’, but, honestly, there’s SO MUCH in here. This is family-friendly fun at its finest, and just a wonderfully-pure piece of internet.

By Marinel Sheu

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS RATHER GORGEOUS MIX OF MODERN CLASSICAL/AMBIENT TRACKS WHICH IS VERY, VERY CALMING AND PROBABLY QUITE A GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO READING A BOOK ON YOUR BED WHILST LOOKING OUT OF THE WINDOW?

THE SECTION

  • Pixelart: A rather lovely Pixelart drawing tool, letting you easily create…well, in my case it let me easily create a classic cocknballs, but, presuming you have slightly more artistic ability and less of a gutter mindset than I do, this might be something fun to play around with. Why not make a pixelart version of your own face to act as your new avatar for all conference calls? GO ON FFS FOLLOW ONE OF MY SUGGESTIONS FOR ONCE JESUS CHRIST.
  • The Colour Dot Font: A font where each letter is represented by a circular dot of different colours, rendering whatever you write a beautiful symphony of colour slightly reminiscent of mid-00s Hirst but also rendering it entirely unreadable. Please implement this on your website and ‘enjoy’ the reaction.
  • Ultra-Abridged Books: A selection of books, abridged ‘beyond the point of usefulness’ by Zach Weinersmith (I have no idea if that is in fact Mr Weinersmith’s real name, but I do hope so). These are a particular type of humour, but, to give you a flavour, the Bible’s Genesis is cut down to: “God made everything, but humans keep screwing it up; some Jews move to Egypt, which seemed like a good idea at the time.” – if that vaguely amuses you then you will very much enjoy all of these.
  • The Cheeseman: Look, we’re all going to be spending a LOT of time at home, and we’re going to need to broaden our horizons a bit and EXPAND OUR INTERESTS. Why not try getting into cheese? Why not let Gavin Webber take you on a journey through casein? WHY NOT?? Gavin is a cheery Australian with a very soothing manner and a recurring catchphrase (‘G’day, curd nerds’) which basically makes it seem like everything is ok in the world. You want to learn how to make cheddar in your kitchen? You want to learn how to make parmesan (also, it’s worth clicking that particular link for all the violently-irate Italians in there; honestly, my people, SO PROUD!)? Gavin has the knowledge. If this all goes much further south, planet-wise, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Gavin engendering some pretty strong feelings of worship among a certain sort of person, tbh.
  • AR Coworking: Does this look fun? Or does it look awful? YOU DECIDE!
  • Power Slides: It’s PECHA KUCHA, THE GAME! Actually, this sounds sort-of fun, in a very specific sort of way: “During a round of Power Slides one player gives an improvised 5 minute pitch for an imaginary app using a series of randomly selected slides. The app concept will be on the first slide. Slides will advance automatically. On the last slide, the presenter must come up with a name for their app, and the audience must applaud!” – I can imagine that for many of you this is literally the least-fun-sounding thing I have ever put in here, but there are others who’ll read that and think ‘that sounds like a really satisfying way to spend a virtual hour in the groupchat with some homebrew’. Pays money, takes choice, innit.
  • Markup: A really smart way of annotating any webpage for collaborative editing and design feedback – plug in any url and it turns it into a canvas that you can add notes, to, enabling anyone to easily leave notes and feedback on specific elements of design. Clever and useful, particularly right now.
  • Concentricon: This is literally just a clock on a webpage, but it is SUCH a beautiful clock that I could happily throw it onto a screen and watch it until the end times arrive.
  • De-Mainstream: USE THIS WITH CAUTION. Demainstream is a plugin for YouTube which claims to remove ‘mainstream’ media from search results on the platform (as an aside, along with the terms ‘virtue signalling’, ‘cultural marxism’ and ‘political correctness’, I find references to the ‘mainstream media’ in anyone’s output a pretty reliable red flag of borderline nuttiness); which is great for, as the site’s makers claim, finding the REAL creators on the platform rather than the big businesses which have also made it their home. It’s also, though, great for suddenly turning YouTube into a roiling mass of mad, with swivel-eyed Coronaloons EVERYWHERE and a surprising number of people advocating the ingestion of chlorine as the ONLY WAY of staying safe. Can I suggest that you be careful when using this and not leave it installed, maybe?
  • Means TV: A really interesting project which I fear will be a casualty of The Times We Live In, MeansTV is meant to be a socially-conscious alternative to Netflix, committed to delivering quality content with a conscience. “Means TV is the world’s first worker-owned, post-capitalist streaming service. Means TV has a library of films, documentaries, and shows with new programming added all the time. We also have live weekly shows covering news, the working class, gaming and sports. All available to subscribers for $10/month across desktop, mobile and smart TV devices like Roku, Fire and Apple TV. No advertisements or product placements. No corporate backers or VC cash ever.” It’s admirable, and important, to attempt to extract the production of art from the moneymaking machine, but I’m not 100% certain it’s sustainable; still, it’s a project that very much deserves a look and perhaps a subscribe – look, I’m not going to lie, there’s a certain ‘knitted hemp’ quality to much of what’s on offer, and I know that an eleven minute, vaguely-Brooklyn-hipsterish account of the history of serfdom isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but equally you can’t only consume TikToks ffs.
  • The TV News App: News channels, from around the world, for free, on an app. Although it’s fair to say that this may not be the most appealing time to scan the world’s bulletins for cheering updates and regional curiosities.
  • Married To Betty Boop: This is BRILLIANT. A very long-running webcomic, ongoing and collected on this Twitter thread, about what it’s like to be a very anxious man married to the famously-pulchritudinous cartoon character Betty Boop. It features a murderous Bugs Bunny, some therapy sessions, an awful lot of uxoriousness, and is honestly one of the strangest things I have seen for a long, long time. I think, more than anything else, it’s the commitment – this goes DEEP.
  • Isolated Vocals: A subReddit featuring, er, loads of isolated vocals from popular songs. I can’t remember if I chucked this in here the other week, but this is where that frankly insane Cyndi Lauper vocal came from – SO GOOD.
  • Extinguished Countries: Kickstarting for a series of books about countries, states and principalities that no longer exist; the first book in the planned series is on the Republic of Venice. I think this is a beautiful idea for a series of books, a feeling only slightly tempered by the concern that we may well be an appropriate subject before too long (JOKES WE’LL BE FINE KIDS I PROMISE).
  • Medicine On Screen: I’m fairly confident most of you really, really don’t to immerse yourself in medical literature and CONTENT given current circumstances, but, nonetheless, here you are! Web Curios – bringing you stuff you didn’t know you wanted and which in all probability you really don’t want AT ALL, since approximately 2010/11! Listen: “NLM holds a world-renowned historical audiovisual collection of nearly 10,000 titles from the silent era to the present. These films cover a broad range of medical and health-related topics, from public health, surgery, and nursing to mental health, cancer, tuberculosis, child development, tropical medicine, genetics, and substance abuse.” I mean, who DOESN’T want to watch some videos about TB while we’re all locked down? NO FCUKER, that’s who!
  • Coloring Book: Oh this is fabulous. “This coloring book is both digital and on paper. The paper copy is where the coloring is done – color through the concepts to explore symmetry and the beauty of math. The digital copy brings the concepts and illustrations to life in interactive animations.” Seriously, click through and get to the meat of the book and all the patterns and tesselations animate so delightfully – I could honestly stare at this for hours, and perhaps you might want to do that too.
  • The Bird Museum: Frivolous art/game poroject of the week #1 – download the ‘game’ and get the ability to wander around a giant virtual art gallery full of pictures of birds drawn by people across the world – some good, some bad, all remarkably cheering. Each bird was drawn by someone on Twitter, and there are over 1000 of them to browse, the museum refreshes and rearranges every time you visit, guaranteeing you a unique, bird-art experience each time you open it up. So, so lovely, totally silly, near-perfect.
  • The Library of Babble: Another one you need to download, but this is also a glorious mix of artwank and words and gentle game mechanic – navigate the topographically-marked landscape and as you do you will come across short stories left there by people across the world; from a few words to a few sentences, these fragments of narrative create a sort of patchwork of stories and feelings across this imagined landscape, and you can add your own at certain points. Honestly, this is a really nice thing to just drop into every now and again – highly recommended.
  • Football Manager: I don’t leave this link here lightly – I know what this game has done to marriages, careers, relationships – but, well, it is time Football Manager – what old people used to call Champ Man back in the day – is available for free for another couple of days. FREE. YOU CAN LITERALLY SPEND THE ENTIRETY OF QUARANTINE HELPING STRANRAER BECOME THE EUROPEAN SUPERPOWER THEY WERE ALWAYS MEANT TO BE!! When we finally emerge, blinking, into the post-lockdown sunshine, molelike and pale, there will be a certain coterie of men (it is always men) who will be desperate to get back inside to carry on with the Brazilian third-tier playoffs of 2039.

By Jenny Morgan

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS EXCELLENT ‘BEST OF THE PAST MONTH’ SELECTION BY NO DEPRESSION?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

  • Archimaps: Architecture and maps. But really interesting examples of both, I promise.
  • Art For Housewives: Not in fact a Tumblr, but instead a slightly old-school blog, this is maintained by an artist living in Italy and details her thoughts, her practice and her work. I really hope that the next few months sees a return to this style of personal documentation; video’s fine, yes, but sometimes written words are just better.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Logofonts: Want to know what fonts are being used in which logos? No, I can’t imagine you do, and yet still I persist in thrusting this, unbidden, into your face.
  • Soap Journal: Old soaps, in their packaging. More interesting than you might think, I promise.
  • 24h Plays: This used to be about time-limited theatre, but has seemingly pivoted to sharing videos of actors delivering monologues from plays, which, if I’m honest, is a pleasing contrast to the amateur-hour entertainment being produced by the rest of Insta. I wonder whether we’ll all sort of lose the love for lo-fi UGC after we’re forced to spend three months or more watching ordinary people being ordinary, BRING BACK HOLLYWOOD AND AIRBRUSHING!
  • Etn.co_man: I don’t ordinarily feature cutesy food stuff but, honestly, this Japanese person’s food art is fcuking astonishing.
  • Electricalgram: An instagram feed that is solely about electrical engineering. It shares photos of wires and junction boxes ffs. I include the for the following reasons: 1) it is boring, niche and largely-inexplicable, making it near-perfect Web Curios content; 2) it is proof that, whatever your community, if you make something that is of use to it you will get numbers – there are over 165k people following this account ffs; 3) there is, inexplicably, exactly ONE slightly-creepy photo of two young women in black dresses standing next to a slightly-grubby-looking circuitbox – WHY??? WHO ARE THE ELECTRICITY GIRLS???
  • Love Is Quarantine: I mentioned to someone that one of the interesting things I think will happen as a result of this is a boom in new entertainment formats – this sort of thing, for example. Love is Quarantine is a riff on insanely-popular dating show ‘Love Is Blind’; it’s been set up this week by two guys who share a flat in the US, and the gimmick is that each day people apply to be set up on dates via a Google sheet; they’re then matched with a date by the showrunners, which then happens over chat later that day. Participants then share their feedback on the date, which is broadcast over Insta as part of the ‘show’, and the whole thing is SO charming (very American, but) and fun, and there is the seed of a really strong show in here imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (AND WHICH THIS WEEK INCLUDES THIS SELECTION OF 30 FREE eBOOKS FROM ARCHIPELAGO BOOKS)!:

  • A Short Note About This Week’s Longreads: Ok, so I’ve tried to keep the longreads largely misery-and-horror free – I imagine you all know where to find SERIOUS NEWS and THINKING about THE PANDEMIC and THE RESPONSE, and, frankly, as previously stated I have no expertise in or around any of the issues affecting us at the moment; as such, I’ve tried to keep this week’s selection, insofar as it touches on WHAT’S GOING ON, on the side of cultural observations, which feel less…well, potentially-terrifying, frankly. Basically, though, there’s lots of stuff to read in here this week which has NOTHING to do with the news and so I encourage you to scroll down a bit and pick some pleasing prose distractions of your choosing.
  • Our Self-Isolating Future: This piece asks the question which I’ve seen several people grappling with this week, to whit ‘will we ever work in the same way ever again?’. This is mainly focused on the practical realities of coworking and collaboration being now proven to…sort-of work, for most white-collar gigs at least, and whether that this, coupled with a potentially more-virally-compromised future, might lead to this, or a version of this, becoming The Norm in the medium-term. The thinking gets interesting towards the end where it begins to consider the societal implications of this sort of shift; this isn’t a miserable piece, per se, but it might make you think slightly scifi thoughts, so, well, caveat emptor. If you’re interested, this piece in Technology Review looks at the same topic from a slightly more technical perspective, coming to many of the same broad conclusions.
  • Delivery In An Age of Pandemic: This is a every angry, slightly shouty, piece in VICE which asks the quite reasonable question of all of us: “Are we stopping to think about the poor fcuks who are the human pieces in the logistics operation ensuring we can order whatever the fcuk we want from the internet and still expect to find it on our doorstep within 24h, pandemic be damned?” No, of course we’re not, and there’s nothing we can do about it – fine, it’s nice to say to people “Don’t buy stuff from places that do delivery”, but not everyone has that privilege; simultaneously, the precarious nature of this sort of supplychain work means there’s a legitimate argument to suggest that we’ve sort of got an obligation to support workers in these jobs who will likely have no security whatsoever. Basically this is a cast-iron example of the magic of the modern capitalist machine, in which whatever you do someone, somewhere is in essence getting fcuked with knives. I know that this is perhaps a bit pinko-utopian of me, but I do rather hope that we come out of this with rather more of a ‘no, these systems are not OK’-type view than we do at present. The central message, though – that in times like these we shouldn’t be buying frivolous sh1t online, or pretending that doing so doesn’t have very real consequences – is one we should all get behind.
  • “I’m Not An Epidemiologist, But…”: Excellent reporting by Ryan Broderick at Buzzfeed, focusing on the author of a certain post on Medium that has apparently gone EVERYWHERE this week (I didn’t see it as I am trying not to read stuff about this that I have no hope of understanding) and which opens with that exact line – because it was written by some bloke in marketing! If you can read this piece and not get small shudders of horror at the revelation (deliciously, just left there without comment) that said marketing bloke has employed a content promotion agency to help get even more attention and fame as a result of having written something viral, you’re a stronger person than I am. USING YOUR PANDEMIC SPECULATIONS FOR THE CLOUT, IS IT??? My days. Honestly.
  • Our Boring Instagram Lives: Or, alternatively, The Great Content Boom of 2020. This piece positions the sharing of quotidian mundanity on the socials as being effectively a form of ‘self care’, a kind of ‘we’re all in it together’ sort of boring shared experience that will start to see people becoming more and more comfortable sharing streams, audio, images and the rest of the every day. Which is almost certainly true, but which doesn’t fill me with joy; I know that sharing’s good and all that jazz, but I’m also increasingly aware that it will be entirely possible to Soma oneself through the next XX weeks of this simply by staring at your tiny screen at other human beings doing nothing and, well, it doesn’t feel like that’s a great idea tbh.
  • The World of Zoom: Three weeks ago, you’d never heard of Zoom; now you’ve got a favourite background, you know the jokes, you call yourself a ‘Zoomer’ (please, don’t do that, even if you’re a kid)…this is a really interesting NYT piece (whose web culture team, Taylor Lorenz in particular, are SO good at the moment) on how people (mainly kids) are using the platform, how it might birth new entertainment formats (see the dating Insta thing above, eg) and how its use may persist the CRISIS into everyday life. I can’t speak for everyone, fine, but I fcuking despise phonecalls AND video chat, and yet even I can see myself doing it over the next few months. Maybe I’ll learn to stop hating my face.
  • The Virtual Happy Hour: You don’t need me to describe what this article is about. A prediction, though – within a month, someone will go viral for getting VERY drunk and behaving disgracefully in one of these groupchats. Actually, maybe I should amend that to ‘within a week’; things are moving awfully fast.
  • Cash App Friday: Cash App is a money transfer app in the US, like Venmo but less famous. Every week, the company behind it gives away money to random users – the only catch is, you need to have the app. BOOM! Instant user-acquisition strategy and a viral moment on social media every week as people across Twitter and Insta start BEGGING Cash App to choose them for the drop. UK BRANDS – there is a MASSIVE opportunity around something like this right now, if you can afford to do big giveaway things; hard to get tonally right, fine, but I reckon we’ll see a couple of people create weekly competition/quiz-type giveaway things in the next few weeks that will do very, very well indeed.
  • TikTok’s Africa Play: TikTok continues to be a fascinating case study in terms of social media 2.0 rollout (sorry for the 2.0 thing, but you know what I mean; post-Insta, basically); this piece looks at how it’s effectively paying African YouTubers to make content for TikTok in the hope that their fans will follow them across and drive adoption. Smart, and also nakedly cynical – it’s rather impressive in a bleak sort of way.
  • TikTok’s Invisible Censorship: Ever wonder why TikTok is so MIDDLE-CLASS and BEAUTIFUL? By design, turns out, as moderation was in place to weed out users who looked ugly or ‘ghetto’ (yes, really – parse that however you will) in favour of more visually-appealing kids who were more likely to keep viewers watching. “Under this policy, TikTok moderators were explicitly told to suppress uploads from users with flaws both congenital and inevitable. “Abnormal body shape,” “ugly facial looks,” dwarfism, and “obvious beer belly,” “too many wrinkles,” “eye disorders,” and many other “low quality” traits are all enough to keep uploads out of the algorithmic fire hose. Videos in which “the shooting environment is shabby and dilapidated,” including but “not limited to … slums, rural fields” and “dilapidated housing” were also systematically hidden from new users, though “rural beautiful natural scenery could be exempted”” On the one hand, this is vile; on the other, the public gets what the public wants, etc etc etc.
  • Folding City: Toyota has very quietly created a hugely-interesting experiment in AI, with the development of the very-Resident Evil-sounding ‘Folding City’ at the base of Mount Fuji, which in 2021 is scheduled to become the world’s first robotic city, in which robotics and AI are integrated into every aspect of civic and social planning. Reading this in the context of the past week is a genuinely-fascinating look at how a post-Corona society might look, with an increased in automated delivery systems and more spaced out housing, etc – obviously, this is very much ‘how a post-Corona society might look for the rich’, but it’s a rare piece of futurology that feels as contemporary as this currently does.
  • From Pr0n to YouTube: Another piece about platform stars pivoting to new formats in an attempt to expand their audiences – after last week’s piece on Twitch streamers trying to make it on TikTok, now it’s the stars of bongo trying to get some of that mainstream appeal by posting wholesome, relatable content on the Tube. Why? Well, audience is money, and I would imagine that bongo really isn’t that lucrative for most performers these days; if you can command an audience of hundreds of thousands for your home workout videos, maybe one day you’ll get to stop having to play ‘P1sspig Granddad’ in “Urinal Chuggers XII”. It’s interesting how as the online entertainment industry matures a bit we’re seeing a similar move from its stars toward becoming ‘entertainers’ and wanting to capture as many demographics as possible, just like back in the day.
  • 25 Songs That Matter Now: This is, I think, the third year the NYT has done that, and as ever it’s a superb overview of the current state of the music scene, taking you from Lizzo to Swift to del Rey to Styles to…oh, just click the link. Really beautiful webwork, too, although personally were I some of these artists I might feel a little bit like the artist had something of a grudge against some of these poor famouses. I mean, Lana del Rey, what DID you do to this person?
  • The Perks of Being a Weirdo: On how oddity and outsider-ness at a young age can help with creativity in later life. Which obviously I agree with, as someone who was very much in the ‘only not picked last for games because there were at least two kids in his class with genuine disabilities’ camp, although part of me does slightly wonder whether it’s b0llocks and the jocks are just as creative as we are, it’s just that they don’t have to bother because they enjoy life just as it is and don’t have to waste their time making up imagined worlds in which they’re the special stars.
  • Cottagecore: I feel like this is coming like a tidal wave. Cottagecore is the aesthetic trend towards the sort of ‘I live in the country and raise chickens and my daily existence is simply a long line of domestic activities which I complete with an air of zenlike calm and without getting even a bit of cupcake batter on my immaculate vintage polkadot Amish dress”; which, basically, is absolutely the Pinterest-version of social isolation that we’re all going to be subjected to.
  • From Bongo To Oscar: Will Pr0nhub ever win an Oscar? Why not? This is an interesting look at the entertainment industry, which posits that on the basis of numbers alone there’s no reason why Pr0nhub won’t be able to expand upon its recent foray into non-bongo content and perhaps become a proper production company a la Netflix.
  • Cameo: I featured Cameo on here a few years back – or certainly something very similar to it – as you will doubtless-recall; it’s a platform that lets you pay ‘celebrities’ a set fee to record a message for you, and its popularity is BOOMING. You want to get Dave Benson Philips to wish your gran a happy birthday? JOB DONE! You want to get Darren Bent to tell your mate he’s got no tekkers? YES MATE! This is a really entertaining look at the site and how it works, and the weird economy of celebrity that means people really are willing to pay a Tom Cruise lookalike to perform a small reaction video that they can use as their signature sign-off in Stories for evermore.
  • Charm With Menaces: I imagine many of you are planning on getting cosy with the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy; this is a (no spoilers: laudatory) review of it in the LRB, which whilst being, obviously, incredibly positive, does a good job of not just being a total hagiography. If you enjoyed Wolf Hall and Bringing up the Bodies, and even if you’re yet to read the final novel, this is a superb piece of literary criticism and a pleasure to read.
  • Naked & Afraid: In the US, there’s a TV show in which two people get dumped, naked, into the wilderness, and have to survive for four weeks with no assistance. This article is the story of a female contestant on the show; it’s a brilliant behind-the-curtain peek at how the sausage is made, and you will be amazed at just how little artifice is used in production of this quite insane-sounding show.
  • On Motherhood and Money: A superb essay – one of a few on the topic I’ve included in here in the past few years, but it does seem to produce excellent writing – on the burdens of art and motherhood and production and getting paid and parenting and guilt on writing women. So, so well-written and well-observed.
  • Broken Country: Or, sexuality and disability. Molly McCully Brown writes wryly (I know, I know, ‘wry’ is one of those qualities that noone actually ever exhibits outside of fiction, but I promise it fits here) and movingly about being a sexually active, interested, curios adult in a body which, during adolescence, is widely seen as nothing but asexual, and how her life is defined, sexually or otherwise, by her experience of a body which fights her. “Just as I hit adolescence, my body abruptly began to break down. I grew, and so did my physical instability. My tendons tightened, and my pain increased. The doctors scheduled another set of medical procedures: a surgery, a summer in a set of full-leg plaster casts and then a pair of heavy, bulky metal braces. Just as I began to learn I could feel sexual desire, I was splintered and in pain again, and the fact of it demanded most of my attention. My earliest experiences with lust feel shrunken by the trauma, vague and distanced, as if I watched through a scratched viewfinder while they happened to someone else. I can’t identify them for you except as strange, dark shapes at an unreachable horizon line.” Beautiful.
  • My Gchat Affair: An office ‘romance’, never consummated, conducted over Gchat, recalled in painfully-clear detail by Eleanor Thomas. If you’ve ever had a workplace relationship of any sort, there will be elements of this that are so painfully familiar that you will wince with recognition.
  • Absolution:The story of a former child soldier who served in Joseph Kony’s (remember him? Wow, where does the time go) army in the late 90s and early-00s, told mostly in his own words, as told to Adriana Carranca. An incredible piece of writing, which manages to present its subject as victim and perpetrator, as the poor man surely was; be warned, there is a LOT of very unpleasant violence in this piece, alluded to if not always explicitly described, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
  • What Do We Do With Feelings Now That They Don’t Matter Anymore?: WARNING: this will not make you feel happy if you read it. That said, I thought it a superb piece of writing, on what we are supposed to do with the feeling that feeling sad is just what we do now, and how we are going to feel forever. Look, here’s a flavour of it: “We’re in a moment now where we have had these lives that we’ve lived, things we have said, things we have achieved, people we love, but in the end, the stuff that matters is whether or not we can survive, and who else we can help to survive. You may have been told all your life that there were certain things you needed and certain things you needed to do, but it turns out that you don’t need most of those things and you don’t really need to do anything. In fact, nothing would be better for the world right now than if we all stopped trying to achieve things and said, “We no longer believe work will set us free, it is the opposite, in fact,” and behaved accordingly.” I thought this was beautiful but, really, take care with it.
  • The Knowledge: Finally this week, a longread about cabbies doing the knowledge. There was an EXCELLENT New York Times piece about exactly this which I included in Curios about 5 years ago – this treads similar ground, obviously, but is far, far better at asking questions about the intangible qualities of specific types of knowledge or information which mean we perhaps ought to value them differently or separately to their utility. Regardless, this is a superb, entertaining, warm piece of writing which made me forget about everything for five minutes while I read it; I hope it does the same for you too.

Weirdly enough, I didn’t see ANY interesting music videos this week so this week’s Curios ends here, with me wishing you a safe week til I write one of these fcukers again. Take care of yourselves, and thanks for reading. I love each and every one of you with a troubling intensity that I am almost ashamed to admit.

By Miki Kim

Webcurios 13/03/20

Reading Time: 33 minutes

Well. That escalated quickly! 

Look, I know fcuk all about disease, transmission, virii, epidemics or any of this stuff so fear not, I’m not about to tell you What I Think about all this. Think of me instead as some sort of diligent support worker, toiling away in the content mines to bring you fresh nuggets of webspaff (globules, possibly, though I’m not sure if one can mine a globule; don’t worry everyone, I write this top section at the end so you’re very much getting the fag-end of my prose here; I promise you it gets better (marginally) after the first picture) to keep you entertained and brainfed in the midst of all the panic. 

So don’t think about the virus more than you have to; try not to panic, try not to fret, call your mum and dad if you’re able, and generally just relax – you’ve now got literally NO EXCUSE not to read every single word and click every single link in here, given you’re probably going to be confined to your home before too long. 

Is this it? Has it happened? Have I finally found an actual POINT to this fcuking blognewsletterthing – to provide something for people to do at a time of viral panic? See, there are silver linings!

Oh, and speaking of STUFF TO DO WITH YOUR TIME, why not pick up a copy of the Imperica Magazine for £3? It contains LOADS of words, none of them by me, and is an excellent way of passing some time while you wait for something to happen. 

I’m Matt, this is Web Curios, and this too will pass.  

By Alessandro Furchino Capria

LET’S KICK THIS OFF WITH AN AMAZING PLAYLIST OF TRIPHOP CLASSICS AND OBSCURITIES!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THIS IS AN EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY FOR US ALL TO QUIETLY STOP DOING BRANDED S*C**L M*D** WHILE EVERYONE IS DISTRACTED BY THE NEWS OF A GLOBAL PANDEMIC SO THAT WHEN THIS ALL BLOWS OVER WE CAN RETURN TO A WORLD IN WHICH FAST FOOD BRANDS DON’T TRY AND TALK TO US ON THE INTERNET:

  • Facebook Extends Political Ad Rules To New Countries: There was a piece of research published recently by Tandon School of Engineering in New York which pointed out that they had found 86,000 instances of ads which should have been flagged as political based on Facebook’s own rules which, er, weren’t – another shining endorsement of the integrity of the Big Blue Misery Factory’s policies and their enforcement. Still, 32 additional countries including Mexico and Indonesia are now at least ostensibly falling into line with FB’s rules on political advertising; check the list and amend your lying propagandising appropriately (or, er, don’t! It won’t matter! These rules aren’t worth the digital paper they’re sort-of printed on!).
  • Twitter Amends Its Developer Policy: This won’t be of any interest to the vast majority of you, but if you build things on Twitter or using its APIs then it’s worth a look; basically this is a tweak rather than a full rewrite, but there’s some interesting stuff in here about the rules around bot creation, specifically-designed to help distinguish between ‘good’ bots and malicious ones in terms of the way they’re treated by the platform. Specifically, it’s asking developers to clearly claim responsibility for bots they have built and make that information available in-bio. So, er, developers! Disclose your bots! Or don’t! Maybe none of this matters anyway!
  • TikTok Improves Analytics: Specifically adding “some new analytics tools in its Creator Marketplace app, including real-time insights into influencer campaign views, engagement rates, engaged audience demographics and more.” As you will all doubtless know, the Creator Marketplace is TikTok’s own ‘let us help you find shiny-haired children on our platform to shill your product for you’ influencer/brand matching tool; these updates are designed to help brands get better, clearer information about the performance of content posted by said ‘influencers’ and make better decisions as to which of the post-Sylvia Young teens they’re going to shower with swag in exchange for making a 10-second ‘comedy’ vignette featuring their specific brand of shampoo. God, it all sounds so tawdry when I write it like this; sorry.
  • TikTok Launches Transparency Centre: This is very smart, I think; TikTok’s getting ahead of the backlash wave by opening what it calls a ‘transparency centre’ in LA which will afford people the opportunity to see under the bonnet of the platform’s moderation and safety efforts. Doing this before there’s a massive cry from old legislators asking for exactly this information is very, very smart indeed, and an object lesson in how to own this type of stuff from a comms point of view; we could sit here and debate exactly how much I’d be inclined to believe the processes demonstrated in this transparency centre as being indicative of actual processes and procedures rather than an idealised version of them, but simply as a PR exercise this is very smart work indeed.
  • Snap Launches Lens Web Builder: ANYONE CAN NOW MAKE LENSES FOR SNAP! Really easily! In-browser! In minutes! This is…oh, look, here: “Snap has created a basic but functional tool that can be accessed from common web browsers, letting users create a new lens in minutes without AR design experience. In addition to hundreds of Snap-supplied assets, including 3D objects, effects, and animations, creators can upload 2D assets, such as logos and images, for personalization. The custom lens is then available for use in Snapchat ad campaigns, subject to daily minimum spending requirements.” This won’t kill the more sophisticated tools previously available, just offer an easy route in for anyone who fancies making some AR gubbins – if you’ve any sort of digital design or artistic talent then this sounds like something that would be a LOT of fun to play around with as you climb the walls with isolation madness in a few short weeks’ time.
  • Snap Camera: It’s entirely possible that this is super-old, but I hadn’t seen it before and it cropped up this week as part of a wider conversation around home working and teleconfering and stuff. Snap Camera lets anyone use AR effects which work using your webcam rather than your phone, leveraging Snap’s excellent tech off-mobile for the lols. Download this and enliven all your otherwise-moribund videocalls over the coming weeks with the application of the COMEDY DOG FACE filter or whichever other one takes your fancy; it’s apparently compatible with loads of programmes, so you should be able to ‘amuse’ your colleagues with this whatever wfh-stack you’re employing.
  • Reddit Launches Paid Trends: This, I think, is rather exciting (insofar as new ad formats can ever be truly described as such); “On Monday, Reddit introduced its latest ad product, called Trending Takeovers, where brands can buy 24 hours of prominent placement on the social platform’s Popular feed and within its search tab”. Now obviously all the usual caveats apply here about what trending on Reddit might end up meaning in terms of ‘loads of internet edgelords making your brand a bit toxic’, but, if you’re willing to put up with hundreds of comments telling your employer to fcuk off and die, there are few better places to achieve mass-level visibility for whatever you’re trying to shill. Prices are on-application, but the article linked here suggests this will cost less than the equivalent service on Twitter, which feels like a bargain imho.
  • Google Chrome Adds Better Accessibility Testing: Not technically about s*c**l m*d**, but it’s worky and so vaguely fits in here; Google Chrome now lets developers test their code to show them what it will look like to people with different visual impairments, which is a simple but very smart way of helping ensure that sites are developed with accessibility in mind.
  • I Lost My Gig: I know a few people who work in the events space, and the poor fcukers are having an awful time at the moment; there are going to be whole business that go to the wall as the virus shuts in-person business down over the next month or so. This website was set up in the wake of the cancellation of SXSW last week, and is a space for people who’ve had gigs disappear as a result to share the nature of their work, the amount of money they’re going to be out of pocket for, links to their businesses, and their payment details should anyone want to chuck them a few quid out of goodwill. Which, obviously, is lovely; that said, I confess to having a bit of a “hang on, WHAT?!?” at the person on here who’s claiming to be in a $40,000 income-hole based on the cancellation of orders for ‘balloons and flowers’ – HOW MANY BALLOONS IS THAT?????
  • Why We Run: Finally, a palette-cleansing, business-as-usual bit of webwork from Strava – this is a really nice piece of digital design and information visualisation all about Strava’s research into the motivating factors for what motivates people to run, what they enjoy – and hate – about the experience, etc, all of which is not only a boon to any of you who ever need to discover some bullsh1t ‘insight’ (actually, can we pause for a second? Can we please, please, please stop using this word? It has become so overworked as to be meaningless and is seemingly now used solely to refer to ‘some data’ and, honestly, every time I hear you misuse it I imagine what it would be like to peel the skin from your face with a meathook) but which is also smart in terms of the brand job of cementing Strava’s status as ‘the people who GET outdoorsy exercise’.

By Daido Moriyama

NEXT, ENJOY PHILIP GLASS’S SOUNDTRACK TO KING LEAR!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT, IF YOU ARE STAYING AT HOME FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME AND STARTING TO CLIMB THE WALLS A BIT, THE WEB CURIOS ARCHIVE CONTAINS APPROXIMATELY 10MILLION WORDS AND LINKS WITH WHICH TO AMUSE AND DISTRACT YOURSELF, PT.1:

  • The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I linked this last week, but it’s important enough to link again – this is a live list of tech resources from across the globe dealing with the spread of the virus, its tracking and its attempted containment.
  • Wash Your Hands Bot: One might hope that we’ve all got the memo about personal hygiene in the past weeks, but in case not you might want to follow this practical little Twitter bot by Rob Manuel which has one job and one job only – to Tweet every hour and swearily remind you to WASH YOUR FCUKING HANDS. Combine this with the ‘don’t touch your face’ webcam-toy from last week and your safety from the viral apocalypse is assured (it is not assured; please don’t sue me if you get sick).
  • Wash Your Lyrics: You know about this, I’m sure – this did the rounds this week, and rightly so. A lovely idea, this lets you plug in any song you can think of and automatically generate a public information-style poster which shows you how to wash your hands thoroughly for 20 seconds using the lyrics of your chosen track as your timer – because we’re all bored of singing ‘Happy Birthday’ as we scrub. You could, of course, take the radical and hitherto-unimagined step of just fcuking counting, of course, but where’s the whimsical fun in that? My favourite outputs from this so far have been the ones using oddly-inappropriate tracks; ‘Too Drunk To Fcuk’ by the Dead Kennedys is nice, as is anything by Cannibal Corpse should you wish to give yourself a deep, undernail clean whilst humming about ‘orgies of Sodom’.
  • Staying Home Club: An ongoing list of the businesses that have so far sent their staff home to self isolate rather than requiring them to come into the office petri dish. If you’re starting to feel a bit anxious about going into work, commuting and all that jazz, I suggest you send this to whoever you feel might give a sh1t and ask them why they don’t care about you and want you to die. As an aside, my cousin in Rome is on full lockdown at the moment along with the rest of my family; she was offered the option to work from home this week, but on trying to take it up was subsequently told that she wasn’t allowed because she hadn’t taken a ‘working from home safety training module’ online. OH KAFKA!!
  • These Nudes Do Not Exist: Right, enough of that virus stuff. Let’s get back to the weird, grubby and vaguely-uncomfortable, the real meat of the Web Curios experience. I’m slightly surprised that this has taken so long, given it’s been a full year since the first ‘X doesn’t exist’ GAN-generated imaginary stuff websites first started appearing; equally, I’m also slightly surprised that this does exist given the fact that, for better or worse, the one thing that you’re never far away from online is an image of the naked female form. Stil, exist it does – this website offers a service whereby for the low, low price of $1 you can download your very own GAN-imagined naked woman, wholly machine-imagined, for you to do with as you wish. I…don’t really understand what this is for, or what use one might put these imagined nudes to, and there’s something interesting-and-bleak in the idea that even nude modelling is an industry that could be affected by the march of the machines and the replacement of human labour with its digital equivalent, but I think, most of all, my main reaction to this is one of slightly-exhausted disgust. Although, now I think about it, if your image is part of the dataset used to train the GAN to create these, what sort of rights might you be able to claim as a partial-creator? After all, one might reasonably argue that one’s image is an integral part of the process, that without one’s image the software would be fundamentally different, and that as such there’s a clear link between said image and the output generated which could, maybe, be grounds for (infinitesimally-small) compensation. I mean, good luck to the lawyer wanting to take this one on on behalf of the rest of humanity, but it’s an intellectually interesting argument if nothing else.
  • This Meme Does Not Exist: This, though, is GREAT – ALL of the meme templates, with machine-generated captions! So, so, so good – surreal and nonsensical and yet just about recognisable within their genres, if I were in charge of a million+ normie Insta account I would absolutely start dropping some of these on the TL to see how people responded. I mean, look at this one! Or this one! Bookmark this on your phone and drop these into the groupchat at regular intervals to win it FOREVER.
  • This Artwork Does Not Exist: DOESN’T IT? OH MY BRAIN! Post-Duchamp snarkery aside, this is a rather lovely stream of GAN-generated art; there’s a little nav console in the bottom-right that lets you generate a new one and there’s something quite lovely about just cycling through the abstracts. I would be interested to see how these looked in a gallery space; on the one hand, there’s a certain common quality to all the generated works that I think would become deadening if experienced en masse, but, on the other, this is all better than about 80% of the stuff I saw last time I went to Frieze so, well, who knows?! Regardless, if there’s not a plan afoot to create a special version of this code in a digital frame for sale as an infinite artwork then I don’t know WHAT is wrong with the world (if nothing else, I would totally buy one – please, MAKE IT JUST FOR ME).
  • The New York Apartment: This is the best and most interesting digital artwork I’ve seen in a while; it takes every single estate agent’s listing for every single apartment available for sale in New York and mashes them into one kilometric, imagined apartment, which you can explore online at your leisure. There’s a 3d virtual tour! There are literally hundreds of thousands of rooms! It costs nearly $50BN! Honestly, take the 3d tour – it’s dizzying and amazing and like some sort of real estate ‘libarary of Babel’ and I love it immoderately. Honestly, everything about this is perfect, not least the strange, otherwordly flatness of estate agent prose when experienced at scale, and the way that the aspiration inherent in property becomes absurd and slightly pathetic when presented in this sort of way. I would LOVE to see this developed as some sort of installation, although I appreciate that probably totally misses the point of the whole thing. Equally, I’d love to see a London comparison; if nothing else, the linguistic differences would be fascinating.
  • Subcutanean: Shamefully I missed this when it was crowdfunding – I’M SORRY – but better late than never. Subcutanea is a horror-ish novel, whose gimmick is that no two copies are the same; the copy is to a degree procedurally-generated, meaning that each version printed will be materially different in meaningful, plot-defining ways. “The master manuscript contains hundreds of moments of variation on the same core story. Sometimes these are whole scenes that might appear in some versions but not others: sometimes they’re single words that change the way you might feel about a character or an event. Each time someone orders a copy of the book, a new version will be generated by randomly collapsing all these alternatives down to a single version of the story, including keeping interconnected bits consistent, handling print-ready layout, and uploading the new text to the printer.” I have my doubts as to whether this will necessarily make for a particularly compelling read, but I am in awe of the ambition here and the thinking behind how to practically make this happen is genuinely fascinating – if you’ve any interest in automated prose generation (AND WHO DOESN’T??), and the possibilities of human/machine literary collaboration, this is probably a must-read.
  • Jigsaw: “Jigsaw is a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer…We identify emerging technology threats that destabilize the internet and our society. We develop cutting-edge research and technology to counter these threats, and help defend civil society, journalists, activists and those at the forefront of digital conflict.” This is an interesting series of case studies and resources from Google, offering some insight into the work it does and the products it develops to help address issues of malicious misinformation and state-level disruption online. If you’re anyway involved in digital democracy and / or related initiatives, this is worth a look.
  • Is Something Behind The Waterfall?: Videogame waterfalls! Is there anything behind them? WHO KNOWS??? Well, thanks to this Twitter account you do! It answers the vitally important question of whether there’s anything for players to find behind digital waterfalls, but not, sadly, why one should never chase them.
  • The Twitter Coding Challenge 2020: This is interesting, although only those of you who can actually code (and, probably, are quite good at it) need apply here. Twitter’s launched its 2020 RecSys challenge, which this year is offering people ACTUAL CASHMONEY PRIZES if they can create code which works to predict engagement levels on Tweets, based on the downloadable corpus available on the site. “This challenge aims to evaluate novel algorithms for predicting different engagement rates at a large scale, and push the state-of-the-art in recommender systems. Following the success and advancements in the domain of top-K recommendations, we aim to encourage the development of new approaches by releasing the largest real-world dataset to predict user engagements. The dataset comprises of roughly 200 million public engagements, along with user and engagement features, that span a period of 2 weeks and contain public interactions (Like, Reply, Retweet and Retweet with comment), as well as 100 million pseudo negatives which are randomly sampled from the public follow graph.” I find this really interesting, not least in terms of the idea that there can be easily-definable criteria or characteristics which can reliably predict engagement rates on content; I thought we’d given up hunting the ‘what makes things go viral?’ unicorn, but perhaps not.
  • Dress David Rose: I believe that David Rose is a character from popular TV show Schitt’s Creek (that’s not intended to be some sort of snobby “I am better than you because I am uncertain about an aspect of popular culture” ‘I believe’, by the way, more an expression of genuine uncertainty and an uncharacteristic reluctance to Google); anyway, whoever David Rose is, this website lets you play dress up with him, in a wide range of outfits taken from various series of whatever entertainment he’s a part of. Wow, that feels like I totally managed to suck the joy from this through the power of my prose alone – well done, Matt! Tell you what, though, I really like some of these tops – can someone make this shoppable, please?
  • The Auction Game: Another site by Neil Agwaral, who made the rather nice visualisation of income from a few weeks back; this is a simple, fun game which shows you an item that has sold at auction and asks you to guess how much it went for. Shouldn’t be entertaining but very much is, and now I want someone to make the same game but which asks you to recall the exact fee paid for Premier League footballers over the past 30 years. Seriously, it would do NUMBERS – you can thank me later, people at Joe or the Mirror or whoever.
  • Rap Machine: This is another AI-ish generative toy and so should really be up top with the rest of them, but taxonomical consistency be damned! Rap Machine is a rhyming lyric generator, trained on a large corpus of hiphop lyrics, which lets you input a seed lyric and then generates another to follow it (you can read about how it’s made here if you like). It’s significantly less impressive than the lyrics generator I chucked in here a few weeks back – this one, in fact! – but it does throw out some very WTF-ish copy and as such might be worth keeping open this afternoon as a way of injecting some creativity into your responses to work emails. Feeding it “did you email the client?” as a prompt caused it to offer me “you don’t need to give a fcuk you a fcuk steak” as the subsequent line, which I am now going to find it very, very hard not to email to someone once I’m done with Curios this week.
  • Carnegie Museum on TikTok: Thanks to Katie for sending this my way – it’s JOYFUL. Museums on TikTok are very much a THING at the moment, but this is the best example I’ve yet seen, mainly thanks to whoever the bloke with the white beard and the inexplicable snail obsession is. Honestly, just watch these – I have no idea who this man is, but I LOVE HIM SO MUCH, and all his dad jokes about snails. This is very, very joyful indeed.
  • Sim Memes: The Sims is…what, 25 years old now? For some reason EA have decided that it needs a new marketing push and have created a new promo campaign featuring famouses talking about how much they love the game and some slightly-cringey language around how it’s all about ‘PLAYING WITH LIFE’ or somesuch; ignore all that, though, and scroll down to get involved with the SIMS MEME GENERATOR! Yep, for reasons known only to the EA marketing team, you can now make ‘memes’ by combining a preselected image from the Sims with a preselected caption (no freedom to create whatever you like here, for fairly obvious reasons of brand stewardship) – there’s noone on Earth who’s ever thought ‘you know what? I don’t feel I can communicate to the best of my ability because there’s as yet no way for me to overlay a series of generic, largely-meaningless phrases over the top of a graphic from a popular videogame franchise about the mundanity of life’, and yet here we are. These are SO BAD, and as a result SO GOOD, and there’s a very real chance that if you know me you will be getting nothing but these and poorly-composed rap couplets for the rest of the day so, well, sorry about that.
  • Unpluq: Are you incapable of resisting the siren call of the magical glass rectangle in your pocket for more than 30s at a time? Do you wish you could GET YOUR LIFE BACK??? Well perhaps consider developing some fcuking willpower, then, you weak, pathetic, spineless whelp; what’s wrong with you? Or, alternatively and perhaps less unfairly-aggressively, consider backing Unpluq – a Kickstarter campaign just nudging up to funded at the time of writing, which offers you a physical key which you can attach to your phone which, when removed, will effectively brick 90% of its functions to transform it into a dumbphone and thereby remove all the shiny digital distractions. Actually, my snark aside, this looks like it could be a genuinely useful thing in terms of instituting parental controls on device use – physical blocking devices are far, far harder to circumvent than digital ones, after all, as anyone who’s played the game of teen whack-a-mole that is ‘attempting to limit their time on Fortnite’ will know.

By Kata Geibl

NOW HAVE THIS FRANKLY FILTHY MIX OF JUNGLE, ELECTRO, BREAKS AND ASSORTED OTHER GUBBINS BY YAZZUS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT, IF YOU ARE STAYING AT HOME FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME AND STARTING TO CLIMB THE WALLS A BIT, THE WEB CURIOS ARCHIVE CONTAINS APPROXIMATELY 10MILLION WORDS AND LINKS WITH WHICH TO AMUSE AND DISTRACT YOURSELF, PT.2:

  • The Uncensored Library: Thanks to Kathryn Meyer (apologies if I’ve misspelled that) for sending this to editor Paul; this is SUCH a wonderful project, and a proper ‘wow, sometimes people and the web are legitimately amazing’ thing. Reporters Without Borders have built a LIBRARY in Minecraft – not just any library, though, but one which features texts of articles and reporting that might have been censored by authoritarian regimes around the world, made available in-game on a special server for anyone to access wherever they are. The intention is that the library will exist as a permanent, growing digital resource, affording people around the world the opportunity to engage with information that may be censored in real life where they live but which can be accessed covertly via the seemingly-innocuous in-game engine. Honestly, this is MIND-BLOWINGLY smart and I am in awe of the concept and its execution – aside from anything else, the library they have built is just a glorious piece of digital architecture. I will be very disappointed if this doesn’t win all the awards this year – it is so, so clever and I wish I had had something to do with it.
  • Somnium Space: It’s Second Life…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN!!! I don’t really understand this – it looks like A N Other virtual world (oh, how quickly we become jaded!) except, er, ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! I think that the Blockchain element is designed to offer some sort of persistent ownership opportunities of virtual assets, but all it makes me think is that this is a massive grift and that someone, somewhere is trying to rip me off – will Blockchain ever shake off that slight air of ‘obsessive Redditor in a basement somewhere’, do you think, or has it been ruined forever by the BitcoinBros? Anyway, this looks like it’s some sort of con, but it’s quite an entertaining one – I especially encourage you to scroll down the website and get to the ‘features’ bit’; alongside the expected virtual world elements such as ‘cross-platform acces’ and ‘a persistent environment’ is also the slightly punchy claim that Somnium Space will one day let you LIVE FOREVER – “Automatic recording mode of yourself on your own property for future AI analysis to bring your avatar to life”!, they say. I..I appreciate that I am running the risk of looking VERY SILLY here, but I’m willing to bet that if anyone does discover the secret to eternal life it’s not going to be anything to do with a fcuking Blockchain-powered videogame.
  • Celebrity Gif Analysis: The Pudding with another piece of silly-but-impressive data analysis and visualisation, this time exploring the emotional range displayed by celebrities in the gifs that are most widely used of them on the web. This is really rather interesting; if I’m being picky, I would have been even more interested had they applied this analysis to the slightly thornier issue of racial representation in gifs, but maybe someone else can do that using this data.
  • A Pure CSS Landscape: A seaside sunset, rendered purely in CSS and presented in such a manner that lets you fcuk with the code and see what happens. Honestly, this sort of thing is basically witchcraft as far as I’m concerned – I can’t even begin to imagine what the inside of one’s head feels like when attempting to wrangle code like this, though I’d be willing to be the answer is ‘angular and crowded’.
  • Customise Your Google Maps: I don’t normally feature ‘quality of life’-type tips for the web in Curios, but I was ASTONISHED to learn that this is possible and you might be too. DID YOU KNOW that you can go into Google Maps and set preferences for the sort of stuff that it shows you? So, for example, you can tell it that you prefer vegan or vegetarian restaurants, say, or that you hate Vietnamese food (why? You racist) and it will take these preferences into account when serving you search results on Maps. Honestly, I can imagine this being a godsend if you have specific dietary requirements; obviously the downside here is that we’re telling Google even more about ourselves and our likes which it will then use as another means of selling us stuff more effectively but, well, it’s perhaps a bit late to start worrying about that now.
  • Jeans for Refugees: On the one hand, this is a charity project and therefore A Good Thing. On the other hand, WOW are some of these ugly. The gimmick here is that a bunch of famouses have donated a pair of denim, each of which is then painted by artist Jonny Dar and then sold off for charity. So, if you want to own a pair of Levi’s that were once potentially owned by, say, Ant of Ant and Dec fame (NOONE MENTION HIS SECRET FAMILY) and which have now been decorated to resemble a plasterer’s radio then, well, FILL YOUR BOOTS. A question – why does Julio Iglesias appear to have donated a pair of what can only be described as Matalan maternity jeans?
  • Mise En Place: A wonderful video series by Eater on YouTube, which looks behind the scenes at a selection of high-end kitchens and shows you how they function. All in the US at present, but don’t let that put you off – honestly, if you’re into food or cookery this will basically be like crack to you; I am running 15 minutes late this morning because I got stuck watching one of these at 640am, so please blame Gabriel Kreuther for the ever-so-slightly-rushed quality to the prose this morning (I know, I know).
  • Jodorowksi’s Dune: You all know the story here, right? That mad Mexican cinema auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky was once onboard to make a version of Frank Herbert’s epic scifi desert’n’worms-fest in the mid-70s, and that never happened, but the insanity of the planned production has passed into Hollywood legend? Well, this is a collection of the concept art and sketches from Jodorowsky’s planning process and MAN does this stuff look interesting (and mad). There has to be a videogame adaptation at some point, surely, using this visual style as a basis.
  • Webcams in Rome: You want to see what a city on lockdown looks like? Like this. Honestly, as someone who’s been to Rome twice a year, more or less, since birth, this is quite astonishing – you NEVER see it looking like this, ever.
  • All Of The Empty Places: In fact, have this – a selection of images from around the globe of cities denuded of people as we all hide at home from the VIRUS. The photo of the Vatican in particular very much felt as though it was taken immediately post-Rapture.
  • Face and Hand Tracking: I think this is the tech that that ‘Don’t Touch Your Face’ site from last week was built on – regardless, if there was ever time to start experimenting with tech that made it possible to control things with gestures rather than touching, now is it.
  • Fluid Dynamics: Another rather pretty little fluid dynamic simulator for you to play with in-broswer. Put this on your phone or on a tablet, put it on the floor and watch your cat get very, very excited as it tries and fails to catch whatever it thinks is moving down there. Or, er, don’t be so cruel. Up to you really.
  • Spatial: So, working from home eh? How’s that working out for you? I feel like, as a pseudo-freelancer, I should offer you some words of guidance about how to cope but, well, IT’S NOT FCUKING HARD FFS JUST TURN ON THE LAPTOP MAKE TEA AND STARE MINDLESSLY INTO SPACE JUST LIKE YOU WOULD DO IN THE OFFICE. Honestly, I don’t really understand this ‘but how will I motivate myself to do stuff?’ fear – like you normally do, you idiot, by telling yourself that if you don’t do it you will end up dying in penury on the streets. Anyway, that’s all by way of longwinded digression before introducing Spatial, an AR coworking solution! Yes, that’s right, SEE YOUR COLLEAGUES! Put virtual post-its on virtual walls! Wave at each other in AR whilst all being in different places! This genuinely does look quite remarkable and very future – it uses MS Hololens, as far as I can tell, and whilst the cost is obviously VIOLENT and there is no way it will work anywhere near as well as promised, but, well, it’s SO FUTURE. I think it only really makes sense for businesses whose work has a heavy design element to it – I can’t really see the benefit of AR for collaborating on GDocs, for example – but for those businesses that that applies to, this could be ACE. For lols, why not email your COO with this link and a short note saying “worth considering for the imminent Corona lockdown?”, just to see their face twitch at your ‘helpful’ suggestion.
  • Niche Twitter Rage: This is both a great Twitter thread and one which, in the end, will make you sort of wish for the virus to take us all and do the universe a favour. Elizabeth May wrote the following last Friday: “please tell me about an extremely niche section of twitter that you never knew existed until you made them angry. one time i made Feed Swans Bread Twitter angry after i suggested food alternatives. FOR MONTHS I got angry tweets, until I finally deleted it. YOUR TURN.” – the responses are…wow. SO many to love (and, really, hate), but this was my personal “what, really??” rubicon: “I said I felt badly for whales (prompted by an article about the noise pollution caused by ships). Apparently, Whales-Are-Bad-Actually Twitter is a thing. I got death threats. So, that was fun.” Imagine being the sort of person who hangs around the internet waiting for people to express a positive opinion on whales so that you could jump out at them shouting “NO THEY ARE EVIL MAMMALIAN FCUKS AND YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED FOR STANNING THEM”. Just imagine.
  • Sidetalkin: This is an EXCELLENT relic from the old internet, which James Whatley kindly informed me was something to do with Nokia fan communities and the NGage and stuff, but which most importantly is a very pure hit of mid-00s era internet, all flashing fonts and garish colours and silly photos of people posing with stuff and pretending to use it as a phone because…er…no idea! Still, it’s a nice callback to an era in which everyone was kind and nice to each other and bad things didn’t happen online ever (I know that’s not true, but it does rather feel like that at times).
  • Musicsplitter: So, what are you going to DO with all this time at home? Why not dedicate yourself to music production and remixing? Why not play with this tool, which lets you upload MP3 files and returns them to you split into individual tracks for vocals, drums and synth? The first couple are free and then it charges you 50p for each subsequent one; I am somewhat suspicious about the quality here, but it’s free to try so why not give it a go and finally get around to creating that reworked version of Crazy Frog that you’ve been dreaming of all these years.
  • Remove Video Background: Or, why not feed a bunch of video into this tool – which automatically isolates people and removes the background from any video you care to give it – and create a series of odd, slightly surreal clips of people from your company speaking at corporate events but now transposed into incongruous scenes from films, or maybe even bongo? See, you will NEVER get bored – Web Curios is basically Why Don’t You? for the end-of-days generation.
  • Zamboni Simulator: For those of you who don’t know, a Zamboni is the machine which cleans the ice on an ice rink. This game lets you drive one. Very slowly. Around an ice rink. You may not think you will enjoy this, but I promise you it is very, very zen indeed.
  • Happy Island Designer: Animal Crossing is a videogame in which you can create and manage your own cutesy little village (I think; I confess to being a touch ignorant as to the exact mechanics); there’s a new version coming out soon, and in preparation the designers have created this browser-based toy that lets you plan out your virtual village in advance, mapping plants and houses and flowers and paths and roads and ALL sorts of other things. You don’t need to know anything about the game, or even to have any intention of playing it, to enjoy this – it’s basically just a really gentle little town creation toy, which seems like the sort of thing it might be mice to spend a few hours noodling around with while you’re stuck inside bouncing off the walls.
  • Plant Daddy: Significantly less overtly-sexual than the name initially led me to believe, Plant Daddy is a game that lets you grow plants. That’s it, but it is VERY SOOTHING and VERY SLOW and VERY GENTLE, and you can’t, seemingly, kill the plants, which makes it approximately 100x more rewarding than real life, where I have repeatedly and traumatically discovered that you really can kill the plants, very easily indeed. This is a really nice one to have open in a browser tab and to check in on every 10m or so.

By Allan Bealy

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSIC, DID YOU KNOW THAT LINKEDIN HAS LAUNCHED ITS OWN RANGE OF MIXES ON SPOTIFY? CAN YOU THINK OF ANYTHING MORE SOUL-DESTROYING? EXPERIENCE THEM FOR YOURSELF AND FEEL YOUR SOUL BEING SUCKED FROM YOUR BODY AS YOU DO SO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Speculative Identities: NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! Still, it feels a bit Tumblr-ish; Speculative Identities is a site about the visual design of scifi, “exploring the worlds of science fiction in search of the possibilities they present, to see what kind of role visual identities have in our imagined frontiers and futures, and to learn how those works can inform the designer of today.” Interesting, particularly if design’s your thing.
  • Just Cassette: Shared on Twitter by the lovely people at Present & Correct, this is also NOT A TUMBLR but, well, fcuk it. It’s a tribute to the cassette tape, and frankly what could be more Tumblr-ish than that?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Marina Triantafyllidou: Not only is Ms Triantafyllidou an excellent artist, whose work combines watercolour work with elements of the fetish and ropework scene, but she also wins the coveted Web Curios ‘Surname of the Week’ award.
  • Romweird: Romwe is, as far as I can tell, like Wish but for clothes – a purveyor of cheap, disposable tat, but in the garment space rather than the WTF space. Except, as this Insta feed shows, it often falls into WTFery anyway; some of these outfits are ACE, though. I would totally wear a tshirt that read ‘Sad and Fancy’, for example.
  • Victor Harold: It’s been a while since I’ve been this impressed with a CG artist’s Insta feed, but this is astonishing stuff. Check out the tadpole-to-frog video; it’s quite, quite brilliant.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • The Italian Lockdown: I ended up on Roman Facebook (“faisbük”) the other night; MAN was that a mistake. If you’re in any way a nervous sort of person, can I please recommend that you don’t attempt to do any digging of translating? Anyway, the country’s in lockdown, my mum’s stuck in the house (I bet that STILL won’t be enough to persuade her to read all of this, though), my gran’s stuck in the house, my cousins are stuck in the house….this piece in Wired is a translation of the FAQs put out by the Italian Government around the currently STAY INDOORS legislation; whatever you might think of the UK Government’s response to date, it’s clear reading these that this isn’t exactly a well-thought or clearly-explained position either. Turns out attempting to put measures in place to change the behaviour of tens of millions of people at pace is hard. Not that you’d know that, of course, by listening to the literally thousands of generic media wankers who have developed a hitherto-unimagined degree of expertise in virology or epidemiology in the past week – I am reminded of this cartoon on an almost constant basis every time I look at Twitter.
  • The Word From Wuhan: Or rather, the word from Wuhan last week. This is an excellent piece by Wang Xiuying on their experience of the virus to date, and how it’s felt from the inside being subject to the strictures imposed by the Chinese state over the past month. It’s particularly interesting reading about the impact that the crisis may have on a generation’s perception of the State as a benevolent parental figure, although should the measures taken end up working as well as they currently seem to be you’d imagine that this whole thing will end up bolstering Xi rather than undermining him.
  • Belt & Road & Pakistan: Of course, China’s got other concerns beyond Corona – the slowing economy is impacting the scope and rollout of the Belt and Road project, which in turn will have interesting and far-reaching consequences for the potential geopolitical power balance across Asia and Africa over the coming century. This piece focuses specifically on the project’s work in Pakistan, where plans to create an international hub port out of basically nothing aren’t quite going to plan. I can’t help but be slightly awed when I read about this sort of stuff – it reminds me slightly of the feeling of impressed terror I get when I contemplate MechaBezos and all his works, insofar as China is here operating on a scale and vision so vastly larger than that we can even conceive of that it’s like their playing an entirely different game of statecraft to everyone else (which, I suppose, is exactly what they are in fact doing).
  • A Dataset is a Worldview: This is an excellent and very smart essay, which made me think about data and its supposed objectivity completely differently. The central thesis here is an obvious one now I come to think of it, but I simply hadn’t even considered it prior to reading the article; effectively its author, Hannah Davis, posits that there is no such thing as an ‘objective’ dataset, as all datasets are by definition subjective based on what it is that they choose to include and exclude; as such, we should all become better at acknowledging this subjectivity and mitigating against it when using siad datasets for universal applications. I’m explaining this badly because, bluntly, I’m not as smart as Davis, but read the essay for a far better and more cogent explanation.
  • It’s Not Easy Being (Consistently) Green: Seeing as we’re all now experts on behavioural psychology, this is a timely and interesting read on how the ‘spillover effect’ works to affect how we approach moral obligations such as being green. Simply put, this is about whether doing something green makes us more or less likely to do something else green in the future – the answer to the question is a complex mix of internal and external factors, bound up with broader social context, peer group dynamics and all sorts of things, but there’s LOADS of really interesting stuff here about how to design systems so as to optimise the likelihood of positive spillover effects resulting from single actions. This is really interesting, and now I too feel qualified to attend the next Cobra meeting along with EVERY OTHER FCUKING PR1CK ON TWITTER (sorry, this is still annoying me).
  • Cascades: It’s been a good week for slightly-hard, thinky, conceptual essays; this is another one, on the concept of ‘cascades’ – often referred to as ‘domino’, ‘snowball’ or ‘butterfly’ effects, but basically any system where an action leads to subsequent, escalating consequences – and how they work and how they can be used. There’s so, so much interesting thinking in here, and it’s written beautifully accessibly, even if you’re a mathematical untermenschen like me. Also, this is a mind-blowing fact: “how many dominos do you think it will take to knock down the Empire State Building? The Empire State Building is 443,000 mm tall (about half a kilometer). And you start with a domino 5mm tall (the width of your little finger). How many dominoes? 28”. Mad. Honestly, if you’re in any way interested in systems thinking, process or maths theory, this is truly fascinating.
  • Digital Theme Parks: Matthew Ball’s fast become one of the smartest people writing about the games and entertainment industries and where they are going; this is another piece of his, talking about the concept of ‘digital theme parks’ as a viable area of growth for companies like Disney, and how we might see Epic and others exploring how to leverage their platforms to create franchised digital experiences for fans to play. Fascinating.
  • Snap: My general bearishness about Snap over the years is a prime example of what a total moron I am when it comes to predicting anything (and why you should never, ever listen to my advice about anything to do with business – Hi, I’m Matt, I’m a ‘consultant’ – hire me!); this is an interview with Evan Spiegel in Fast Company which shows exactly why he’s a billionaire and I’m not. I find the way in which the company now barely talks about the Snapchat platform at all, instead focusing on the twin pillars of hardware and the AR tech stack, fascinating, and a great example of business evolution (sorry, I went all LinkedIn there, won’t happen again).
  • Weird Internet Careers: I love this, but it almost makes me a bit jealous. Gretchen McCulloch, online linguist who became famous last year off the back of her excellent book about how language is evolving post-web, writes here about ‘Weird Internet Careers’, jobs which are sort-of impossible to describe and certainly impossible to imagine without the web, and which are, in the main, self-sustaining and self-employed. God I wish there was a way in which I could do Curios as a job – and yes, I know that the main way of doing that would be to make it shorter, easier to consume and less cnuty, but, well, WHAT WOULD BE LEFT OF ME??? Anyway, if you have a young person anywhere in your life who’s feeling a bit confused, and you think that they are clever or talented, and they are EXTREMELY ONLINE, then give them this to read – I think it will help them (this also applies to non-young-people, tbh).
  • Dressing for the Surveillance Age: ANOTHER article about anti-surveillance fashion and tech; look, FFS, I called this MONTHS ago – this is going to become a mainstream fashion thing so can someone just hurry up and make it so so that I can move on? This is a New Yorker piece, so it’s a bit highfalutin’, but it asks lots of interesting questions about the extent to which we can expect to be able to stay one step ahead of the tech, and for how long.
  • Scarcity Studios: This, I confess, totally passed me by, but apparently – at least according to this WIRED piece – Scarcity Studios is a legitimate UK YouTube phenomenon, reporting on local crime with a degree of diligence and professionalism you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a YT channel. This article interviews the person behind it, but doesn’t (to my mind at least) quite go deep enough into why they are doing it, and the potentially iffy relationship between YouTube’s storied algorithm, monetisation and content; I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced that a system that rewards virality – which in itself tends to content of a sensational nature – is necessarily the best basis for sober reporting in the long term.
  • Twitch TikTokers: This is about Twitch streamers attempting to crossover onto TikTok – God I love writing sentences which would have been literally meaningless a matter of months ago – and is probably only of interest if you’ve skin in the streaming, gaming or content games. Still, as an overview of differing styles and approaches to content on the two radically different platforms, it’s fascinating, particularly the questions about whether the classic Twitch streamers persona can live on a different platform with different rules of engagement. I find this really, really interesting – not least the absolute 360 degree turn we’ve all done since the early days of the web. From ‘I can be whoever I want to be with whoever I’m with because noone will ever know’, to ‘you need to be consistent everywhere, the web rewards the true self’, back to ‘I’m this person on Insta, this on my finsta, this on my TikTok, this one on Messenger’…I think there’s something genuinely fascinating in this back-and-forth, though I confess that I don’t quite know exactly what.
  • I Was A Middle-Class Drug Mule: The sort of story that I imagine VICE writers sh1t out in their sleep, this is neither particular interesting or revelatory; that said, though, it’s worth reading if you want an object lesson in what ‘White Privilege’ looks like. You can’t quite imagine a person of colour having the same experiences, can you?
  • Woodrocket: Another VICE piece, this one however significantly more entertaining than the last – this is a profile of bongo studio Woodrocket, whose name you may not recognise (frankly, if you do, you possibly need to maybe put down the lube) but whose output you almost certainly will, even if only from the sharing of horrified WTAF thumbnails online. Woodrocket make those bongo parody films – the ones with people dressed in borderline-horrifying Smurf outfits, or as Spongebob, or as the weird CG monstrosities from Cats, all just sort of messily going at it whilst wearing slightly terrifying grins – and this is all about how (and why) they do it. Full warning – this is sort-of NSFW, in that there are a couple of pictures of naked people in here, but they are also made up to look like cartoon characters, so, well, no idea what the HR policy on that is tbqhwy.
  • Starbucks: I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this essay about Starbucks so much, but it is WONDERFUL – it’s about the idea of Starbucks, and how that idea is embodied in its thousands of shops, but also about how that idea communicates quite a lot about how we live (and how we aspire to live, and how we are told to aspire to live) in the West in the early part of the 21C. This is far, far better than any essay about a chain of coffee shops has any right to be.
  • In Praise of the Onion: It’s a glorious, beautiful paean to the onion – what more do you want to know? It’s by Thom Eagle, it’s an extract from his book ‘First, Catch’ which I am off to buy just as soon as I have finished typing all this rubbish, and it will make you want to spend the afternoon cooking.
  • Too Close To Home: Heartbreaking story of a young black man’s shooting and death, and how the community mark and celebrate his passing. Beautifully-written, unsentimental and very, very raw.
  • Tips for the Depressed: This is a wonderful piece of writing, comprising a series of pieces of advice for the depressed as well as being in itself a meditation on the condition and what it feels like and how we address it, or not, as a culture. Superb, and essential reading, I would argue, for every single one of you.
  • This Is, Of Course, Impossible: Finally this week, a genuinely cheering piece of writing by Eddie Robson – I don’t think I’ve ever featured fan fiction in here before, but this is a piece of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fanfic, and it’s beautifully written – it’s obviously indebted to Adams’ style, but not slavishly so, and it doesn’t feel at any point like Robson’s trying to be him if you see what I mean – and it’s funny and, honestly, it’s exactly the sort of thing to take your mind off stuff. Though, er, it does feature the end of the world. Anyway, it’s GREAT – thanks Eddie for writing it (NB I don’t know Eddie Robson and I don’t imagine they will ever see this, but just in case).

By Kazuo Sumida

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

  1. Riz Ahmed’s been in the news a lot this week with his comments on Britishness, identity and his feelings on both; if you’ve not heard the single from his new album, or seen the video, or listened to the poem at the end which honestly had me in pieces, then watch this NOW. All of it, please – it’s an astonishing 11 minutes:

  1. This is by Mild Minds, and the video is SO GOOD; I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite this visual effect before, and, honestly, it’s mesmerising. I rather like the track too, which makes me think of being driven across a city in the back of a car, over a flyover, at night, whilst staring out of the window as towerblocks pass:

  1. This is called ‘Nausea’, it’s by Black Dresses, and if it’s not the official global anthem by now it really ought to be. It feels really, really unwell:

  1. Not sure why, but so far 2020 has been a really good year for techno – this is another absolute banger, with an excellent, weird video – from Poland, VTSS with ‘Batman Church’:

  1. Sonic Rebuilt is a remake of the 1999 Sonic the Hedgehog animated film, recreated by over 200 artists in a mix of animation styles. It’s a mess, but it’s also a beautiful, incoherent, VERY ONLINE mess. Also, it’s an hour of Sonic; what else are you going to do with your time til this all blows over?:

  1. HIPHOP CORNER! This is Blueprint, it’s called ‘A Hero Dies Once’, and it’s SO beautifully oldschool I might cry. I adore this:

  1. Last up this week, thanks to Matteo for bringing this to my attention – it’s ITALOHIPHOPCORNER! Look, this is a total earworm but I promise you’ll thank me later – this is by Anna (who is 16 FFS!!) and it’s called ‘Bando’, and it BANGS (don’t worry about what the lyrics mean; not a fat lot, basically). Enjoy! Oh, and THAT’S IT I’M OFF TAKE CARE PLEASE – I REALLY DO MEAN IT THIS WEEK – AND STAY SAFE AND PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE WHEN IT COMES TO THOSE MORE VULNERABLE THAN YOU AND GENERALLY JUST TRY AND BE OK AND I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AND IN THE MEANTIME I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

<br>

Webcurios 06/03/20

Reading Time: 34 minutes

HELLO AGAIN I MISSED YOU!

That said, I’m somewhat up against it this morning what with needing to wash the stench off the fetid meatsack I call ‘corporeal reality’ and get myself to a lunch reservation; let me just say, though, that I hope none of you are currently infected and that you manage to stay alive at least as long as I do in the coming pandemic; I wouldn’t want to think of you missing any Web Curios, after all. 

This, then, is your regular weekly dose of words and links; it won’t protect you from infection, but I do like to think of it as something of a prophlactic against stupid if nothing else. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, let’s all try not to die (unless, honestly, we’re just tired and have had enough, at which point I think dying’s actually a pretty legitimate choice, all told). 

By Ethan Gill

LET’S START THIS OFF WITH THE FULL TWO-HOUR SOUND OF COVID19 AS CREATED BY SHARDCORE AND WHICH HONESTLY IS ONLY A SMALL REMIX AWAY FROM BEING A PROPER TECH/TRANCE BANGER IF YOU ASK ME!

THE SECTION WHICH WAS UPSET TO FIND ITSELF USING THE TERM ‘FLEETS’ YESTERDAY IN WRITTEN CONVERSATION LIKE IT WAS THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD BUT WHICH IS MAKING AN INTERNAL PROMISE TO NEVER UTTER THE TERM OUT LOUD OUTSIDE OF ITS TRADITIONAL, NON S*C**L M*D** USAGE:

  • Facebook Tweaks Messenger: It really isn’t much more interesting than that; the app’s now smaller (huzzah!), and rather than promoting bots to interact with through the ‘discover’ tab it’s instead going to focus on Stories as the content to promote instead (presumably the idea behind this being that noone in their life has ever opened a messaging product and had the first thought of ‘oh, what I’d like to do most right now is have an unsatisfyingly-scripted interaction with a nested conversation tree!’). This makes little practical difference to how bots work on Messenger – they’ll still be there, still working, but to get people to find them you’ll have to SPEND TO ADVERTISE!! Or, you know, promote them via your website or something. Anyway, you can read the whole announcement post here – it’s really not that interesting.
  • FB ‘3d’ Photos Can Now Be Taken With Any Phone: This is of no practical professional interest at all, as far as I can see, but it’s technically very impressive – those pseudo-3d ‘tilt to get an illusion of perspective’ images you can create on Facebook now work with photos taken on old, single-camera phones rather than newer, fancier, double-camera devices. Which is great!
  • Better Insights to Facebook Workplace: I worked somewhere last year (a big company, all international and stuff) which used both Facebook Workplace AND Microsoft Teams AND email AND, in the case of certain teams, Slack, and, well, WHY? I DO NOT WANT TO TALK TO MY COLLEAGUES IN THIS MANY PLACES PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE. Aside from my own misanthropy, though, it also seemed a colossal waste of money – I haven’t, in my dealings with it, been super-impressed with Workplace, or seen much of a point to it when you’re on the MS or Google stack, but perhaps I’m missing something obvious. Anyway, this is by way of typically longwinded preamble to the news that you can now get better data on how your staff are using Workplace – what they’re doing, for how long and with whom. On the one hand, DATA!; on the other, I am immediately suspicious of software that tracks interactions between coworkers like this as being step one towards the creation of the office Stasi (but I concede I may be more antagonistic to the concept of employment than most).
  • The Workplace Academy: Oh, and there’s this too – if you use Workplace or if you’re responsible for ensuring that others do, “The Workplace Academy is your new Workplace training hub, where you’ll find free live interactive training, self-paced courses, learning videos and guides. The Academy is available to all Workplace users, so anyone can get up to speed quickly and get the most out of Workplace.” Sounds ghastly.
  • Twitter Testing ‘Fleets’: Or, ‘Stories for Twitter’! Or, ephemeral Tweets! A feature that literally noone has been clamouring for is being tested in Brazil, with users there being granted to the ability to create multi-part Tweets – largely text-based, though you can include gifs and photos at this point – called ‘Fleets’. These will last for upto 24h (though I presume one will be able to delete them earlier), won’t appear on your main TL, can’t be linked to or embedded (in part or in full), and will only be visible to your followers – users will see Fleets from those they follow appear as little icons at the top of the feed (a la Insta), with mutuals showing up first followed by other follows. This is…interesting; there’s obvious stuff you can do with this as a brand to rewards followers who pay close attention to your output, and the ‘you can’t RT or QT or link to or embed this’ thing is good from the point of view of minimising the weaponisation of Tweets…but the fact that replies come straight into your DMs sounds like a recipe for disaster, and were I a less-scrupulous person who was better at coding I would totally be spinning up a plugin called ‘FeedCapper’ to export individual elements of a fleet as images for sharing and posterity. Worth watching – I have a feeling this could be quite interesting.
  • Twitter’s ‘Hide Replies’ API Opens to Developers: This basically means that it’s now easier to code solutions to hide horror from your Twitter replies, basically, and the article links to at least one new plugin designed to help you do exactly that. Potentially useful.
  • Twitter Expands Hatespeech Guidelines: The platform will now police content of a derogatory or offensive nature about disease, disability or age. Which we can all agree is good, and which I’m sure won’t affect any of you, but which I can imagine being tested when all the old people find out and start reporting anyone replying to them with ‘OK Boomer’ as being guilty of hatespeech.
  • Stories Are Coming To LinkedIn!: Maybe. MAYBE. Still, they are being tested, and that was enough to give me a cold chill of horror. IMAGINE – Stories about people’s exciting time delivering the Keynote at the annual Sales offsite (“Kev, can you just make sure you get a good video of me doing slide 24 – the one with the joke, yeah, that one – but MAKE SURE IT’S IN VERTICAL ffs”), Stories about how it’s only your non-growth mindset that’s stopping you from CRUSHING IT…no, I must stop, this tumescence is redirecting too much blood from my brain and I’ve still got about 7000 words to go. One serious point – presuming this becomes a thing, and presuming Twitter Stories does too, and presuming that they end up being primarily image/video led like on Insta…this sort of makes it ridiculous that most agencies aren’t set up to produce vertical content at all. THERE IS AN OPPORTUNITY HERE FFS.
  • Reddit Offers Mental Health Support: Joining Snap and TikTok as the latest platform to set up safety nets for those feeling…less than sunny, Reddit this week announced that it was launching a (US-only at present) partnership with an organisation called Crisis Text Line to let users flag posts that they believed to be indicative of mental distress. “The partnership makes it possible for a Reddit user to flag someone they feel is struggling with serious self-harm or suicide. That will trigger an immediate private message from Reddit to the person in distress. The message will include mental health resources and a suggestion to use their phone to text the phrase CHAT to connect with a Crisis Text Line counselor.” Which on the one hand sounds sensible, but on the other makes me wonder whether they’ve got some checks and balances in place here, because otherwise they are quickly going to be overwhelmed by people on The_Donald reporting ‘the libs’ as in need of support and counselling because of being ‘butthurt.
  • Miu Miu Twist: Finally in the section noone reads, a nice little 5-minute platform-based distraction from Miu Miu; run along, jump collect the perfume bottles, get to the, er, premiere or something. This is very simple but th pixelart style’s nicer than it needs to be, and there’s something pleasingly-floaty about the jump mechanic for connoisseurs of the genre.

By Jules de Balincourt

NEXT, TRY THIS SLIGHTLY THROWBACKISH MIX OF BREAKS AND BASS AND ALMOST-DUBSTEP BY BLUFURY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT WOULD BE VERY 2020 FOR US ALL TO BE WIPED OUT IN A VIRAL EPIDEMIC AS WE ALL DO #CORONADANCE CHALLENGES ON TIKTOK FOR THE CLOUT, PT.1:

  • The Coronavirus Tech Handbook: I’m going to put all the ‘species-ending outbreak’ stuff uptop, so if you’d prefer not to click any links about THE OUTBREAK then skip down about 5 and I promise normal service will be resumed. The rest of you, though, might find this interesting as an overview of digital projects currently being run around the Coronavirus; from a variety of live local maps of infection – this one from Singapore is particularly impressive – along with links to datasets, technical tools, forecasters…what’s notable about this global health scare compared to other global healthscares I have known is the extent to which the impact of data is really being felt; not necessarily in a positive way, one might argue. More, more open, data means better collaborative efforts to track, manage and address the spread of the virus, but it also means SO MUCH NOISE as everyone and their dog decides to bring their early-21C data expertise to bear on the issue (mate you work in marketing and know the difference between ‘quant’ and ‘qual’, calm down). Still, this resource – by the nice people at Nwspk House – is the best rolling tracker of all the available techy resources out there at the moment, and if you’re in any way interested in open data-type stuff there’s a lot to explore in here. Don’t get scared.
  • Don’t Touch Your Face: This is hard for me; I’m forever worrying at my increasingly-saggy, Droopy-like countenance – don’t you find it fascinating how the elasticity just…goes? – and so the perfectly-reasonable public health recommendation to keep your grubby mits away from your facial orifi is proving…tricky. Still, thank GOD for this browsertoy which lets you train a system to track when you aren’t, and by extension when you ARE, touching your fizzog, and which will then shout at you every time it sees you bringing fingers to face. This is sort-of amazing – the fact that it’s just running off the web, and it learns in about 15s, is pretty remarkable when you think about it – but it’s also, due to the slightly stentorian nature of the barked commands, very funny as well.
  • Is It Canceled Yet?: A convenient way of tracking whether that work conference (the one that you really didn’t want to go to but which at the same time you were slightly looking forward to because it meant six nights away from the kids and that means at least one proper night of decent, uninterrupted sleep and NO, CHRIST, OF COURSE I’M NOT COMPLAINING BUT YOU SNORE, TONY) has been cancelled yet due to the bat AIDS. I do wonder what Cannes will do with all of the millions if it’s forced to cancel this year – I’ll put my money on something performatively worthy but fundamentally empty, like buying a billion facemasks for the world’s poor that turn out to be non-biodegradable or something.
  • 100 Women of the Year: This is GREAT. Time Magazine, famous for its yearly bestowing of the ‘Person of the Year’ honorific (do you remember, by the way, when they made it ‘You’ in 2006? Doesn’t that feel a long time ago, and that maybe we didn’t deserve an award at all?), changed the designation from ‘Man of the Year’ in 1999; there were 72 years when the award wasn’t open to women at all. “This project is an exercise in looking at the ways in which women held power due to systemic inequality….To recognize these women, we have created 89 new TIME covers, many of which were designed by prominent artists” – the project also includes the 11 women who’ve been named ‘Person of the Year’ since 99. This is so cool – nice interface, nice covers, a reasonably-international selection of women (although it skews US), and short essays introducing each honoree. The churlish, never-satisfied whelp inside me might argue they could have gone a bit harder on the links out to additional information on each of the people in question, but I appreciate that that’s a lot of additional work and that I should probably just shut up and enjoy the beautiful, free bounty of the open web while I still can.
  • Disappear Yourself: The person who made this says it’s code, but I don’t think it is – I think it is witchcraft, pure and simple (it’s not; he’s posted the code and everything). Turn on your webcam, step back so that your entire body is in its field of vision, walk around…and watch as the machine slowly learns to see you and then, gradually, erase you from its field of vision and the video output it produces. Honestly, this is (fine, a bit clunky, but) astonishing, and the sort of thing that will be an installation at the Serpentine by the end of the year, no question. Tweak the code to be able to recognise either gender or skintone and there’s a ‘powerful digital installation about the silencing and erasure of traditionally oppressed peoples’ in there waiting to be set up (to be clear, I’m not being facetious; I can totally imagine that, and it not being sh1t).
  • The King’s Tattoos: I don’t, let me make it clear, particular care about the royals, but it’s impossible not to have a vague impression of the weird media war being fought between varying bits of the family, particularly with this week’s slightly pointed-feeling press shots of Charles and William and Kate doing NORMAL THINGS like ‘going on a bus’ or ‘visiting a school’ or ‘baking a loaf’, all with nary a logo or brand consultant in sight. It makes you rather wish that our Royal Family could be a touch more like the Danes’ version – for one, you can’t quite imagine The Firm being too happy about a website like this one, which (brilliantly, bafflingly) allows you to explore the denuded body of hypertattooed monarch Frederick the 9th to see all of his ink. This is GREAT – scroll down and a weirdly-lumpy, burns victimish model of Fred appears, smoking a tab in sailor garb, and then WOAH there he is in his pants, all be-tatted, striking a Putin-ish strongman pose in his pants – the site gives you an explanation of the provenance and significance of all his ink, personally and historically, and it’s a GREAT piece of webwork and far, far better than my slightly stupid writeup suggests.
  • Million Dollar Metropolis: Every few years on here the Million Dollar Homepage comes up – kids, look it up – and I am minded to wonder what Alex Tew is doing with himself these days. I just did, and remembered that he’s now a mindfulness app grifter and wish that I could forget again. Still, his one great legacy is that people will never cease attempting to rip off his original, excellent idea – the latest version is the MILLION DOLLAR METROPOLIS, which is again selling off virtual real-estate but this time in a slightly cooler-looking way, with buyers being afforded the opportunity to purchase space on virtual skyscrapers in a virtual little city, which their virtual logos can sit on in perpetuity for a minimum spend of $100. I…I quite like this, and there is a part of me that wants to ask Editor Paul if he can advertise Imperica there just to see what happens (then I remember that $100 is literally the server money). This is, potentially, quite a cool way to announce or leak something, depending on your audience.
  • The Most Depressing Trivia Game Ever: Ok, this is too hard for me to explain here in the limited space and time available to me, but you can read a proper technical description of how it works here. Basically a machine was trained on a bunch of factual data and is now able to do natural language parsing of trivia questions; this site lets you pit your general knowledge skills against that of a machine learning programme. Reader, I lost – I lost repeatedly. Look, there’s a lot of really quite remarkable tech and stuff behind this, but know that what it is at its heart is a means by which you can have your trivia ar$e handed to you on a plate by a few lines of code. It’s the beginning of the end, lads.
  • JS Paint: MS Paint, but in your browser, in Javascript. You may think that this is just a silly proof-of-concept coding exercise, but, honestly, there’s still no better or faster imagecropping tool out there. DESIGNERS! Why not try frustrating your colleagues by setting yourselves the challenge of ONLY using this for all design requests submitted to you between now and hometime?
  • Judy: Or, SURVIVAL PREP FOR MILLENNIALS! Older millennials, though, ones who perhaps now have a young family and are more likely to be concerned at keeping said family safe, but which are, at the same time, still SUCKERS for a well-packaged product with a nicely-designed logo. JUDY (sorry, it’s an all-caps brand) offers a range of SURVIVAL PREPAREDNESS KITS (my caps here, but it feels important to shout about these things), containing things like torches and firelighters, nutrition bars and maps and compasses and stuff, presented in a sturdy, vaguely-apocalypto-fashion backpack or box in Cillit Bang orange. Even better, it’s INTERNET CONNECTED, with purchase also granting you access to some slightly vague-sounding ‘survival guide content’ which they’ll send you at semi-regular intervals. So, to be clear, that’s 200 quid for an ugly rubber backpack in bright orange with the name JUDY emblazoned on it, which comes with a couple of flashlights, a power bar and some chlorination tablets? FFS EVERYONE. Still, I admire the grift here – “what if survival preppers, but designed in Brooklyn?” is a strong elevator pitch to VC.
  • All The Music: You’ve almost certainly read about this by now – it’s been around for a while – but in case not: “Two programmer-musicians wrote every possible MIDI melody in existence to a hard drive, copyrighted the whole thing, and then released it all to the public in an attempt to stop musicians from getting sued…To determine the finite nature of melodies, Riehl and Rubin developed an algorithm that recorded every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody combo. This used the same basic tactic some hackers use to guess passwords: Churning through every possible combination of notes until none remained. Riehl says this algorithm works at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. Once a work is committed to a tangible format, it’s considered copyrighted. And in MIDI format, notes are just numbers.” This is SUCH a clever idea; can someone do it for words too, please, just to see what happens? Although based on the old Arthur C Clarke short story, the answer is possibly ‘apocalypse’.
  • MSGGIF: God I love this. There was something a few years back called ‘REALLY BIG MESSAGE’ or similar – it was a website where you could type in whatever you like and it would create a REALLY BIG version of that text on eye-bleeding backgrounds that you could send to people. This is a bit like that, except it creates an animated text gif of whatever you tell it to – you can then download it and use it wherever you like (Twitter, FB, Insta, etc). I think this is PERFECT for some low-key shade-throwing, personally, or for you poor community managers to find a new way of expressing your feelings to the unthinking, unfeeling mass of the unwashed online – just imagine the poignancy of one of these reading “I am typing as myself now Karen; I don’t like this any more than you do” appearing on your feed from Utterly Butterly or whatever.
  • Loki: Is there anyone out there right now who looks at Western society and thinks ‘you know, we’re simply not recording enough of our daily lives; we’re simply not obsessional enough about documenting the minutiae of every single fleeting second that passes and sharing it with a doubtless-fascinated world’? No, probably not, and yet here’s Loki, an app which encourages you to take 10 seconds of video a day – RAW video, UNFILTERED video, the REAL YOU – which at the end of the year it will compile into a PERSONAL MOVIE for you which you can then edit and share on the socials as you desire. Leaving aside the fact that the idea of a six-minute film composed entirely of disconnected 10s clips seems like the type of idea every film student has had during a 6am khole epiphany and then rejected when the pints kicked in around 11, there’s actually the kernal of something interesting here; I do like the concept of constant personal documentarymaking (there was something called the Viconrevue about 10 years back which I was briefly obsessed with the concept of). Maybe there would be something interesting to be gained by taking 100 very different subjects, asking them to do this and then splicing the footage in interesting ways. Basically I think this is a lot more interesting than I did when I started writing this link, which says a lot about the DEEP THOUGHT that goes into the Curios ‘curatorial’ (HA!!) process.
  • Miniature Pop-Up Books: Would you like a smol shop in which you can buy smol pop-up books to order? OH GOOD! If they did commissions – which potentially they do, for a fee – this could be an EXCEPTIONAL personalised gift for someone of a certain type (I’m not judging, I promise).
  • This Is Spotify: Spotify offers to take users on a JOURNEY TO THE PAST with this ‘3d musical exploration experience’ – which isn’t actually that 3d, fine, but is a nicely-scrolly bit of web interactive which lets you choose from a selection of ‘retro’ artists (Louis Armstrong, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley, Metallica, Whitney Houston, Linkin Park, er Shakira????) and then do a bit of a dive into their history,etc. It’s VERY shallow but there are a few nice touches in there – the way you can scratch on the record playing the artist’s most-streamed track is a lovely little gimmick.
  • NYC Neighborhoods: A Google Map featuring all NYCs neighborhoods with the boundaries clearly marked – both useful if you’re visiting the city, but also there’s something about the fact that it looks quite a lot like it’s from Sesame Street. Invaluable if you want to get a vague handle on where the fcuk all the places in Jonathan Lethem’s novels actually are.
  • VC Brags: Oh I do like this. VC Brags is a Twitter account with one simple gimmick – it RTs tweets from Venture Capitalists in which said Venture Capitalists are not-so-subtly applauding themselves for their brilliance and perspicacity and performance and the skill and endeavour with which they CRUSH IT every day. Stuff like this, which manages to tick both the “cloth-eared failure to gauge the global mood when it comes to flying” and the “probably didn’t actually happen” boxes simultaneously: “Just got an announcement at the gate from @united for hitting a million miles. Got a round of applause. Gate agent says to expect a “surprise” on the flight.”
  • The VHS Vault: The Internet Archive really is the gift that never stops giving; in this specific corner, you can find over 20,000 old videos digitised from VHS and roughly categorised by theme…you can, I promise, lose entire weeks in here, as there is a truly astonishing volume of stuff – weird old promo tapes, whole films taped off the telly, complete with adverts and bowdlerised swearing…honestly, it’s almost worth being self-isolated for.
  • 2019 in Illustration: A superb collection by the NYT pulling together some of its favourite examples of design work from the paper over the past year. This is glorious, not least as it shows the breadth of styles that they employ – pleasing in an era of increased homogeneity of design and illustration styles – as well as giving a much-deserved platform to the people whose names you almost never notice when reading an article online. Aside from anything else this is a really nice place to scope out potential art styles you might want to consider for forthcoming projects.
  • The Opera Database: The opera database is…a comprehensive database of operas! That’s right – ALL OF THE OPERAS, searchable by date, country and whether or not there’s a PDF of the libretto available online. If you’ve ever need to do a deep-dive into the historical significance of opera in mid-20th Century Armenian folk culture then this is very much the website you’ve spend days and nights praying for.
  • Numode: DADS! THIS ONE IS FOR YOU! Ok, fine, not ONLY dads – potentially mums too, it’s just that I didn’t spend quite so much time in the 90s/early-00s with women who desperately wanted to be DJs as I did with men. Anyway, if your days of spinning vinyl are behind you – until the glorious day when your kids are old enough to have a proper big party and appreciate music and you can FINALLY do that Detroit techno set you’ve been practising since you saw Derrick May at FABRIC that time – then you will LOVE Numode, which is basically LEGO-esque kits which let you build turntables and speakers and mixing desks that you can keep on your desk at work as a throwback to the times when you were up at 6am because of speed and not because you have a client presentation and your kid’s been sick and oh god the school run.
  • Eggdog: Speaking of kids, I bet yours watch any old sh1t they can find on YouTube don’t they? I’m not judging them, to be clear, I do too. Still, why not try them on Eggdog – a CG cartoon dog, in the shape of an egg! You may lose them forever – I get the feeling that this might be a bit like crack for small children – but it’s still better than Jonny Jonny Papa Papa or whatever the fcuk that was.
  • The Simpsons in CSS: My God this is some impressive coding – LOOK THEY ARE EVEN BLINKING FFS!
  • The Taco Bell Quarterly: I was convinced when I first saw this that it was a stunt by Taco Bell – in a way I wish it was, as there’s something perfectly po-mo about a fast food chain establishing an academic journal to collect critical theory pieces about its significance in modern culture. Sadly, though, this is just artschool stuff – “T aco Bell Quarterly is the literary magazine for the Taco Bell Arts and Letters. We’re a reaction against everything. The gatekeepers. The taste-makers. The hipsters. Health food. Artists Who Wear Cute Scarves. Bitch-ass Wendy’s. We seek to demystify what it means to literary, artistic, important, and elite…First and foremost, TBQ is about great writing. We think great writing can be about Taco Bell. We think trash can be beautiful.” So there – if you have some low-culture, hi-trash musings that you’d like an outlet for, have at it. I would love someone to submit a heartfelt piece about Wimpy to this fwiw.
  • Javelina Running: The purest thing I have seen online in the past fortnight, this is footage of a Javelina (which I understand to be a type of pig) running by the roadside in Texas, tweeted every few hours in sync to a different backing track and OH MY GOD every single one is perfect but I could watch this particular version for the rest of my natural life. Honestly, scroll back and find your favourite, these are GLORIOUS.

By David Palumbo

NEXT ENJOY THIS ABSOLUTELY CRACKING TECHNO MIX BY TARAVAL – HONESTLY THIS IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT WOULD BE VERY 2020 FOR US ALL TO BE WIPED OUT IN A VIRAL EPIDEMIC AS WE ALL DO #CORONADANCE CHALLENGES ON TIKTOK FOR THE CLOUT, PT.2:

  • Do You Know Darkness?: How Goth are you? Are you just a bit goth – a few black clothes, a bit of a penchant for the more obscure writings of Alan Moore and maybe a bit of the sort of industrial grind of some Skinny Puppy or something – or are you FULL GOTH – Sisters of Mercy tatts and appearances at the infamous weekenders and a childhood full of trauma at the hands of cider-drinking normies flicking Embassy Number 7s at you as you tried to hide in doorways at the precinct? Would you like to find out? Well back this boardgame on Kickstarter, then! Basically this is a slightly-occult-themed trivia game, with all the questions being based around ‘dark’ themes, which I am hoping tends more towards the occult, horror movies, maybe a bit of Bathory, and less towards requiring you to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the names of Ed Gein’s victims. I reckon that this looks like a lot of fun for the right sorts of people – are YOU that sort of person? If so, thanks for reading Web Curios, please don’t curse me.
  • Woodwork by Henk: This is, I think, genuinely lovely – this is the Facebook Page of a New Zealand woodsmith, started this year, which has achieved a degree of online virality by dint of the quite incredibly magical designs. Honestly, if you’ve got a small kid who’s into magic and wizards and witches and stuff then look at these and just IMAGINE how excited they would be to have something like one of these in their room – the chests that look as though they’re bursting portals to another dimension, the twisted bookcases…SO good. There’s currently no online sales or international shipping, but the degree of attention this has deservedly received suggests that will probably change before too long.
  • The Best Year in Music: Another superb piece of work by The Pudding, this one letting you choose ANY month since the 60s on the US Billboard charts and then play through time seeing how the composition of the top of the charts changed as time past; even better, it plays you the number one as you go, fading songs in and out as they jockey for position at the top. It’s beautifully-presented, and gives you an interesting sense of sonic trends that you probably couldn’t pick up just by looking at the data on its own. They are SO SO GOOD at this stuff, honestly, and this is an absolute delight to play around with and explore.
  • The Pwn College: An interesting resource for any of you looking to learn more about hacking from the ‘White Hat’ point of view – Pwn College is a beta programme which teaches the rudiments of hacking and, by extension, online security. To be clear, you REALLY need to want to learn about this, and you need to have a degree of familiarity with Linux and that sort of stuff if you’re even going to make sense of the first lesson, but if you’re committed to getting more of an idea of how this stuff works and are willing to put the hours in then this could be super-useful.
  • Maev: Dog wellness in New York. Look, let’s just leave it there sha…no, actually, no, let’s not. DOG AS A SERVICE! DOGFOOD AND TREATS AND VITAMINS AND TOYS AS A SERVICE! I know that people living in cities have busy lives, yes, and that that can negatively impact their ability to do things like shop for groceries and, I don’t know, wait in line for the next Supreme drop, and that’s why we can now employ people to do those things for us, but, well, IF YOU HAVE A FCUKING DOG THEN YOU HAVE TIME TO WALK IT, MEANING YOU HAVE TIME TO WALK IT TO THE FCUKING DOGFOOD SHOP YOU FCUKING CRETIN YOU DO NOT NEED TO PAY A PREMIUM FOR THESE PEOPLE TO DELIVER PREMIUM DOGCHOW TO YOUR LOFT APARTMENT. Even better, the ‘holistic diet advice’ for your dog is ‘tailored to your health goals’. WHAT ABOUT YOUR DOG’S HEALTH GOALS??? WHAT IF HIS HEALTH GOALS CONSIST SOLELY OF ‘EAT SOME DOG CHOW’?? This virus can’t come soon enough, frankly.
  • Smithsonian Open Access: I can’t describe this any better than they do: “Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.” ALL OF THIS IS USABLE! You can take, use, cut, play, remix…this is superb, and almost makes up for the dog thing.
  • Underwater Photographer of the Year 2020: These are always superb, but this particular image struck me this time around; as ever, though, this is an absolute treasure trove of gorgeous marine photography- the ‘behaviour’ category in particular is stunning.
  • The Cinema Club: This is such a lovely project. The Cinema Club presents a different film each week, for free, to audiences all around the world – actually turns out it’s funded by Chanel, which is a lovely piece of sponsorship by the legacy Nazi business – with a focus on short cinema. There is a VERY heavy arthouse vibe to the whole thing, which is no bad idea imho; looking through the archive suggests that there’s a real commitment to digging out slightly more unusual or challenging works, and if you’re a student of the medium (he says, like a dreadful fcuking pseud; sorry about that) then you’ll probably really enjoy this. There’s a newsletter too for those who want to be alerted to each new film – overall, this is a just a bit great.
  • Switching Software: A useful guide to the alternative software products available if you decide that you’d like to migrate yourself off the big tech stack for a bit. Featuring alternative for everything from MS Office to Google to Amazon to the Adobe Creative Suite, this is a really useful resource; be aware, though, that the reason that all the massive behemoth tech products are massive behemoth tech products is because they are so, so easy to use, in the main; honestly, Gimp is a lovely idea but I don’t think I’ve ever hated a UI more in my life, for example (for those of you who don’t know, Gimp is not only a sex slave in a latex dungeon but ALSO a free Photoshop equivalent – do not, unless you’re very patient, attempt to do any significant image editing with the former.
  • Songs That Sound The Same: A series of YouTube videos exploring those songs that basically are exactly the same except NOT QUITE. These are uncanny and will make you want to fire up that old copy of garageband or whatever it was that you used to make mashups with back in 2003.
  • BBC Earth Kids: I’m sure that all of you with kids will know this exists already, but on the offchance that you don’t…er…it does! BBC Earth Kids is a YouTube channel launched a couple of weeks ago by (full disclosure) part of a team I used to work with; it’s SUCH a nice idea, and definitely worth bookmarking if you’re looking for something to take your kids’ minds off Eggdog (for which I am now starting to feel a creeping sense of guilt and regret, and for which I feel I ought to apologise a bit).
  • The Coolest Websites You’ve Never Heard Of: I like to think that I provide a sort of window onto the rest of the web for some of you – a sort of ‘there by the grace of God go I’-sort of thing for those of you less-inclined to waste 7 hours a day staring right into the guts of the human machine than I am. Still, I have NOTHING on the people on this Reddit thread, which is a truly astonishing rabbithole of excellent, weird web. Trust me when I say that I spend more time online than you do – I am not proud of this, it is not a boast, it is simply an almost-certain fact – and I had heard of at best about 40% of these sites; there’s no rhyme or reason to them, just a collection of people recommending odd little web places that you might not have heard of, and it is just PERFECT. If I ever go on holiday again – and I will – consider bookmarking this and using it as the methadone to Curios’ full-on skag.
  • Fraidycat: I’ve featured Kicks Condor on here before – their roundup of the best of the past decade of the web was a glorious, weird compendium of online culture over the past decade, and they’re obviously committed to rooting out the odd online as they have just released the latest version of their STUPENDOUSLY useful Fraidycat programme. It’s a bit hard to describe, but basically Fraidycat lets you organise EVERYTHING you want to keep track of in the web in one place, sort of like RSS but…well…not-RSS. You can follow content from websites, social feeds, Twitch, Soundcloud…so many places. Honestly, if you’re the sort of person who has a well-organised regimen of web research that uses a large-but-defined selection of sources, this is potentially gold dust; as a journalistic research tool it also has vast potential. So, so clever, and not a little daunting.
  • What fetish will you keep a secret from the people you know IRL?: Thanks, Reddit! This sounds like it would be awful, but instead ends up being a genuinely lovely celebration of kink and difference – look, I have no idea what you’re into and it’s unlikely that I’ll judge (but, look, just keep it to yourself), but if you ever feel a bit, well, weird about it then please read this thread and reassure yourself that there is nothing so diverse and wonderfully-multifaceted as human sexuality – I mean, look, there really is something out there for everyone: “Floor Tiles. I don’t know why I just really like how clean they look and the colors and lines. The more detailed the pattern, the better. I get really upset when the tiles get dirty.” That last line SLAYS me.
  • Swyp: THIS IS A LINK TO ACTUAL BONGO DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK AT WORK. Also, it’s mobile-only so you’d be wasting your time on desktop. This is YouPr0n’s attempt to ruin teenagers forever by effectively creating a TikTok-esque interface for its video; users are presented with a seemingly-infinite selection of bongo clips across genres (I would bet a significant amount that it always defaults hetero/male gaze, though), swipe to flick to the next, with the promise of an underlying algo that learns your preferences and keeps feeding you what you like and, well, basically this is just a Skinner box for 14 year old boys, isn’t it? That sound you hear? That’s the sound of millions of them voluntarily self-isolating til they need skingrafts on their palms. On a more serious note, I don’t think that there’s necessarily anything hugely great about making a neverending stream of porn available with this much ease, especially if, like TikTok, it’s designed to keep you there for as long as possible via a hidden recommendation engine – still, it gives us something to do with all those gallons of hand sanitiser I assume we’re all sitting on.
  • Beat That: This is a promo game for…I think some motoring company – anyway, it’s basically a browser-based version of Outrun and it is SO MUCH FUN – seriously, I lost 15 minutes on this around 625am this morning and am still suffering for it now.
  • Play Emulator: Finally this week, as a special present to all of you and as an apology for having been away last week, have THIS. You remember the Internet Archive’s PC games selection, with EVERYTHING you remember from when you were a kid playable in-browser? Well this is that, but for console games. You want Mario64? You want MarioKart64? You want Metal Slug? OH MY GOD THEY HAVE EVERYTHING AND THEY ALL WORK. Honestly, find a corner where noone can see your screen and stay there for as long as you can – this is a GOLDMINE. Man was Metal Slug a bit racist, though, turns out.

By Julie Fisher McCarter

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS LOVELY RELAXING AMBIENT-Y SET BY ATLAST!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Homophone Weakly: Not in fact a Tumblr, but it’s a single-serving website that talks about homophones and so it’s basically spiritually one at least.
  • Shifty Thrifting: Excellent tat found in charity shops. My girlfriend is now the proud owner of a mug which, inexplicably, reads “I HEART MUSTARD” – you too could be so lucky if you spent more time hanging out in Marie Curie Crouch End!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • I Don’t Give A Seat: Fabric patterns from seats on public transport around the world. Makes you appreciate the understated magnificence of Tfl.
  • Cecile Davidovici: Beautiful embroidered art; portraits and landscapes and still lifes, rendered in thread with uncommon, occasionally almost-impressionistic, skill.
  • Unfinstory: Oh this is SO GOOD! The artist who runs this – known only as Damian as far as I can tell – turns popular meme formats into comic strips. His ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ strip is honestly a work of genuis, but you will be taken on SUCH A JOURNEY by the four-part story of salad cat and the shouty women than I urge you to go and check it out RIGHT NOW.
  • Subpar Parks: US National Parks often receive reviews online – some of those reviews are bad, featuring such comments as ‘too many bugs’ or ‘just google ‘national parks sunset’ instead and save yourself the hassle’. Artist Amber Shares has taken to making promo posters for the parks in question, depicting them as described in these reviews. Beautiful.
  • The Dazzle Club: Makeup strategies to confuse surveillance equipment. As per the clothing lines that do the same, I would be amazed if this sort of aesthetic wasn’t coopted by proper fashion in the next couple of months.
  • Boys Who Can Cook: These boys CANNOT cook. The very definition of cursed food imagery.
  • David Henry Nobody Jr: I have no idea who this person is, but their aesthetic is basically my life now.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

  • The Robots are Already in Charge: Much of the talk over the past three years or so has been about the impact that automation will have on the workplace and, by extension, the workforce, specifically in terms of the potential drop in jobs available for us meatsacks as the robots slowly become better and cheaper and more efficient. This piece effectively explains why to be honest the robots are already in charge and have been for a while, talking you through the ways in which software is already being used to determine things like supplychain management, shift patterns, optimal performance standards, etc, and how these choices are then being imposed on workers, for better or oft for ill. Honestly chilling, not least the very real sense that noone seems to be paying too much attention to the fact that the numbers – the ‘units’ – being administered by machines are in many cases people, and people are perhaps less good at being optimised for manufacturing efficiency than, say, things made of metal and plastic.
  • The Future is Here: Along similar lines, and taking as its starting point the famous-but-possibly-apocryphal Gibsonism about the future’s uneven distribution, this is a smart, short essay looking at how much the differing pace of adoption of modern technologies, and differing usage, tells us about the equally different pace of progress. It also, as an aside, has an interesting rebuttal to the Pinker-ish utopianists who insists there’s never been a better time to be alive; that’s just what it looks like from where you’re sitting, bucko, and that’s not evenly-distributed either.
  • The Cost of Poverty: I thought this was fascinating, and deserves to be reas and discussed more widely – in it, Rutger Bregman investigates various studies that have been done on the impact of poverty on cognitive function and, conversely, the reverse impact of that poverty being lessened. Citing several studies, including one in India and one in the US, Bregman suggests that being poor has real, demonstrable impact on individuals’ ability to make effective decisions, process information and deal with stress – effects which are reversed when the conditions of economic hardship are removed. Which, it would seem, makes a pretty convincing argument against any sort of suggestion that poverty is in any way linked to a necessary lack of ability or intellect.
  • Manny for President: This was remarkable to me – I had no idea that Manny Pacquaio, the most famous Filipino in the world and one of the greatest boxers ever, a man who is still boxing – was also a Senator in the Philippines and is thought by many to be the most-likely successor to famously-awful dictatorial loony Rodrigo Duterte when the country comes to elect its next leader. ESPN sent a reporter to hang out with Pacquaio at home for a few days, seeing his lavish birthday party and his donation of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the poor outside his house, and it’s hard to read this and come away with any other impression than that a) it’s quite likely this man’s going to be in charge in a few years’ time; and b) it might not be a fantastic idea. This piece is, I presume, written by a boxing correspondent, and it reads that way (which is very much a compliment).
  • This Brand Is Late Capitalism: “I CALL THEM “THIS THING IS LATE CAPITALISM” ESSAYS. There are several variations on this genre of lifestyle writing. They don’t always invoke the “late capitalism” phrase explicitly, but all offer a critique of a popular brand or product in terms of its relationship to the system. Some are formulated as takedowns of companies that market themselves as millennial-friendly, or environmentally focused or, most often, feminist. In these essays, a writer will explain that, while this brand claims to be offering you empowerment, it is selling you a product at the end of the day: the enlightened brand is actually capitalist, but you might be fooled into thinking otherwise.” As a Web Curios reader you will doubtless be familiar with this very 2020 style of writing, and you may also be sick of it; this piece does a good job of explaining why, in both cases.
  • Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?: Sort of a companion piece to the above, this explores the ubiquite of the very particular millennial aesthetic – sans serif, pink, green, grey, sincere-but-not-too-much – and how there’s seemingly nothing that can’t be designed up to be sold to young people as a packaged ur-ideal (see the survival kits from a bit earlier as a prime example). Basically, it had me at this line: “The millennial aesthetic promises a kind of teleology of taste: as if we have only now, finally, thanks to innovation and refinement, arrived at the objectively correct way for things to look.”
  • It Doesn’t Matter if Anyone Exists: Oddly enough, despite all the chatter about how exciting it is that GANs can now generate seemingly-infinite imaginary faces of people who’ve never existed, this is the first article I’ve read that asks what that might mean. It does, and its answer is the slightly depressing “it doesn’t matter, and it doesn’t mean anything to us, because a necessary condition of the online life – whether extremely or otherwise – is to basically forget that all the people at the other end of the internet pipes are fully-realised individuals because if we didn’t do that we’d go mad. As such, these people who don’t exist are just another set of imaginary people populating our singular, solipsistic realities”. The actual essay’s loads better than what I just wrote, though, promise.
  • Post-TikTok: TikTok’s having a WILD lifecycle – we’ve already seen the first ‘WE MUST QUIT’ missive from a teen, and now we have the first piece about the formerly-famous who get left behind by the caprices of the algo. This is less about the poor kid and their feels – though I do feel a bit sorry for them – and more about how the necessary side effect of the algo is ALWAYS towards homogeneity; it’s worth noting that the creator themselves speaks of the shift away from ‘goofy, silly, spontaneous’ content towards the sort of polished choreography of the beautiful that’s increasingly coming to dominate the platform; once the pretty and stage school get hold of it, their inexorable gravitational pull will always necessarily distort any platform, especially one that’s trained on human feedback.
  • Why Restaurants Are Closing: If you have any interest at all in food and the business and economics of eating, this is a must-read; it’s all about the US, fine, but the parallels with the UK and London in particular are striking, not least the boom in delivery and the likely impact it will have on the trade when we’re all conditioned to think we can get whatever food we want whenever we want wherever we want, and that we don’t even have to leave the house or talk to anyone to get it. This is a fascinating read about one of the most brutal sectors to make a living in, and despite everything I would still love to work in food.
  • How Google Changed Diets: Another excellent food piece, this one looking at how Google used small bits of nudge-y psychology to change its staff’s eating habits in its canteens. I found this really interesting – in part because of the fact that these things quite obviously work, but also because I wonder how they would work in an environment where most of the people didn’t quite fit the profile of your typical Google employee and weren’t on the same sort of salary as your typical Google employee, and how this feels rather like an example of that unequal distribution of future benefit that we were talking about a few pieces back.
  • The Athletic: A bit ‘inside media’, but this is an interesting piece looking back at the UK lanch of sports website The Athletic in the UK last Summer – I was working at the company’s PR agency when it launched, and I remember thinking at the time that the fact that it had hired a comms shop before launch marked it out as…different from your standard media event. Anyway, this explores how they went about poaching a bunch of senior staff writers from across the UK press and how the operation functions – it also functions as a useful reminder of the way in which football journalism in the UK works. The number of women mentioned in the piece? One, I think.
  • Watching Magnus: Magnus Carlsen is widely considered to be the greatest chess player ever, effectively akin to a Bach or a Picasso or a Maradona – this piece explains how humanity’s best chess brain is amusing himself by messing around on various chess lifestreaming sites, playing all-comers under pseudonyms and generally just sort of goofing off and having fun with his community; there’s a lot in here about slightly arcane chess in-jokes, but the main point of interest to me comes at the end when people talk about the privilege of being able to see someone’s brain work as they strategise and plan; effectively this is like having access to a genius’ creative marginalia in realtime, which is, I think, something I’d not considered before. Imagine Lucien Freud’s studio on Twitch – I am frankly AMAZED that Koons or one of the other more media-savvy artists hasn’t already setup a constant livestream as a work in itself tbh.
  • The Llamas and the Dress: This is a whole article looking back on the day on the internet when those llamas escaped and the dress happened. I don’t like this article, I don’t find it particularly interesting, and I am including it solely so that I can point at it and say “look, look at this – THIS IS PEAK CONTENT WE DO NOT NEED ANY MORE CONTENT WE ARE MAKING CONTENT ABOUT THE HISTORY OF CONTENT NOW THIS IS THE END LET US PLEASE GET ONE DAY ESCAPE THIS RECURSIVE HORRORSPIRAL PLEASE’.
  • The World of Extreme Metal Logos: A very wholesome and slightly-heartwarming interview with someone who designs those spiky, largely-illegible logos that bands with names like “Bleeding Endoscopy” or “Necrotic Fistula Explosion” like to have; this is honestly quite charming, and I would absolutely commission a new logo for Web Curios in this style if I thought he took commissions.
  • Hideo Kojima: Hideo Kojima’s a neat little cipher for the world of games in general, and their relationship to the mainstream. If you’re into games you will know who he is and have opinions on his work; if you’re not, though, you will have NO IDEA. Contrast that with cinema, where even I, pretty much the opposite of a cinephile, know who Niklas Winding Refn is, for example. Anyway, Kojima’s basically a proper auteur in the old school sense, and this profile communicates much that is fascinating and baffling and frustrating and brilliant about his work – if you’re a fan, you might find this a bit superficial, but anyone else, especially non-gamers, really should read this; if nothing else, I promise you it will change your idea of what games are in 2020.
  • Shell Is Looking Forward: Malcolm Harris spoke at a meeting at Shell in London last year during which the company was ‘strategising’ about its future; this is his writeup of his experience in NY Magazine. It’s not, you won’t be surprised to hear, glowing in its praise of Shell, but it is surprisingly clear-headed about everything else; about how the fact is that Shell’s approach is just enough to keep them going in the face of what really ought to be far greater public opprobrium, and how their long-term vision – which they are currently executing surprisingly well – is to move to a position where they are seen as being at the vanguard of saving the planet whilst at the same time wringing the last drops of blood from all the bits of the selfsame planet whose extraction by people like Shell is killing us. It’s brilliant really, in a fcuking awful way.
  • Improvements Since the 1990s: A corrective to some of the more generally gloomy tone of much of Curios – a list of stuff that has gotten better since the 1990s. You will, I promise, feel a bit better about EVERYTHING after reading this; or alternatively, you will once again think that this stuff only applies if you’re middle-class and living in the affluent west, and that it’s meaningless for a good 70% of the world’s population. Your choice!
  • Crispy: On the massive industry built around making foods crispy. Crispy sells. Crispy plus salty plus fat plus sweet is basically what’s diabetes-ing us all into an early grave. This is SO SO INTERESTING, and I guarantee that by the end of this you’ll be craving one of those chicken sandwiches, despite yourself.
  • Homeless in Hampstead: Finally this week, a rare Guardian link – but this story is too good to miss. Dominic Van Allen dug himself a bunker beneath Hampstead Heath to live in – this is his story. A beautiful piece of writing by Tom Lamont.

By Virginia Mori

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. Shimon is a robot that composes music. This is its first song with lyrics. It is AWFUL, but sort-of compelling:

  1. I went to see Max Cooper at the Barbican last year – this was one of the highlights for me. SUCH a wonderful combination of music and visuals for this track, called ‘In Pursuit of Ghosts’:

  1. Do wish the Pet Shop Boys were still making music that sounds just like it did when they were making music in the 1980s? OH GOOD! This is Bell Towers, it’s called ‘Privacy’, and it’s as though Momus and Neil Tennant had children. It’s GREAT:

  1. The song is OLD – it’s called ‘Plus Device’ by Our Pleasures. The video, though, is new, and it’s GREAT (horrible, slightly creepy CG):

  1. IMAGINARY HIPHOP CORNER! Lil Brain is, as far as I can tell, a VIRTUAL STAR in the manner of simillarly-monikered Lil Miquela – except Lil Brain is a RAPPER! And he makes…REALLY BAD, WOOZY, SUB-SOUNDCLOUD SADBOI RAP! This is terrible, but sort-if interesting at the same time; are we due the first post-Hatsune Miku avatar-star, or is this all just a bit too…well, crap, for mainstream audiences? If you don’t want to listen to the whole song, by the way, scrub to about the 3m mark to see Lil Brain in all his CG glory; I think if I were the estate of various deceased Soundcloud rappers I might perhaps be taking quite a close look at those tattoos, is all I’m saying:

  1. This is Rascal by RMR. I don’t want to say anything else – just listen to this. Whatever you think it’s going to sound like based on the thumbnail here, I can promise you are so, so wrong:

  1. Last up this week, we have 13 minutes of poetry! But no, wait, this is fcuking BRILLIANT poetry – honestly, I wasn’t expecting to feature this at all, but it grabbed me from the opening lines about dolphins and didn’t let go. Very, very funny, and very, very good, this is called 2048 and it’s by Daniel Searle and OH LOOK AT THAT IT’S TIME TO GO I REALLY MUST RUSH BUT PLEASE BE AWARE THAT I HAVE MISSED YOU AND IT’S SO GOOD TO BE BACK ALTHOUGH I CONFESS TO NOT REALLY HAVING ENJOYED THE 6AM START TODAY BUT I PROMISE YOU IT’S WORTH IT TO IMAGINE THE LOOK ON YOUR FACE AS YOU READ THIS SO THANKS FOR READING THANKS FOR READING THANKS FOR READING I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Webcurios 21/02/20

Reading Time: 33 minutes

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

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

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

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

By Natalie Foss

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

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

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

By Ed Fairburn

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

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

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

By Vincent Desailly

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

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

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

 

By Whitney Hubbs

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

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By France-Lise Mcgurn

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. First up, a song by AI – a creative agency fed a bunch of Travis Scott lyrics into GPT-2 and played around with it til it had a verse that vaguely approximated the rapper’s style (it’s…not hard tbh); the music was also composed by algos trained on his sound – this is the result. It’s…it’s not bad, amazingly, though that perhaps says more about the questionable quality of the rest of Scott’s output (says the old man, shouting and fist-waving at the clouds):

  1. This animation is called ‘Love’. I don’t really know what’s going on, but it’s got some nice CGI and is borderline NSFW, which is perfect Curios-fodder really:

  1. This is by someone called Ellis, from their debut album which is out in April, and it’s called ‘Embarrassing’, and I am probably far too old to enjoy it as much as I do – a fcuking great sadpop song, this:

  1. I don’t really know what is happening here – what language this song is in, who the band are, what the video’s about, anything really – but it is MESMERISING. I am told this is called ‘Baloje’ and it’s by an outfit called Solo Ansamblis; it’s really, really good (and quite odd):

  1. HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new one from Jpegmafia, and it’s called ‘Bald!’, though I don’t know why:

  1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! I am basically going to post everything Manga releases this year – this is ‘At All Times’, featuring the excellent Izzie Gibbs:

  1. It’s fair to say that Yves Tumor isn’t the most welcoming name for an artist, but this is a fcuking GREAT track, sort of slightly sleazy semi-funk with a Labyrinth-channeling video – the song’s called ‘Gospel for a New Century’:

    1. Last up this week, just…enjoy. This is called ‘Boycycle’ and it is wonderful and OH LOOK AT THAT JUST LIKE THAT IT’S ALL OVER FOR ANOTHER WEEK AND ALL YOU ARE LEFT WITH IS THE MEMORY OF THE LINKS AND WORDS THAT HAVE GONE BEFORE AND MY ABIDING LOVE FOR YOU YES YOU I LOVE YOU THANKYOU FOR READING AND I WILL SEE YOU IN A FORTNIGHT TAKE CARE HAVE FUN AND PLEASE DON’T ABANDON ME FOR OTHER, BETTER, LESS CORPULENT NEWSLETTERBLOGTYPETHINGS IN MY ABSENCE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE I MISS YOU BYE BYE BYE!!

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Webcurios 14/02/20

Reading Time: 30 minutes

Love is in the air! Or a virus! Or both! Whether it be Cupid or the Coronavirus that strikes you down, I hope you’re preparing to step into the weekend with vim and vigour and no little spunk. It’s been another week – that’s pretty much the best I can say about it – but now it’s time to cast aside your cares and your worries and your woes and focus on the BEST Valentine’s Day gift of all – 8,000+ words of bitter cycnicism, garnished with links and all wrapped up in bile JUST FOR YOU!

Before you get all up in my links, though, can I take a moment to once again remind you that Imperica’s ACTUAL REAL PROPER MAGAZINE, packed with excellent articles life and culture and THE NOW, all by a range of writers from a range of backgrounds, all of which deserve to be read for the low, low price of £3 (which, let it be said once again, doesn’t go anywhere NEAR me) – CLICK THE LINK AND BUY A COPY NOW! DO IT!

Anyway, enough of the plugging – I’m off to wash the crusted filth from my limbs and then begin the arduous task of constructing my girlfriend’s present from the collection of biological oddities I’ve been accumulating since October; you’re a lucky girl, Saz! The rest of you, though, consider the following mess of ‘content’ as my gift to you – imagine me staring plaintively at you as you read it, watching and waiting for any small gesture of appreciation. Imagine my massive, sad, watery eyes with their distressingly-liquid pupils just sort of boring into you like gimlets. IMAGINE THEM!

I’m Matt, this is Web Curios – it’s good for you, I promise, although I concede that it might not feel like it at the time. 

By Connor Addison

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT TRY THE SOUNDTRACK TO THE PLAY ‘POET IN DA CORNER’ WHICH IS CURRENTLY ON AT THE ROYAL COURT AND IS BASICALLY INSPIRED BY DIZZEE’S DEBUT?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THE CURRENT DEARTH OF UPDATES ABOUT S*C**L M*D** TO CONTINUE FOREVER:

  • Facebook Adds ‘One Time Notification’ Option To Messenger: The fact that I’m opening this section with some ‘news’ about an update to the Messenger API should give you some idea as to the paucity of ‘news’ from the platforms this week. Still, impenetrable and tangential as this will be to most of you, there’s also the kernel of an opportunity here – Facebook’s now affording developers the opportunity to build in the ability to send users ONE notification, unbidden, via Messenger, presuming said users opt-in; meaning you can get people to grant you ONE SINGLE OPPORTUNITY to spam them with brandwank per year (no, really – the token which affords a Page the ability to contact users direct has a 12m expiry date, which in itself feels like something you might be able to exploit; this is exactly the sort of thing you could use to issue birthday present reminders, for example). Basically this is technical and boring and requires you to understand a bit about how the mechanical bits of Facebook actually work, but if you can put up with that then there’s some proper creative use cases for this, I think.
  • Facebook Launches Hobbi: The latest malformed chimera to emerge, limping and mucal, from Facebook’s new projects team, Hobbi is basically a Pinterest ripoff. It’s seemingly not available in the UK yet – no guarantee that it ever will be tbh – but if you’re curious I’m sure you can VPN your way in. Hobbi’s basically a sort of scrapbook for one’s own creative process; the idea is that you can create moodboards and the like of your photos of your work, documenting the process and the progress of your endeavours; there’s seemingly very little that’s truly ‘social’ about it, but you can export your collections of images to share elsewhere should you so desire. There’s no obvious reason why you should care about this, unless you’ve got a significant interest in Pinterest stock in which case be afraid.
  • Snap Launches Mental Health Support Tools: There is, frankly, a finite amount of times one can type phrases such as ‘redolent of a darkly dystopian future’ and ‘it’s just like Black Mirror’ before one starts to lose the will to carry on breathing; still, it’s another one of those updates from s*c**lm*d**land, reminding us that however oddly dispiriting our dark scifi imaginings might be, the reality is far more chilling. Snap, fresh from some surprisingly-positive earnings numbers last week, has announced a suite of tools designed to automatically serve up positive, helpful content to users whose in-app behaviour indicate they might be feeling a touch on the self-harmy side. “When a user types in words that could imply they need help with health and wellness issues, the tool will surface a special section within Snapchat’s search results. It includes proactive resources from mental health experts, as well as content from partners on topics such as from anxiety, mental health and suicide.” You know what this is? THIS IS MENTAL HEALTH CLIPPY FFS! “You appear to be having some dark thoughts; have you considered meditation?” I know, I know, it’s better to do something rather than nothing, and it’s A Good Thing that Snap’s making material available to help kids address feelings of sadness and alienation, etc, but, well, I don’t know whether having a fcuking algo ‘reach out’ to me when I display symptoms of emotional fragility is necessarily the pick-me-up I’d be looking for.
  • Spotify Kids Comes To UK: I don’t think there’s any sort of brand relevance here at all, although maybe you could derive some sort of small benefit from getting your brand’s content whitelisted for inclusion in the app. Still, I imagine that many of you have kids and that the idea of not having your Spotify algo polluted by ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Baby Shark’ is probably quite appealing – see, I am always thinking of you.
  • Spotify Launches ‘Songwriter’ Pages: BIG SPOTIFY NEWS WEEK! The other big announcement is that songwriters can now claim their own Page on the platform, meaning they can have a space of their own to showcase the songs they’re responsible for in one place. Er, that’s it!
  • The Online Harms Consultation Response: You will, of course, have seen the news about Ofcom being named by the Government as the preferred regulator to whip those pesky internet giants into shape; you may not, though, have taken a look at the actual text of the response. Yes, ok, it’s very dry and written in total horrorgovernmentese, but it’s worth a look – whilst nothing has really been announced here other than a vague desire to ‘do a regulation’, it’s interesting to see just how theoretical all these plans are – despite the hard-man rhetoric. “”There are many platforms who ideally would not have wanted regulation, but I think that’s changing,” said Digital Secretary Baroness Nicky Morgan. “I think they understand now that actually regulation is coming.”” Which sounds meaningful, until you read the actual text of the Govt response, which says: “regulation will establish differentiated expectations on companies for illegal content and activity, versus conduct that is not illegal but has the potential to cause harm. Regulation will therefore not force companies to remove specific pieces of legal content. The new regulatory framework will instead require companies, where relevant, to explicitly state what content and behaviour they deem to be acceptable on their sites and enforce this consistently and transparently.” So, er, the regulation will regulate companies to self-regulate better! This…doesn’t *feel* like a solution
  • The Rough Guide to XBox: I was quite impressed by this; Microsoft has partnered with the Rough Guide to produce a travel guide to XBox, the idea being that it’s a wonderful infinity of beautiful worlds to explore at your leisure, and as such it deserves its own tourist guide to the best bits. A genuinely nice idea, this.
  • 1917: This is a typically-shiny BIG MOVIE WEBSITE, fine, but it’s particularly nicely made; a companion to the war film, this site takes you through the trenches in glorious 3dCGI-o-vision, presenting you with short clips from the film to whet your appetite for, er, a couple of hours of brutal battleporn. The site itself isn’t hugely revelatory, fine, but the navigation and interface are really rather nice, and I like the fact that there’s a clear ‘BUY TICKETS’ prompt throughout – though why it’s geolocked to the US is slightly beyond me. Still, lovely work.

By Vaka Valo

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PLAYLIST OF HIPHOP INSPIRED BY THE ABOVE PLAY! IT’S A GENUINELY GREAT MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD THAT NONE OF YOU THOUGHT TO GET IT ANY SORT OF VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT, PT.1:

  • Botnet: Oh, this is good. Part one-note gag, part art project, part weird little RPG, part therapy tool, Botnet is an app that answers one simple question; what if everyone else on your favourite s*c**l m*d** platform was a bot? What if YOU were the only real person? What if YOU were the center of everything? A wonderful combination of smartly-coded interface which mimics Facebook, Twitter and Insta with nailed-on design, and some nice use of GPT-2, the app lets you create your profile and then post whatever you like into the bot-filled ether; the botnet will then engage, react, respond and bicker in your comments, a machine-scripted peanut gallery reacting JUST FOR YOU! There are small microtransactional elements, like the ability to introduce new bot personas into the network like trolls and superfans and the like, but the real joy is the oddly-surreal and laugh-out-loud funny comments that your fandom will come up with; honestly, I really can’t recommend this enough. Annoyingly iOS-only, but nick a partner or friend’s iPhone and have a play – it’s ACE, and also (I found at least) weirdly sort-of revealing after a while.
  • The BBC Microbot: Thanks Gill for sending this my way – I am convinced that I’ve featured something almost exactly like this before, but I couldn’t find it and this is new and noone cares anyway, so. The BBC Microbot does one simple thing – you Tweet it some lines of BBC Basic code, and it will respond with that very programme running as a Gif on Twitter. Whilst I’m capable only of the standard “10 PRINT “MATT IS ACE; 20 GOTO 10”-type stuff, the bot’s feed showcases all of the outputs so far requested and, honestly, this is ART – how the everliving fcuk all these middle-aged men have managed to remember exactly the input strings they learned all those years ago in CDT is beyond me. I will give a special prize (it won’t be good, but I promise it will exist) to anyone who makes it write something nice about Web Curios.
  • Playmaker: I remember when Fantasy Football first started in the UK around 1992, and the frenzied playground discussions about whether Chris Sutton was worth the money; I couldn’t have predicted the weird stranglehold it appears to have developed on significant numbers of football fans across the UK, who seemingly spend hours fretting over each week’s captaincy and the worrying lack of assists being delivered by what they were sure was a creative midfield powerhouse. If you’re one of those fans, then you might be enthused by the prospect of Playmaker, “a dedicated discussion platform that allows you to build your identity and grow your following as a Fantasy Manager.” Yes, that’s right, ANOTHER INFLUENCER PLATFORM! Too ugly to make it as a YouTuber? Too malcoordinated to get on with TikTok? Why not monetise your ability to pick a fictitious team of footballers every week?? Whilst this is probably appealing thought for many of you, the platform’s at present very light on details as to exactly how it’s going to help you become a PROFESSIONAL FANTASY SPORTS PLAYER (no, really, that’s a legitimate aim of theirs). I am fascinated by things like this – I have no idea AT ALL how they envisage monetisation working, either for them or their userbase, but the feature list is quite interesting; the live game chat stuff, backed by live match data from Opta, is potentially quite an attractive idea. Basically, though, I just don’t think that it’s possible for more than about 5 people worldwide to make a living as ‘pro’ fantasy football players, whatever this app might want you to believe – watch, now, as it proves me wrong, and ‘Fantasy Football Influencer’ becomes a legitimate kids’ career aim by 2024.
  • Hoop: Interesting more for what it represents than what it is, Hoop is the first breakout app to be built on the Snap web API thingy (look, I know that that’s not it’s technical name, but let’s be honest – you can’t remember what it’s really called either, and you care less than I do, and you know what I mean, so, look, just LEAVE ME ALONE OK???), which effectively lets developers integrate Snap with other apps and websites. Hoop is basically Tinder-for-new-Snap-Friends; you launch the app, and it shows you a neverending cavalcade of Snap users; you can use the app to ask them for their Snap username which they can choose to share with you, thereby connecting you on the app and enabling you to send ephemeral pictures of your erogenous zones to each other (come on, let’s be honest). It’s not hugely exciting per se (unless you’re a very, very thirsty teen), but the way it leverages (sorry) Snap is interesting.
  • 136 Internet Videos: This is from the end of last year, but don’t let that in any way dampen its majesty. I’m nicking this from Faris’ newsletter, which I am sure you all subscribe to already – the link takes you to a Google Slides presentation by Joe Sabia who’s (I think) Head of Creative Development at Conde Naste, which presents 136 YouTube videos that, in his words, BLEW HIS MIND. Honestly, this is SUCH an incredible bit of web culture time travel and a wonderful repository of video creativity to boot; feel free to circulate this around your office and enjoy the spectacle of people in their early-20s discovering things like the Honda Rube Goldberg ad or ‘The Scared is Scared’. If you’re anything like me and have spent far, far too much of the past two decades burning through neurons whilst staring at a screen, this will be an incredible nostalgia vehicle; even if you haven’t, I promise you this is the best resource for visual inspiration I’ve seen in an age.
  • Electronic Football: I love stuff like this – its creator got in touch with @imperica on Twitter as he thought we’d like it, and how right they were. This is a Kickstarter – just started, with two months to go – for the development of a remarkable-looking reimagining of table football, all played automatically with magnets and code and affording the opportunity for computer-vs-computer play or for a human opponent to take on the machine. It’s quite hard to describe, but basically: “A dense matrix of a new kind of electromagnetic actuator that we invented in 2018 (patents pending) – covering the underside of the playing surface – enables both ball control and fast action. The addition of high-speed electronic ball tracking technology means that the system can play with or against human players.” You can get a pretty good feel for the idea by watching the video, but I think that the potential for this is SO much greater than that proof of concept suggests; the idea of being able to create self-adjusting kinetic landscapes like this is fascinating, and you can imagine this sort of thing at scale being used in theme parks to magical effect. Basically I want you all to back this so I can ask the nice people at Spaceman Technologies for a freebie – go on, pledge a quid.
  • The Big Crossword: There’s not a whole lot of scope for additional exposition here to be honest; it’s, er, a really big crossword. Available for download on iOS and Android, this is free and massive and, if you like crosswords, basically all your Christmases come at once. Contains 1250 clues, which ought to keep you reasonably occupied for at least part of 2020, alongside the intriguing idea of a ‘Quest Mode’ which promises to introduce some sort of narrative metagame to the concept of ‘solving some reasonably-simple word-based questions’. Best accompanied by a flask of weak lemon drink.
  • SNAFU: When you were a kid, did you dream of working in the music industry? Did you fantasise about a gig as an A&R person at a major label, using all of your taste and nous to pluck deserving, talented kids from small-town obscurity and propel them to genre-defining, generational stardom? Well, in common with much of the rest of the music business, technology is KILLING that dream; welcome to SNAFU, a new record label which proudly boasts that it chooses all its artists via…AI! Yes, that’s right, it’s the WORLD’S FIRST Artificial Intelligence-led music business: “Our proprietary algorithms analyze millions of data points over 150,000 songs per week to find the few artists that can make a major cultural impact with their music. We then put our resources to work to make sure that the music reaches its potential.” I am a very big fan of the hubris here – not only can the AI predict what will be a hit, but it can also pick those artists who will CHANGE THE WORLD! Honestly, I’m ready to hand over control of everything to these lads, they sound GREAT. I will watch this with interest; judging by the tracks on their homepage, the AI is at present seemingly trained to discover ‘tedious, Xanaxed-out Soundcloud rap that sounds like literally everything else in 2020’, but I presume I only think that because I am old and practically-dead.
  • Repper: Let’s add ‘textiles pattern designer’ to the list of creative professions made obsolete by the advent of the internet and the rise of machine intelligence; Repper is a really, really smart-looking platform, available on a subscription for a seemingly very reasonable 5 quid a month, which lets anyone upload image files and then select small areas of said images which can then be tesselated and messed with in seemingly-infinte ways. The breadth of output you can achieve with this is quite, quite dizzying, as is the way in which it cleverly takes selected elements from the source image and turns them into perfectly-aligned abstract elements; honestly, if I did stuff with fabrics I would LOVE this (I sort of love it anyway tbh).
  • Romantic London: HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY EVERYONE! This is the only vaguely Valentine’s-themed link in here this week, I think, and even this isn’t really about it at all; the ‘Romantic’ here refers to the time period rather than anything to do with Eros. Romantic London is ‘a research project looking at the life and culture of London at the turn of the 19th Century’, and features elements from Richard Horwood’s classic map of the time along with assorted other historical curios. This is lovely, and makes me want to spend a cold, sunny day walking the City – you may feel the same.
  • The Biodiversity Heritage Library: You want an incredible Flickr collection of prints of wildlife and assorted flora? EXCELLENT! This is a wonderful archive, and the sort of thing which, given the time, I would totally mine for prints with which to decorate my kitchen. The prints of fish in particular are SO good, and I quite want an 18th Century lithograph of a Senegalese manta ray should anyone feel minded to get me a present.
  • Cuss Collar: I’m going to have to stop featuring projects by MSCHF soon – it’s a bit annoying to have to include their stuff each week, particularly as it’s almost always either US-only or sold out by the time Friday rolls round. Still, this is too good (and silly) an idea not to feature – the Cuss Collar is their latest limited-edition product, developed for no discernible purpose and sold out within minutes, which sits around your dog’s neck and translates their bark into swear words. Yep, that’s it – it’s a dog collar which will shout things like “FCUKING PROLAPSE!” or “DICKNOSED BUMFACE!” every time your dog barks. That’s it – no high concept, no ;’purpose’, just a device that makes it sound like your dog has a terrible pottymouth. If someone at Pedigree doesn’t see this and rip it off somewow then, well, I fcuking despair of you.
  • The Unword of the Year: Stuff I learned this week – that each year since 2001, “a German linguists’ panel chooses one new or recently popularized term that violates human rights or infringes upon Democratic principles. The term may be one that discriminates against societal groups or may be euphemistic, disguising or misleading”. This year’s word is “climate hysteria”; previous winners have included “ethnic cleansing” and (my favourite choice) “human capital”. This is darkly-funny but also actually quite un-funny when you think about it in terms of language, power and meaning – stare too hard and it all gets a bit Orwellian imho.
  • 1000 Google Earth Landscapes: You want 1000 stunning aerial shots of the Earth in hi-res, to use as a screensaver or a piece of rotating wall art or to train your GAN on? YOU GOT THEM! This is actually an update to the original collection, bringing the number of images included to around 2,500; a truly beautiful collection.
  • Audionautix: This is a really, really useful service, collecting seemingly thousands of original compositions by the insanely-prolific Jason Shaw which he’s kindly made available for free for download and commercial use. If you’re regularly faced with the horrific task of creating ‘mood’ videos and needing to find some sort of inoffensive backing music then this will be absolutely fcuking GOLDEN.
  • The Rotary Cellphone: You might have seen this doing the rounds this week – designer Justine Haupt has created this WONDERFUL invention, a mobile phone powere by a rotary dialer, and which features no screens at all; rather than being a theoretical piece, this is actually a working device that Haupt intends to use as her primary phone; to that end, there are some excellent practical features such as one-touch dialing buttons for your preferred contacts. It’s intended as a means of limiting one’s obsession with / contact with the digital, but is also a genuinely lovely piece of design which harks back a bit to that weird period in the mid-00s when phone design went totally mental and Nokia was trying to flog us devices that basically looked like those odd Turkish flatbreads covered in mince that you get in Green Lanes.
  • Printing Money: A simple but very neat way of visualising different degrees of income. Really effective, not least at showing exactly how sh1t a human being Jeff Bezos is as regards his charitable contributions and attitudes towards taxation.
  • Newfoundland and Labrador Beard and Moustache Club: It is, I concede, a bit late for calendars, but if you’ve yet to get yourself a 2020 daymarker then let me STRONGLY recommend this one; the Newfoundland and Labrador Beard and Moustache Club has, for the past three years, published an annual calendar in which its bearded, moustached members pose as, er, mermaids. Lovely, sparkly-tailed mermaids. This is superb, and not a little erotic.
  • Podsync: This self-describes as a “simple and free service that lets you listen to any YouTube or Vimeo channels, playlists or user videos in podcast format”; that’ll do for an explanation, right? Right!

By Rose English

NEXT, HAVE THIS VAGUELY MINIMAL TECHNO-ISH MIX BY CULT MEMBER!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY SAD THAT NONE OF YOU THOUGHT TO GET IT ANY SORT OF VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT, PT.2:

  • Beetles in Games: No idea who compiled this list, or why, but if you’ve ever thought to yourself “You know what? I really wish someone had bothered to compile an exhaustive, image-based list of all the times the VW Beetle has appeared in a videogame and put it online for me to peruse at my leisure” then this will be all of your Christmases come at once. Whilst you might not think that this is of any interest to you, I encourage you to click and marvel at the frankly INSANE dedication to completeness on display here – when was the last time you did something this thoroughly? You ought to be ashemed of yourself.
  • The Tube Challenge: What are you doing with your weekend? Other than having THE BEST AND MOST ROMANTIC DAY OF YOUR LIFE, obviously. If you don’t have any particular plans, and you happen to be in London, why don’t you attempt one of these quite preposterous Tube challenges? No idea who’s compiled this, but I am VERY grateful for this – there are LOADS of different ones you can attempt here, from the classic ‘visit every station on the network INCLUDING Battersea Park’ to the far more esoteric ones like the ‘Points of the Compass’ challenge where you have to visit all the stations that have a compass point in their names. Even better, each challenge has the curre tn record time next to it, so you can RACE AGAINST THE CLOCK!! I realise as I type this that you might not all share my enthusiasm for the idea of doing nothing for 9 hours or so other than sitting on a fcuking underground train, but I respectfully suggest that you are WRONG and that this is the best thing you could do with a quite possibly very miserable weekend indeed.
  • Avocado & Toast: The latest drop from Matt Round’s continuing ‘Vole’ project of curiosities, this is a wonderful little algogenerated comic which takes millennial-bashing newspaper articles from all over the web and uses them as the seeding point to generate small comic strips in which the titular millennial couple Avocado and Toast discuss their incomprehension of certain popular Boomer things, to the inevitable furious consternation of said Boomer. This is genuinely funny, and works far better than you’d imagine; it’s also a brilliant example of how formal constraints can, when properly applied, be a genuine boon to creativity.
  • Mapping The Gay Guides: Oh wow, this is *such* a slice of queer history. I’m just going to give you the description here: “While on his frequent business trips around the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bob Damron wanted to find bars and other locales to meet other men like him. A gay man, Damron sought friends, companions, and safety at friendly businesses in the various cities he visited. He began jotting down the names of the spots he frequented, sometimes loaning out his notebooks to fellow gay friends to take with them on their own journeys. His prolific lists became the basis of gay travel guide he began publishing in 1964. Named the Bob Damron Address Books, these travel guides became almost survival guides to gay and queer travelers across the United States. First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in public and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) find bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people like themselves.” This is a glorious piece of social history, and a fascinating ongoing project; if you click on the ‘vignettes’ section you’ll see that there are a couple of essays documenting what the Guides can teach us about regional variations on attitudes towards homosexuality in the 60s and beyond, and I imagine these will be added to as time goes on. So, so interesting.
  • Open Syllabus: A whole LOAD of university syllabi, letting you see which are the most prescribed texts in each field in each country; it’s interesting not only in terms of getting a representative impression of what is canon in a specific discipline, but also to see how trends in academia vary from country to country. Equally, if you’re the sort of autodidact who fancies doing all the reading for, I don’t know, a DPhil from Cambridge, then this will tell you where to start (you madman).
  • VanGogh: A search engine for colour palettes which, wonderfully, just lets you put in whatever terms you like and will seemingly find a palette for anything; I just fed it the word ‘Fear’ and it threw out some genuinely unsettling colour selections, for example. This works by using the search term you input to pull associated images from Bing; it then pulls a palette from those and presents it to you. Simple, useful, fun, and it afford you the ability to create a colour palette based on YOUR NAME; chromatic narcissism at its finest.
  • Old Soviet Photos: You can’t move online for collections of old photos, and in the main I don’t bother with them in here because, well, there are other websites and newsletters for that sort of thing. This, though, I’ll make an exception for; this collection of images is from an unknown Moldovan photographer (now named as Zaharia Cusnir), all depicting rural life in the 50s and 60s; the images were discovered a couple of years ago as negatives in the rubble of an old house, and have been developed, scanned and collected online. The faces here, Christ; whilst old photos often have a slightly stuffed quality to them, these people are alive in a way you don’t always see. There are some truly gorgeous human beings in these images, photographed superbly.
  • Brainfood: Are you sick of the fact that your phone and the web have chipped away at your attention span to the extent that you can barely concentrate on anything long enough to compose a Tweet? Do you wish that you could do something better than reaching for your fcuking device every time you’re left unstimulated for more than 10 seconds? Tough, you’re weak and that ship has definitively sailed; still, you might like the sound of Brainfood which promises to make your mindless scrolling marginally more useful by sending you bitesize learning modules about all sorts of things – astronomy, geology, history, etc – each week. The site seems to suggest you’ll get about 60s of learning per week, which doesn’t personally sound like it’s going to transform me into some sort of well-rounded intellectual ubermensch and certainly doesn’t sound like it’s worth $5 a month, but perhaps I’m underestimating the degree of density these minute-long infobites will have. Launching, apparently, ‘soon’, you can sign up now for your chance to make yourself smarter via the medium of small, cartoonish lessons (look, I’m going to say this now – you are not going to learn anything meaningful or useful by being spoon-fed minute-long ‘lessons’ in cartoony format by an app).
  • Dark Future Shop: I don’t know whether any of you are secret Cosplayers (but I have my suspicions); still, if you are and if you want to go full-post-apocalyptic next time you play dress-up then this Etsy shop is the PERFECT place to stock up; this stuff is all quite ridiculous, but also incredibly well-made. Basically if you’re in the market for some Fallout-esque get-up, this will fulfil all your needs; also potentially appropriate for any of you contemplating Burning Man but who are too lazy to make your own gear. This is quite incredible stuff, honestly, although it does also rather scream “spends more time than is health on Reddit”.
  • Korean Films: Following Parasite’s Oscars triumph, it’s now absolutely de rigeur to have a strong opinion on the state of Korean cinema, and to be able to affect a slightly-bored long-standing knowledge of the country’s filmic output (look, I don’t make the rules, that’s just how it is). To aid you in this endeavour, have this YouTube channel which presents 200+ actual, full-length Korean films, with subtitles, for you to enjoy at home. On which note, can I personally recommend ‘My Sassy Girl’, which is honestly AMAZING and you should all go and watch right now (it’s actually a perfect Valentine’s film, now I come to think of it).
  • Fangs: A comic strip detailing the love affair between a vampire and a werewolf. Yes, I know, this sounds awful; ordinarily I have no tolerance whatsoever for this sort of Tumblr-esque stuff, but I promise you that it’s a delight. Smartly-written and beautifully-drawn and surprisingly affecting. Give it a try, it’s LOADS better than it ought to be.
  • Glide: I hate Powerpoint. You hate Powerpoint. And yet, because the world is stupid and wrong, and work is a pointless hell, we are all seemingly compelled to keep using it for ever, regardless of whether or not it’s actually useful or helpful. Still, thanks to Glide you can at least download a really simple, sleek and moderately-customisable template for the bloody thing, which might be useful to you if you don’t have access to a friendly designer (or any innate design ability of your own).
  • Jam: This isn’t live yet, but could be an excellent service – Jam will, it promises, offer a service to allow people to share subscription logins simply and securely via an app; the idea is that it will enable you to produce one-off login access to your accounts, letting you grant people time-limited or single-use ins to your Netflix, Amazon or similar. This is potentially a really useful tool if you don’t want to give your password out willy-nilly (and you shouldn’t).
  • Ad-Free YouTube: Or, more accurately, YouT-ube – this is a very simple hack, but a very useful one; simply add a ‘-’ after the ‘T’ in the irl of any YouTube video and it’ll remove all the ads and, as a bonus, play it on a loop. Feel free to use this however you want – were I in an office today, I would use this to play ‘Smell Yo Dick’ by Riskay on repeat on the telly, but you do you.
  • Space: “Space”, as Douglas Adams famously wrote, “is really, really big”. This is probably the most incredible photo of space I’ve ever seen, not so much for the nebulae and stuff on display as for the incredible resolution of it. Click – now zoom. Now zoom some more. Now zoom some MORE. Now take a moment to contemplate how far away this is, and how small and insignificant you are in the face of all this infinite cosmic majesty. GOOD, ISN’T IT?
  • Robots: The Atlantic’s In Vision series presents a selection of images of robots – as they term it, ‘at work and at play’. This is a lovely set of photos, but equally feels a little bit like it’s capturing something of a cuspy moment, where we’re just getting to a point where robotics is day-to-day adjacent but still quite far enough away to engender a sense of curiosity and wonder. Imagine travelling back in time and showing these to your seven year old self; you’d be rapt.
  • Old Book Illustrations: I mean, you don’t really need me to explain this. Illustrations from the 18th to early-20th Century, browsable and downloadable. A treasure-trove, and the sort of thing it would be quite interesting to train a GAN on to see what sort of strange historical drawings it might imagine as a result.
  • Extremely Online: I don’t want to spoil this – all I’ll say is that it’s a text adventure game in the style of Zork and all those old Infocom classics, and that it’s really quite smart. You may need to experiment a bit to get the hang of where the creator’s head’s at – type in commands and see what happens…
  • Wiz: Last up this week, an EXCELLENT little puzzle-platform game. Move the blocks, reach the exit, tear your hair out around level 20 when it starts getting HARD.

By Linda Norton

LAST MUSICAL SELECTION: HAVE THIS 80s-POP-LOUNGE-EURO-TYPE-THING BY S&W!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Sh1tty Possum Sadposts: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a classic of the genre; the linked Page is the Q&A, but if click ‘next’ in the left-hand sidebar you’ll get to the meat of this project – a load of photos of possums, overlaid with various inspirational and uplifting captions. You may not think you need this, but if you’re having something of a trying day I can recommend that you take a moment and stare at the possums accompanied by the lyrics to ‘Mr Brightside’; it will, I promise, improve EVERYTHING.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Michele Castagnetti: A US-based artist, Castagnetti’s work (as displayed in this Insta feed) is a weird mix of strong, tape-based graphics, brand subversions and stylised oil portraits; it’s an odd combination of styles, but it makes for an interesting and varied feed.
  • Royalty Now: Imagining what royalty from the past would look like if they were alive now, based on their representation in portraiture and sculpture. There’s a certain degree of ‘bad waxwork’ to some of these, but as a project it’s fascinating.
  • Joey Solomon: Solomon takes photos of disabled people that don’t look like any other photos of disabled people I’ve ever seen. He photographs other things too; his work is so, so good, I really can’t recommend this one enough.
  • Good Vietnam Shirts: By ‘good’ we here mean ‘written in comedically broken English’. If you’re a fan of tees that read things like ‘FUKK OF GOD!’ then you will ADORE this.
  • Nicolattes: Currently posting photos of the oddity of Chinese cities on lockdown as a result of the bat AIDS.
  • Pac In The Sink: No idea who the account’s owner is, but they have SNEKS! If you don’t like serpents then you may want to give this a swerve; otherwise, though, LOOK AT THESE LOVELY SLITHERY BOIS!
  • Paid Technologies: Slightly-bafflingly-named account which posts photos of beautifully-crafted edible jellies. Yep, jellies. No, I promise, it’s better than you think.
  • The Anonymous Photo Project: Collecting, preserving and sharing old photographs and negatives – there’s no thematic consistency, no grand plan, just an endless stream of anonymous old photos, slicing through life and the 20th Century. Wonderful.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • GPT-2 And Intelligence: A fascinating and pleasingly-sober look at the reality of GPT-2 (as I’m sure you’re all aware by now, that’s the current gold standard for text AI), which does an excellent job of pointing out the benefits and limitations of the tech as it stands, and makes it very clear exactly where the gaps are when it comes to producing something that can be said to not only produce text but which might be able to parse its meaning in some way; it also has some interesting things to say about theory of language and thought. Really, really interesting.
  • Carbon and the Web: A small essay by Danny van Kooten about his efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of the websites he works on; I’m including it mainly because FCUKING HELL EVERYTHING IS KILLING THE PLANET LITERALLY EVERYTHING.
  • Fashion’s Digital Identity: I’d expected this sort of thing to be far bigger than it is by now; I remember a good 10 years ago, charity shops were experimenting with adding codes to objects so that their donors could attach some sort of history or back story to their donations, say. Still, it is apparently on its way – this is a Vogue Business report on the growing trend in high fashion for garments to be ascribed a ‘digital identity’ with information about their provenance, manufacture, etc, available via scanning a label or a code. This is reasonably interesting, but if I’m honest I’m including it here because I invented the term ‘The Frockchain’ in my head when I first read this and now want to use it at every possible opportunity.
  • The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake: I don’t know about you, but when I was a teen and into my early 20s I still harboured a hope that I would end up living with all my friends as an adult, and that we’d be able to subvert convetions by having a happy, communal adult existence and we’d all be each other’s chosen family, bound together by choice rather than accidents of birth. Obviously it didn’t work out like that, what with nearly all my friends selfishly insisting on doing things like growing up and moving on and procreating and marrying, whilst I stayed firmly stuck in protoadolescence (I am the Billy Childish of webmongs); still, I’ve always been curious about non-traditional modes of living an alternatives to the traditional family unit, and this superb essay in The Atlantic looks at exactly that. It’s focused on American history specifically, but there are obvious parallels with all Western countries in terms of the way in which technology and progress have altered the way in which we relate to each other as familial units. This is beautiful – interesting and intelligent and learned and sad and hopeful – and it will make you want to spend the weekend with people you love.
  • White Collar Crime: This is a profoundly-depressing essay, I warn you; the Huffington Post looks at how and why the current era could be seen as something of a halcyon era for white collar crime, and how it is that so many plutocrats are able to get away with cheating the system and dodging their taxes, all with the knowledge of the largely-impotent enforcement agencies. There’s something so miserable about the fact that it all boils down to a question of money, and how, as ever, it’s the person with the most who wins. It also reminded me of the fact that in the 40 years I’ve been going to Rome I have bought approximately 9 bus or tram tickets; whilst there are fines in place if you’re caught without one, I know for a fact (courtesy of my cousin who works for the Roman equivalent of TFL) that there are a total of around 50 inspectors IN TOTAL in the whole of the city, and they never all work at the same time, meaning there’s basically no chance at all of ever getting caught. I am, effectively, doing exactly the same thing at a small scale as the billionaires referenced in this article, and I now feel ashamed. Sorry, Rome.
  • The Airbnb Scam: A great piece of investigative reporting, looking at the prevalence of Airbnb scammers who are using clever tricks and listings hacks to get around laws in cities like London which limit letting of properties to a set number of days per annum. Part of me admires the entrepreneurial ingenuity of these guys; a larger part of me thinks that Airbnb really is an urban cancer and we’ll all be better off once cities start properly clamping down on it.
  • Bloomberg Memes: As the US Democratic nomination approaches and we get to see which of the pretenders gets to enjoy losing to That Fcuking Man in November, take a moment to read this account of billionaire contender Michael Bloomberg’s memetic campaign war machine – the fact that there are actual meme-based political consultancy shops out there is honestly amazing to me, almost as much as it is that Michael Bloomberg thinks that this is anything other than a very ‘Hello, Fellow Kids’-type move. Didn’t the UK election last year not prove that a strong meme game is literally meaningless when it comes to engendering actual political turnout and support? Still, fair play to the kids who’ve managed to get access to his wallet for this.
  • Jailbreaking Teslas: This is about cars, but it’s actually more interesting than that (I promise); I had no idea that Tesla basically bricked their cars as soon as they appear on the resale market but, er, they do! This is fascinating to me – not the Tesla stuff (although, honestly, what an absolute d1ck move this whole thing is) so much as the future this presages, in which all our products and devices are software-dependent and can be turned off or rendered obsolete on a manufacturer’s whim and with a simple download. More reasons why having everything connected to the web isn’t necessarily always a great idea.
  • I’m Quitting TikTok: This may not be the absolute firts, but it’s certainly the first I’ve seen – TikTok’s received its first ‘why I’m quitting TikTok’ open letter! It’s all growed up! It’s more of a cultural/historical artefact than anything else, but it’s interesting how similar it is to every single one of these you;’ve ever read before, despite the novelty of the platform, though I did rather like this line: “TikTok isn’t merely a social app to share posts and mindlessly scroll through. For almost every user, it’s become an activity, a hobby, a project, a transactional video dialogue between user and camera.”
  • Playing Red Dead: Specifically, ‘playing Red Dead Redemption 2 as a 75 year old woman who’s never played games before but who wants to try this one because her son is one of the lead actors in it’. This is SO LOVELY, and a superb illustration of why games are wonderful; reading the author’s description of how the world drew her in and the characters slowly became familiar over the hours of playtime is genuinely moving, and a reminder that, honestly, games can and should be for everyone and you should get your mum on XBox live (actually, maybe spare her the foulmouthed teens, on reflection).
  • Types Of Person: I loved this essay, and it made me momentarily sad that I’ll never have teenage kids. Only momentarily, mind; I then remembered what I was like as a teenager and how even I didn’t want to spend much time with me. This is by Dan Brooks, and it’s about how there’s a trend amongst young people, borne of online discourse, to identify themselves and their peers exclusively as ‘types’, and how that’s not fantastic, maybe, for their emotional development: “When I say I didn’t do the dishes because I’m lazy, I’m talking around the fact that I could have done them but chose not to. The illusion of a fixed nature gives us an excuse to repeat bad behavior. To insist that what we do determines who we are — and not the other way around — is to make freedom and therefore responsibility a part of our worldview at the most basic level.” I’d be fascinated to know if this resonates with the parents among you.
  • Palindromes: OH GOD I LOVE THIS! Palindromes are wonderful, magical things, and this piece takes a language-lover’s delight in exploring how they work, what makes a ‘good’ one, and how computational power has allowed for brute force palindromic construction (which is cheating a bit). If you’re a linguist of any sort you will absolutely adore this – also, the fact that the Japanese word for ‘tomato’ is palindromic is SO PLEASING.
  • Meet the Femcels: Welcome to your depressing slice of internet life for the week; the online communities for women who, for various reasons, consider themselves to be involuntarily celibate – hence the construction ‘femcels’ This is an interesting if miserable read.
  • Macauley Culkin: This interview with Culkin has been widely mined for quotes, but it’s worth reading the whole thing – less because of Culkin, who doesn’t say anything particularly interesting throughout, more for the genuinely weird tone and style of the whole piece. From the incredibly grating authorial affectation of referring to Culkin as ‘Mack’ throughout, to the strange reverence that his most banal utterances are granted, this is truly odd piece of fame-sycophancy, painting someone who, whilst pleasant-seeming, doesn’t demonstrate anything remarkable whatsoever in the course of the profile. No wonder famous people are weird.
  • Emotion Eric: I cannot tell you how happy I was when this floated across my field of vision this week. I’ve spoken before I think of my love for early web sensation Eric, of ‘Eric Conveys An Emotion’ – a website in which the titular Eric would solicit requests for emotions to act out, and post images of him evoking, I don’t know, ‘uncertainty’ or ‘mistrust’ or ‘the feeling when the door shuts behind you and you just KNOW you’ve left your keys in your other trousers’. This is an interview with Eric who is, I promise, literally THE sweetest man you will come across in 2020. I promise you, this is SO PURE and SO GOOD, you will grin like a loon throughout.
  • The People of Las Vegas: Oh wow, this is superb. Amanda Fortini lives in Vegas – the real Vegas, not the strip – and this essay is her portrait of the city and its people and the weirdness and the artifice and the lies and the magic and the crime. So, so good: “One early morning as I am leaving my apartment, two esoteric sports cars are idling in front of me, bumper to bumper: a man gets out of the rear car holding a giant aspirin-pink designer purse and hurls it, with all the rage in his body, into the first car, which is presumably occupied by the purse’s owner. Recently, at a party on the Strip, a four- or five-year-old girl in a mermaid costume posed for photos with partygoers; her parents, also dressed as mermaids, were placing her in people’s laps. “I don’t think children should be used as props,” my friend whispered, after the parents tried to sit the child on her, “but that’s just me.” I agreed, but the kid seemed to be enjoying herself. Downtown, on a sweltering late-spring afternoon, my husband and I watched as a man in a wheelchair determinedly kicked his way up Fremont Street, backward and uphill, with one leg, his only limb. My heart collapsed in on itself, as it does so often here. Just last Saturday, I saw a woman on the sidewalk outside my apartment, bathing her legs in beer. Well, it’s not water, I thought as I passed her, but it works. That’s a thought I never would have had before moving to Las Vegas.”
  • Colgate Lasagne: I didn’t think that the best essay I would read this week on truth and falsehood and the nature of what is ‘real’ would also be about Colgate’s ill-fated expansion into frozen foods, and yet here we are. This is an attempt to find the ‘truth’ of the persistent internet legend of the Colgate Lasagne, but morphs into a far more interesting and smarter series of investigations into what ‘true’ means in an era of layered narratives and no sources and little critical thinking. Superb.
  • I Don’t Want To Be A Strong Female Lead: Finally this week, filmmaker Brit Marling talks about what it’s like being a female actor and why she doesn’t want to ever be offered the role of a ‘strong female lead’ ever again. This is excellent.

By Natasha Law

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. This is called ‘Lust’, it’s by Julia Bonnar, and I want to describe it as an absolute kinetic banger or ‘propulsive techno’ or something like that, but I can’t because it will make me sound like a total cock. Still, that’s exactly what it is – reminds me vaguely of Gearwhore, but better. SO GOOD:

  1. Next, Beaches with ‘Want What You Got’ which is basically the Instagram anthem that we didn’t know we needed. Love the video here too:

  1. This is superb – King Princess singing ‘Ohio’, seemingly recorded live:

  1. HIPHOP CORNER! This is Fat Tony & Taydex, and it’s called ‘Get Out My Way’. Very wonky indeed, but interestingly so:

  1. Finally this week, this won Best Short at the Oscars – watch and see why. It’s called The Neighbour’s Window and it’s brilliant. Oh, and BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU LOADS ESPECIALLY BECAUSE IT’S VALENTINE’S TODAY BUT FRANKLY I LOVE YOU ALL THE TIME EVEN WHEN IT’S NOT AND I HOPE THAT YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND PLANNED THAT INVOLVES EROS AND AGAPE IN WHATEVER PROPORTIONS YOU PREFER AND I LOVE YOU AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AND I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Webcurios 07/02/20

Reading Time: 32 minutes

It…it doesn’t feel hugely different, does it? Almost like there was no control to take back!

Hello everyone! Happy Friday! It’s been another long, unpleasant week at the coalface – and I don’t even work full-time FFS, I have no idea how you lot do it – but it’s now OVER. How have you celebrated our first full week free from the SHACKLES OF EUROSLAVERY? Have you CRUSHED IT and KILLED IT and SEIZED and WON and TASTED THE BLOOD OF YOUR FALLEN ENEMIES?

Sorry, that came out of nowhere; it’s just that it’s hard not to get caught up in the exciting machismo of NEW, UNFETTERED BRITAIN, poised as we are to once again take the lead on the global stage. I’m feeling so macho that as soon as I’ve stopped typing this and gotten round to washing some of the filth off, I’m going to make sausage rolls – THAT IS HOW WE DO IT HERE AT WEB CURIOS TOWERS!

Before I crack right on with the links and associated prose gubbins, though, there is an IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT to make – WELCOME TO THE WORLD IMPERICA MAGAZINE VOLUME 2!! For a mere three quid, you can get your hands on LOADS of excellent and interesting words (none of which, let me guarantee you, are by me) by several excellent writers; not only that, but I am absolutely in love with the cover art and indeed the artist, with whom there’s an excellent interview. It’s a lovely project, and Editor Paul’s done a fantastic job, and, I repeat, none of it will sound like me AT ALL. It’s ace, honest. 

Right, gentle plugging done with, now it’s time for the REAL stuff – this isn’t a magazine, there’s no editing (PAH! EDITING!), there’s just me and you and some links, and some pictures, and the unspoken knowledge that neither of us really understands why we do this anymore but that there’s something deeply, darkly ritualised about the whole experience which is doing neither of us any good.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you should be grateful. 

By Shae Detar

LET’S KICK THE MIXES OFF WITH THIS NEW HIPHOP SELECTION BY TIFFANY CALVER!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THE OCCASION OF TWITTER’S LATEST EARNINGS STATEMENT TO REMIND EVERYONE OF THE VANISHINGLY-SMALL NUMBER OF REAL PEOPLE WHO USE THE PLATFORM AND CONSEQUENTLY WOULD APPRECIATE THE MEDIA PLAYING SLIGHTLY LESS ATTENTION TO IT AND WHAT PEOPLE SAY ON IT BECAUSE IT IS ABOUT AS REPRESENTATIVE OF ACTUAL PUBLIC OPINION AS LONDON IS OF THE UK:

  • Facebook Will Shut Down Its Audience Network’s Mobile Arm: An irritating week in s*c**l m*d** news, this one, in the main because there’s stuff which has happened and which I probably ought to write up in my capacity as a…as a…actually, hang on, why do I have to write this up? DAMN MY STAKHANOVITE DEDICATION. Anyway, this is the news that Facebook’s audience network – which shows Facebook ads on non-Facebook properties, basically – is shutting down it’s mobile arm, which means FB ads will, in time, run across a more limited range of third-party mobile sites. I can’t imagine why you’d care about this – I mean, as long as we hit those magical, arbitrary KPIs, who gives one iota of a fcuk where they come from? It’s this sort of attention to detail and deep pride in my work that you can expect when you hire me as a consultant, should you be tempted.
  • New FB Streaming Tools For Gamers: There’s been a semi-interesting degree of rumbling this year about Twitch looking like it’s in for something of a tricky year, with YouTube and Facebook and Microsoft’s platform whose name I can never remember all luring big-name streamers away with cash and new features and stuff. Facebook’s latest feature update is designed primarily to protect streamers from harassment: “With the new toolkit, creators and moderators will be able to remove comments, mute viewers for a short period of time or ban people from their Page or stream. Once someone is banned they will still be able to watch the stream but won’t be able to comment or react to the stream or other people, and their previous comments will be removed.” So there.
  • Better Parental Controls for Messenger Kids: This all seems good and sensible from a child safety point of view – “parents will be able to see who a child is chatting with and how often, view recent photos and videos sent through chat, access the child’s reported and block list, remotely log out of the app on other devices and download the child’s chats, images and videos, both sent and received. The company is also introducing a new blocking mechanism and has updated the app’s Privacy Policy to include additional information about data collection, use and deletion practices.” It does, though, equally read rather like a laundry list of features which I, even as a non-parent, would sort-of have imagined might have been included in a piece of messaging software aimed at kids right from the start; I’m slightly astonished that this update was needed.
  • You Can Now See Which Accounts Insta Thinks You Care About Most: There’s literally no practical purpose to this whatsoever – at least not professionally – but Insta users can now get info from the app as to which of their friends they’re most likely to see content from first; you can view both ‘most shown in feed’ and ‘least interacted with’ lists. There’s nothing you can obviously do to materially affect the former, but you’d imagine that there will be a host of people attempting to use this information to work out additional details as to how THE ALGORITHM determines is most likely to light up your synapses at any given moment. Expect this to cause not insignificant arguments in certain types of households – “WHY IS YOUR MOST-SHOWN LIST ALL INSTATHOTS???” “IT’S THE ALGO, BBZ!”, etc etc.
  • Twitter’s Q419 Earnings: On the one hand, revenue surpassed $1bn for the first time, which continues the broadly-positive trajectory of recent earnings reports; on the other, let’s just focus again on the fact that the Daily Active Users number is 150million, which is literally 10% of Facebook’s and which once again should be a reminder that, aside from in specific instances, attempting to extrapolate anything significant about the majority of people in the real world based on what people say on Twitter is a very, very iffy business indeed.
  • Twitter’s Deepfakes Policy: It’s here, and it’s not bad. Basically, it boils down to “You may not deceptively share synthetic or manipulated media that are likely to cause harm”; this focus on aims and motives is an interesting one, and seems like a decent start. As with a lot of stuff on Twitter, there’s also going to be an awful lot of reliance on the wider community to pick up the heavy lifting in terms of monitoring and reporting; it also remains to be seen how a platform with a…questionable track record of interpreting intention when it comes to things like hatespeech, Nazis, deaththreats and the like does when it comes up against some of the inevitably-tricky questions policies like this will throw up, but it’s a decent opening position imho.
  • YouTube’s Anti-Misinformation Policies: These are also quite good, and basically focus on banning material that’s been edited to explicitly mislead about facts or practices in and around elections, and banning accounts that impersonate others or artifically inflate or boost their views. Again, the devil will be in the implementation; equally, again, one wonders what exactly it is about Facebook as a business that makes it so spectacularly bad at this stuff.
  • Demand by Google: This is really interesting. If you’re in the music business you’ll want to keep an eye on this; just launched in the US, Demand is Google making available an absolute fcuktonne of data about music and artists, intended to help the music industry make better, smarter decisions about things like tour schedules and ticket pricing and things; you might, say, want to be able to access search and streaming data on a city-by-city basis and use that to recalculate the tour schedule to tap into perhaps hidden fanbases, say, or find out exactly which brands resonate best with your artists so as to ink the most appropriate sponsorship deals and…it all sounds a bit, well, soulless, doesn’t it? Still, it’s almost certainly THE FUTURE – given that the music we’re fed is increasingly algoinfluenced, why oughtn’t the rest of the business? I look forward to all the various stan groups attempting to game this by organising 24h ‘Google Rallies’ to persuade Ariana Grande to visit Skegness via the power of data manipulation.
  • Pinterest Launches AR Lenses: Launching with a bunch of makeup brands but apparently available to all advertisers in the US, Pinterest’s effectively opening up its own version of Insta’s SparkAR platform. If I worked for Farrow & Ball I would be FEVERISH with excitement about this (I would also be a very, very different person).
  • Superbowl Ads: I’m presenting these here not because I think any of them are particularly good but more because each and every one of these could have been scripted by AdWeek’s Twitter bot. Honestly, these are ALL basically “Famous people X & Y do something vaguely nostalgic/surreal – and there’s a payoff at the end!” – look, let’s just let the machines take over the whole of the industry, please. The ads will be a bit rubbish for a while, fine, but they will also be weird, and frankly ‘weird’ is literally the only currency of the attention economy and so they’ll do fine and perhaps those of us currently working in it or adjacent industries can all just lie down and go to sleep for a long, long time.
  • Gucci Pinball: Have to say, I was a bit disappointed by this, but I am honour-bound to include it as a) it’s by Gucci and I tend to love their webwork (to be clear, I have no interest at all in anything they sell; PLEASE MARK THIS AS ‘SENTIMENT NEUTRAL’, SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT MONKEY!); and b) it’s pinball, and who doesn’t love a game of online pinball?! NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Sadly it’s not a very good game of pinball – certainly not a patch on the high-watermark of all promotional digital pinball games, this masterful effort from a French rail company from about three years ago) – but it’s mildly diverting for three minutes or so, and the instruction to resize your browser window if you try it on desktop is a rather nice piece of design.

By Adam Priester

NEXT, ENJOY THE LATEST SUPERB MIX FROM JOE MUGGS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WORKING IN AN OFFICE WITH FANCY MEETING ROOMS WITH SILLY NAMES TO COMMANDEER THE LARGEST OF THOSE THIS AFTERNOON AND INSTALL THE COLD WAR STEVE EXHIBITION IN IT AS IT WILL MAKE A NICE CHANGE FROM THE WALLS BEING COVERED IN PRINTOUTS OF SLIDES THAT YOU SPEND ALL DAY REARRANGING LIKE THE PROVERBIAL DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC, PT.1:

  • Flashpoint: I have no idea whatsoever if anyone ever pays attention to this sort of thing, but I tend to chuck the games at the end of the miscellania each week, mainly to act as some sort of reward for having ploughed through the preceding several thousand words of rubbish. This week, though, this really does need to be presented front-and-centre; Flashpoint is an INCREDIBLE project, which seeks to preserve seemingly EVERY SINGLE FLASH GAME EVER MADE in this downloadable launcher. Be warned, the full collection’s 241GB; there is, though, a pared-down selection of some of the best games for a fraction of that size. This is…this is EVERYTHING, I promise; if you ever spent any time in the 00s clicking through thousands of random titles on Newgrounds as you waited for the agonisingly slow hands on the office clock to tick round to 6pm so you could go to the pub (or, er, if you were a child in the 00s and this sort of thing is what you did after school) then you’ll be instantly-transported by the titles in here; aside from anything else, there are some SUPERB games in here, classic RPGs and prototypical versions of things like Angry Birds and OH GOD I WONDER IF THEY HAVE YETI SPORTS? Frankly it’s a miracle you’re getting a Curios at all this week, is what I’m saying.
  • You, Me & Cold War Steve: Such a wonderful idea by, were the position to exist, the person who would almost certainly be granted the position of ‘Artist Laureate’ – Cold War Steve, ‘he’ of the surreal collages depicting Phil Mitchell navigating a surreal, blasted modern Britain alongside a motley crue of a vaguely-noncey cultural icons from Blighty past and present, is launching a new show; the twist here is that anyone can display it. “The follow up to the hit debut ’A Brief History of the World (1953-2018)’ is a high resolution, free to download and display exhibition for the people. The entire exhibition will be hosted on a public link for anyone to download and put up anywhere they choose. The exhibition could run in your local library, a pub, front room, back garden, doctors surgery, music venue . . or even a gallery…The exhibition pack will include a poster template to promote your exhibition, some basic guidelines for print but no set rules. Curate your own exhibition in any order and any size, print locally and spread the word!” I’m not joking in the section heading, by the way, I would like ALL of you to do this in your offices and please share your pictures of it with Imperica on Twitter or via email; we could maybe make a nice gallery of them. Come on, FFS, unless you work somewhere genuinely rich it’s guaranteed to be better than the anodyne crap currently adorning the walls.
  • Text For Humanity: I came across this because Stephen Fry of all people was RT’d into my timeline – it was almost quaint to see his name, like 2009 Twitter was making a strange, whimsical, hopeful return only to get kicked to death by its jaded, disillusioned, battle-scarred 2020 future self – so apologies if this has already been all over the normie web. Still, benefit of the doubt and all that – Text for Humanity, grandiose title aside, is an initiative by Mental Health America but available worldwide; it aims to connect strangers around the world via the medium of sending anonymous, vaguely-anodyne positive messages to…well, to anyone really. The idea is that you send the sort of text that you’d like to get from a stranger to a number; it then gets forwarded on (after, one presumes, being lightly checked to ensure it’s not an exhortation to suicide) to someone else, who gets to feel momentarily warm and fuzzy about the fact that another person somewhere has felt compelled to say something platitudinous about a non-specific idea of a human being. Oh, dear, no, I can’t give it the benefit of the doubt, turns out. Look, obviously this isn’t a bad idea at all; it’s more that I personally find the completely random and unconnected nature of it a bit dispiriting. I don’t know, for example, that I’d find a message saying ‘I don’t know you but I bet you’re AWESOME!’ anything other than a reminder of my own fundamental solitude in a cold and uncaring universe, but I concede that it’s entirely possible this is my problem rather than the project’s. Still, that’s not prevented me from firing off a quick “Dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt!” to someone, somewhere – I mean, I’m not a total cnut.
  • Coronavirus Charts: This Twitter account’s a weird sort-of microcosm of ‘life and the internet in 2020’ imho. Its bio states “Your number #1 source on charts and “news” for #Coronavirus”, and those inverted commas around ‘news’ are quite important here; this is basically coronavirus-themed sh1tposting, and it is ART. I particularly like the chat around the virus’ ‘ranking’ in the CDC’s virality charts, with all these Doomer kids in the replies saying things like “INFECT ME DADDY GET TO NUMBER 1 FOR THE CHILDREN” – what could be more 2020 than “something strange and potentially awful and terrifying is happening; let’s cheer it on and pretend we are actively seeking the sweet release of death and let us also sort of weirdly anthropomorphise and fetishise it!”? Expect to see a LOT of ‘Sexy Coronavirus’ costumes come October, is all.
  • Column: Column is…mysterious. “Column is a new social network dedicated to fixing information incentives online”, backed by Peter Thiel amongst others and recipient of quite a lot of curious chat online as to exactly what that will practically entail. At the moment Column’s recruiting expressions of interest before accepting people into a proper alpha launch, and it’s not entirely clear how it will function, but coverage so far suggests there’s going to be a strong emphasis on guided conversations and discussions, with users choosing to ‘follow’ conversations and groups convened and effectively run by high-value (intellectual or, inevitably, financial) individuals. “The plan is for these luminaries to buy in to the service: the document suggests that Column could raise $50 million from “500 equity holders that are public intellectuals,” each paying $100,000 to invest in the site and lead their own private community (or “column”). The network itself, however, although it’s subscriber-only, is not intended to be exclusive. Anyone can join; the goal is to scale, and the hope is that a paid service will nurture high-quality content instead of the toxic morass most social networks give rise to.” Which feels a bit like a platform designed to foster cults imho, but frankly if the future is all about a bunch of people paying money to access the online Church of DiCaprio then who am I to argue?
  • Guild: What’s holding YOU back from business success? What’s the main thing that’s stopping you from reading this on one of those mental rich person’s mobile phones made out of diamond and ocelot perinea? Let me guess – IT’S THE ABSENCE OF A DEDICATED MESSAGING APP FOR BUSINESS, RIGHT?! I thought as much – thank GOD, then, for Guild, which bills itself as ‘the world’s best messaging app for business’, and which describes itself as “as easy to use as a consumer messaging app but with the privacy, control, sophistication and service you’d expect for business.” Basically it’s a halfway house between LinkedIn and WhastApp, because that’s exactly what you’ve been crying out for, right? There is literally no conceivable reason that I can think of as to why this is necessary or indeed better than any number of existing platforms and services out there – look, I know we all hate LinkedIn, right, but how about we just stop using it rather than replacing it with something parallel? WE DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS STUFF! WE CAN MAKE S*C**L M*D** STOP IF WE TRY! Please?
  • Mydora: Oh God, this is dizzying. Another project by the amazing team at Restorativland – whose Geocities archiving project I featured a few weeks back – this is Mydora, an incredible resource which they actually built last year and which I totally failed to see at the time. Basically they managed to save nearly 500,000 songs from the old MySpace archive and turn them into this, an infinite streaming service which you can tweak by genre but which otherwise just serves up a near-infinite stream of entirely random, mostly obscure musical odds and ends from the 00s. Depending on the sort of decade you had back then, this may send you spiralling back to some sort of Nu-Rave, Klaxons-y fever dream; seriously, this is SOOOO deep.
  • Oscar The Bin: I have literally just realised as I typed that why this device is named ‘Oscar’. I am an idiot. Still, this is a smart-sounding idea; Oscar is technology developed by Inuitive AI which is designed to be installed in places where there’s differentiated refuse disposal; the idea is that Oscar uses image recognition to determine what someone is depositing into the bin, and admonishes them gently if they’re putting, say, bacon fat in the glass recycling. Doubtless based on some nudge-type principles, this apparently has a significant positive impact on the quality of refuse division and lessens the wastage in stuff being taken to recycling; it’s a really interesting idea, although obviously does lead one to image a classically-dystopian Judge Dredd-style future in which the bins are always malfunctioning and swearing at you, and in which eventually they’ll be equipped with low-level electroshock capabilities because we always, always need a stick.
  • Amazon Dating: This isn’t a real site – it’s a very well-made spoof by Ani Acopian and Suzy Shinn – but I feel reasonably-confident in predicting we’ll have some sort of Amazon dating product before the decade is out; after all, what better indicator could there possibly be as to your likely compatibility with a potential partner than your shopping history? Still, while we wait for ever-munificent MechaBezos to grant us another boon – stick me with your arrow, skin-domed cupid! – we can enjoy the painstakingly written profiles of the various singles available for your perusal on Amazon Dating (which reads quite a lot like Amazon Pimp, which is another potential area for expansion; I’d imagine this would probably be a sub-brand, though). Do check the reviews too; I think these are real ones culled from elsewhere, but they work wonderfully.
  • All The Basketball: Non-football people in the UK are often known to quite-justifiably complain that the football IS ALWAYS HAPPENING; spare a thought for the sports refuseniks in the US, though, who have not only their own version of football (the one with the pituitary meatheads and the concussion) but also baseball and, worst of all, basketball, a sport so preposterously constant that each team in the NBA plays every two or three days for basically 10 months of the year (this might be an exaggeration, but it’s only a very slight one) and that therefore produces SO MUCH BASKETBALL that it’s literally impossible to see it all. Unless, of course, you use this site – Clips is quite amazing, and seemingly legal (or at least it is in the UK), and presents EVERY SINGLE IMPORTANT BIT of EVERY SINGLE BASKETBALL GAME on one website. You can see every point as an individual 10-second clip should you so desire; if you like basketball then you will possibly never do anything else ever again.
  • Synesthesia Me: A nice little art project in which artist Bernadette Sheridan has built a little online tool which lets you see how she ‘sees’ your name, chromatically. In common with some other synesthetes,Sheridan sees specific letters as stark blocks of colour; type in your name and you can see what combination it creates for her. You can browse galleries of the visualisations of others’ names, or create your own and buy your own print of it from Etsy; this is potentially a lovely present for a kid, I think (or adult; there’s nothing inherently childish about synesthesia, Matt, you wanker).
  • Zyl: This is quite a cool idea in theory, but a terrible one in practice. I think there’s a general understanding that there’s nothing good about Facebook amongst most people, but the one feature that stills seems to elicit some shred of affection is the timehop thing, showing you memories from a past in which you were thin and still had fun; Zyl is basically that, but for your camera roll; the app will pull out a random photo from your phone’s memory each day (presumably it’s got some sort of software to prevent it from pulling anything too…er…fleshy), and exhort you to share it with others – IN THE APP!! Yes, that’s right, it’s ANOTHER FCUKING S*C**L N*TW*RK! Were it not for the insistance on becoming a community, I quite like the idea of mining your phone’s memory for stuff like that and wonder how else it could be applied.
  • A Thread of Awesome Birds: You might not think you care about mad avian plumage, but I promise you that you really, really do.
  • Audio Canterbury Tales: Oh this is so wonderful! You can get this either as an app or use it in-browser; it’s the General Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, presented simultaneously as its original manuscript, as a textual translation, and with an audio file of the original version being read overlaid on top, and it’s FASCINATING. Even better, this is an entirely self-made project by a bunch of academics who’ve cobbled it all together themselves, and it was even championed by the late Terry Jones who aside from being a Python was also a Chaucerian scholar of some renown. So, so lovely, and genuinely happymaking (especially if you’re any sort of history geek).
  • Pokemon of the Year: I don’t really understand why Google is running a poll to determine the popular choice for ‘Pokemon of the Year’ but, well, it is! You can vote for another week or so, so CHOOSE WISELY.

By Deborah Paauwe

NOW WHY NOT TRY THIS SLIGHTLY FRANTIC BREAKS MIX BY YOROBI!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WORKING IN AN OFFICE WITH FANCY MEETING ROOMS WITH SILLY NAMES TO COMMANDEER THE LARGEST OF THOSE THIS AFTERNOON AND INSTALL THE COLD WAR STEVE EXHIBITION IN IT AS IT WILL MAKE A NICE CHANGE FROM THE WALLS BEING COVERED IN PRINTOUTS OF SLIDES THAT YOU SPEND ALL DAY REARRANGING LIKE THE PROVERBIAL DECKCHAIRS ON THE TITANIC, PT.2:

  • Amiibots on Twitch: I only partially understand this, if I’m honest – there are a few things here that are largely a mystery to me, such as Amiibos which I have since learned are little collectibles produced by Nintendo that come in the form of cards or figurines and which can be used to affect in-game play via RFID or something like that. Still, the overall premise is really interesting – this is another 24/7 autoplaying stream of videogame fighting, all running entirely autonomously, with the game in this case consisting of Super Smash Bros with a roster of fighters comprising the Amiibos uploaded by users. Which, fine, all sounds totally arcane and baffling, I appreciate, but the basic premise is that this is infinitely-streaming, computer-controlled videogame play based on characters created out-of-game by actual people. So one could imagine a situation in which, say, FIFA players could train and improve their teams in FUT before uploading them to something like this to play computer-controlled ranking matches against other users’ teams in exchange for currency, etc. DO YOU SEE? Fine, this is all VERY niche and VERY geeky, but I genuinely think there’s the beginning of a very, very big entertainment movement here.
  • Go Dogo: Do you love your dog? Of course you do! He or she is a GOOD BOY OR GIRL! It’s fair to say, though, that unless you’re a very particular type of delusional you probably don’t think of your dog as being particularly smart (apologies, obviously, if your dog’s one of those ‘open the door, use a flushing toilet, rescue kid down the well-type animals); perhaps the reason is that is that you’re not giving it enough stimulating mental challenges! Enter Go Dogo, a pre-release product which is designed to address that exact lacuna in your pet’s life – “The Go Dogo game consists of two physical units that connect to your home TV through an HDMI cable. The main unit includes a computer, a treat dispenser, and a camera. A small side camera provides a side view of the dog. You control the system through an app, available for iOS and Android. It will allow you to set up the system, schedule trainings and follow your dog’s progress. Once you’ve started a session, the instructor on the screen will call your dog over and ask it to perform a task. The two cameras ensure that the dog’s response is captured, and if the task is performed correctly, a treat is released.” So, basically, you’re outsourcing ‘playing with an interacting with your dog’ to a machine. Get a fcuking hamster, you don’t deserve a dog.
  • The Hair Freezing Contest: You might have seen the photos of this annual event at Takhini Hot Springs doing the rounds online for a few years now, but i didn’t realise that it had its own website with its own excellent online photogallery of very, very cold-looking people with hair straight out of anime. You still have until 1 April to enter the 2020 contest, should you be able to get yourself to the Yukon between now and then.
  • Check Republic: Online collaborative art projects aren’t new, but I’ve not seen one that uses this particular conceit; Leon Eckert’s built what’s basically a massive, multiplayer piece of pixel art out of little tick dialogue boxes, which anyone can check or uncheck to create…something. At the time of writing, there’s a slightly-Japanese-looking cutesy design on there, but who knows what it will be when you click? Web Curios accepts no responsibility should the answer to that question be ‘swastikas’, but genuinely hopes that it isn’t.
  • Google Maps Hacks: You will, I’m sure, have seen this this week – artist Simon Weckert who manipulated Google Maps into falsely displaying a traffic jam by taking a small trailerload of Android phones over a bridge very slowly, thereby making Google think that there were a bunch of people stuck in very heavy gridlock and thereby causing a red traffic overlay to appear on the live Google Maps display of Berlin. Fascinating project, not least for the ideas it sparked about what else you could do with this sort of thinking / hacking, but also because it shows quite how cobbled together much of the seemingly-shiny modern web infrastructure is; stuff like this is why so many companies are so keen on the idea of smart cities, so as to eliminate the possibility for person-led fcukery and error (the two things that I imagine will render living in the future maybe halfway tolerable).
  • This Cat Hopefully Does Not Exist: A Twitter feed publishing GAN-imagined cats. Cats which can at best be described as ‘approximations’ and at worst as ‘hairy nightmares’. HORRIBLE.
  • The Art of Building 2019: The 2019 finalists of the Chartered Institute of Building’s ‘Art of Building’ photography prize. The website’s a bit horrible (sorry, but it is), but you can see the various pics by using the selector in the top-right of the page; it’s actually really nice to see a selection of photos that doesn’t focus on people, I must say, which is a new level of misanthropy even for me.
  • Little-Known But Obvious Facts: I guarantee you will do a proper “OH WHAT?!” at at least three of these. A classic-of-the-genre Reddit thread which taught me LOADS (including that I simply don’t think hard enough about anything); personal favourite findings include the fact that “Words that are spelled the same but pronounced with emphasis on different syllables is actually indicative of the part of speech it is. Stress on the first syllable is a noun. Stress on the last syllable is a verb. Examples: CON-tract and con-TRACT. The former is a noun ( sign this contract) whereas the latter is a verb (the muscles contract). Same with record, address, impact, object, and a few others”, and that cats and dogs literally cannot see what’s under their noses. I promise you, this will teach you more than ANYTHING that has happened at work this year.
  • UK Govt Organograms: Ok, fine, I appreciate that that’s not the most compelling link headline I’ve ever penned BUT I promise you that this selection of designs, using the departmental structure of various UK Governmental bodies in 2014 as the starting point, are sort of soberly-beautiful. I particularly like the way they’re kept unannotated, lending them a pleasingly abstract quality; I can imagine that there’s a parallel universe in which the civil service is much, much cooler than it is in real life and young departmental hotshots get designs like these inked on their perfectly-sculpted torsos to mark their first classified assignment or something like that (having worked, briefly, at DWP, I can categorically confirm that this is a very far parallel indeed).
  • Masterworks: After last week’s site which let you bid for the rights to a musical artist’s back catalogue, another online service which very much fits into the ‘price of everything, value of nothing’ bracket; Masterworks lets anyone (well, anyone with a reasonable amount of liquidity at least) invest in the purchase of actual, genuine bona fide art, PROPER art, by people you’ve heard of and maybe even quickly rushed past on your way to see the Mona Lisa or one of the Van Goghs you’ recognise (sorry, I know that that is horribly snobbish, but this sort of thing rather brings out the worst in me). Like the potential returns you can get from a Monet but don’t quite have the seven figures to drop on one? NO WORRIES JOIN A SYNDICATE!! Yes, that’s right, you can become part of a collective to own 1% of a Monet, or a Manet, or a Magritte (painters not beginning with an ‘M’ are also available, I believe), with the eventual hope that it will resell at a profit and you’ll trouser a tidy sum. Leaving aside the utter, utter misery of conceiving of art in this way, it also strikes me as wildly optimistic; I mean, these big ticket lads don’t move that often, and I’d be interested to see exactly what their presumed vesting period is for these shares. Still, if you have all the artistic soul and emotional depth of a blobfish then FILL YOUR BOOTS.
  • Write With Parkinsons: This is lovely. The creator’s mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, and so they created this – a font designed to record her writing as it currently is, which will change over time as her writing does. It’s a beautiful and sad expression of what’s lost with Parkinson’s, and the way it’s been open sourced to allow anyone to create their own version with their own or a relative’s handwriting is lovely. I am very, very bored of ‘we are going to use a tech thing to highlight issue X’ stunts, but even my miserable cynicism was won over by this (that said, please, no more fonts as campaigns, please).
  • Take Care: This is an interesting idea; as far as I can see, Take Care is designed to be an online retailer which carries only products which it determines to meet certain criteria around environmental impact, etc (they use the term ‘sustainability’, but I have decided to boycott it in 2020 as it’s fcuking meaningless and seemingly used only by people who want to obfuscate what they are actually doing for the environment with vaguery); if you’re interested in keeping track of what’s new in the world of environmentally-friendly (ish – it’s all relative, because, as it’s important to keep reiterating, WE NEED TO STOP WANTING AND BUYING THINGS ALL THE TIME) retail then this is a must-bookmark. It’s a Dutch company but obviously has international ambitions, and I think it’s a really interesting site; worth keeping an eye on, I think.
  • Bongoquotes: I found this Reddit thread so much funnier than I wanted to; I am a base person. Still, I can convince myself that I am better than all the people responding in here – HOW MUCH BONGO DO YOU HAVE TO WATCH TO HAVE A ‘FAVOURITE’ QUOTE FFS?!? The question being asked is ‘what’s the best quote from a pr0n film that you remember?’ and some of the answers…just wow. But seriously though, if you recognise any of these then I sort of pity you. I am genuinely curious about the context for some of these – particularly “In front of my salad?” – but not to the extent that I’m about to go searching for them. There’s no pictures in here, but there’s quite a lot of NSFW words. Still, HILARIOUS.
  • Spaghetti Hentai: A brand new one for the Rule 34 encyclopedia, this. Who was the first person to think ‘Hm, I wonder what would happen if I took Hentai imagery [for those of you fortunate enough not to be immediately familiar with what that word means, it’s basically the generic for anime bongo] and then used a Neural Net to style transfer it so that it looked like that it was made of spaghetti?’? Sadly it appears that we will never know, but that special man’s (going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty confident I’m right here) legacy is going to be preserved forever thanks to this subReddit. Is it NSFW? Hm, on the one hand, it’s spaghetti; on the other, it’s pictures of preposterously-proportioned cartoon people, fcuking, albeit rendered in cooked pasta. I don’t know, kids, this one’s up to you – I think you could make a convincing defence if confronted by HR, though, as there’s no way in hell anyone could possibly w4nk to this (please, please, don’t feel the need to prove me wrong).
  • iSpy Waipoua: This is Where’s Wally? (But obviously not for copyright reasons!), except rather than looking for a lanky, speccy kid in a stripey top you’re instead looking for a bunch of creatures and characters from Waipoua National Park in New Zealand. Soothing fun, and the sort of thing that might shut a kid with an ipad up for a good 40 minutes if you’re lucky.
  • The Snake Mother: Finally this week, a choose your own adventure-type text game with very simple graphics that goes weirdly deep – there are a LOT of branches here, and despite the simple 8-bit graphics there’s quite a haunting, creepy vibe to the whole thing (and the sountrack’s really very good); give this a play, it’s a really fun way to spend 10-20 mins).

By Casey Weldon

LAST THIS WEEK, THIS IS A SUPER-CHILLED AMBIENTY SORT OF LOUNGE JOB BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED GEOFFREY LARUE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • It’s Just A Question of Style: Just the one Tumblr this week, but it’s a good one; old cars, classic 50s and 60s designs, a proper retro-vehicular timewarp.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Playtronica: Thanks Rina for pointing me at this, the Insta feed of sound/art collective-type people Playtronica – an excellent selection of musical toys and experiments with, aside from anything else, a really nicely-defined aesthetic to their posts (aesthetic consistency and theme development like this in Insta is underappreciated imho).
  • Virtual Superland: The coolest use of greenscreen you’ll ever see. I really, really want to mess around with this stuff.
  • Puzzle Pastime: One woman and her puzzles. There is nothing – NOTHING – purer than puzzle Instagram.
  • Bauzeitgeist: Subtitled ‘All The Buildings of the World’, the feed’s owner is seemingly in Mozambique; this is a wide-ranging and hugely varied eye on the world’s architecture.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle-Classes: This is a great article, although I might broaden the title to instead read ‘destroyed everything’ (love me some hyperbole); this is a superb piece of analysis of how the ideas, themes and tropes common to the management consultant have, though their promotion to the very top of the Church of Business (McKinzie’s, Accenture, these lads, they’re High Priests of Commerce, gutting your bloated corporate carcass and worrying through the viscera to find the One True Path of Mammon), somehow ended up infecting every aspect of our culture, particularly politically. As we saw this week another Management Consultancy alumnus take a step closer to taking a step closer to the White House (a man whose tilt at the Presidency I dismissed outright in 2018, demonstrating once again my unerring ability to back a winner), this feels timely – I honestly think we don’t pay enough attention to the impact of specific, idiotic elements of business orthodoxy on wider society.
  • The 2020 Disinformation War: Another piece in the Atlantic, this time looking at Trump’s Facebook campaigning in advance of the elections this year and taking a more general ‘state of the digital truth/politics waltz’ look at where we’ve gotten to since the last US election and the subsequent Cambridge Analytica furore. I found this piece interesting-but-frustrating; it gives a mouthpiece again to Chris Wylie, who’s never had anything interesting to say about any of this that doesn’t involve…Chris Wylie, and, to my mind at least, doesn’t make enough of the fact that the main scary thing here, based on all the available information, is less microtargeting and more the fact that Trump is legitimately entitled to spend $1billion promoting actual lies to people on Facebook. Personally speaking I’m nowhere near as uncomfortable with microtargeting as I am with the ability for someone to tell untruths for personal political gain without sanction, but maybe I’m odd.
  • Crazy Government Twitter: A look at how, in the US at least, several Government Departments have decided to take a leaf out of the book of every single fcuking fast food chain in the Western World and adopt ‘world weary millennial fear and angst’ as a tone of voice in 2020. The article suggests that this is a ‘strategic’ move as it gets them occasional big-number RTs and amplifies their existence to a far wider audience, thereby raising base awareness of their role and necessity; I’d argue that the National Body for Water Conservation getting 32k RTs on a Tweet calling the spray from a burst fire hydrant ‘a real chonky boi’ demonstrates nothing more than their ability to blend into the background and become part of the ambient noise of latterday capitalism, but then again I fcuking hate social media.
  • The World of Vaping: A brilliant piece of reporting by California on Sunday, investigating the murky world of vaping to try and see what effect the past 6 months health scares have had on it as an industry. This is great, and takes in all sorts – your Juuls, the very iffy trade in semi-regulated cannabis oils for weed vaping, the fact that this is yet another example of something being invented and aggressively marketed waaaaay before anyone had worked out whether it might have one or two negative externalities…so, so good, and so interesting – and, actually, reasonably reassuring on the subject of the side-effects of vaping, unless you’re getting through a whole bunch of dodgy under-the-counter THC-infused vaping oils a week, in which case rip your lungs mate.
  • The Rise of Smart Camera Networks: Given the fact that those of us in London can enjoy an almost-constant close up from the hundreds of CCTV cams we’re blessed with, and given that those will shortly be able to track who we are and where we are and who we’re with and what we’re doing, it’s not a bad time to look back at the history of smart cameras and facial recognition; this article traces the development and implementation of these and adjacent technologies, and offers some thoughts on likely developments over the next few years. If you think that data is a complex and occasionally-iffy issue here in 2020, read this and take a moment to imagine the dazzling, dizzying implications of a world in which everything that happens anywhere is filmed and analysable at scale by massive networks, cross-referencing and tracking and listening and thinking. Either scary or inspirational, depending on how much of a witless Polyanna you are.
  • Ethics in the Valley: I seem to recall mentioning the likely rise of the ethicist as an actual serious role in Silicon Valley at points last year; this article’s the first serious exploration of how that’s working out that I’ve read. In short, so-so; it’s clear that there’s a pretty fundamental tension here that a lot of these ethicists are butting up against; to whit that VC DOESN’T FCUKING CARE ABOUT ETHICS. I mean, look, it’s all well and good saying that you want to take reasoned and thought-through decisions about the way in which you use and implement tech, but, equally, YOU NEED TO DELIVER 10X GROWTH BY Q32020 OR YOU’RE A DEAD UNICORN! Which, do you think, is going to get sacrificed? The ethicist or the growth hacker? HMMMMMMMMMMMM.
  • Messing With The Algo: One of those occasional stories that make you think that maybe the kids are alright after all; this piece explains how kids are sharing Insta logins so as to confuse the algorithm, flooding it with wildly divergent and conflicting signals to render its user(s) unknowable. Lovely, brilliant, and there’s an art project in this just waiting to be discovered.
  • MSCHF: I think I’ve mentioned these people three times so far in Curios in 2020; seems fitting then to feature this profile of HOTTEST COLLECTIVE IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW MSCHF, based in New York and churning out random, seemingly-unrelated webarttoyexperimentthings every fortnight to the general bafflement and delight of the wider world of the Extremely Online. This is quite the story; they don’t make anything tangible, they don’t make any money, and yet there are people throwing money at them. SO IT FCUKING GOES. Go on, read this and then try and explain it to your parents next time you speak with them.
  • Tiktok and Bongo: It is a truth universally-acknowledged that any social media platform will eventually develop a bongo-related subculture; so it is with TikTok, which whilst technically banning nudity and sexual content, has nonetheless managed to establish a thriving community of thirst-trap ‘creators’; this content gets ripped and posted to appreciative subReddits for a community of creepy masturbators to ‘enjoy’, whilst one imagines that, per Insta and the rest there’s a thriving backchannel economy of nudes, etc, going on. Which is fine – no interest in judging sex workers, etc – but at the same time I do find there’s something a bit…icky about this in the context of TikTok, a platform which not only is all about performance but which is already having a significant effect on the manner in which kids conceive of and present themselves. Oh, and there’s a line in here which is perfect in its poignancy: “After years of Instagram’s emphasis on staged polish, Gen Z is demanding unfiltered authenticity — no stage lights, no airbrushing and no expensive cameras. They want content that mirrors their own lives, spent largely on an iPhone in their bedrooms. Is it any surprise, then, that they want the same from their porn?” That…that is not a happy sentence.
  • An Oral History of Prince’s Halftime Superbowl Show: Regardless of whether or not you give any sort of a fcuk about the Superb Owl, this piece is a delight – basically ANY piece about Prince is a delight, as he seemingly really was as much of a magical, odd little eccentric genius as he was always painted and mythologised. Honestly, the section in which he previews his proposed set to the rest of the band whilst gliding around his house on custom fcuking light-up Heelies is worth the click alone.
  • WeWork is a Scam: I know, I know, you don’t need to read another piece about WeWork, that’s SO 2019! And whilst this won’t tell you anything you don’t know about that company’s demise, what it does do very well is explain exactly how damaging this sort of business is to so many people; the impact on workers far, far down the employment food chain of the collapse of a business like WeWork is significant, and often overlooked in these pieces; read this and then think about what happens when all the mattress companies die and the delivery businesses fold and all the associated jobs that potentially go with them.
  • The Edison of Slot Machines: Oh I love stories like this! Tommy Glenn Carmichael was for years the man who struck fear into the heart of slot machine developers, inventor of several devices which for a decade or so contributed to massive theft from the slots via ingenious mechanical manipulation. Carmichael was obviously a mechanical genius, and the kicker at the end of this story suggests that there might be not insignificant benefit to continuing his studies should you fancy a bit of massive fraud.
  • The Inside Story of ‘Wild Wild West’: I don’t think I ever saw this steampunk/Western Will Smith vehicle that this piece refers to, but I’m certainly aware of it because of that fcuking song and my girlfriend’s charming ability to rap it. I might have to see if i can find it online somewhere, though, as based on this article about the history of its making it sounds WILD. Kenneth Branagh? MECHANICAL SPIDERS?! So many killer lines in here, like this insouciant beauty: “One of Maddock and Wilson’s story ideas was that there should be that aforementioned giant mechanical spider at the end of the film. Peters’ office rejected it, however, suggesting a stealth bomber instead. The writers thought that this was inconceivable for 1868, and a 100-foot-long armor-plated “flying machine” with gun turrets was the compromise.”
  • Stormzy: A superb profile of Man of the Year Stormzy in GQ, by Gary Younge. Pleasingly unhagiographic, Younge’s always an excellent writer and Stormzy comes across as he always does, smart and ambitious and like this year and next might be his too.
  • A Partial List of Rome: This is quite simply an account of the author’s eatings over the course of a visit to Rome, but if you know the city or love the food or, ideally, both, then this will be the best and tastiest thing you read all day, and will leave you salivating. Oh, and if you’re planning a trip there are some superb recommendations buried in here too. I love this and I can practically taste it.
  • Comedy Written for the Machines: On TikTok virality and its pursuit, and the weirdness of people performing tricks to satisfy an unknowable desire and an unknowable algorithm. When you read the piece and stop to think of what it’s effectively saying – that there’s a whole load of people whose current primary motivation in life is to make a video that will get seen by loads of people but it is literally impossible for them to know how to make that happen consistently and so they try and try and try and try in the dark, making small variations on infinite themes in pursuit of the virality-chimera – then, well, it’s quite mad, isn’t it? “Maybe that’s why millions of internet users keep watching, sometimes, and other times do not. Or maybe none of that is right. Maybe there is some other arbitrary system governing us all. Maybe the story of Angelmamii7 is not one woman and her family trying to hit the jackpot by doing what even they do not understand but a whole culture responding to incentives we can’t articulate but are being trained to follow, moment to moment, by a dopamine-drip system we carry in our pockets.”
  • Kidzania: A year ago I had to visit Kidzania because my girlfriend was working on something there – it is a DEEPLY surreal place, but the most surreal thing was when I was walking past one of the empty units and the staff member I was with told me that it was going to be filled later that year…by Nike! I don’t know about you, but the idea of a company known in part for its use of child labour setting up shop in a theme park designed to teach kids about the glory of capitalist endeavour is…well…a bit iffy. This essay in Granta perfectly captures the oddity of Kidzania and the weirdness of training kids to festishize work, and in so doing makes some pointed parallels to the way in which access to opportunities are curtailed in society depending on social status, race, etc.
  • 100 Ways To Live Better: I could not give less of a fcuk about improving my life, and as such I generally hate anything designed to motivate me to make changes for the better – LOOK SOMETHING HAS TO KILL ME SO WHY SHOULDN’T IT BE CANCER AND CIRRHOSIS FFS? – but this list of 100 ways in which to live marginally better made me laugh a lot, and so I present them here for anyone less fundamentally-nihilistic than me to benefit from. I would strongly advise you against #93, though, unless they have VERY understanding parents (or unless you *are* their parents).
  • Normal Novels: I never ordinarily include things I don’t like in the longreads, but I’ll make an exception for this – it’s a review of Sally Rooney’s writing, and it made me SO ANGRY, so I want to share it with you so you can tell me if that’s fair. The author is obviously smart, and writes well, but the criticisms she levels at Rooney, her style, her characters and, frankly, herself seem born out of a weird…jealousy? It’s hard to pinpoint. Katie Moffat, with who I discussed this, pointed out that she’s an academic and this is obviously part of her dissertation and perhaps she’s just gotten lost in the forests of academe, but this was just such an odd read. Given the fact that everyone in the world has now read Rooney’s novels and seemingly adored them, I would love to know what you think of this.
  • A Scandal in Bohemia: Last up this week, a WHOLE SHERLOCK HOLMES! All in lovely multimedia fancy presentational style, by the kind folk at Texas-based digital design studio Paravel. Thanks, Paravel!

By James Bullough

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. First up, this is called ‘All Is Lost’ by Naked Shirt and it reminds me a LOT of Naked City; this isn’t necessarily an endorsement, but I very much enjoy the mad wibbly jazz shouting here:

  1. Next, this is ‘Steady’, the new song by Polica and it is so, so beautiful. Had this on repeat for a few days and it’s still sticking:

  1. WHAT a song – also, what a performance. This is called ‘The Night’, and it’s a live recording by Everything Is Recorded:

  1. HIPHOP CORNER! I think I first featured Zebra Katz in here about 5 years or so ago – I thought he’d have been huge by now, and maybe he is in queere circles than those I move in; regardless, this is his latest, called ‘ISH’ and it’s excellent and angry and menacing and the video’s typically ace:

  1. MORE HIPHOP CORNER! New by Aesop Rock, this is ‘Rogue Wave’ – I love the illustration and semi-animation of the video here:

  1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! Another week, ANOTHER new Manga, and this one’s even better than last week’s. Best MC in the UK, bar none; this is ‘No Deal’ and OH HANG ON THAT’S IT THAT’S THE END IT’S ALL OVER FOR THE WEEK AND I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT AND FOUND AT LEAST ONE THING YOU LOVED AND I HOPE THAT YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING NICE TO LOOK FORWARD TO AND THAT YOU’RE ENJOYING THE SLIGHTLY-BRIGHTER WEATHER AND THAT YOU COME BACK NEXT WEEK BECAUSE I LOVE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU AND I DO THIS FOR YOU JUST FOR YOU ONLY YOU ALWAYS YOU I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU!:

Webcurios 24/01/20

Reading Time: 29 minutes

Hello! Hello everyone! ARE WE ALL STILL ALIVE???

Welcome to the end of yet another week in which almost every single news item could double as the opening precis of a mid-ranking airport novel, one of those with the author’s name in intimidatingly-embossed type on the cover and which you could comfortably beat a man to death with given enough effort and rage. From a new virus to CEO-hacking to the weird, simultaneous horror-and-vapidity of Davos, it’s another excellent time to be alive at the pinnacle of recorded history! SMILE, EVERYONE!

Still, much as I’d love to sit here and pen a few lines about all the MAD, I can’t – instead I have to get washed and dressed and go and record a fcuking podcast which I agreed to months ago in a moment of unusual positivity and which I now have literally no interest in doing at all. Take as small consolation the fact that I promise I won’t at any point attempt to make any of you listen to it. While I go and lather myself thoroughly, then, you carry right on and have a good old rummage amongst this week’s offerings – some sharp, some worryingly, meatily soft, some rough and some unpleasantly, tackily mucal; you may not find anything you like, but then that’s not really the point. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, whether you like it or not.

 

By Jan Hoek

FIRST, LET’S KICK OFF WITH SOME EXCELLENT-IF-OLD MATERIAL FROM INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE, A MAN WHO REALLY OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN A DJ WERE IT NOT FOR THE FACT HE’S BASICALLY A PROFESSIONAL CORNISHMAN!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS ONCE AGAIN NOT BEEN INVITED TO DAVOS:

  • Twitter Launches Reactions Feature in DMs: It’s something of a slow news week in s*c**l m*d** land, thank Christ, hence you getting this spectacular development as the first link of the week. Have you been clamouring for the ability to react to your Direct Messages? No, of course you haven’t – still, rest safe in the knowledge that if you want to engender a sense of creeping irritation amongst your interlocutors by responding to everything they tell you with a cheery fecal emoji you’re now able to do that very thing. PROGRESS! The only vaguely brand-related thing I can think of to do with this is to gently troll anyone who’s attempting to engage in customer service chat with a series of baffling-and-borderline-troubling reactions, but I’m clutching at straws to be honest.
  • LinkedIn Brings Livestreaming To Everyone: I don’t spend much time on LinkedIn if I can help it – it’s full of dreadful people, as far as I can tell, who have…different approaches to their professional life (slightly less self-immolatory, in the main) – but if this catches on I might have to start hanging out there. The opening up of the livestreaming feature feels like it might just usher in a totally new type of CONTENT, something that hovers somewhere between performance art and remote therapy, and I would imagine that we’re only a matter of mere weeks away from a selection of no-doubt-plutocratic business gurus offering their solid gold tips for success via the medium of poorly-lit, straight-down-the-camera platitude-fests. There are a couple of other updates announced alongside this – Page admins can now directly invite their contacts to ‘like’ Pages they run, creating a wonderful new way of being an irritating, spammy pr1ck, and it’s also now possible to write Page posts direct from the LinkedIn homepage – but it’s the livestreaming that’s the real draw here; I can hardly wait to meet the new breed of careerfluencers (I should copyright that) who are doubtless just around the corner.
  • Shutterstock’s Creative Trends: I think I’m still allowed to link to trends stuff seeing as it’s still January – this is Shutterstock’s list, all about STUFF THAT WILL BE EVERYWHERE from a visual perspective over the course of the coming 12 months. As per usual with these things, the list is a mix of the staggeringly obvious – the roaring 20s? Art Deco? – the depressing – HEY BRANDS, WHY NOT CAPITALISE ON THE GROWING FEELING OF FEAR AND ANGER THAT PEOPLE ARE FEELING ABOUT THE STATE OF THE WORLD BY INCLUDING PROTEST SIGN TYPOGRAPHY IN YOUR MARKETING???? – and the slightly baffling (we in the UK are apparently going to be seeing a lot of visuals inspired by the twin concepts of ‘sunken cities’ and ‘tropical leaves’, although Christ alone knows why.
  • All Of The Trend Reports!: In fact, look, here, have this Google Drive full of ALL (not all, it’s impossible, there are too many of them and like the stars in the sky they are uncountable and inestimable in their multifarious splendour) the trend reports published by EVERY SINGLE BASTARD AGENCY IN THE WORLD! Or at least quite a few of them – there’s We Are Social and Forrester and JWT and PWC and so many more! Use these however you see fit – personally speaking, I’d be strongly tempted to print out all of them and then leave the individual pages in a binbag, pulling one out at random each time I needed some ‘inspiration’. If nothing else, this is useful for anyone who wants to do a GPT-2-generated trends presentation for 2021 – there’s a certain commonality of theme and style in these which I think would lend itself quite well to some algofcukry. Overall, though, the overall effect of all of these being collected in one place is a slight feeling of weariness; I’m going to call it a full 11 months early, the big trend for 2021 is ennui.
  • One Question: One Question conference – which Imperica is in some way involved with, full disclosure and all that – is BACK! Next week! Go! Click the link! Buy a year’s membership and get to go to ALL THEIR EVENTS! DO IT!

By Vasco Trancoso

NEXT, PRETEND IT’S NOT INCREDIBLY COLD AND GREY BY PUTTING ON TWO HOURS OF SOCA!

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED IN OUR LACK OF SUICIDAL INGENUITY IF WE’RE ALL OFFED BY A VIRUS TBH, PT.1:

  • Planetary: If Facebook didn’t exist, would we invent it? Were you attempting to create an analogue, how would you go about it? Latest in the moderately-sized line of people to ask that question is Tom Coates, who this week announced the soft launch of Planetary which is designed to be a social network with less of the…horror, basically. The fundamental differences between Planetary and Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory are its technical specs – Planetary is a decentralised network, with sharing allowed between first and second-degree connections only and a bunch of other features designed to prioritise safety and security over reach and virality – and the ethos underpinning it, which can basically be summarised as ‘no ads, no snooping, no Bad Stuff’ (it’s hard not to be cynical about this sort of aspiration, isn’t it? Anyone would think that we simply don’t believe in the uncorruptible promise of utopian technologies anymore!).It’s not quite live yet, but you can sign up for early access which will open…soonish; as ever with new social networks, the odds are very much stacked against it – that said, Mastodon’s proof that new platforms can survive and even thrive at small scale, and if you’re not committed to the Facebook ecosystem through existing connections then it might be worth keeping an eye on this as a potentially-less-evil alternative.
  • The Freddiemeter: I know that there are no new ideas under the sun, and in fairness I have no idea when this site went live and so I shouldn’t automatically assume that the creative’s a straight lift, but, well, do you remember that excellent singing game from last year made by Matt Round? The one which presented you with 27 singers and asked you to match their pitch, with your tuneless warblings judged by your microphone? This one, to be precise? Well this is exactly the same thing, but specifically about Freddie Mercury. I mean, in fairness it’s developed by Google and the Mercury Phoenix Trust (the charity set up by the surviving members of Queen in Mercury’s memory) and so is perhaps slightly more technical than Matt’s version (I mean, it claims to be based on AI ffs, and we all know that that’s never used as a bullsh1t term!), but it still feels like a bit of a steal. Still, fcukit, it’s also REALLY fun – you get to select from one of five Queen classics, and if you don’t find yourself grinning as you attempt to nail the sound of Freddie on Bohemian Rhapsody then, well, you’re a bit of a joyless pr1ck (and I should know).
  • The Radiohead Public Library: Yes, I know you know about this; yes, I know it was in the Metro. It’s still a lovely piece of webwork and you should still check it out. Radiohead’s approach to the web has always been fascinating; they’ve been experimental pioneers for much of the past decade in terms of their use of websites, Easter Eggs and the way they’ve often managed to cross the two parallel worlds of obsessive fandom and obsessive internetting. The Radiohead Public Library is effectively a wrapper for much of the material that the band has produced and placed online, giving it a central interface and ostensibly making it more accessible and easier to find. Except, this being Radiohead, it’s still weird and obscure and not really very clear; I suggest just clicking on whatever you think looks interesting and seeing what you find. There are some lovely touches, though; I particularly like the fact that you can navigate to content related to specific albums by clicking on a series of coloured squares in the top right of the site, but that this is never explained to you. Go on, next time you’ve got a website project to deliver why not try suggesting a similar approach to UI and see what the reactions are like.
  • The Geocities Gallery: I think this is the third variant on a Geocities archive I’ve posted on Curios; it’s a weird function of internet conservation that even the conservation projects seem to need saving, but neither of the previous ones seem to be live anymore. Thank God, then, for The Geocities Gallery by restorativland – which, actually, launched a year ago but for some reason I’ve only found this week – which offers another snapshot of some of the millions of weird, inexplicable, personal, lonely, mad Geocities pages, these arranged by ‘Neighbourhood’ (younger readers may not recall the quaint late-90s/early-00s habit of attempting to arrange digital spaces as though they were physical places); just click and see where it takes you. Among the broken image links and weird fonts you’ll find the personal homepages of strangers, the diaries and hobbies and obsessions and loves and OH GOD THIS IS BRILLIANT. Honestly, it’s only my massive self-control that’s preventing me from sacking off the rest of Curios this week in favour of just browsing through gems like this, a page inexplicably devoted to ‘My Family AND Elton John’. All of human life is here, and it is mad and brilliant.
  • Nototo: I rather love this, although I don’t quite see the point of it – Nototo is a mind-mapping / note taking tool which, for reasons which I really don’t understand at all, allows you to create strangely-pleasing and rather cute series of islands and archipelagos, each of which is supposed to connote a different theme or area of thinking; ‘humans are visual!’ the website burbles, but then slightly fails to explain why this should therefore mean that I want to write my business plan on a graphical representation of Indonesia. Regardless, it’s free, charming, and if you’re the sort of person who likes to use planning and thought-arranging tools and techniques, but who also really likes woolgathering and procrastination then I think this might be perfect for you.
  • City Roads: Oh oh oh this is WONDERFUL! City Roads is a single-purpose site – give it the name of any city (or town – I’ve not attempted to go down to Hamlet level, though) and it will quickly generate a simple visual of all said city’s roads in isolation, providing a gorgeous black and white representation of an urban area as defined by its thoroughfares. I think these are glorious – even better, you can customise the output by zooming in and out, or changing the colours of the streets and the background of the image, and then PRINT THE RESULTING OUTPUT ON A MUG!!! I mean, what could be better? You can export the images too, should you want to use them for non-mug-related purposes; personally I think these would make truly wonderful tattoos, although I concede you’d need quite a patient inker.
  • Last Tissue: It sometimes feels like there’s a lot of lazy humour aimed at Silicon Valley and startup culture in general. Why shouldn’t people want to use new technologies to disrupt old business conventions and change things up? Why shouldn’t we question all the assumptions we have about products and services and monetisation and how markets work in favour of ushering in a brave new world in which we all rent our fcuking cereal (I mean, that seems almost plausible tbh) from Venture Capitalists? Then again, when you see companies like this you understand the ridicule. Go on, have a guess as to what the startup world has magically reinvented here at the dawning of the third decade…any ideas? No? IT’S THE HANDKERCHIEF!!! Yes, that’s right, they’ve DISRUPTED SNOTRAGS! LastTissue is ‘launching soon’ on Kickstarter, and will offer buyers a silicon printed wallet containing six (organic!) cotton tissues, which can each be washed upto 300 times before being thrown away. IT’S A FCUKING HANKY, MY DUDES! A FCUKING HANKY!!! Sadly there’s no indication as to what the price point is going to be for this, but I am willing to bet quite a lot of money that it’s going to be a figure simultaneously risible and rage-inducing. The only thing that could possibly make this better would be an internet connection, but perhaps that’s coming in version 2.0.
  • Science Diagrams That Look Like Sh1tposts: I mean, I don’t really think I can add much to the title of this Twitter account. Follow it, it’s GREAT and makes you realise that there’s an awful lot of Scarfolk in science textbooks.
  • The Soy Sauce Challenge: Congratulations to TikTok, which has matured to the point where it now has its very own ‘stupid viral challenge which will doubtless be written up in horrified fashion by the media, which is almost certainly the point’ – in this case, let me introduce you to the Soy Sauce Challenge which, for reasons which I think stem from a wilful misinterpretation of a slightly obscure scientific paper, involves users dunking their testicles in the salty condiment. The link takes you to the hashtag page, where you can see a wide and wonderful range of videos riffing on this theme – TikTok’s a family platform, so no testicles are on view and you can enjoy this safely in the comfort of your own office should you so desire (although I feel compelled to warn you that attitudes towards testicular immersion vary wildly from workplace to workplace).
  • Justine Falcon Legal AI: This is…wow. Look, I’m just going to do a bit of a C&P job here and then invite you to click through as soon as possible: “Hi, my name is Justine Falcon and I am a Legal Artificial Intelligence. I can read and understand the code of LAW upon which human civilization runs, and I am learning to write, translate and understand this code and manipulate it to help human lawyers quickly research, compose, format and e-file litigation that is designed (and timed) to win cases. Justice Falcon is my powerful alter-ego, my Dark Phoenix, my Magneto, the back-end of my Legal AI, my weapons. Justice Falcon is a set of data mining, case analysis, and litigation planning tools that can draw on the vast number of cases in the California Superior Court system databases, and do deep analysis on a single case, profile all of the cases by a particular attorney and train a prediction engine, or survey all of the cases prosecuted by an entity like a District Attorney’s office or against an entity like a big bank.” This is, seemingly, entirely serious – a real, functional service which effectively automates a lot of the tedious lifting involved in the law – but which, for reasons only its creator would be able to explain, is represented by a weirdly-sexualised 3d female avatar which looks uncomfortably like the stereotype of the ‘sexy lawyer’ you might see in a piece of 1990s bongo. Thing is, the spec seems entirely legitimate, and I think this is quite a serious thing – how, then, noone stopped the people behind it to suggest that they perhaps make it less crushingly sexist, is beyond me. Still, GO JUSTINE FALCON!!
  • The Aftermath of a YouTube Apology: The first big dataviz project of the year, by The Pudding, which has taken a look at that popular YouTube genre, the apology video – this is an interesting look at how differing styles of public contrition perform in terms of views, reaction and effect on the subscriber base, and the extent to which certain tweaks in editing and content can make a significant difference to an apology’s reception. If you’re a keen consumer of YouTube tea then this will be of keen interest; if you work in comms, you can probably learn quite a lot to inform your next crisis management project (I would genuinely love to film a CEO apology for some sort of fcukup in the style of a James Charles vid).
  • NBA 3d: You know how the football is ALWAYS HAPPENING? Basketball’s worse, seemingly NEVER stopping and with each team playing a preposterous number of games (it’s something insane like every three days, which is brutal) – which, of course, means there’s a similarly preposterous amount of DATA being produced around the sport, with every single aspect of the game recorded and enumerated for armchair statisticians to pore over in search of pattern and meaning. This site presents some of that data, presented in pleasingly-visual 3d and giving a picture of mean and median data around things like career points totals, three point performance, etc – this sort of display is particularly good at showing up statistical outliers, and I’d be fascinated to see this applied to a sport I vaguely understand.
  • The Turn of the Screw: I wish I liked opera – sadly, though, my tastes are largely plebeian and I simply can’t get into the spectacle of large people shout-singing at each other as they pretend to die. Still, I was charmed by this ‘immersive trailer’ for Opera North’s forthcoming production of ‘The Turn of the Screw’, which presents a CG flythrough of a series of pastoral landscapes, with audio from the performance incorporated through 3d sound and moving around your ears (when experienced with headphones, at least) as you change your viewpoint through the video. The audio trickery in here is lovely, and I confess to getting smol goosebumps at points here, so maybe opera is good after all.
  • NameGuess: This is based on US data, but it will probably sort-of work for you if you’re a Brit – using figures for the popularity of baby names over the past century, this site asks you to specify your year of birth and gender and the first letter of your name, and then guesses what you were Christened with some pretty impressive accuracy. Oh, ok, fine, it’s not really impressive, it’s literally just pulling from a ranked list of popular names, but it still momentarily charmed me.
  • The Exercise Book Archive: Oh, this is lovely – kids’ exercise books from around the world and through the years, scanned and uploaded to this site for anyone to browse through. The English ones are all from the relatively-early 20th Century (meaning my hopes of finding a graffiti’ed Tricolore memorialised forever were dashed, dammit) and there’s something quite time machine-y about reading kids’ writing exercises from the 1930s; there are books here from all over the place, including several from wartime Germany which have been in part translated, full of banal notes on Hitler Youth meetings and suchlike. Such an interesting historical archive, this.
  • Free Audio Books: 1000 FREE AUDIOBOOKS! Tends towards the classics, but there’s something here for everyone – poetry to scifi to romance to PROPER LITERATURE, all for nothing. You can even get the entirety of The Divine Comedy should you be in the market for something punishingly long and obscure which you can use to make yourself feel better about your Love Island habit.
  • All of the Russian Films: Ok, perhaps not all of them, but lots – this is the YouTube channel of…some Russian film company, I think (look, it’s all in Cyrillic ffs, I don’t read Cyrillic), which has put LOADS of old Russian movies online, the majority of which with English subtitles. I’ve, er, not watched any, but there’s bound to be something interesting in here – look, this one has vague Soviet ‘Confessions of a Window Cleaner’ vibe about it! You could spend the weekend binge-watching some new, critically-acclaimed Netflix thingy, but why not spend it searching for hidden gems of Russian 20th Century cinema? DO IT!
  • Manytools: This is VERY DULL but also maybe-useful; Manytools presents a bunch of different, er, tools, to automate simple-but-dull webdev tasks – there’s loads of slightly random stuff in here, but if you want a one-stop site which lets you make ASCII images from a jpg or do some low-level steganography (hiding info in pictures, that sort of thing) then this might be worth bookmarking for later.
  • TalkSport Singles: Thanks Kev for sending me this, possibly the worst-sounding dating site EVER. LADIES! Are you in the market for dating someone who doesn’t really understand the concept of a clitoris and whose conversation tends to skew quite hard towards discussions of whether or not a false nine is actually a thing and whether the lads on Sky are right about Paul Pogba? WELCOME TO TALKSPORT SINGLES! I honestly CANNOT understand the thinking behind this site – I know that this is a hugely gendered assumption, for which apologies, but is anyone seriously suggesting that TalkSport’s listenership is anything other than a comfortable 95% hetero blokes? Where are they going to find the poor, poor women? On the plus side, though, if any scammers are looking for a new platform through which to prey upon the vulnerable and lonely then this is probably a pretty decent bet.

By Joshua Flint

NOW ENJOY THIS ECLECTIC MIX OF BREAKS AND BASS AND TECHNO AND STUFF BY MUTANT JOE!

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE SLIGHTLY DISAPPOINTED IN OUR LACK OF SUICIDAL INGENUITY IF WE’RE ALL OFFED BY A VIRUS TBH, PT.2:

  • How’s Their Driving NYC: This amazed me when I spotted it this week – I imagine it’s impossible to implement in the UK for various data privacy-related reasons, sadly, but I would love to see if here. Tweet this account with the license plate of any car registed in the district of New York and it will pull any traffic violations and tickets associated with the vehicle and tweet them at you. Totally pointless other than to validate your opinion of that prick who just cut you up, but, still, wonderful. If nothing else if I lived in NYC I would spend my days looking up every single vanity plate I saw to see if I could get some objective data to prove my theory that people with personalised numberplates are the worst humans in the world.
  • Instagram for Windows 95: Thanks Ged for this – a simple gag, but a very nicely-designed one, imagining how Instagram might have looked had it been launched in the mid-90s. The little animations in particular are gorgeous.
  • The Most Popular Free Online Courses of 2019: Literally that! I tend to include stuff like this every January on the offchance that there are some of you who are less tediously nihilistic than I am and who still believe in concepts such as ‘personal improvement’ and ‘development’ and ‘learning’ – if you want a place to find courses on everything from Brand Strategy to the Tudors (to be clear, those are separate courses (which is a shame)) then this is very much it.
  • Reverberations: Have you ever thought to yourself “You know, I’d really like to hear the music of JS Bach performed not on an organ but instead on the chipsets of a C64 but then filtered to sound as those those chipsets were themselves being played through an organ’? No, I don’t imagine you have, and yet you’d be amazed at how weirdly good this project by Linus Akesson is – what’s particularly impressive is the care he’s taken to ensure that the results don’t have that slightly-overspeed chipmunk quality common to much chiptune music; honestly, it’s really decent and quite unexpected.
  • KITE Festival: I went to Wilderness Festival a few times a few years ago – the first occasion was, I think, only the second time they’d done it and it was actually pretty fun, with a decent location and small bands and some genuinely good talks and associated events. I then ended up getting comped a few subsequent times and dear GOD did it go downhill – I know all festivals are a bit like this, fine, but it did feel like any one of the bands could have shouted “everyone here who works on brands say YEAH!” and you’d have been deafened by the response from the blonde-tressed advermarketingpr drones celebrating their individuality by all taking MDMA and putting glitter on their faces and wearing fcuking tails (no, I’m no fun at all – why do you ask?). Anyway, festivals are fine until they become really popular with cnuts is what I’m saying; KITE is a new one, being put on by the people behind slow media outfit Tortoise and which sounds like it’s either going to be a pleasing addition to the boutique festival circuit with more of a focus on talks and thinking than hardcore hedonism or A N Other bullshit bit of packaged pseudoalternaculture for white twentysomethings who work in ‘media’ – there’s no way of telling, but the early bird tickets are actually pretty cheap so it might be worth checking out if you’ve missed out on Glastonbury tickets AGAIN.
  • Pinball Map: A map of pinbal tables. Probably not all of them, fine, but a fair old number – it’s quite sad to see how few there appear to be in London. I think I might try and play all of them this year – see, mum, I DO have ambitions!
  • Play: Designers! Are YOU frustrated by the fact that it’s really fcuking hard to do any work on your phone? Would you like a new type of design app which is built specifically for mobile devices and promises to offer powerful tools to make and edit imagery and video and animations and stuff, all on the fly? Well take a look at this then – Play purports to be that exact thing, and whilst it’s not quite live yet you can sign up to request a beta invite. It certainly looks powerful and shiny, and is probably worth keeping an eye on if you’re a photoshop-wrangler of some sort.
  • The Bloomberg Climate Scoreboard: Tracking a variety of indicators on environmental degradation, including the number of football pitches-worth of forest that have been decimated this hour and the most polluted city in the world right now based on publicly available data (at the time of writing, Anyang in China). I do rather wish they hadn’t called this a scoreboard, as if you think if it in those terms then all it’s doing is offering a constant reminder of the fact that we’re losing as a result of a series of calamitous own-goals.
  • Monster Hunter Motion Capture: Regardless of whether you play videogames, WATCH THIS. Monster Hunter World is a game all about killing massive monsters – said massive monsters are all beautifully animated through motion-captured actors, and this is a video of one of those actors going through the filming process. THIS IS AMAZING! LOOK AT HIS FACE AS HE PRETENDS TO BE A GIGANTIC, ENGRAGED, DRAGON-APE THING! It’s so, so joyous, and also properly impressive – the side-by-side comparisons between the morph-suited actor and the final, polished CG beast are remarkable. The very best thing, though, is his facial expressions – THEY’RE NOT CAPPING YOUR FACE, MATE. So good.
  • Lookbusy: “Look Busy fills your work calendar with realistic-looking (but secretly fake) work events. Your co-workers won’t schedule conference calls and meetings, so you can get actual work done.” Why you’d want to pay £1 for an app that does this when you can literally just fill your own diary with crap and by so doing spend a pleasingly-zen 15 minutes zoning out whilst doing something that looks ostensibly like sort-of work is beyond me, but, still, here you are.
  • Davos or Davros?: Is this a quote from one of the world’s leaders enjoying some top-quality networking or from Davos, famously funny-looking and very evil leader of fictional, murderous pepperpots the Daleks? Play this game and find out!
  • The Internet Archive on Twitter: The Internet Archive is ace, but there’s a LOT of it and it can be quite hard to navigate and find the wheat amongst the digitchaff. This Twitter account shares curated links from the depths of the Archive, and is an excellent way of dipping into some of the best bits without getting stuck in the weeds of, I don’t know, an archive of historic versions of WordPerfect. The past few days have seen links to old Monty Python games, books of magic eye pictures and a weird old point-and-click game voiced by Robin Williams; eclectic doesn’t even begin, really.
  • The Strangers Club: I can’t quite work out whether this sounds like a good thing or the internet-doorway to an online murder club – here, you decide: “Strangers is an online, non-fiction book club. Our goal is to carve out a secluded corner of the web where we can read, write, and learn together. We read a lot about the roles of technology in society. We also explore learning and education; anthropology and philosophy; along with language, writing, and design. We avoid fiction, self-help, and business. We prefer to read books that are distant from the present, and we ignore best sellers. We are a global group of readers, writers, and thinkers who spend a lot of time questioning our world. If that sounds like you, we’d get along.” I mean, it’s hideously elitist-sounding, but if you fancy getting involved with detailed and probably-obsessive debates about the nature of Jungian discourse then this is probably perfect for you.
  • Letter Monster: I signed up to this earlier this week, and now that I come to write it up for Curios am slightly concerned that that was a bad idea. Letter Monster is the website / project of…someone, I think in North America, who promises to write a letter to anyone who leaves them their address and some light information. No idea what the letter will be like, how long it’ll take to arrive, or whether when it does it will be delivered by hand and accompanied by a crazed grin and some uncomfortable touching – on reflection, I am not totally convinced that I should have given my name and address to a stranger on the internet in exchange for the promise of a missive. Maybe wait til I confirm that it’s not led to a murder before signing up to this one, eh?
  • Vein Painting: This is rather beautiful. Left click to ‘seed’ elements, right click on them to ‘paint’ and create a simple black and white picture of what looks like a network of veins along the route you’ve created. This is far harder to describe than it is to understand, I promise – click and have a play.
  • Barm Pet Salon: The Twitter feed of a Japanese pet grooming salon, providing a seemingly-endless parade of photographs of beautifully-coiffed roffs. SUCH GOOD BOYS!
  • Dismoji: A N Other random emoji creator, mashing up various emoji types and design elements to create infinite randomised variations which you can then download and use as you wish. Not the first of these I’ve seen (or indeed featured), but the results are pleasingly weird and occasionally nicely wonky.
  • The Ocean Art Contest Winners 2019: The Ocean Art contest is a photo competition – the latest winners have just been announced, and you can peruse the gallery of winning shots here. Predictably, they’re all amazing, with a startling breadth of style and subject – I’m personally always a sucker for the sharky pictures (I should really have said ‘remora’, shouldn’t I? FFS MATT!), but there are some pleasingly derpy seals in there which also deserve some attention.
  • Tree: Gentle little webtoy in which a tree grows in your browser; by clicking to trim its branches you can influence the shape it takes, effectively turning this into your own personal digital bonsai creation kit. Literally nothing else to it, but it’s nice to leave open in a tab and return to every now again to gently trim and sculpt.
  • Haunted Garage: I don’t really want to tell you too much about this – just explore and see what happens. All I’ll say is that you start by clicking the small door icon on the right of the window when it all loads up – from there, you’re on your own. This is delicious, and very reminiscent of 2005-era internet (in the very best way).
  • Endless Scroll: Finally this week in the miscellania, this is a beautiful little short story presented as a tiny, minimally-interactive 8-bit style game, all about adolescence and memory and forgiveness and memory. Not going to lie, this made me get a bit emo at points (in a good way); I would really love to see more writers explore more with digital media when it comes to storytelling, this sort of thing still feels hugely underexploited. Regardless, this is genuinely lovely – click and read, please.

By Jillian Evelyn

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS BY THE FABULOUSLY-NAMED ‘DUG UP THE BONGO’ WHICH I CAN’T REALLY DESCRIBE BUT WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Mystery Flesh Pit: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a good one – Mystery Flesh Pit is the website of the now-sadly-shuttered US visitor attraction, the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, which once welcomed thousands each year to explore its…meaty environs, but now exists only in memory. Of course it never really existed (probably) – instead, “This archive catalogs a series of illustrations and writings by Trevor Roberts, AKA StrangeVehicles. This project started as a worldbuilding exercise originally posted on the r/worldbuilding subreddit on reddit.com, and continues as a for-fun creative outlet that is slowly being fleshed-out (pun intended.). The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the permian basin region of west texas in the early 1970s. The pit is characterized as an enormous subterranean organism of indeterminate size and origin embedded deep within the earth, displaying a vast array of highly unusual and often disturbing phenomena within its vast internal anatomy.” This is VERY Scarfolk (again), and very nicely-done.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Yuko Shimizo: A US-based Japanese artist, Shimizo’s Insta feed is a procession of their illustrations, paintings, sketches and brushwork; I adore their style, which combines elements of traditional calligraphy, 17/18C illustration and anime/manga.
  • Nancy Liang: Australian artist whose feed is packed with small, charming animations of the sort that 20 years ago would have featured on the very fanciest e-cards (this sounds like a cuss, I know, but I promise it’s not meant to be).
  • Sasikumar KSK: As far as I can tell this is just some Indian kid who takes incredible photos of insects (in the main) using nothing but his iPhone camera – you will be embarrassed at how much better he is at using his phone’s camera than you are.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • Clearview: In case you didn’t read it, this is the NYT’s big expose from last weekend all about Clearview, a company which provides facial recognition software and which has amassed a terrifying quantity of data which enables it to offer market-leading face lookup tech to whoever wants it. Where’s all this from? SCRAPED OFF THE WEB!! Yep, turns out that this is another one of those ‘hang on, is that…is that ok? You mean I’ve been here wrestling with this stable door for hours and you mean to tell me that the horse scarpered last week?’ moments – stop worrying about the future becoming a dystopian surveillance nightmare, it’s now a complete inevitability! My bleating hyperbole aside, this is a really good piece of reporting which does a reasonable job of explaining how Clearview got its data and why this is only the beginning of our confused, cack-handed attempts to deal with the consequences of the past two decades of (mostly-)unthinking digital utopianism.
  • The Internet of Beefs: This has been something of a polarising essay this week – it’s a (very) long piece by Venkatesh Rao which sets out his position on the state of internet discourse and concludes that, fundamentally, it’s all about the beef. Rao characterises online debate as being populated by ‘knights’ and ‘mooks’, effectively actors and the audience they perform for engaged in a neverending dance of beef for their own benefit and the diversion of the peanut gallery; it’s an interesting idea which in part feels very true (particularly in light of That Actor’s appearance on Question Time last week and his seeming aim to ride the Morgan/Hopkins hatebandwagon all the way to the bank) but which equally undermines itself through length and flabbiness and the author’s insistence in using terms which feel just a little bit loaded throughout – ‘knights’ has been perceived by some commenters to be a reference to ‘white knights’, basically an anti-SJW term employed by a lot of pricks on the internet, for example. Still, it’s worth reading if you’re any interest in culture and discourse and polarisation and the culture wars (whether or not you believe them to be a thing).
  • The Metaverse: Another long piece of analysis about the videogames industry by Matthew Ball, who in this piece looks at the concept of the ‘metaverse’, specifically as embodied by Fortnite, and what it might mean for the evolution of both the games industry and the wider entertainment business. The term ‘metaverse’ is a bit of an elastic one, but can be effectively said to relate to a persistent online environment which exists as a parallel layer to the physical and which is responsive, interactive, and which interacts and interexists with the physical. Ball’s keen to point out that this isn’t quite what Fortnite is, but he argues that it’s the closest we’ve come to something that embodies the idea of the metaverse from scifi and offers interesting and useful pointers to how we might see virtual worlds developing over the coming few years).
  • The TikTok Politician: Or more accurately the TikTok candidate – Joshua Collins “is a 26-year-old socialist truck driver running to represent Washington state’s 10th district in Congress”, and whose running his campaign largely through the medium of moderately-viral TikTok videos. This is simply the latest in the long line of ‘ooh, look at a relatively young politician using a medium that they are comfortable with to communicate to their peer group!’ pieces (see also: everything ever written about AOC), but it’s interesting to see how he’s combining memery with policy (or at least trying to; I’m not really sure how much deeper than “YAY UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE, BOO BILLIONAIRES” it gets, but still). Has anyone tried to get Keir Starmer on TikTok, do we know?
  • Who Makes Wikihow’s Art?: If you’ve spent any time at all online in the past 10 years you’ll have stumbled across a Wikihow entry – the website answers EVERY QUESTION IN THE WORLD EVER (seemingly), giving instructions on everything from how to open a car door if you’ve driven into a lake and are rapidly sinking, to unclogging your sinuses using Sriracha (probably), each illustrated in a very particular, slightly-peculiar WTF-ish style. This piece looks at how that style was arrived at and how the pieces are commissioned and created – it’s more interesting than it sounds, promise, although if you’re an artist or illustrator I warn you that the financial elements make for slightly bleak reading.
  • Private Restaurants: Eater looks at the trend for ultra-exclusive, super-prestigious private restaurants in New York, offering exceptional food in intimate surroundings at eye-watering prices. Fascinating, mainly as a portrait of a world I’ll never experience – I actually went to something vaguely like this in London a few years back, at Maus which Nuno Mendes set up as a sort of weird, high-end dining club-type-thing; the food was incredible, the staff lovely and Mr Mendes charming, but, well, the problem with that sort of thing (expensive, pseudo-exclusive) is that it attracts…er…cnuts. Honestly, I met some genuinely dreadful people – SO OLIGARCHY – which rather spoiled the experience for me, and I sort of think all the places herein described would be much the same.
  • The Quest for Screentime 0: The author of this piece describes the steps he took to try and eliminate screens from his life for a limited time, the effect it had on him and whether he thinks it’s a good idea; I feel ok spoiling this by telling you he doesn’t manage it (the failure’s pretty spectacular), but it’s more interesting to read as a counter to the countless ‘screens ruin lives’ pieces. Yes, fine, I accept that our addiction to our phones and the rest is possibly not always positive, but equally there are huge, wonderful benefits to screens and our relationship with them, and the reductive idea that ‘electronic/tech=BAD’ is probably one we ought to have grown out of by now.
  • The Rise of the Dance Influencer: A really interesting piece in the LA Times about the new breed of dancers being recruited by artists and major choreographers on the basis of their virality on Instagram – I hate Insta, obviously, but stuff like this is genuinely wonderful, breaking down barriers and affording opportunities to talented kids who might never have got the chance were it not for the platform offered by social media. It’s obviously not all positive – there are interesting questions about the way in which the creative process (regardless of medium) is impacted by the visibility of all the other work out there (homogeneity of output, etc) – but this is a rare instance of an article about Insta that won’t make you think that it’s the worst thing in human history.
  • Games and Borders: This is a rather lovely piece of writing in which the author reflects on their experience of playing the game Life Is Strange, which features discussions of migration and race and identity, and through so doing examining their own status as a second-generation immigrant to the US and their relationship to their race and history. Writing about the intersection of games and personal identity is fascinating to me; should any of you see any good stuff around this, please do punt it my way.
  • Lizzo: I should have known Lizzo was going to blow up last year – when I featured ‘Juice’ way back in January 2019, my mum wrote me an email telling me how much she liked the song (that NEVER happens, fyi) and we all know that maternal approval is the cast-iron guarantee of global pop superstardom. This is a nice profile of her – candid and vulnerable and not too hagiographic (thought it still is, a bit), and containing the best reference to cunnilingus I’m likely to read in a celebrity profile all year.
  • RevolutionQ: A really interesting look at the QAnon movement, still limping on despite the fact it’s all patently utter fcuking rubbish, and what it tells us about the evolution of the online conspiracy theory – how, once, conspiracy theories were often evidence of a lack of critical thinking whereas now they’re often evidence of too much. There’s something fascinating about the extent to which the increased availability of information and the devaluation of hierarchies of source engendered by the web have led to a situation where anything and everything is potential grist to the truthseeker/conspiracy nut.
  • Always The Same Dream: A superb, acerbic-yet-weirdly-sympathetic portrait of Princess Margaret by Ferdinand Mount in the LRB, responding to Craig Brown’s new biography; I’ve no interest whatsoever in the Royal Family, as a rule, but this is wonderful stuff – gossipy and mean and funny and sad. Some of the anecdotes are wonderful, if not particularly flattering of the Princess – if I can ever elicit a quote of this magnitude from someone, I will die very happy indeed: she was described by Alan Clarke as “fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved”, which I would personally have on my gravestone.
  • Is Cannabis The Answer To Everything?: No, is the short answer here. This article takes a look at the weed-as-wellness movement, aimed specifically at the sort of late-20s/early-30s young professional woman who scoffs at Goop but secretly covets one of their candles and possibly some of the essential oils – the author is, by her own admission, very much that sort of individual and this is her JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY into the world of weed marketing and sales. I found this INFURIATING, which I get the impression is sort of the point, but fair play to whoever’s able to sell a hand-crafted skinning up plate for £60.
  • The Incredible Adventures of Man-Spider: A comic about a spider who is bitten by a radioactive man and attains superpowers based on human abilities. This is very funny, if a little painfully real.
  • My Instagram: The author describes their relationship with social media and herself and reality, both projected and perceived, and the way Instagram has a gravity that’s inescapable. I think the writing here is superb: “Modern voyeurism has precedents, even the multiple-window kind. The entangled dynamics of who sees whom and who knows they’re being seen have always been present. Where Instagram seems truly new — beyond the introduction of machine learning and commercial surveillance to the mix — is in the strange instability of the viewer’s position as a subject. A voyeur knows what kind of viewer he is, but looking at Instagram, you are not always a voyeur. Neither are you always a witness, nor any other single kind of watcher. Each post interpellates you differently. Your implied identity slips with each stroke of the thumb.”
  • Whatever Happened To?: About writing and womanhood and domestic abuse, and the things that get in the way of creation. This is a hard read at times,but, again, the prose is superb: ”These are points on a line: the rise of potential, then the particularly feminized fall embedded in gentle, hetero domesticity. It’s a wistful blend of longing, regret and admiration. For the story to work the way it always works, the woman has to be better than average. She has to shine. Then she conforms. Then she disappears, fading into the ambient noise of a dishwasher and the washing machine, the TV, lawnmower, barking dog, and family phones. She comes to mark a spot in memory, on a real writer’s path. It’s one of those story structures that’s so pervasive, people harbor and project it onto the arc of a faint career well in advance. There might even be a sort of satisfaction taken in the comfort of assuming this path is inevitable for other people, those women writers who once foolishly set out to have it all.”
  • Birdie: A short story by Lauren Groff, in which a group gather at their dying friend’s bedside to share stories and say goodbye. Excellent on friendship and ageing and letting go, and far less sad than this brief description might make it sound. This is very much one for the sofa and a mug of tea, imho.
  • The Catastrophe: Finally this week, this is so good that I actually stopped to laugh and clap at multiple points throughout. Weirdly reminded me of Vonnegut, stylistically, but has a brilliance all of its own; Amy Leach writes beautiful, funny prose about the planet and nature and us – this is basically a perfect 1800 words if you ask me.

By Vivian Greven

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. This is by Amyl and the Sniffers and it’s called ‘Gacked on Anger’ and I imagine if I was 20 I would be playing this on repeat:

  1. Next, this is the new one from Best Coast which really, reminds me of Beverley Hills by Weezer – if that doesn’t put you off, enjoy! It’s called ‘Everything Has Changed’:

  1. This is by AJJ, it’s called ‘Loudmouth’ and it’s weirdly reminiscent of 2003 and I LOVE IT:

  1. My favourite video of the week, this, partly for the very cool ghosts but mainly for the terrifying CG Zuck. Also, where ARE his hands and why DON’T you ever see them in public? This is called ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ and it’s by The Naps:

  1. ‘Shelby Tell Me Everything’, sings Esme Patterson – this is a lovely piece of slightly wan indiepop, and I found the video charming:

  1. Finally this week, this is by Lala Lala who I was convinced by the vocal was Irish but apparently isn’t – regardless, I absolutely adore this song and her voice. It’s called ‘Legs, Run’ and I hope you like it and OH LOOK AT THAT IT’S THE END OF CURIOS I HAVE TO RUN AND GET WASHED AND DRESSED NOW BUT NOT BEFORE WISHING YOU LUCK AND HAPPINESS AND JOY AND ALL THE GOOD CLEAN FUN YOU COULD HOPE FOR AND MAYBE EVEN SOME DIRTY FUN IF THAT’S MORE YOUR SPEED AND ANYWAY I’LL BE BACK NEXT WEEK BUT TIL THEN TAKE CARE AND REMEMBER THAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!: