Hi everyone! Hi! Have we all returned to normal now? Worked off the Christmas pounds and returned our cheekbones to their previous razor-sharpness, sloughed off the excess of comfort and returned to fighting fitness, ready to take on everything 2020 can throw at us and more besides?

No, me neither to be honest – can we all go back to the safe, slightly-yeasty fug of the perineum, please? No? FFS. FINE. If we must continue onwards through the blasted, rain-slicked lowlands of the new year then at least perhaps we can do it together. Take me by my hand – or at least what you assume is my hand; whatever, grasp the proferred, fleshy multidactylate lump and come with me as we venture deep into the Dantean horror that is this week’s web. I’m your Poundland Virgil, and what follows is a slow descent through innumerable circles of hell – Sartre was right, it really is other people. 

Welcome to Web Curios – it’s designed to make you feel better. 

By Sam Weber

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS EXCELLENT AND VERY, VERY LONG MIX OF BANGERS CURATED BY WRONGTOM!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO ASK EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU WHO HAS EVER HAD A CONVERSATION ABOUT HOW AI COULD ‘NEVER’ REPLACE HUMAN CREATIVES TO READ THE PITCHES CHURNED OUT BY THE ADWEEK SUPERBOWL BOT AND, AS YOU DO, TO ‘ENJOY’ THE CREEPING SENSATION UP THE BACK OF YOUR NECK AS YOU COME TO THE COLD, FINAL REALISATION THAT OUR DAYS IN THIS STUPID PROFESSION REALLY ARE NUMBERED:

• Facebook Offers New Video Traffic Insights: You want a better idea of where your views are coming from on Facebook? I mean, other than ‘people on Facebook’? Well, LUCKY YOU! You’ll now be able to see whether video views have originated from your Page’s followers, as a result of a users Sharing the video to their friends, whether it was due to a ‘recommendation’ from a Facebook algo (‘Next Up’ video card, for example, or featured in Facebook Watch), or whether it was as a result of paid promotion. More for getting a better, more granular understanding of exactly how your audience is ‘enjoying’ your content rather than being a new, seismic set of ad features, but still potentially useful if you really, really care about this stuff – work out what content gets most views through shares, mechanically identify every single potential variable quality that video has, A/B test each quality in future videos to see what works best, optimise the fcuk out of everything, get more views, wonder what the point of all of this is anyway.
• Insta Testing Desktop DMs: Of very little interest to anyone other than community managers, who will, if they are anything like me, relish the ability to type messages to irate punters on an ACTUAL KEYBOARD rather than on a bloody phone. No word on exactly when this will be with everyone, but probably ‘soonish’. As an aside (which I think comes up in one of the longreads later in some way, iirc), it very much feels like the next big online generational schism will be between old people like me who like ‘big’ (ie non-mobile) computing/browsing, and younger people who are all mobile-uber-alles; there will come a point at which I know most new digital experiences are going to be mobile first, and at which I will start to feel like an antediluvian, sausagefingered lummox shouting at the sky about how things just work better with a proper keyboard ffs. So it goes.
• Boomerang Launches New Creative Features: One of the best things about TikTok is the quality and ease-of-use of the in-app editing features; honestly, one of the most incredible things about the past 20 years has been watching the democratisation of video production tools and people’s growing ability to make stuff on their phones which would have taken days of studio time and a proper editing rig to create back in the early 00s. Anyway, Insta’s launching a few new toys for its ‘Boomerang’ video tool, letting you run them in slowmo, with motion blur, or with some sort of slightly digital-ish filter on it – you can read more here about how to access them, should you wish to. I wonder how weird / deep-fried this stuff can get if you multiply apply these, export / save out the video and then overlayer the resulting video with other sets of effects, ad infinitum? There’s almost certainly a nicely messed-up aesthetic you could arrive at with a bit of effort.
• TikTok’s Misinformation Rules: Included mainly to point out, again, just how bad Facebook’s equivalent statement from last week was (in case you missed, it, here). See, Mark, TikTok maybe a Chinese Trojan horse seeking to covertly steal the faces of all good US citizens as part of the terrifying communist plot to eventually enslave America by creating robot clones of all teenagers and slowly-but-surely using them to infiltrate and take over the nation, but at least they can write a sensible policy on deepfakes, lies and misinformation.
• When Brand Banter Goes Wrong: Do you remember when Disney formally launched Disney+ and they had this sort-of cute, sort-of nauseating ‘thing’ on Twitter where all the various sub-brands and franchises that were coming to the service chimed in and had a ‘conversation’ with each other? No? WHY AM I CONDEMNED TO RECALL THIS STUFF FFS???? Anyway, Facebook joined Twitter the other day (as in, the specific Facebook app rather than the parent brand – do keep up) and attempted something vaguely similar with all of the other products chipping in to welcome it to the platform (even typing this is giving me huge, awkward fantods, to be clear) and oh god it’s just so, so embarrassing. Please, please, please, unless you’re the owner of a massive stable of the most popular entertainment franchises in the world, don’t attempt to do this cutesy ‘let’s all pretend to be brands having a chat’ thing ever again. And even then, think twice.
• The Adweek Superbowl Bot: Really, this is so, so good. One of the big trends of the past decade or so in advertising is that now everyone in the Western world is obligated to pretend to give a fcuk about the annual orgy of spending that is the Superbowl ad break jamboree, pretending that it’s the absolute pinnacle of creative endeavour in advermarketingpr when in reality it’s about 15% that and 85% ‘let’s spend all the budget on a famous and / or some CGI, and double down on whatever the internet thinks is ‘relatably surreal’ this year!’. Enter Adweek: “perhaps you’ve looked at how famously formulaic most Super Bowl ads are, with their celebrity cameos, animal hijinks and inspirational voice-overs, and questioned whether a machine could generate an ad idea that would fit right in. Enter Adweek’s Super Bowl Bot, a text-generating AI trained on nearly 3,000 descriptions of Super Bowl ads—134,000 words in total, so far—sourced from around the web”. This uses the now-ubiquitous GPT-2 AI text generator as its base, and, whilst there is obviously quite a lot of human curation of the output going on, the results are glorious. I mean, honestly, let me just pick one at random – here, look, this would TOTALLY get made: “An ad for Quaker Oats by Havas – A horse shows an uncanny resemblance between him and actor Anthony Hopkins. The two share a telepathic conversation about the quinoa in their cereal, and how it is in fact sustainably grown”. SEE??? That is totally plausible; I mean, in real life there would probably be a final line that reads “We pull out to see that Anthony Hopkins is wearing a Furry-style horse suit, but we can chalk that down to it being early days yet. Honestly, I’m uncertain whether I will see anything better from adland all year, this is golden.

By Ellen Von Wiegand

NEXT, A TRULY GREAT SET OF JAZZ, FUNK AND SOUL PULLED TOGETHER BY SHABAKA HUTCHINGS!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY IS MISSING A TRICK BY NOT ANNOUNCING A NATIONWIDE REALITY-TV-LED SEARCH FOR A NEW PAIR OF ROYALS TO REPLACE THE OUTGOING PAIR AND CALLING IT ‘THE SUSSEX FACTOR’, PT.1:

• Connect BTS: Ordinarily I’d shy away from including something by one of the planet’s biggest musical acts, what with Web Curios’ raison d’etre being pointing you at weird, obscure stuff that isn’t already the subject of obsessive squealing from a literal army of teenagers, but this new project by Korean pop juggernaut BTS is exactly the sort of thing I’d be rhapsodising over were it instead created by an obscure witch house outfit from Dudley and so here it is. ‘Connect’ is BTS’s BIG ART PROJECT, all accompanied by some vague guff about wanting to CONNECT THE WORLD THROUG ART AND MUSIC, and which, more interestingly, is going to comprise 22 artists and works across five cities, presenting works both physical and digital. It’s…unclear the extent to which the individual members of BTS have been involved with this, and there’s much of the wording on the website which very miuch makes the whole project sound like the sort of thing that was invented in a marketing meeting rather than as a project born of artistic passion, but maybe I’m just being cynical – certainly, the first work, Catharsis, by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, which you can either see at the Serpentine Gallery or in its digital version here, is genuinely beautiful, and I’m curious to see what the other works are like and how they interconnect with each other – all my cynicism to one side, it’s hard to imagine One Direction having done this (though you know full well that Harry Styles has a full and impressive command of International Art English). Thanks to Alex Fleetwood for this, who emailed it to me and DEMANDED that I credit him.
• Lovot: I know it’s only the second proper week of January, but I can already tell I’ll be hard-pressed to find anything more unsettling and vaguely-depressing all year – well done, 2020, it’s a STRONG START! Meet Lovot, a horrible portmanteau name combining ‘robot’ and ‘love’ for a smol, ambulant robot companion, who wants nothing more than to be loved by YOU! But, thank God, at least not in that sense – no, Lovot is all about the Agape rather than the Eros, a tiny wheeled robot that exists solely to be the recipient of its owners affection and to return that affection in kind, with its odd, fleece-y body and its dull eyes and its slow, wheeled gait. It’s a combination of motorised home assistant, complete with camera and microphone to act as a sort of ambulant domestic surveillance system, and teddy bear, which will actively seek out its owner, ask them for hugs, and even, if there’s more than one unit, get demonstrably ‘jealous’ if humans lavish more affection on one Lovot than another. I honestly can’t look at this without feeling deeply, immeasurably sad – I think it’s the Lovot’s face, or absence of one, just these huge eyes staring sadly up at you, designed to elicit emotions that it itself can never feel. Or maybe it’s the fact that the design and finish of the thing looks almost exactly like the model that would be used in the horror version of this, which starts out gentle but which picks up pace massively in the final third in which the Lovot gains sentience and the blood and gristle and hatred starts flying everywhere. I know that things like this are probably good for the old, the infirm and the lonely, and that they can fulfil a positive function in the lives of the elderly or infirm, but, honestly, the Lovot breaks my heart.
• Doublicat: Create your own slightly-sh1t deepfakes, in an app, on your phone! This is quite shonky but sort-of fun, and as ever with this stuff you’ve probably got a short window before this sort of thing is baked into Insta, Snap et al directly and EVERYONE uses it, so here’s your chance to fill your stories with something NEW and DIFFERENT. The results are…well, crap, frankly, but sort-of funny in a ‘JESUS CHRIST WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO MY FACE??’ way, but I think the most interesting thing about this is how it proves quite neatly exactly what an incredible head-start the established tech platforms have when it comes to this stuff; the difference in quality between this and the stuff that Snap in particular puts out is like night and day, and one wonders slightly at the barriers to entry for any non-established players to enter into the video fx market. Or at least I do, funless pr1ck that I am.
• Receptiviti: Things I have learned after two decades or so of work which I would like to pass on to the younger readers of Curios, part x of y: in 99% of workplaces, they really don’t monitor your internet access or email usage AT ALL, unless you give them good reason to think that they ought to – I mean, who has the time? Seriously, when I (briefly) worked for the Department for Work and Pensions I spent the last month leaking stories to the media from my work email address FFS. Or at least that used to be the case – now, though, thanks to the ineluctable march of AI (or at least stuff that’s being peddled by chancers as being AI, which is basically the same thing) bosses can buy services like Receptiviti and you’re fcuked, mate. This is a genuinely creepy service offered to businesses, which plugs into each and all of their systems (the Office Suite, Gmail, Slack, the Bloomberg terminal, etc) and offers large-scale analysis of ALL their employees’ communications across these platforms, employing sentiment and semantic analysis to monitor things like levels of stress, relationship qualities, etc, amongst the workforce. Anyone whose ever done any work at all with automated sentiment analysis (why HELLO social media monkeys!) will know exactly how crap it is, and will be feeling a very real sense of fear at the prospect of their future career trajectory being determined by a series of red and green pie charts. This sounds HORRIBLE, but is very much the future – it’s worth having a read of the ‘ethics’ section on the site, which makes it very, very clear that when it talks about ‘privacy’ it’s talking to employers about their data rather than to staff about their private correspondence, which is…nice. And yes, fine, I know that technically when you’re at work everything you type is owned by your paymaster but, well, no.
• The Kickstarter Make It 100: Genuinely amazed that I’ve never spotted this before given it’s been going for a few years – I am a disgrace. The Maker 100 is a Kickstarter initiative, obviously a marketing gimmick but a nice one, designed to encourage people who’ve got a small, niche idea for a thing to have a go at getting a simple run of 100 editions funded on Kickstarter. Anything goes, from comic books to art to design to prints to mugs to stitching to cards, and the link up top takes you to the collected entries so far. If you’re not a maker yourself, this is still a pleasing selection of small, idiosyncratic projects to browse and maybe support; if, on the other hand, you’ve always wanted to do that craft thing then this might be the incentive you need to give it a go. The project runs til the end of January, so you’ve still got a couple of weeks to get involved if you fancy it.
• Pet Playlists: Yes, I know that this is technically marketing for Spotify but it’s also silly and internetty and noone reads the first section and it would be a shame if this got missed as a result, hence its inclusion down here. Tell the site a few things about your pet (including the type of animal you have – weirdly they include ‘iguana’ as an option but not, say, ‘guinea pig’, which very much suggests that this was developed by a team in Brooklyn, but overall this is a pleasingly silly way of creating new playlists and discovering new artists (although weirdly the cat playlist I generated the other day didn’t include ANY of this, a particular favourite of my girlfriend’s (and her cat’s), suggesting its creators know NOTHING about feline tastes).
• The Human Screenome Project: This is a really interesting idea – this is a Stanford University project which takes as its starting premise the idea that taking data about mobile usage in blocks (as in, “I spent 5 hours on my phone today, used these 7 apps and visited these 5 websites”) doesn’t actually tell you that much of use or interest, and that instead it’s more useful to take snapshots of how those 5 hours actually played out in realtime – how do you scroll, how do you switch between apps, how do you browse, and what can this data tell us about who you are and how your mobile use might affect you? Unscientifically this feels right; I don’t think its controversial to suggest that there are significant qualitative differences in the psychological effect of, say, spending 5 hours flipping between the Insta profiles of a series of mad-faced influencermongs vs spending those same 5 hours getting into increasingly ill-tempered arguments about local bin collection policies in the Crouch End Appreciation Society Facebook Group (they are both bad for you, to be clear). There’s one example of this sort of datacollection available on the site, and some information about the project, but it’s frustratingly light on practical examples – still, it’s a really interesting line of thought / research.
• Teaching Machines to Lip Read: This is a very dry webpage for a hugely impressive piece of research by Imperial College, in conjunction with Samsung – basically they have taught a machine to generate reasonably-accurate speech using nothing more than its observations of the speaker’s moth movements as input. The most obvious use-case for this is in terms of hearing aid tech for the aurally-impaired, but there’s a huge range of potential applications – this is really, really impressive.
• Lulupet: Did you think we’d seen every single variant on the ‘X, but connected to the web!’ IoT bandwagon it was possible to conceive of? HA! Never underestimate the ability of the tech community to add features and online elements where none ever need to exist. We may, though, have reached peak-IoT with this, though – Lulupet is, as far as I can see, the world’s FIRST EVER internet-enabled litter tray! That’s right, you can now get precise, scientific data as to your cat’s stool and urine production, as the device tracks volume, uses image recognition to identify the type of emission (apparently weight sensors often struggle, so a camera designed to work out whether it’s looking at sh1t or p1ss is vital) and to work out whether it’s ‘normal’ scat based on comparison with some sort of universal catscat database (and now I have just thought of Paula Abdul’s 1990 hit ‘Opposites Attract’ featuring MC Scat Kat and it’s taken on a whole unpleasant new meaning), and to recongnise individual cats within a multi-feline household and WHY??? I understand some people are mental about their cats (HELLO SAZ!), but even by their standards the idea of having every single one of your pet’s fecal deposites compared against some sort of kitty Bristol chart is…insane. Thanks, Taiwan! Thanks!
• The Madness of CES: I don’t know Ed Zitron, and likely never will, but he seems…odd. Still, this is his thread of ‘mad stuff he saw at CES’ and, as it is each year, it’s a genuine delight. I am so, so glad I have never had to attend this – it looks awful, although some of the stuff he’s photographed is quite, quite marvellous. My personal favourite is the booth running a big ad saying “Don’t quit smoking today!”, which in the age of wellness strikes me as the very definition of zigging whilst others zag – well DONE those visionary creatives!
• The Witcher: Another marketing thing, but, again, I imagine enough of you have watched the TV series or played the game that you’ll be interested in this regardless. Netflix’s latest ‘swords and tits’ epic is The Witcher, based on an old Polish fantasy series and the subject of three increasingly-brilliant videogames; this site gives you a lovely interactive timeline of the lore of the fictional land – hang on, what is it called? Oh, it doesn’t matter, let’s just call it Genericfantastica – letting you go back and forth in history to see how events and people all interrelate. There was something similar, and far more complicated, for Game of Thrones, but this is lovely in its own right – and if you’re only familiar with the games, as I am, it’s a nice way of remembering some of the high points from those stories and how they fit into the wider canon of Geralt’s world.
• The Paris Museums Collection: Over 300,000 items from Paris’s museums have just been put online as a digital collection, all housed on this nicely-designed, easy-to–navigate site with some really good advanced search options (see, this is what I get enthused by; fcuk’s sake, Matt – honestly, though, the ‘search by colour’ option is SO nice), thematic collections to offer you a way into the archive without being daunted by its scope…The centralised nature of this is particularly nice, offering the ability to browse works regardless of their current ownership – a London version of something like this would be immense.
• The List of Fictional Institutions: From Wikipedia. SUCH a wonderful rabbithole, and taught me that whilst ‘Jewbilee’ was a fictional Jewish youth camp invented by South Park, the name has since been adopted by a real Jewish group for their annual get-togethers, which is the best example of life imitating art that I can recall.
• The Water Peace Security Map: It’s interesting (to me at least) that one of the big, scary things to be worried about in the future back in the early 2010s was always water – its scarcity, and the eventual inevitable conflict that would result between peoples as that scarcity bit harder. I remember reading estimates that suggested that we were only a few years away from the first major geopolitical conflict over access to water, which hasn’t quite turned out to be true…yet. Still, as this map covering the current state of water availability and conflict across the global South shows, that’s unlikely to maintain for the next decade. The site’s not the most user-friendly, but there’s a lot of interesting information in here and all the data’s available to download should you be interested.
• The Apple Archive: There will be some of you reading this for whom this is basically like a digitised bible – I don’t really understand you, but, well, fine. The Apple Archive is an unofficial project which collects all the stuff that Apple put out, every year since the 70s; press releases, products, adverts…you name it, it’s archived and celebrated here. You want to take a nostalgia trip to the 90s and the weird, massive boiled-sweet-coloured iMacs? You want a reminder of quite how weird tech was at the turn of the millennium? You want to be able to practically smell Steve Jobs? Well, ENJOY!
• The Texas Testicle Festival: This is happening in Texas tomorrow – I am 99% certain that nobody reading this is going to be in a position to attend, but, just in case you’re in or near Texas and are in the market for an all-day celebration of eating animal testes then ENJOY!
• The Tokyo2020 Art Posters: I had completely forgotten that there was an Olympiad happening this year, but, well, there is! Hi, imminent Olympiad! As ever, one of the elements that makes up the anticipatory run-up to the event is the release of all the associated gubbins – mascots, commemorative coins, stadia and ART! This is the official poster selection for the Tokyo 2020 games, and there is some glorious stuff in here – in particular, the breadth of styles and themes on display is wonderful, with work ranging from manga-style illustration to this beautiful calligraphic image which I am going to spend this afternoon trying to buy a print of. So, so beautiful, these.
• Custom 3d-Printed Miniatures: This is VERY GEEKY and will be of no interest at all to most of you – however, if there’s anyone reading this who plays D&D or roleplaying board games or anything like that then you might find this immoderately exciting. This is a Kickstarter for a company called Hero Forge for the next iteration of their service which custom-prints character models in 3d; now they’re offering COLOUR. Honestly, this is very cool indeed (and I say that as someone who doesn’t play D&D or boardgames, really) – you’ll be able to create your character, paint it in the site’s engine, and then have it either 3d printed in colour or, even more impressively, get it hand-painted by one of their artists. Frankly, I’m quite tempted to invent and design a fictional character just so I can get one of these.
• Public Pianos: A website mapping all (maybe not all, fine, but lots) of the public pianos situated around the world. Depending on your tolerance for people playing Pachebel’s Canon with varying degrees of competence, you can either use this to visit them all or to avoid them.
• Super Scale: This is SO impressive, in a slightly (ok, incredibly) geeky way – Super Scale is one bloke’s project to make the most realistic radio controlled car possible, in terms of its handling and the like. It’s AMAZING, seriously – click the link and watch some of the videos and watch how it corners and how the chassis moves and Christ what do I know I don’t even drive FFS. Still, it looks amazing and the guy’s apparently going to start selling them via the site (I don’t see that ending well, but still), so if you’re in the market for an insane engineering project for 2020 or if you just want to drop a few hundred quid on a strangely overengineered toy car then this could be for YOU.

By David Kramer

NOW GIVE THIS SPOTIFY MIX A GO, DESIGNED TO TAKE THE P1SS OUT OF THE GENERIC SOUNDTRACKS THAT ALL TRENDY RESTAURANTS HAVE WHILST AT THE SAME TIME BEING A GENUINELY GOOD MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT THE ROYAL FAMILY IS MISSING A TRICK BY NOT ANNOUNCING A NATIONWIDE REALITY-TV-LED SEARCH FOR A NEW PAIR OF ROYALS TO REPLACE THE OUTGOING PAIR AND CALLING IT ‘THE SUSSEX FACTOR’, PT.2:

• The Five Thirty Eight Data: If you do datawrangling, this is very mucj up your street. Nate Silver’s lost some of his lustre over the past couple of years and is not quite the infallible guru of predictions he once was, but that doesn’t mean he’s not a very, very smart person and that Five Thirty Eight doesn’t still do some of the most interesting work out there around at the edges of data and prognostication. This offers a series of datasets used in their stories and investigations from around 2014 – historical, fine, but useful as training sets or simply as ways of working out how they wrangled the numbers to get their results. If you play with numbers, for profit or fun, this is worth a look.
• The London Sound Survey (Redux): I featured part of this in Curios in September 2015, but now it seems there’s a whole WEBSITE – the London Sound Survey, “a growing collection of sound recordings of people, places and events in the capital.” Covering the sounds of people, animals, transport, music, sound maps, interviews and LOADS more, if you’ve any interest in the urban or social geography of the UK’s capital then this is an absolutely required click for you. Honestly, this feels like it shoudl have its own permanent installation in the Museum of London or similar – it’s got so, so much wonderful stuff here, and is a treasure trove of inspiration and writing prompts and jumping-off points through which to explore the city; I am absolutely using this as an exploratory template as soon as the weather gets marginally less offensive.
• Tilemaker: This is absolutely one of those links which I clicked on with a vague sort of ‘oh, yes, this looks sort-of interesting’ and then BANG it was 45 minutes later and I was concentrating with my tongue poking out of the corner of my mouth agonising over the final colour combination of my tile. Here’s the blurb: “Qatar Foundation International’s (QFI) Mosaic Tilemaker application introduces students to fundamental concepts of Islamic art and architecture through the exploration and creation of mosaic tile art. Here, users can learn more about the history and geometric principles behind this art and engage in an interactive learning process to explore these concepts by designing and sharing their own mosaics.” DESIGN YOUR OWN TILES FFS! Honestly, if your partner won’t stop banging on about renovating the house, point them at this and know that they will likely lose themselves in pursuit of tile perfection for at least a few weeks, thereby buying you some time.
• Goofonts: Google fonts, but made properly useful and searchable. I mean, that’s literally it, but if you need help finding web fonts then it’s probably really useful. Or at least a bit useful, and that’s frankly good enough – there’s a low, low bar here at Web Curios.
• Received Not Read: A simple Twitter bot which automatically crawls the spam/junk folder in its creator’s email and tweets out the subject lines from random junk emails they’ve received. There’s an odd sort of nonsensical poetry about lots of these, as well as a few slightly baffling ones – “I have a surprise for you”, sent from an otherwise-anonymous ‘Natalie’, sounds to me far more sinister than enticing, for example.
• Anxiety Empire: Thanks Editor Paul for pointing me at this – Anxiety Empire is the title of a new publication which looks to explore mental health through the prism of various macro issues of society, such as ‘work’, ‘language’, ‘money’, etc. On the one hand, this is an interesting project and I can imagine it will throw up some good writing; on the other, I’m increasingly of the opinion that ‘mental health’, like ‘sustainability’, has been rendered largely meaningless as a term through over-/misuse.
• FFT Battleground: I can’t imagine any of you will find this particularly compelling – though I might of course be wrong, perhaps you want nothing more than to bet imaginary money on bot battles in an old videogame – but it’s interesting to me as a sign of where Twitch might end up going. Do you remember SaltyBet from a few years back, which streamed endless randomly-generated fights between bot-controlled characters with a sidebar chat in which people bet on the outcomes? No? Christ’s sake. Anyway, this is like that, but on Twitch and using Final Fantasy Tactics as the game rather than SaltyBet’s weird, own-brand fighting mod – the point is less what’s going on here (which is mostly incomprehensible, at least to me who has no idea at all about FFT mechanics), and more about the creative use of Twitch as a platform for community and shared experience and, of course, betting. I can TOTALLY imagine a situation in which, say, Capcom creates a neverending stream of random matchups between SF characters with a real-world betting angle for actual cashmoney (bets capped at 5p a time to mitigate against eventual criticisms of the negative effects on young minds of promoting gambling via gaming) – seriously, this is if not the future then certainly a future.
• Brutu: This feels very much like an art project rather than a real thing, and yet, here we are. Do you feel like your phone’s a constant distraction and even all the screentime notifications and app usage limiters simply aren’t keeping your addiction in check? Well add a financial incentive to it! The app “is an iOS timer that helps you stay focused. Select any amount of money that motivates you and start a timer. Put your phone down and stay on task. If you leave the app Brutu will charge you.” Beautifully, there’s no indication that anything good or worthy happens to the money – I presume it just ends up in the pockets of the developers, to which I say WELL DONE YOU. That said, there’s DEFINITELY a charity app here which one could create, doing exactly the same thing but donating the forfeited sums to a cause of your choice. Hang on, that very much feels like it should exist already, it’s a GREAT idea? Does it? If not, it’s YOURS.
• Algorat Sweater: Would you like to design a virtual sweater which will then be displayed on a smol 3d CG rodent? You might not think you would, but you are WRONG. I have no idea at all why this exists (although googling ‘sweater rat’ just now has gifted me a selection of VERY CUTE examples of rattus rattus looking all toasty warm) but I am glad that it does.
• Mute VC: A plugin which mutes Tweets from VCs from your timeline. Which is fine as far as the joke goes, but until this exists for specific professional categories on LinkedIn (marketers, I am looking at YOU) then it’s meaningless.
• The Great Migration: “During the Great Migration, from about 1915 to 1970, millions of African Americans moved from southern, primarily rural areas of the United States to urban areas to the north and west. They sought better opportunities away from racial discrimination and violence in the South.” This collection in the US Library of Congress presents a selection of these images, and offer an ever-timely reminder of exactly how close we still are to an era in which segregation and discrimination were law in the States.
• The Montreal Age Map: For the approximately two Canadians who read this, and anyone who’s interested in the history of cities, this is a map showing the various ages of Montreal’s buildings on the occasion of the city’s 375th birthday and offering a parallel curated guide to some of the older and more interesting structures. Fine, it’s probably not of huge interest if you’re not a Montreal resident, but it’s a pleasing way of exploring the city and its heritage online, and a good example of how to present projects such as this in appealing, accessible fashion.
• Famous Paintings With Added Search and Rescue Vehicles: Charming Twitter thread of the week, this. Andy Doe posted it with the following explanation: “This week, my firstborn asked me to teach him photoshop, which means we now have a lot of famous paintings with search and rescue vehicles added to them.” These are just GREAT, and there’s an angle here that you can definitely rip off if you’re a particular sort of brand with an awful lot of free time and photoshop skills.
• The Pirate’s Lair: Have you ever wanted to own a GENUINE (may not in fact be genuine) pirate treasure chest? Have you ever wanted to look at LOTS of photos of said chests, restored to their former glory? Almost certainly not, fine, but you might find yourself becoming surprisingly enthused by this excellent, shonky site whose design evidently hasn’t changed since approximately 1998.
• Significant Otter: Absolutely an app which started out as a vaguely-punny brainfart and which somehow became real, Significant Otter is basically ‘Yo’ for lovers; “With Significant Otter, you can take your relationship to the next level with biosignal sensors, a cutting-edge technology that’s built into your Apple Watch. There’s no texting, calling, or messaging involved. All you need to do is tap and you’ll instantly be in touch, literally”. Effectively it creates a peer-to-peer connection between two watches, automatically sharing status updates and enabling hideously-cutesy ‘I’m thinking of you!’ one-touch connectivity, all accompanied by animated little cartoon otters. On the one hand, this is so saccharine it makes me want to kill; on the other…no, there are no upsides. Oh, ok, FINE, the cartoon mustelids are nicely-designed.
• Bushfire Dildo: Do you want to donate money to the disaster relief effort in Australia, but don’t want to just give them your cash? Would you like to get something in exchange for your caring help? How about a MASSIVE RUBBER COCK? Well great – in that case, order the Down Under Domination D1ldo and enjoy the feeling of doing the right thing AND the feeling of six inches of hand-moulded rubber with a cute little koala-shaped raised bit on the base of the shaft! Between this and the woman who claimed to have raised a million selling nudes, we appear to have reached a point in human history whereby the criteria for charity seems to be ‘can I get an orgasm out of it?’ which, I don’t know, feels…odd. Still, d1ldos! Australia!
• Upwards: Finally this week, I think I stole this from B3ta (HI ROB!) – it’s simple, and a few years old, but it’s SUCH a great piece of game design. You have one ability – jumping. You can’t move, except to jump. How high can you get?

By Daisy Collingridge

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, THIS LOVELY BALEARIC CHILLOUT SELECTION BY MIDNATTSSOULA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Una Vida Moderna: Want a selection of images of mid-century modernist architecture in Mexico and Detroit? No? TOUGH.
• Celebreedy: The latest Shardcore joint, already featured in a FAR more popular newsletter than my own, but re-upped here because a) it’s great; b) I NAMED IT!! You can read the blurb about the how and why here, but basically it’s a series of machine-imagined celebrity mashups, which are SO wonderfully uncanny-valley. The project’s on Twitter and Insta too, should you wish to follow it in MULTI-PLATFORM fashion.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Yuuuteando: Thanks to Ed for this – Yuuuatendo is a Brooklyn musician whose insta is full of odd little 90s-style CG animations and his slightly-bleepy compositions. It’s ace.
• Derrick O Boateng: Boateng is a Ghanaian photographer who shoots solely on his phone; these are SUPERB, and the use of colour here is hallucinatory and brilliant. Such a wonderful aesthetic on display here.
• Aleia: Snails, in smol human habitats, doing snail things. Clicking on the link will take you to the artist’s website, where I fell in love with the earrings shaped like mini Hitachi Magic Wands.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The State of the World in 2020: I think, though I can’t quite be bothered to check, that this is the fifth year now in which I’ve featured The Well’s ‘State of the World’ conversation between Bruce Sterling, Jon Lebkowsky and guests (who this year include digital musical genius Holly Herndon) – as it is every year, it’s an absolute must-read; if you’re interested in reading some very, very smart people discussing and debating where we are now as a species. Taking in everything from tech to politics to art to sociology and everything inbetween, it’s a particular pleasure to read Sterling this year who’s got a sort of wonderfully flat ‘everything is a mess and everything is wonderful and nothing matters and everything matters and I am going to die and I don’t care and I care so much’-type-vibe going on throughout. The conversation’s upto five pages right now, which is a LOT, but try reading just the first page and see how you get on – I promise, this will make you smarter.
• The 2030 Future Timeline: YOU WANT PREDICTIONS? WE GOT PREDICTIONS!! Quantumrun, the site from which this is taken, is a frankly MENTAL collection of futurepredictions, annualised for each yer between now and 2050 – this links you to their selection for 2030, but you can go to the homepage to browse the other years. If this is right, in a decade we’ll be enjoying the first flying cars and a mini ice-age; we’ll also live in a world in which the largest demographic cohort in the continent of Africa is 0-4 years old, which is INSANE.
• Buzzfeed in 2020: I’ve featured Jonah Peretti’s annual address to the troops a few times over the years; the 2020 effort is definitely worth a read, as Peretti looks back on the successes and failures of Buzzfeed’s past, opens up a bit as to its planned future monetisation model (cutting out the middlemen is the basic takeaway here), and drops some interesting hints about what he sees as the potential for the creation of parallel small interest-based communities as adjuncts to the Buzzfeed brand. This last is particularly interesting to me in terms of general digital trends; five years ago, anyone making any ‘hey, let’s build our own community’ noises would rightly have been decried as a lunatic; now, though, it’s not inconceivable that forums could make a significant comeback as we all scrabble to keep our lives private and separate and out of the hands of BIG TECH (NB – if you think giving all your data to Buzzfeed is better than Facebook then, well, not quite sure what to tell you here kids).
• Corporations of Loving Grace: This has done the rounds this week, and rightly so – Martin Weigel has penned a truly excellent essay, discursively tracking from advermarketingpr chat to a wider debate about the extent of our societal belief in the idea of ‘corporate entity as our only saviour’, and the commercial/commoditisation of, well, everything, including the aptly-named ‘marketplace of ideas’. This is very, very smart – even if you don’t agree with all of Weigel’s points, you will find yourself nodding along at his reasoning. “Instead of politics we are to have the marketplace. Instead of elected representatives we now we must surrender ourselves the personal visions of billionaire business leaders. And instead of the citizen, of homo politicus, we are only and everywhere homo economicus – self-interested individuals seeking seek to enhance our own wealth and power with little regard for the impact on others. Instead of citizens then, we are to remade as consumers.” Well, yes, quite.
• From Context Collapse to Content Collapse: Another great personal essay, this time by Nicholas Carr (and, like Weigel’s, published on a personal website – WE’RE CLAWING BACK THE WEB, KIDS, ONE LINK AT A TIME!!), looking at how the projected idea of context collapse – that is, the idea that the internet would usher in a degree of radical transparency which would see people abandoning the multifaceted personal identities of the past for a single, honest, unified personal which existed consistently regardless of context – has instead given way to content collapse, where instead we’re all different for different people but instead it’s the content we’re presented with which is unidimensional and devoid of context. Really good, this.
• The Rise of the Personal Brand: This is actually from the tail end of 2019, but I missed it when it was published what with already being on my holidays – it’s also written by K=Hole co-founder Sean Monahan, which makes it very much worth a read. So, so good, and an excellent companion piece to the above, on the past decade’s rise of the personal as professional and the ceaseless pursuit of the hustle, and the weird reemergence or recontextualisation of the idea of the (or indeed ‘a’) scene. Excellent, and if you work in advermarketingpr, sort-of essential (as in fact are all of the past three links).
• The Death of iTunes: A series of observations (11, to be precise) on what the emergence and eventual death of iTunes tells us about the shift in the way in which we envisage digital storage and taxonomy, and how it’s emblematic of the shift from personal curation and organisation and limited storage, to the acceptance of software and the infinity of digital, and the algo being in charge, and what this means in terms of cognitive and emotional burden when dealing with our digital lives.
• How To Build An AI Text Bot On Twitter: Specifically, one which uses the GPT-2 model to create creepily near-human copy on whatever subject you train it on. This is long and techy and NO FUN to read, but if you’re after a smol coding project for the year and have an idea for a Twitter bot based on a meaty corpus of extant text, this is potentially very useful indeed.
• The Smart Beauty Devices of CES: This is a Mashable link (sorry), so don’t click expecting sparkling prose or high-quality journalism; it’s worth a look, though, mainly as a slightly jaw-dropping rundown of all the crazy beauty tech that was on show at this year’s CES in Vegas; reading this made me think that, amongst all the chuntering about wellness and acceptance and body positivity and the rest, we are simultaneously cosigning some pretty unhealthy-sounding behaviours when it comes to the obsessive tracking of our facial imperfections and the pursuit of the flawless Instaface.
• 7 Reasons Why Gaming Will Take Over: One might reasonably argue that in terms of the global entertainment industry gaming has already taken over – nonetheless, this is a smart and coherent rundown of all the reasons why the gaming industry is set to be the dominant entertainment juggernaut for the foreseeable future, and why everyone who’s able should start seeking to jump on it asap. This is very much a piece of business / market analysis rather than a ‘games are sooo cool!’ hagiography, and is all the better for it – its author, Matthew Ball, is always worth reading on the gaming market in general, and he makes some excellent points about the unique nature of game worlds and content which make them specific value multipliers in way that few other industries can match.
• Twitch For Non-Gamers: This is really interesting – for the first time, the amount of non-gaming content on Twitch is outstripping that about games (or at least, ‘chat’ content is outperforming all content on specific titles, which is still remarkable). I am hugely interested in seeing exactly how TV ends up; I don’t think Twitch is going to be it, necessarily, but this model – microbroadcasts, interactivity, rewards, responsiveness, community and intimacy – is absolutely the future.
• How To Be Anonymous: Specifically, on the rise of fashion and accessories designed to distract or thwart surveillance technology such as CCTV; this is a fairly functional article, but it’s fascinating from the point of view of the sheer range of stuff that’s now out there, from glasses to scarves to tops to hats to makeup to anything else you can think of. It’s totally possible that TopShop will have its very own ‘Hackers’-type line of anti-surveillance clothing in shops by the end of the year, mashing up this sort of thing with the strong dystopian cyberpunk aesthetic of last year’s HK protests – in fact, £10 says some of this stuff is SOMEWHERE on the high street by Q3 this year.
• The Man Who’s Buying Music: Merck Mercuriadis has an excellent name and the sort of demeanour, at least in these photos, that very much suggest that one ought not fcuk with him. He’s also, though his company Hipgnosis, on a quest to buy the rights to all the songs in the world, whatever the cost – this is his bet on how the future monetisation of artists’ catalogues is going to work, and he’s bullish enough to be spending a $billion-odd on so doing. If you’re a romantic or a purist then this might not make you feel particularly warm and fuzzy – it’s also a bit galling to see Nile Rogers cosying up to a man who basically reads quite a lot like the Gordon Gekko of music – but the ambition and the vision is coldly impressive.
• Derek Parfit: OK, you probably need to be a bit into philosophy to enjoy this, but I ADORED this essay all about Derek Parfit, one of the most brilliant philosophers of the 20th century, a wonderful ethicist and moral philosopher and a proper eccentric. This is wonderful, on both his thinking and the wider theory that surrounded it (specifically, on the practical applications of utilitarian theory), and also on the very peculiar eccentricity of academics of a certain stripe – “Gradually a legend built up around him. ‘Derek only eats meals he can consume with one hand so he can read and eat at the same time’. ‘’Derek drinks instant coffee made with hot water from the tap, so he doesn’t have to wait for the kettle to boil’. ‘Derek always wears the same clothes, even in the St Petersburg winter, to spare him from having to think about what to put on in the morning’. Unusually for such legends, this was all completely true.” Lovely, affectionate, fascinating stuff.
• A Eulogy for Yo: You remember Yo, right? The briefly-viral app whose sole function was to enable users to swap messages which simply read ‘Yo’? You may even have written a brand strategy for it on a quiet afternoon back in 2014. This is a really interesting essay, sort-of in defence of Yo but more accurately all about the benefits of low-friction communication, and the function that such systems can end up fulfilling; there are a number of anecdotes contained within about how people used Yo, and it does sort-of start to make sense (but only ‘almost); there is something to be said about super light-touch checkins with people, and the vague sense of safety and security it can give. Maybe we should bring back Yo, is what I’m basically saying here. Except if it was created in 2020 it would be called ‘ennui’ and would just let you send a message saying “i think i want to go to sleep forever! actually death is good, maybe?”.
• The Many Lives of Roberto: A lovely essay, from the New Yorker’s Helen Rosner, about the peculiar wonder of creating a recipe and watching others take it and run with it and make it their own, and, in parallel, the community that can build up around these recipes on social media (the ‘Roberto’ in question is a soup, for reasons that are sort-of explained in the piece). Gorgeous and comforting and warming – the essay, not the soup, though the recipe’s at the end if you want to try that too.
• Comedy Screenwriters’ Favourite Names: How did Bob Loblaw’s Law Blog on Arrested Development come into being? Why was Gob’s boat called ‘Seaward’? And why was Niles Crane called Niles? This is a charming piece, interviewing various comedy writers from hit shows on how they came to name their creations – the Niles one in particular is SO TRUE.
• Gonzo Goes Gonzo: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, written as though it featured the Muppets rather than Hunter S Thompson. This is far, far funnier than it needs to be, as is often the case with McSweeney’s.
• Trying to Live Forever: Or, what doing all that biohacking crap feels like in real life. The author of the piece, Joel Stein, has previous in this field, having a few years back done a piece in which he tried to get an action movie star’s body; this time, he goes down the rabbithole of the weird pseudoscience of cryotherapy and sleep analysis in pursuit of fitness, health and (near) eternal life. Stein’s an engaging writer, and is just sincere enough in his interest in the ‘science’ to make this a fun read rather than a slightly humourless takedown; it strikes me that there is no amount of longevity that can be worth having this little fun.
• Operation Backfire: I fell in love with this essay from the London Review of Books within the first few lines, when it mentioned the British Interplanetary Society – its headquarters are near my house, and I was long-fascinated by what went on behind its unassuming facade (til I remembered to Google it and found that it was significantly less involved in communicating with alien species than I’d hoped) – but the whole thing is just MARVELLOUS. It’s the story of the British experiments with rocketry which took place in the 50s and 60s – there’s a lot of science here, and a lot of engineering, but in the main it’s just such a wonderful portrait of a very specific type of Britishness; staid, sensible, a bit cheap, practical, eccentric, and fundamentally doomed to irrelevance. Honestly, it’s hard not to read this and imagine it being voice overed in clipped RP tones – what makes it all the better, for me at least, is that this is an account of exactly the sort of imagined postwar Albion that so much of the Leave campaign harked back to, subconsciously or otherwise, and it shows that we DIDN’T WIN. Those halcyon post-war days? We were losing ground, we were an irrelevance, a joke. THEY ARE NOT TIMES TO HARK BACK TO FFS. This is possibly the most ‘dad’ piece of writing I have ever included in Curios (it’s about rockets and engineering and THE WAR, ffs), but I promise you that it’s so, so good.
• The God Phone: Finally in this week’s longreads, Leora Smith writes about manning the God Phone at Burning Man. Long term readers will know that Burning Man fascinates and repels me in equal measure; the art and the costumes and the drugs I would love to see, the people perhaps not so much – this, though, is wonderful, charming, thoughtful and kind, and Smith writes beautifully. It will make you want to do at least one slightly-whimsical art thing this year, or at least it will if you’re anything like me, and that can’t be bad.

By Eliana Marini

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s kick off with a cover version. Momus is one of my favourite ever artists, and this is one of my favourite ever songs of his; when I first discovered it, age 15 or so, it’s fair to say I identified a bit – 25 years later and it’s still lyrically fantastic, and whilst this version by Kirin J Callinan isn’t quite up to the original it’s still fcuking GREAT. This is called ‘The Homosexual’:

1. Next up, the latest from Poppy, who, having been following her for about 6 years now, I am convinced is going to properly break out this year (I know she’s already internet famous, but in a mainstream sense) – this continues the weird narrative ‘Poppy is now FREE’ arc of her personal story and the shift away from the ultra-Kawaii aesthetic of her early stuff towards more of the Babymetal-aping sound of recent singles; I have to say, I really do like this quite a lot. It’s called ‘Anything Like Me’:

1. Deathgrips are always a ‘challenging’ listen. When accompanied by a GAN-imagined video, that’s…moreso. Honestly, this is aesthetically fcuking WONDERFUL – the work’s by Robert Luxemborg, and you try not seeing these faces in your nightmares afterwards:

1. This is by Igorr, or at least the song is – the animation’s by some people called Meat Department. It’s called ‘Very Noise’. It’s so…wet. And so meaty. The track reminds me quite a lot of Autechre and the sort of jazz x Aphex Twin-type stuff that Clifford Gilberto was doing back in the day – it’s ACE:

1. Finally this week, UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Pa Saliou, with Frontline, which, as all the comments say, has a touch of the J-Hus about it; they’re both of Gambian origin, which might explain some of the musical similarities, but this is a different sort of flow – feels like this kid could be big (although obviously I would have no idea if he’s already really famous and on the radio and stuff), see what you think. Oh, and THAT’S THE END I’M OFF HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND DON’T FORGET TO WRAP UP WARM AS IT’S VERY COLD OUT THERE AND I DON’T WANT YOU TO CATCH A CHILL BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU ESPECIALLY THOSE OF YOU BOTHERING TO READ THIS BIT BUT EVEN THOSE OF YOU WHO AREN’T TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE HAVE FUN TAKE CARE BYE BYE BYE!!

HELLO! HI! Christ, er, writing this newsletter is HARD WORK, turns out, My tendons are all aflame and I feel like…well, like I’ve just spent the past six and half hours typing near-solidly with only occasional breaks for tea (oh, and urine; it’s not like I catheterise, I’m not that dedicated), which is about as delightful as you can probably imagine. 

Still, it’s ALL WORTH IT, eh? Who knows, maybe this will be the decade in which some plutocrat or another finally realises that the missing piece in the ineffable, unknowable puzzle that is ‘the future of content’ (a puzzle in which all the pieces are blank, many of them are missing, and you’re blindfolded whilst playing) is paying me a comfortable annual salary to produce Curios. Maybe. The alternative of course is that I continue to eke out an existence in the consultancy mines until the point at which my attitude renders me genuinely unemployable (current ETA: Q2 2021) at which point WHO KNOWS! Still, early signs are that we might all have been nuked into nonexistance by then anyway, so WHO CARES!

Yes, that’s right, Christmas has put me in a GREAT frame of mind for the year ahead – any of you hoping that Web Curios was going to return full of vim and positivity in the new year will be sadly disappointed, but probably should have known to lower your expectations. Still, if you’re still game then step forward, step forward – welcome to another year of words, of links, of some truly wonderful examples of creativity and endeavour and love and pride, as well as an awful lot of things that might make you hope for the end to come sooner rather than later. Which. probably, it will. HAPPY JANUARY EVERYONE!

I’m still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and I still haven’t found anything better to do with my time. 

By Linder Sterling

LET’S KICK OFF THE FIRST CURIOS OF THE YEAR WITH A PLAYLIST OF SONGS FROM THE BEST ALBUMS OF LAST YEAR!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS A WHOLE LOT BETTER ABOUT 2030 NOW THAT IT KNOWS MARK ZUCKERBERG’S ON THE CASE!:

• The Zuckerfesto: We begin 2020 with an ending of sorts; no more will Mark Zuckerberg embark upon one of his much-loved annual challenges, throwing himself headlong into a new ameliorative endeavour each year to the increasing bemusement of the rest of us meatsacks. It’s a shame really; I’d rather enjoyed the annual frothy speculation about what it all meant each January, whether it be the tour of the US meeting ‘ordinary folk’ which we were all convinced was the precursor to an eventual Presidential run (I can’t work out if that flight of fancy seems more or less ridiculous after three years of Trump), the slightly-embarrassingly-curtailed project to build himself a robot butler called ‘Jarvis’ (I mean, I’m not a regular visitor to Mr Z’s house, but I’m reasonably confident that he’s not singlehandedly pushed back the frontiers of servile AI in the past couple of years), or, my personal favourite, the bizarrely-bloodthirsty commitment to killing all the meat he ate with his own hands (it really is worth remembering this one – you sort of get the impression that most people might maybe cut back on the steak and sausages if they were the ones having to exsanguinate the beasts each time, but I can’t help but imagine that Zuckerberg, by contrast, now counts a distressingly-well-stocked mammalian ossuary in a crepuscular corner of his McMansion). Anyway, he’s done with that – this year, by contrast, he’s published a 10-year vision, outlining what he sees as the priorities that he and Facebook will focus on, and, well, it’s worth a read. Look – I’m not denying that Zuckerberg is smarter than me by a very, very large multiplier, and that he’s literally changed the world and at that, but reading this once again makes me wonder about his suitability to be at the vanguard of future human endeavour. So much of this is either blindly utopian, wilfully miopic, or, well, just a bit banal and obvious; ‘Generational Change’ will be a marker of the coming decade, says Mark, with millennials increasingly coming into positions of power across the globe – WELL YES, THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A GENERATION GROWS OLDER AND STARTS TO HIT ITS LATE-30s/EARLY-40s, IT ALWAYS HAS FFS! We’re going to focus more on smaller, more private online communities – YES, AND NO THANKS TO YOU MARK, AND WE KNOW THEY’LL STILL BE MONETISED TO FCUK BY ADS, WE’RE NOT FCUKING STUPID! The one that really got my goat, though, was the final bit about increased global governance of the web and related areas – it’s not the principle, with which I broadly agree, that I have a problem with, it’s the high-handed tone that somehow suggests that Mark’s run out of patience with the heel-dragging of legislators which is causing, and this line in particular: “I don’t think private companies should be making so many important decisions that touch on fundamental democratic values.” OH SO YOU DON’T THINK A COMPANY WHOSE MISSION IS, AND HAS BEEN, ‘CONNECT THE ENTIRE WORLD’ WITH NARY A CARE FOR EXACTLY HOW THAT MIGHT WORK IN PRACTICE OR WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES MIGHT BE HAS BASICALLY BEEN ENGAGED IN EXACTLY THE PRACTICE OF ‘MAKING IMPORTANT DECISIONS THAT TOUCH ON FUNDAMENTAL DEMOCRATIC VALUES’ FOR ITS ENTIRE MATURE LIFESPAN?!?! You disingenuous fcuk, Mark. God, it’s nice to start the year with a momentary flash of the good, old-fashioned impotent rage.
• Facebook Doesn’t Really Change Its Political Ad Rules: The headline here is that if you’re a politician you can literally pay to promote almost any old cobblers. There are a few interesting tweaks in here, though, which will be rolled out ‘in the future’ (regular readers will be aware of Facebook’s less-than-stellar track record of actually delivering much of what it promises in these announcements, though, so perhaps don’t start holding your breath just yet. Significant tweaks include: the ability to see rough audience size for political ads, presumably to help unmask the sort of INTENSE MICROTARGETING of small communities and interest groups that everyone always gets very excited about but which is increasingly being debunked as an effective mechanic; the ability for users to exclude themselves from Custom Audience targeting; and the chance for users see political ads even if the advertiser has sought to exclude them from targeting based on Custom Audiences. The second of these is the most significant, but the percentage of Facebook users likely to a) be aware of the fact that they can opt-out of Custom Audiences; and b) then go ahead and do something about it can conservatively be estimated at
• Facebook Launches More Ad Reporting Metrics: I don’t make new year’s resolutions – it’s not because I’m in any way superior to those who do, you understand, it’s more because I simply can’t imagine having that degree of volition or motivation about anything – but, if I did, I think that mine this year would be to make 2020 the year in which I finally stop having to do anything to do with social media for my jobs (I’m about 80% there fwiw). The reason? Stuff like this. YOU CAN NOW REPORT MORE DIFFERENT STUFF ABOUT HOW ACE YOUR FACEBOOK ADS ARE AND HOW WELL THEY ARE DOING AND OH GOD I CAN’T DO THIS FOR ANOTHER TEN YEARS.
• The Facebook Deepfakes Policy: Another example of how, for a company of its size and wealth and scale, Facebook is in many ways so, so bad at everything to do with its announcements about platform regulation; this week it published what was meant to be a clarifying update on its policy on Deepfake content, designed to help limit the potential of the platform to be used for malicious purposes as the technology continues to improve. The outcome? A mess of a statement that will basically do nothing at all to enforce the removal of deliberately-misleading fake content on the Facebook ecosystem. Look, just read the significant elements of the statement – video will be removed if “It has been edited or synthesized – beyond adjustments for clarity or quality – in ways that aren’t apparent to an average person and would likely mislead someone into thinking that a subject of the video said words that they did not actually say; and if It is the product of artificial intelligence or machine learning that merges, replaces or superimposes content onto a video, making it appear to be authentic. This policy does not extend to content that is parody or satire, or video that has been edited solely to omit or change the order of words.” Can someone please, please explain to me the meaningful difference between a video that has been edited or synthesised by AI or ML to ‘mislead someone into thinking the subject of the video said words that they did not actually say’ and one where someone’s manually edited it to rearrange the words of a speech or statement and thereby change the meaning? NO BECAUSE THERE IS NO PRACTICAL DIFFERENCE. Honestly, whoever’s working on this stuff in Menlo Park ought to be applauded for their chutzpah in drawing a salary, because this is staggeringly badly-considered. If you want a contrast, look at Reddit’s policy, also released this week, which whilst imperfect is a million times more useful than Facebook’s.
• New Business Tools For Instagram: Basically it’s a bunch of analytics stuff – account growth, aggregated updates of your mentions in Insta Stories on a daily basis, and, usefully for all your booze/gambling brand needs, AGE-GATING IS FINALLY HERE! There’s your excuse to break with dry January and celebrate with some lovely January meths.
• Insta Introducing Collaborative Group Stories: This is interesting and quite cool – the idea is that people who are in an Insta Group Chat together will be able to collaborate on creating Stories together, with upto 32 people working together to upload different elements to a collaboratively-collated Story. Whilst the practical mechanics are a bit iffy (ie unkown), and you’d obviously need some sort of controls to stop That Person in the chat (there is always one, and sometimes it’s you) ruining the vibe by chucking in rogue elements, the potential is huge – and for brands (and particularly those in the entertainment / experience space) this is a really interesting way of sourcing UGC and doing competitions, etc; I think that the barriers to entry for creating a Group Story of an event you were at with your mates for a competition would be far lower than doing it on your own, for example. Anyway, this is still lurking around in beta somewhere but expect it to roll out soon(er than any of the Facebook stuff up there about political ads because where do we really think their priorities lie? Exactly).
• Instagram Is Testing Its Own Brand Collaborations Manager: Do YOU work for any agency that manages the relationships between ‘influencers’ and brands on Insta? Do you long for the sweet release of death (or, perhaps more soberly, just maybe to not have to do it any more)? Well, rejoice – there’s possibly light at the end of the tunnel (although, er, it might be the oncoming train of unemployment), as Instagram’s testing its own-platform version of the already-extant Facebook Brand Collaborations manager, which seeks to match brands to creators without any pesky agency middlemen. Again, no word on a global rollout schedule, but I’d imagine by Q2 this should be reasonably widespread.
• Twitter Rolls Out ‘Promoted Spotlight’ To All: Do you want to spend a violent amount of money buying a trend on Twitter? Would you like to spend even more money by attached a 6-second piece of looping video to that ad buy, so you can have YOUR VERY OWN MOVING IMAGES at the top of the ‘trending’ page for as long as you like? GREAT! I don’t know the pricing on this stuff, but previous experience suggests that Twitter’s rate card is MENTAL at launch for these sorts of things, so perhaps wait a few months before exploring whether it’s right for Rymans or Dynofit or whoever you represent.
• Twitter for Academic Researchers: I don’t think that all this stuff is necessarily new, but it’s been given a nice shiny facelift and a dedicated section on Twitter and it might be useful to the more academically-inclined of you; this page links out to all the various tools and features and APIs and stuff that academic researchers can leverage to build Twitter data into their research. If you’re an academic with a conceivable use for this sort of thing in your work, you should probably take a look (though you may well be aware of it already, in which case sorry to bother you).
• New YouTube Kids’ Content Rules Come Into Force: Look, this is mainly a thing for ‘creators’ rather than brands, but it’s worth being aware of in case you or your clients make stuff that could conceivably be considered as having kids as its primary audience – videos with that designation will now be subject to specific restrictions, blocking comments, preventing them being added to playlists, and stopping them from being monetisable through personalised ads. This has been the subject of yet another backlash from a community that doesn’t seem to have quite realised that this is what happens when you don’t own the platform you’re producing for – for most of you, this will be of no concern whatsoever, but it’s worth knowing about for the sake of completeness if nothing else.
• Bitmoji TV Coming Soon: This is on Snapchat, and so by definition it’s aimed at children, but read this and try not to think of it as some sort of event horizon of stupid coming towards us: “Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV…With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceships to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies.” Click the link, please, and watch the 90s ‘trailer’ – done that? Good! DOESN’T IT LOOK AWFUL??? There are literally no details at all beyond this, and the rest of the piece is mostly speculation, but I could imagine this being quite big (or at least the precursor to something quite big), and if I were in any way involved with any sort of entertainment property I’d probably be calling Bitmoji up right now for some informal chats (though not if said ‘entertainment property’ was scat bongo, obvs).
• Giphy Launches Giphy Video: Basically they’ve added the ability to include sound in uploads, meaning it’s now gifs AND videos! It’s not self-serve, meaning only official media partners will be able to upload videoclips at present but, again, if you have any meme-y telly/film/sports/etc-type content that would benefit from the inclusion of its audio then this is worth a chat (and Giphy have always been lovely to deal with in my experience).
• Taglines: As per usual I was in Italy over Christmas, and as per usual I was struck with the almost quaint nature of Italian advertising and marketing (obviously ‘quaint’ here is synonymous with ‘displays attitudes towards society and gender norms that appear unchanged since the late-70s); no ‘VERB MORE ADJECTIVE/NOUN!’ three-word slogan trends for them, no, just a steady parade of beautiful people and women who can only ever fit into one of four archetypes (child/teen, mother, grandmother, seductress, since you asked). It was nice to spot this on my return, then – a Twitter post by Jeremy Webb collecting 61 slogans or taglines he noticed whilst visiting the UK over the same period. What’s noticeable here is the wildly varying quality of the copy, and the extent to which many of the recent work sticks out a mile by dint of being, comparatively, very, very stupid. Oh, and NOONE is ever allowed to use ‘X Lives Here’ for anything, ever again. It’s the law.

By Yo Az

IN FACT, LET’S CONTINUE THAT SLIGHTLY RETRO TREND WITH ANOTHER PLAYLIST OF TOP 2019 TRACKS COURTESY OF LAUREN EPSTEIN!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.1:

• MarsCat: Just over 20 years since Sony debuted its original Aibo (decided, by the way – when I am waiting to die and have fully embraced heroin, I am absolutely buying one of these to keep me a vague sort of company as a gouch in and out), we welcome to the world MarsCat, an already-funded Kickstarter project which offers you the chance to purchase your VERY OWN ROBOT CAT! O MAOW! MarsCat operates on, seemingly, exactly the same principles as the Aibo – fully articulated limbs and tail, sensors all over the place, and a rudimentary degree of AI which will enable the machine to ‘develop’ based on inputs it receives from its owner (if you talk to the cat more, it’s more likely to be more vocal, etc etc). This looks sort of terrible, but also sort-of amazing; as ever with these things, only the curious, the tinkers or the stupid ought ever to buy the first ever version of stuff like this, as inevitably it will be superseded within 12m by something better, cheaper and less likely to go rogue and suffocate your family with its tiny plastic paws as you all sleep (NB – Web Curios in no way believes that MarsCat would or could do such a thing). It also, though, looks weirdly sad in a way that Aibo never did; not sure whether it’s just that Sony have some truly world-class designers, but this cat looks…like it was designed by Tomy, basically, and not in a good way. Still, if you’re in the market for a prototypical virtual pet that will purr, arch its back, play with a toy fish and even pretend to clean up its own crap (really?!) then MarsCat is…well, it’s the only option, but it’s also a potentially attractive one. Don’t worry, Lebowski, you’re not about to be replaced.
• BBreaking News: This is fascinating. BBreaking News is a really clever, simple project that uses people’s requests to use footage in news broadcasts or on news websites as a reasonably strong signal to suggest that a video is newsworthy or interesting, and collates them on that basis – all the videos on the page have been flagged as of interest to news media as one stripe or another (although exactly which outlet it was looking to make use of the video contained in this Tweet I have no idea). It’s a compelling stream of news – right now there’s a lot of footage about protests in Sydney against climate change, a couple of traffic incidents, some sports stuff…depending on how you use it, it’s either an interesting snapshot of broadcast news worldwide, or an excellent way of keeping track of breaking stories.
• This Foot Does Not Exist: Christ, it’s a whole year since the explosion of GAN-imagination sites, peddling everything from imaginary humans to imaginary anime figures. 2020 sees a BRAND NEW GANSITE, though, and this one’s my favourite yet, mainly as whoever’s behind it has really leaned in hard to the artistic side of it and provided a proper, in-depth, serious exploration about the project and its aim (to whit, to ask questions about the market for foot fetish pics online) – “Because foot pics* can operate in two discrete modes of content consumption simultaneously (i.e. they can be memes and nudes simultaneously, in the same public sphere), their perception depends entirely upon the viewer and the context in which the image appears. Thus the foot pic is both highly valuable and almost worthless at the same time – and this creates a highly intriguing supply & demand dynamic when creators/consumers fall on different ends of this valuation scale.”. The site itself doesn’t show you the feet, but you can sign up for text alerts so you can get new, computer-imagined toes and soles sent to you on the daily should you so desire (and should you be willing to jump through the hoops of accessing a US phone number).
• Open Streetmap Haiku: Oh well isn’t this just lovely! This site lets you either specify any location in the world on a map, or uses your location, and generates a brand-new, machine-created haiku about the place, based on data contained within the Open Streetmap (there’s a lot of data – take a look here); it looks for landmarks, features, etc, and then pulls lines of relevant length together to make your very own bespoke tiny poem. Honestly, these are SO GOOD; the only way this could be improved would be to add some sort of Google image search-based visual collage to the output, but, honestly, I’m quibbling. Honestly, try this out, I promise you will be charmed (and then you will spend a bit of time, if you’re anything like me, seeing what it creates for everywhere you’ve ever lived, and every place you’ve ever worked, and then worldwide landmarks, and before you know it it’s 823 and FFS MATT STOP WASTING TIME).
• Canals of Amsterdam: Ok, it’s fair to say that to enjoy this site to the fullest you’re likely to need to be quite a big fan of canals and, specifically, the canals of Amsterdam. That said, if that sounds like you then WOW are you in for a treat, not just for the not-insignificant amount of Dutch waterway-related intel contained herein, but also because of the webdesign, which is genuinely lovely; I don’t tend to ,like side-scrolling websites, on the whole, but this really feels like it works to deliver a high-quality magazine-type feel to the information, and the look / feel has a wonderful 70s Eurodesign-type vibe to it whilst simultaneously feeling very stylish and oddly modern (to me, at least – feel free to explain to me what’s actually going on here in stylistic terms as I’m probably talking rubbish). Regardless of your feelings about canals, though, this is worth checking out from a design point of view.
• Huginn: I get the impression that this is a really, really useful piece of code that I am sadly in no position to properly make the most of – you, though, might be different, or might have made ‘become less of a useless coding refusenik’ a goal for the new decade, in which case, well, enjoy! Huginn is basically ‘If This Then That, but infinitely customisable if you know your way around a bit of html; I’m sure that the promises are a bit hyperbolic, but the theory here – that you can set up events and triggers and dependencies across anything you like, given the imagination, the API and the coding chops – is impressive. I especially like the examples they give, from setting up your own, free, ‘if volume spikes by x% in y time, perform action n’ rules on Twitter, to this (which, if you’re anything like me, will give you a brief moment of truly evil inspiration): “Create Amazon Mechanical Turk workflows as the inputs, or outputs, of agents (the Amazon Turk Agent is called the “HumanTaskAgent”). For example: “Once a day, ask 5 people for a funny cat photo; send the results to 5 more people to be rated; send the top-rated photo to 5 people for a funny caption; send to 5 final people to rate for funniest caption; finally, post the best captioned photo on my blog.” SO MUCH POTENTIAL.
• Postcode Finder: This is REALLY REALLY BORING, but if you do geotargeting of ads then it’s also super-useful. Draw a shape over any bit of the UK and it will tell you what postcodes are contained within it – which obviously doesn’t sound like much but crikey is this potentially helpful for campaigning and the like.
• Display Land: I’m quietly curious about where exactly we’re at as a species with the creation of the (inevitable) digital twin of the earth’s surface; it’s inevitable that at some point or another we’ll have enough video / photo coverage of the planet’s surface to be able to create reasonably high-fidelity digital representations of topography which can then be used and manipulated for a wide variety of purposes, from research to planning to games. It’s obviously most likely that one of the big tech companies will end up being the owner of this data, at least in the first instance, but projects like this one make me hopeful that there will be a parallel open source virtual Earth to play with too. Display Land is an app, available for Android and iOS, which…oh, here: “generates 3D captures of physical spaces using the everyday smartphone camera, empowering anyone to create shared digital spaces for self-expression and creativity”. Basically, anyone can create a navigable Street View-style area which, I presume, can then be uploaded to your 3d engine of choice for further manipulation and experimentation. Whether you’re a game developer looking to shortcut environments into Unreal, say, or an architect looking to imagine a redevelopment, or an urban planner imagining new transportation systems, the potential is vast and slightly-thrilling. Of course, what will actually happen is there will soon be a burgeoning market in bespoke 3d VR POV bongo in which you can have whichever adult star takes your fancy disposing of themselves in your very own house, but there may well be other things too eventually. Quite amazing, this.
• The Dril Turing Test: Actual dril Tweet, or the imaginings of a GPT-2 net trained on his corpus? YOU DECIDE! This is far, far harder than I expected, which suggests either that dril’s honed his schtick to the point where it’s so stylistically pure that it really can be learned by a machine, or alternatively that we’ve been lauding a fcuking neural net for its ‘weird’ humour for the past decade.
• Jupiter: You thought that the end of the 2010s would see an end to the preposterous trend for VC-backed startups doomed to fail because the model is so fundamentally flawed as to be borderline-commercially suicidal? THINK AGAIN! The first, but doubtless not the last, ‘really? REALLY? THIS is what you chose to invest in?’ startup of the 2020s is Jupiter, a service for the wealthy, busy, grocery shopping-averse 1%, whereby you pull together a list of what you need from your weekly shop and some poor peon goes and does it all for you, even going so far as to pop into your house while you’re out and putting everything away for you so you’d never know that an actual, real human being has been working on your behalf to smooth all the rough edges off your life til there’s no texture to it any more. Beautifully, they even offer a ‘stretch’ service where for an additional fee they will organise your pantry for you – WHO HAS A FCUKING PANTRY???? WHO?????? ESPECIALLY IN URBAN AMERICA?!?!?!?!?!?!?! This is pretty much everything that’s awful about VC-funded startups – pandering to people’s laziness, and reducing actual living others to the status of invisible elves, working tirelessly for less-than-minimum-wage in order to provide you, the customer, with the seamless, luxury futurelife you deserve. Please, please let this fail.
• Driver Album: In the intervening month or so I’ve been away, Adam Driver has inexplicably become the subject of seemingly ALL OF THE THIRST. Why is this? Anyway, if you want a Twitter feed which offers nothing but photos of Mr Driver holding a selection of different classic LPs then this is very much the late Christmas present you will have been dreaming of.
• Face The Music: This is VERY SILLY, but equally very fun. Enable your webcam and let the site track the shape of your mouth and its movements, and produce appropriate sounds that sort-of track the types of vocalisations you look like you should be making. Which is the first truly godawful Web Curios description of 2020 – YOU’RE WELCOME! Look, this basically lets you mime being an opera singer, is the upshot – which, actually, is EXACTLY the sort of thing that the Royal Opera House could consider doing as an Insta /Snap build to turn the kids onto Turandot or similar (and this is why I don’t work for the ROH).
• Colour Palette Inspiration: Colour palettes drawn from classic / famous album covers, just in case you ever wanted to decorate your home in the exact shades used on Momus’ seminal 1988 album ‘Tender Pervert’ (for example; I don’t suggest that you actually do that, it would be terribly monochromatic and it’s possibly a hard one to explain away).
• Tonaly: If your goal for 2020 involves ‘write the global smash hit I know I’m capable of, and leave this life of tedium and penury behind forever’ then, well, good luck to you – you might find this app of use. Tonaly basically uses the circle of fifths (here) to help you come up with chords for songs; basically like one of those colour palette matching tools, where you give it one colour and it suggests any and all that would be complementary to it. I don’t think you’ll necessarily end up composing anything revolutionary or groundbreaking, but it’s probably good enough for an Ivor Novello if you persevere with it.
• Greggs and Pret: I’m not quite sure exactly how Greggs and Pret became the retail avatars of the two opposing poles of the British class spectrum, but somehow this is where we’re at (as an aside, seeing as we’ve now had coffee chains on every street in every town in this country for an entire decade-plus now, can we draw a line under people referring to ‘metropolitan elites with their frothy coffees’? THEY SELL CAPPUCCINO IN GREGGS FFS. Anyway, this is a potentially-useful and freely-available dataset of the location of every single Greggs and Pret in the UK, which anyone can use to map them against any other dataset one might want, to see exactly what sort of odd correlations and inferences can be drawn. Personally speaking I think vape and betting retailers are a more interesting and useful indicator of social conditions, but there’s DEFINITELY some gentle clickbait you can make out of this with a bit of thought).
• VJ For Your Home: I mean, that’s maybe a touch grandiose – this is just a browser toy that you can set up to display an infinite, ever-changing sort of glitchy digital art stream, but it’s pretty cool looking thing and the sort of thing that you might want to stare at, slack-jawed, while stoned on the tranqs you told yourself you were DEFINITELY knocking on the head this year, honest.
• IsoCity: I normally keep the games to the end of the miscellany, but this is more of a sort of gentle toy – IsoCity lets you create a small, beautiful-looking 3d isometric cityscape, with roads and buildings and ramps and trees and stuff, all in a lovely Sim City-esque graphical style. You’re limited by the tile types available and the 7×7 size of the grid, but otherwise you can noodle around to your heart’s content to create your perfect mini-utopia. There’s no saving your creations and you can’t export them, but I promise you it’s genuinely soothing and a wonderful antidote to whatever stupid, pointless, mildly demeaning work you’re currently being forced to do by people you neither like nor respect.

By Hayden Clay

NEXT, TRY THIS SORT-OF FUNKY NEO-DISCO-ISH MIX BY HOTTHOBO!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER I MIGHT GET TO SEE HOW THIS ALL ENDS AFTER ALL, PT.2:

• Climate Simulator: So, er, what looks like it might be something of a significant decade in our attempts as a species to save ourselves from climate catastrophe has gotten off to a good start, eh? I FOR ONE AM FEELING PRETTY POSITIVE! Still, if you’d like to take a more scientific look at what the prognosis is for us and the rest of life on earth (leaving aside the tardigrades and the cockroaches who’ll be here til the sun engulfs us), why not try this fascinating little webtoy which draws on MIT research to offer the ability to see what sort of projected effect on emissions, etc, various shifts in policy will make. Want to see what will happen if we drop taxes on nuclear, slow population growth and increase investment in renewables? What about if we say ‘fcukit’ and try and consume our way to Mars? This is SO interesting, and, my tedious apocalyptic yelping aside, made me feel marginally better about things, insofar as it appears there really is material change that can be affected by us changing our collective behaviour. Obviously it depends on things like ‘undertaking a massive problem of afforestation’ (no, not YOU Jeremy, sit down), and ‘taxing the fcuk out of everything that is nuclear and renewables’, and a whole bunch of willing endeavour from a whole load of actors who, it’s fair to say, don’t seem massively inclined to do what they ought, but let’s not let that stop is from trying to feel a bit more hopeful about stuff!
• Cards Lacking Originality: As far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem to have any official link to Cards Against Humanity whatsover, which makes it slightly surprising that this is still online – still, while it lasts, here’s a way of playing CAH in-browser, at work. There’s a theoretical game-matching system in place, but noone’s playing at the moment – instead, set up your own ‘room’ and share it with your colleagues and spend the rest of Friday afternoon having some low-effort lols about incest and murder and stuff. Your mileage will vary – after all, this is still basically CAH except, as far as I can tell, without the quality control – but, as ever, it’s probably better than writing client updates about things that don’t matter at all.
• Canned Emails: There’s the germ of something good in here – this site offers a selection of template emails for a number of specific situations, like being owed money or responding to a request for help or ending a relationship (well, yes, quite), which anyone can access and use as they see fit. Which is fine, but minimally useful or interesting unless you’re very lazy / stupid / illiterate. What would elevate this would be the ability for anyone to add their own templates – I’d LOVE to see people’s creative ideas about how best to construct a job rejection email, or maybe their go-to draft for ‘sorry, I’ve given you the clap’. PLEASE can the creators add an ‘upload template’ function? GO ON.
• Bello: I can’t quite work out whether this device – produced by a Korean company as far as I can tell, and currently 5x funded with a month to go – is named ‘Bello’ after the Italian word for ‘beautiful’ (masculine) or because it sounds like ‘belly’; regardless, if you’re in the market for a piece of kit that will make you feel miserable and fat then, well, here you go! Bello promises that it will use revolutionary technology to measure the exact amount of belly fat you have, so you can feel bad about yourself and your fitness on a daily basis based on ACTUAL DATA! Aside from the fact that body fat is not necessarily a universally-helpful or useful indicator of health, wellbeing and fitness (says the alcoholic anorexic writing this, who OBVIOUSLY knows), HOW OFTEN DO YOU NEED TO CHECK?! If you’re the sort of person who feels that they need to be apprised of their fat levels on a regular basis like this then perhaps you might want to consider investing the money in a few therapy sessions before considering shelling out for this.
• Dwitter: The art-tech crowd among you probably know this one already (for which apologies), but this was new to me – “Dwitter.net is a challenge to see what awesomeness you can create when limited to only 140 characters of javascript and a canvas.” The results are some lovely little minimal art animations, which are impressive not only in terms of composition and minimal style, but also in terms of what can be done with code operating within such tight parameters; sort by ‘hot’ to see some of the most-popular creations currently onsite.
• Family Archive: I love this, whilst acknowledging that it feels a little voyeuristic (but in a really good way). A project by artist / photographer Daniela Spector, which she describes as an ongoing project to digitize her family’s archive. Here collected are family photos from the past six decades, spanning people and places and events, the banal and the remarkable, all presented in chronological slices. What I love about this is the novel’s worth of stories you immediately find yourself beginning to create to stitch the photos and the faces together into some sort of coherent narrative (a narrative that no family would ever create for itself, being by their nature utterly incoherent entities with no ominscient narrator pulling the strings). Honestly, if you’ve done any reading of BIG NOVELS over the past few years – you know, the sort of generation-and-continent-spanning familial sagas that tend to bother the best-of lists – then this will basically feel like the outline for one of those, which is, I promise, a compliment.
• Emoji Simulator: Simple-but-flexible tool/toy/thing that lets you set up simple simulators using basic rules and emoji. So, for example, you can create a model of Conway’s Game of Life, or a simple simulation of how fire might spread in a forest, or disease in a community, or traffic in a traffic system, all presented with CUTE LITTLE EMOJI! No idea at all what you might want to do with this, but I like to think one of you will do something.
• Joy Division Maps: I mean, that’s not technically what the site’s called, but it’s what it should be called – navigate to any place in the world on this map, hit a button, and get said map rendered topographically as a series of jagged lines in the manner of the cover of Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Fine, if you’re in London or Norfolk there’s little geographical interest to be found, but if you’d like a monochromatically geometrical representation of your favourite part of the Peak District, say, then this will be catnip to you. You can even get your selected graphic printed on a mug, which is a very niche gift idea but one which your Joy Division-obsessed, hiking mad uncle might quite like.
• YAP: This describes itself as ‘an ephemeral chatroom’, and is designed to provide a free, simple and easy way to spin up a chat interface for a bunch of people to use in seconds, with no need for any sort of signup or registration, even by email. Not only is the chatroom itself ephemeral, but the messages you post within it are too – each will fade away after they’ve been typed, meaning that a) everyone has to pay attention to what’s being said; and b) you can in theory get away with posting anything with no paper trail whatsoever. I…I can’t help but think that the only possible realistic applications for this are for BAD THINGS – honestly, the most benign application is as a place for coworkers to put all their mean gossip so as not to run HR risks, and that’s a horrible use case. This is terrorism and porn, basically, and I won’t be persuaded otherwise.
• Roam: This is going to be unpleasant to describe, but bear with me. Roam is…a sort of note-taking application which basically seeks to act as a seamless, frictionless version of Evernote, effectively linking related documents and materials based on shared concepts and themes. It’s a LOT to take in, but if you’ve any interest at all in digital taxonomy and information gathering / sorting (and WHO DOESN’T? I know that it’s what I for one live for) then this is very much worth looking at and signing up for. It’s free, and whilst it’s not the easiest thing in the world to get your head around it looks, even to my relatively cursory exploration, to be incredibly powerful. If you’ve ever struggled with how best to organise and arrange your online research and your thinking around it, this is absolutely worth investigating.
• Flow State: A newsletter! Except instead of 8,000 words of crap about the internet you can instead get a weekly musical selection emailed to you, designed to provide you with a two-hour soundtrack to work to each day. If you’re the sort of person who needs headphones on to function in the workplace (I tend to achieve the same sort of isolating effect by being unpleasant and surly, but whatever works best for you), then the prospect of daily, fresh non-intrusive sounds to accompany you may well be appealing.
• 8-bit Katamari: If you know Katamari Damacy, then you will be SO EXCITED at the prospect of a pixellated version you can play in-browser; if you don’t, then I promise you that you will love this. Roll around, collect everything, GROW, repeat – this is SO gently soothing and oddly meditative. Enjoy!
• Snow: Finally in this week’s miscellaneous links, this is a smol skiing game, pixelart-style, all in first person. Ski, avoid trees, hit jumps, wipe out, imagine yourself in Verbiers with a boozy hot chocolate and some raclette rather than at work. Go on, imagine.

By Izumi Yazakizumi

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, LET’S CLOSE OUT WITH SOME UNASHAMEDLY RETRO PSYTRANCE AS THOUGH IT WERE STILL 1995 AND I WAS STILL PLANNING TO GO TO ESCAPE FROM SAMSARA TONIGHT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• World Wide What: Tumblr’s started the year off with its own attempt to help address the generally problematic nature of social media for teens, presenting a variety of helpful guides and q&as and bits and pieces of content all focused on issues such as online safety, bullying, sex and the like, aimed at the younger people who form Tumblr’s core demographic. Or at least that used to – I’m not 100% convinced that Tumblr’s actually got any actual kids on it any more, or indeed that the peculiarities of the platform won’t render all this stuff a bit invisible, but there seems to be some useful stuff in here should you know people of an age where they might find it helpful / instructive.
• Caitlyn Cold: Artist’s website, presenting Cold’s gorgeous paintings, mostly in acrylic, whose style weirdly brings to mind an odd combinations of Schiele and Shirley Hughes (which I know is a somewhat esoteric combination, but I promise you you’ll see it if you squint).
• WTF Fanfiction: The whole tumblr is wonderful – celebrating, as you’d imagine from the name., some of the…odder elements of fan fiction found on the platform – but this link is specifically to a recent post in which its curator compiles all the best (worst) euphemisms for genitals found in fan fiction. There’s a…worrying focus on the penis here, with 3x as many terms for cocks as for vaginas, but overall these are just JOYFUL (and very, very awful) – could you be aroused by a ‘woman tomato’, for example? Have you ever heard the male member described as a “beef slinky”? I hope the answer to both of those questions is ‘no’, fyi.
• Camgirl BRB: Shots from camgirl streams in which the performer in question has stepped out of frame. Unquestionably, this is ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Toraya Wagashi: Toraya is, I believe, the name of the seller; Wagashi is a type of traditional Japanese sweet. These are SO PRETTY.
• Dog With Sign: A single dog, protesting about various different things with hand-written signs. Gently funny, and given it’s only about 15 posts in you can totally get away with stealing this for a petfood campaign if you’re quick about it.
• Shaina McCoy: Beautiful, textured oil paintings. I adore these.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The 2010s: I know, I know, we’re DONE with the old year and the old decade; we’ve got rid of all that 2010s stuff, it’s all about the FUTURE and the NEW! Still, though, this interactive timeline archive thing by Dazed, looking back through what they consider to be some of the milestones of the past decade, is too nice to leave out – it’s a lovely way of scrolling back through the years, and provides a genuinely great reminder of one or two minor cultural moments that might have faded from your memory; who could forget that moment in 2012 (December 12, in fact) when Kanye wore a Givenchy kilt? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Leaving aside the somewhat…er…inconsequential nature of many of their picks, this is actually quite a neat way of tracking certain trends emergence and acceptance into the mainstream, and a useful reminder of quite how new some things are.
• What You’ll Need To Know In 2020: Predictions for now, as written 20 years ago – this is superb, not least for how much it got absolutely spot-on. Facial recognition as a means of speeding up security checks; the need to clean up one’s data trails; the death, or at least the serious revision, of the concept of ‘privacy’; the rise in false information and uncertainty over the truth…honestly, this is fcuking astonishingly prescient and makes me wonder which of this year’s current crop of ‘next decade’ futurethinkpieces will be its equivalent. Seriously, THIS: “Even in 2020 you will always need to know if the facts you’ve dredged up are accurate and truthful. With so many sources doling out information, you will need to know: What is he selling, and why is he selling it? Most unsettling is the fact that these precious touchstones are not permanent. They never will find their way to the library stacks. Instead we are moving closer to Orwell’s nightmare: the truth ceaselessly modified, altered, edited, or altogether obliterated. Here today, gone tomorrow, with nothing but a bewildering ERROR 404 FILE NOT FOUND left in its place.”
• A Sick Giant: OK, first a warning. You know how Web Curios is…long, right? Really, really long. Well, this piece is…longer. I think it took me about an hour to read, and I read pretty fast – don’t embark upon it lightly. But, er, don’t let that put you off! Honest! This is a SUPERB essay, taking in polarisation, politics, discourse, the overton window, concepts of ‘right’ and ‘left’, social media, filter bubbles and so much more. This is about the US specifically, but is honestly applicable to any post-Internet country in the global West – honestly, I can’t recommend it enough if you’ve any interest at all in modern politics and discourse. It’s part of a long-running series of reflections on related questions on Wait But Why, and if you’re inclined you can go far deeper into the arguments presented by dint of a pretty comprehensive list of sources and companion reading at the end – I know you probably don’t want to think too much this month, but bookmark this for when you feel up to it, it really is that good.
• America Vs China: Another LONG piece (though not as long as the last one, don’t worry), presenting what seems to this uneducated eye a pretty well-balanced look at the current and future conflict/confluence of interest between the past and future global superpowers, as well as a degree of cultural and historical context as to how we’ve arrived at the status quo and what might come to pass in the coming decade or so. This covers politics, economics, technology, culture and all the bits inbetween, and whilst I wouldn’t suggest it as a substitute for actually knowing anything real about Sino-American relations, as a primer on ‘where we are now and why’ it struck me as being pretty exceptional.
• Location Tracking: This came out over the Christmas period, and many you may already have read it – if not, though, then this is a bit of a must-read, at least if you or anyone you know is still naive enough to believe that the magical glass-and-metal box in your pocket isn’t just a personal surveillance and tracking device. The piece takes a look at exactly how easy it is to track the individual movements and actions of a bunch of individuals in New York over a defined period, going so far as to identify individuals and track them down based solely on data they were able to access through brokerage firms and the like – as ever, seriously, if you think Facebook and SOCIAL MEDIA is the problem with the web then, well, sorry kids but this will BLOW YOUR MIND. This is a US investigation so it’s important to point out that there are various legal reasons why this is less terrifying in the UK and Europe – but only a bit less terrifying, and only at the moment.
• Friend of a Friend: I love things like this. Friend of a Friend was an old web standard that, briefly, looked as though it had the chance to become the ‘relationship graph’ of the web. It’s a bit techy, but basically it was a system whereby the relationships between different nodes on the web could be mapped and tracked and searched and used, all based on markup language that could be used on any website and read by any search engine, browser, etc. The reasons it never worked out are myriad, but this piece presents and interesting vision of a parallel version of the web in which we all had our own web pages that interrelated and coexisted based on a semantic graph framework, rather than just outsourcing all the hard, fiddly stuff to Facebook in exchange for them being able to sell us mattresses forever.
• The New Midlife Crisis: I don’t think I’ve ever linked to anything from Oprah dot com on here before – NEW DECADE NEW RULES, MOTHERFCUKERS! This is a piece about what its author terms ‘the new midlife crisis’ taking place amongst women in the US (but which, I imagine, might feel relatable to women or indeed men in the UK or indeed elsewhere). It’s not a new story – burnout, precariety, uncertainty, overload, all combining to leave people in middle-age frazzled and mad – but it’s part of a growing trend I’ve noticed over the past year or so of women of 40ish very much not seeming ok, at all, any of the time, and becoming increasingly open about it. A couple of caveats – surprisingly given it’s Oprah Magazine, this read very much as a white experience (though of course that might just be my own readers’ inherent prejudice); regardless, what it definitely is is a middle-class account rather than one that also factors in things like, I don’t know, multiple jobs or grinding poverty. Still, if you want a ‘state of modern, middle-aged, middle-class womanhood at the turn of a new decade’ piece then this is a pretty interesting one, to my mind at least.
• Google, Help Me Quit Skag: Or, more accurately, a really interesting look at how search ads can be used to target vulnerable groups, with either positive or negative messaging. I would quite like to take this quoted section and force everyone in the NHS and elsewhere to read: “Ad click data is a microscope. It allows the viewer a way to see society’s maladies in a way that is completely hidden to epidemiologists and psychologists and politicians and economists. But as long as Google’s ad system has been around, the microscope has been pointing at the wrong things. If marketers seem perfectly willing and capable to use ad click data to their own ends, why can’t doctors and teachers and governments use it to help people who are suffering; people who need help but don’t know where to turn to find it except Google?”
• The Boom In Insta Filters: Look, if you don’t work in advermarketingpr then you don’t need to read this; if you DO, though, then this piece on the booming trend in custom Insta filters as a means of gaining reach is exactly the sort of thing you can pick up and drop into your next client update meeting knowing that nothing will ever come of it but that you’ll get some reflected kudos for being vaguely on the pulse of something. AND THAT’S WHAT COUNTS, ISN’T IT??? *cries*
• Quibi Coming Soon: I think I first put a piece about Quibi in here about 6 months ago – now that it’s more imminent (well, a few months away), it’s worth looking at again, particularly in the context of everyone wanging on about 2020 being THE YEAR OF THE STREAMING WARS (although Quibi is positioning itself as a TikTok competitor rather than a Netflix competitor, from what I can tell). The article’s a general overview of the platform (which, as I’m sure you know, is a subscription-based mobile platform offering high-budget content from name creators designed to be consumed first and exclusively on the small screen) and is light on specifics – apart from the slightly jawropping revelation that EVERYTHING on the platform will be shot in both vertical and horizontal, and that viewers will be able to switch between the two versions on the fly by tilting their phones, and that, in certain cases, the orientation of the device will materially affect the narrative experience the viewer has. Which, let’s be clear, is MADLY ambitious and a hugely clever creative opportunity, and an idea which I now really, really, really want to steal for something.
• The Hype House: There is nothing new under the sun. A decade since YouTubers first started moving into mansions together in Hollywood to form content-production / influencer powerhouses (cf Jake Paul and Team10, etc), so the cycle repeats itself with the invasion of the TikTok teens, all following the same template as they attempt to squeeze their (and the platform’s) 15 minutes as hard as is humanly possible. As ever with these pieces there’s a slight air of unreality about the whole thing, as well as a really overwhelming sense of utter joylessness about the whole thing – notice that at no point do any of these kids, when speaking in interviews, sound like they are having any fun at all. Dead-eyed predators in the content ocean, all of them. Also, depressingly for a medium that grew directly out of Vine, all of this is SO WHITE. Still, if you want to see how some of your favourite content-sausage is made, step inside the factory!
• The Cost of Being a Woman Who Covers Games: If you play games and are interested in the industry, this account of what it’s been like being a female games journalist over the past decade is an unsurprising and admirably dispassionate account of quite how horrible much of the 2010s was. If you’re not au fait with Gamergate, doxxing, SWATTing and the rest, and if you’ve never spent any time examining the discourse and media around the most profitable entertainment medium in history, then dive in (but be aware you’ll want a shower afterwards).
• What Adults Are Missing About Technology: From MIT Technology Review: “We asked teenagers what adults are missing about technology. This was the best response”. Touching on identity, self-expression and freedom of thought, this is required reading for any and all of us who’ve ever looked at a teenager on their phone and done a small headshake of disapproval.
• Interracial Love Confessions: Buzzfeed has created a section on its website where users can submit their anonymous thoughts and feelings about their experiences of being in interracial relationships; they can choose to have their submissions publicly visible, and this page collects them for others to read. These are fascinating, sad, hopeful, heartwarming, confusing, upsetting and utterly, utterly brilliant as a collection; this is a TV series’ worth of writing prompts, a short story collection waiting to happen, testament to a world that’s hopefully changing but which definitely isn’t doing so quickly enough.
• London CCTV: A night in the company of the men and women who monitor the CCTV feeds of Hackney, keeping an eye on the drug deals and the beefs and the fights and the traffic and the accidents and the drunks and the fcuking and the crying. This is POETRY, and I will be hugely disappointed if this doesn’t prove the inspiration for a piece of theatre (tbh I reckon you could make a cracking opera out of this premise).
• A World Without Pain: SUCH a good essay by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker, profilingh a 70+ Scottish woman called Joanne Cameron whose unique genetic makeup means that she has never experienced pain in her life – not only this, but she’s also predisposed towards happiness, and evidences a sunny disposition which someone like me, whose personal raincloud has its own personal raincloud, boggle somewhat in disbelief. This is a gorgeous portrait of a remarkable person, as well as being an interesting look into whether this should be considered a genetic anomaly to be marvelled at or a utopian amelioration for all that ought to be pursued. Regardless, Joanne sounds wonderful and I wish her all the very best.
• The Year of Pivoting to Video: David Roth writes a beautiful account of the madness of working modern media, chasing the video views and becoming, momentarily, a slightly gentle meme as a result of his paymasters’ insistence on autoplaying video ads. It’s superbly-written, unusually for pieces on media trends, but more than that it reads incredibly surreally – you sort of hope that in 30 years time someone will unearth this and boggle at the madness (and stupidity) described. There’s a vague sort of ‘And Then We Came To The End’-type vibe about it, if that means anything to you (and if it doesn’t, learn).
• Alan Bennett’s 2019 Diary: I am going to miss this so, so much when Bennett eventually dies – it’s an annual treat. This year, Alan has unexpected surgery and continues to reflect on being old. I could read this forever and ever and ever.
• Journey by Pizza Toast: This is a brilliant piece of travel writing, in which the author tours old-style Japanese inns, called kissaten, in search of pizza toast, an uninspiring dish of thick-sliced Japanese white bread topped with pizza-ish toppings and toasted. Except it’s not about pizza toast, really, at all; like all the best travel writing it’s about senses of place and time, and how memory and place intersect with those to colour personal experience. Honestly, this is sublime and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
• Elizabeth Wurtzel: Finally this week, in memory of Elizabeth Wurtzel who died this week. I read Prozac Nation as a 15 year-old and it floored me – none of her books ever quite grabbed me in the same way, but her writing elsewhere was always superb, and a wonderful counterargument to the oft-held wisdom that the role of the author was to minimise the ‘I’ (though it’s equally fair to say that few of the past few years’ glut of confessional self-centric writers quite match her prose). The piece here linked is from 2013, but it’s timeless; I am genuinely sad she’s dead.

By Katarina Riesing

AND NOW, ONE MOVING PICTURE WHAT WITH ME NOT HAVING HAD A CHANCE TO DO THIS BIT THIS WEEK!

1. Excellent GANwork from Shardcore to close the first Curios of 2020 – “Godley & Greme’s seminal 1985 video, back-projected through stylegan FFHQ network, and slightly pushed along the ‘age’ vector.” This is ‘Cry, but everyone’s a little bit older’, this was Web Curios, I was and still am Matt, and THIS IS THE END BUT IN TRUTH IT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING OH ME OH MY WHAT LINKS AND FUN WE SHALL EXPLORE TOGETHER I HAVE MISSED YOU AND I HOPE YOU HAVE MISSED ME A BIT AND I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A GENTLE START TO THE YEAR AND THAT YOU ARE GENERALLY OK AND THAT YOU ARE COPING AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!:

There’s something I need to tell you. It might come as something of a blow. You may want to sit down.

WELCOME TO THE FINAL WEB CURIOS OF THE YEAR AND IN FACT OF THE DECADE!

Yes, that’s right – I would ordinarily do another one next week before turning off the internet for Christmas, but given that I’m likely to be up all night next Thursday, alternately swearing, smoking, drinking, crying, drinking, smoking, swearing, crying and drinking some more, it’s fairly certain that I would be in no fit mental or physical state to do this next Friday.

So, then. Here it is. The LAST ONE OF 2019. 38 editions, approximately 365,000 words (that’s…a lot, isn’t it? Maybe I’ll get help over Christmas), and the fat end of 3,000 links, all for YOU. In a brief moment of actual sincerity, can I take a moment to say thanks to all of you who read any of this rubbish, those who subscribe and those who don’t, those who nick whole chunks of it wholesale and pass it off as your own work, those who don’t tell their colleagues about it because it confers them a tiny modicum of professional advantage, those who hate it but read it anyway because it’s occasionally useful, and those of you who just ctrl-F for your own name and then stop reading when you’re not in it. Thanks, seriously, so much; this is the only thing I do that’s vaguely professional that I actually enjoy (and it’s the one thing I don’t get paid for – go figure), and I really appreciate you all for indulging me. 

I hope you all have really nice Christmases and that none of you die. Or that if you do, your final words are ‘Read Web Curios’.

I love each and every one of you immoderately and probably more physically than you’re comfortable with, and I want you to know that deep within yourselves. TAKE ME INSIDE YOU NOW. 

By Yanin Ruibal

FIRST OF THE LAST MIXES OF THE DECADE IS THIS NEW SELECTION COMPILED BY ADULT SWIM!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS VERY LITTLE HOPE FOR THE COMING DECADE BUT WHICH, IF IT IS ALLOWED TO WISH FOR ANYTHING, FERVENTLY HOPES THAT IT WILL FOREVER SEE THE END OF PEOPLE BEING PAID TO ANTHROPOMORPHISE MASSIVE, LISTED CORPORATIONS AND CONDUCTING WHIMSICAL OR ARCH INTER-BRAND CONVERSATIONS WITH EACH OTHER ON TWITTER FOR THE BENEFIT OF…WHO, EXACTLY? WHO? PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP:

• Facebook Launches Photo Portability Feature: It’s what can only be described as a slow news day here in s*c**l m*d** land, thank fcuk, so we’re forced to kick off with this spectacularly underwhelming nugget of novelty from Facebook – users in Ireland can now easily export their photos to Google Photos (with other services being integrated in the future). This will in theory be rolled out to the rest of the world in the coming months, although it’s worth taking a moment to think about all the other features we’ve been promised by Facebook over the course of the past few years, not least the ‘scrub all the off-Facebook data from its ad targeting databanks’ thing, which you may recall was announced waaaaaay back in Spring 2018 and which, strangely enough, we’re still seemingly no closer to seeing rolled out beyond a few small test markets.
• Facebook Updates Crisis Response Features: Absolutely NOTHING to see here from a brand point of view, but just f your collective i’s: Facebook’s post-disaster’s featureset is getting a series of updates, including the ability for Facebook posts to link to Whatsapp when offering or requesting help in the aftermath of a crisis. Perhaps slightly less positively, it “will allow people in affected areas to share first-hand information about what they’re witnessing or think others should know — like building collapses or road closures, for example”; an idea which sounds great in theory until you stop and think about people’s general attitude to truth and responsible communication on the platform as a whole. Prediction for 2020! Someone will use this feature to commit some sort of mid-level fraud in the aftermath of a major disaster, or to disseminate some sort of politically-motivated misinformation!
• Instagram Will Now Make Kids Under 13 Lie About Their Age To Use The Platform: I mean, that’s not exactly how they’re describing it, but that’s effectively what’s going to happen. Whereas up til now anyone could sign up to Insta with nary a question about whether they were of a suitable age to be exposed to the weird world of lipfills and sponcon, now the platform’s going to to….ASK PEOPLE HOW OLD THEY ARE! Which will obviously do wonders to improve child safety. This will make no difference to anyone, in practice, apart from brands in regulated sectors who will now find it marginally-easier to advertise on Instagram as they’ll be able to at least in theory exclude the under-age from their targeting, whilst at the same time knowing that it’s all a fcuking joke. EVERYONE’S A WINNER!
• Twitter’s Changing Ts&Cs: There’s nothing seismic in the new copy, or at least nothing that I as a non-lawyer can see, but the laws around posting edgy, NSFW stuff have been tightened up a bit; the linked piece goes into more detail, but, basically, if your Twitter account is posting a lot of what Twitter considers to be ‘sensitive material’ then expect to get banned. It’s basically another small step towards the tedious vanilla-ing of the digital commons; l appreciate that the nature of Twitter and its general openness and visibility as a platform means that the rules around bongo need to be a bit more restrictive than elsewhere but, on a purely personal level, I’d be far happier if they allowed the occasional profile that posted nothing but pictures of cartoon horse-men boniing each other and maybe got rid of some of those that spend all their time being needlessly antagonistic to strangers about politics.
• A Post Full Of Up-To-Date Stats About Facebook And Instagram: Elsewhere on Imperica, this is a useful list of BIG NUMBERS about how HUGE AND VITAL FB and Insta are. None of these numbers really mean anything at all, but you might find them of some small help when you’re back at work in January and someone, again, asks you to pull together some slides about why ‘digital’ is really important and you stare at your monitor through a film of tears and realise that this is your life, now and forever.
• YouTube Rewind: This year’s edition of YouTube’s annual Year In Review, presented on a typically lovely website and featuring a roundup video which, after last year’s backlash-filled farrago in which creators from across the spectrum railed against the sanitised, advertiser friendly version of the community presented by Google, is basically just a commentary-free highlights reel. If you spend any time on YouTube this site probably won’t tell you anything new, but I found it fascinating to go through the individual country-level breakdowns of most-popular stuff from 2019; I am now, for example, one of 192million people who have enjoyed the titular song from Indian smash film ‘Gully Boy’, and my life is all the richer for it.
• Tumblr in 2019: My having to do the last Curios of the year a touch early means that I’m sadly (ha!) not catching all of the platforms’ year-end updates, but I very much enjoyed Tumblr’s this year, not least as it demonstrates the sheer breadth of the site’s users and their interests. It also demonstrates the incredible power of specific areas of the entertainment industry; if you want any sort of indication of the incredible global power of the MCU, take a moment to check out the top 50 lists of films, film characters and performers; you can’t move for fcuking superheroes. If nothing else, though, it’s worth spending a moment going through the top 30 Tumblr memes of the year; DOGE LIVES! It’s been a bit of a tough week, if I’m honest, and that particular nugget cheered me more than I’d expected.

By Vava Ribeiro

NEXT, TRY THIS EXCELLENT, GENTLE AMBIENT MIX FOR A COLD DECEMBER AFTERNOON, COURTESY OF COMMAND D!

THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS THAT IT SHOULDN’T ATTEMPT TO LECTURE ANY OF YOU ON POLITICS AND KNOWS THAT IT’S TECHNICALLY NONE OF ITS BUSINESS, BUT, EQUALLY, WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE ANY AND ALL OF YOU THINKING OF VOTING TORY NEXT WEEK TO PLEASE FCUK OFF, UNSUBSCRIBE AND READ ANOTHER BLOGNEWSLETTERTHING IN 2020 THANKYOU, PT.1:

• The Best Websites of the Decade: To be honest, I could leave this here and be done with it this week. I featured the href site back in May, along with some gumpf about how it contained a mind-boggling amount of…stuff; its creator and curator, the mysteriously-named Kicks Condor, got in touch with me afterwards and we correspond every now and again, and this week they sent me this, and, well, BLIMEY. Kicks has collected all of their favourite links from the past 10 years into one place, and MY GOD is there a lot of wonderful, weird stuff in here. About 25% of it has been featured by me at one point or another, and there are some all-time classics of the web which you’ll certainly recognise, but there’s equally a load of amazing things I’d never even heard of. From Caine’s Arcade to Porpentine’s incredible, emo interactive fictions, from Frog Fractions to Twitch Plays Pokemon, this is a dizzying, eclectic and, for me at least, oddly-emotional look back at 10 years of online culture and creativity. Honestly, it’s like a museum of quite a large part of my life over a decade – I can’t recommend this enough. If you only click one link this week, make it this one; and save it somewhere, so when you’re desperate for some sort of distraction from the cirrhotic mess that is your family on boxing day you can use it to retreat into the wonderful, comforting, safe digital past.
• Hyperlapse Map: This is great; sadly it only seems to feature videos filmed in London at present, although it’s designed to encourage other people to add their own. Regardless, the site mashes Google Maps with YouTube hyperlapse videos of people walking at superspeed around the city. Take a hyperlapse trip along the thames, through Hyde Park, across Hampstead Heath or around St Paul’s; there’s a nice touch here whereby the map shows the exact route of each hyperlapse and tracks where the camera is throughout, which is a rather cool feature for anyone wanting to play hyperlapse tourist in our glorious capital. If nothing else, you could probably do some quite interesting stuff with storytelling using this, dropping in odd little clues or Easter Eggs into these hyperlapses for people to find, or maybe linking them together through small visual connections. Or, you know, you could do nothing at all. It’s been a long year, I won’t judge you.
• Drumbot: This week Amazon unveiled its exciting evolution of the Bontempi organ, with its AI keyboard which will let anyone create a hideous, cacophonous audiomess, cobbled together with ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE!! Sadly you can’t get your hands on one yet, though, so instead you can make do with Drumbot, which uses similar tech to create a drum pattern for whatever atonal rubbish you play. You can use your keyboard or plug in an actual synth and use that; either way, you bash out a few bars of piano and the software will create appropriate drums to back you up; you can leave the piano line looping and the AI will keep listening and refining the drum track, and you can dial up or down the ‘heat’, increasing or decreasing the degree of leftfield craziness depending on your whims. I can’t play piano AT ALL, meaning this sounded horrific, but the drums still had a sort of skittering, free-jazz, Whiplash-style quality to them, which either means that I’m an unheralded musical talent or, perhaps more likely, that this can make a purse (not silken, but perhaps polyurethane) out of any old sow’s ear.
• The AI Dictionary: A Twitter account which spits out new word definition a few times a day, each generated by what I presume is GPT-2. The methodology’s not explained in the bio, and frankly it’s been a long year and I’m tired and I can’t currently be arsed to dig around to read up on it (sorry, but, well, it’s not like you’re paying for this), but I get the feeling that the definitions are created by feeding the machine a few words of the actual definition and then seeing what it comes up with. Regardless, it’s rather good – the majority of these are only slightly wonky, meaning they could probably be passed off as actual, real definitions to people less familiar with English. I mean, look, I’m pretty decent at the language (not that you’d guess from reading Curios, I concede), and even I can’t be 100% certain that the dictionary definition of ‘melon’ isn’t in fact “n. a man’s head. When two men love each other, though, they will push the melon into one another, a smooch of molten love to the heart of sweetness.” I mean, it should be, right?
• Boris Johnson Lies: Not that it matters, obviously. My friend Rob wrote this somewhere the other day, and it’s typically smart: “I think you’ll find that most people, when they see their side accused of lying either a) don’t believe it or b) accept it but think everybody does it. Basically lying isn’t the killer argument we all assume it is, and trust is more complex than thinking people are telling the truth.” Still, if you feel there’s any point in attempting to rail against the constant stream of lies spewing from the cakehole of our current Prime Minister, you might want to consider spreading this website, which seeks to act as a comprehensive and fact-checked compendium of all his many, many untruths, as far and wide as you can.
• The Best-Selling Singles of EVERY Decade: A nice antidote to the misery of the last link, this is a wonderful Twitter thread in which someone called Archie Henderson (as an aside, what a great name) lists each of the best-selling singles from the past decades. You might think that there would be a point in history at which Archie might need to stop, what with the actual music industry not existing in any meaningful way before, say, the 1800s, and yet he does no such thing. This is very, very silly, but also very funny, and the commitment to the gag includes short audio snippets of each track. You can all find your own favourites, but I’m personally a big, big fan of the Rancid Prince’s 1353 classic ‘Be My Daddy’. Wonderful.
• The Cards Against Humanity Challenge: CAH’s annual silly Thanksgiving stunt this year was a genuinely funny one – the game’s makers pitted its writing team against an AI (again, based on GPT-2) trained on the game’s corpus, with the challenge being to see which special, holiday expansion pack sold more. This works beautifully, mainly because the CAH conceit is very much about short, surreal, non-sequiturs, which is basically perfect for this sort of machine learning model, and it’s a really smart way of using AI for PR purposes (which can probably be ripped off at least once and possibly twice, frankly, particularly if you’re in the UK where noone really noticed this happening). I think CAH is a bit of a garbage game, personally, but I can’t fault their marketing which is STELLAR and up there with Pr0nhub’s in terms of consistently doing smart work.
• The Best Photos of 2019: Look, it’s not my opinion, it’s National Geographic’s, and who am I to argue? NO FCUKER, that’s who! These are, as you’d expect, wonderful; it’s literally impossible to make observations about THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE on display here without sounding like a tedious cliche, but, well, LOOK AT THE RICH TAPESTRY OF HUMAN LIFE! There’s one particular shot of a kid in Bolivia eating a watermelon in the back of a pickup truck which stood out for me, but every single one of these is a singularly-beautiful piece of photography.
• History Muppets: A Twitter account sharing old clips and photos of the Muppets. I don’t care who you are, it’s physically impossible to feel too bad about anything when contemplating the Muppets; this is basically balm for the soul and you should follow it immediately.
• LOLHunt: There is, quite simply, far too much STUFF on YouTube, and it’s getting harder and harder to find the sort of gently-humorous content that made the platform globally massive (when was the last time we saw a nice, U-rated clip like Charlie Bit My Finger, eh? SIMPLER TIMES. BETTER TIMES); hence LOLHunt, which each day lets anyone link a comedy YouTube clip for the community to vote on; it’s basically a subReddit in anything but name, with users up- and downvoting clips on the daily, providing a rolling stream of peer-reviewed ‘comedy’ content. If you’re the sort of person who finds footage of small children falling over to be HILARIOUS then you’ll love this; equally, if you’re in the unenviable position of needing to source bland, inoffensive, lightly-memetic content to populate a pointless social media presence for a brand that doesn’t need to have one, then this could well be a professional godsend. Also, it just taught me that very small comedy actors are very much a THING in Bangladeshi (I think) TV/Cinema, which, well, I don’t quite know what to do with.
• Lostcode: A single-serving artprojectwebsitething, which I’ll leave to the creators to describe: “Lostcode is a graphic design project exploring the friction in translation”. Make sense? No, it doesn’t to me either, and yet the slightly weird and frustrating experience of the site – presenting a series of images that you can never quite see fully and which you can’t resize and which are constantly obscured and overwritten by the movement of the cursor across the screen, leaving indelible trails across everything as you try and make sense of what the site is for – absolutely (to my mind at least) conveys the experience of incomplete communication I feel when speaking to someone in a mutual second language. I JUDGE THIS ART A SUCCESS, should anyone involved in its conception or creation give anything resembling a flying fcuk about the opinion of some random webmong.
• Liam: You may or may not have seen the wonderful, preposterous news this week that Facebook has created a chatbot (called, bafflingly, Liam) for staff to help them answer awkward questions from friends and family about exactly why they are working for Mark Zuckergerg’s Big Blue Misery Factory; beautifully, someone’s mocked up a spoof version, which you can play with here and which does a wonderful job of skewering exactly how robotic and humourless the scripted lines provided to employees are. “Grandma: What are you planning to do to lose the baby weight? Chatbot: You rightfully have some hard questions for me to answer. First, though, I want to talk about how we got here.” See? It’s great. Also, it reminded me of the worst CV I have ever seen, owned by a man called Liam who described himself in his opening blurb as ‘an aspirant polymath’ and which made me wish more harm on a stranger than I think I have ever wished before in my life.
• Longshot Features: Longshot is a company working in and around film. Their website is GORGEOUS, with all sorts of wonderful 8-bit, noir-ish representations of movies and TV portrayed as you scroll. Honestly, whoever did the artwork on this deserves a medal, this is beautifully-made and really, really slick.
• Closer: Do you like techno? Are you a bit too old to go clubbing? DO YOU MISS IT??? If so, you might want to check out Closer, the new app from superstar DJ Richie Hawtin which accompanies the concert series he’s currently doing. “CLOSER is an interactive audiovisual platform designed to bring greater transparency to the underlying art of DJing by exploring Richie Hawtin’s ongoing CLOSE concert series. The unique vertical layout provides three distinct visual perspectives from the performances – crowd view, stage setup and equipment close-ups. Each panel offers different interactions including multiple camera angles, the ability to listen into separate audio channels and real-time track information.” I downloaded this yesterday to have a play, and it’s really very slick indeed, although to be honest more than anything it made me wish I was 20 years younger and about to spend large quantities of the weekend doing speed, so it’s perhaps not totally healthy.
• Streetview Journey: Japanese artist Nao Tatsumi paints scenes they have seen on Google Streetview. There’s probably some sort of high concept here about this being two degrees removed from reality, and the oddity of representing a representation of something, but frankly I just really like the style here. The artists promises that they’ll open this out to make it a collaborative project by creating a shared Google Map for people to recommend places they’d like to see painted in the future, so if you’d like to submit, I don’t know, the Streetview of your house for consideration then perhaps consider bookmarking this page.
• Chess Roots: On Monday I went to see an interesting play all about the Bobby Fischer / Boris Spassky cold war chess matchup of the early 70s (it could do with having 20m trimmed off the runtime, but it’s definitely worth a look), and it made me wish that I was smart enough to play chess properly. I mean, I know the rules, but I think the last time I tried to play I was beaten by an (admittedly very precocious) 11 year old and I think that might have been the moment when I sulkily resigned my king for good. Anyway, if you’re less of a chess moron than me, you might find this site, which collects a mind-boggling amount of data about chess matches past and uses it to draw inferences about probabilities and lets you model games on a move-by-move basis. I get the impression that this is quite possibly a staggeringly impressive piece of datawrangling and could be hugely useful in the right hands, but, mainly, it just makes me feel really, really stupid.
• Parrot VC: A Twitter bot which spits out stuff about venture capital, investment and entrepreneurship, having been trained on a bunch of actual Tweets from actual VCs. It’s remarkable quite how hard it is to distinguish this stuff from the platitudinous guff spouted by actual, gilet-wearing lending partners. I mean, look: “You have to sense the vibe and have mutual respect/credibility on both sides. Not easy in early interactions” – that could literally be lifted from any blogpost on the Index Ventures website.
• Esperanto Design: This is a really, really slick website housing a variety of conversations between its creator, Robin Noguier, who spent 2018 travelling around the world meeting designers from across the planet and talking to them about the craft and their work within it. Of most interest if you’re a designer – or aspirant designer – yourself, but worth a look just in terms of the quality of webdesign here; it’s really, really nice.
• De Mi Rancho A Tu Cocina: You don’t need that translating, do you? Good. This is a BRILLIANT YouTube channel which apparently has absolutely blown up in Mexico since it launched a couple of months back; the woman who fronts it has become a bit of a bona-fide famous, it seems, and has been profiled in magazines and all sorts. The gimmick is that she presents a series of cooking videos from her farm in rural Mexico, showing how to make traditional dishes in the traditional manner, cooking on a hot stone, grinding everything by hand and demonstrating knifework that makes me wince in genuine fear every time I watch her grapple with an onion. It’s very much in the style of other global smash YouTube cookery hits like those village cookery guys from India, but the presenter has a charm all of her own and you will absolutely want to go and smash about 10million tacos after watching approximately 2 minutes of these.
• The Airpod Prank: This is not big and not clever, and frankly is quite a dickish thing to do, but, well, the though makes me laugh a LOT. Art Director Pablo Rochat has created printable, life-sized images of Apple Airpods which you can print out and then stick to the floor to make people think that they’ve dropped theirs. WATCH AS UNSUSPECTING IDIOTS SCRABBLE TO PICK UP A PIECE OF PAPER THEY HAVE CONFUSED FOR AN EXPENSIVE LIFESTYLE ACCESSORY! All your Christmas fun in one place!
• Bunnysitting: While you continue to ‘enjoy’ the rest of this, the final Curios of the decade (MOMENTOUS, isn’t it?), why not open this in another tab and enjoy the gentle, faintly-meditative process of ‘looking after’ an 8-bit virtual bunny? There’s literally nothing to do other than occasionally press a button when it needs something (it’ll beep at you every now and again), until it eventually grows up enough to leave the nest and, I don’t know, go to some sort of carrot-filled virtual bunny pasture or something. This is totally, totally pointless, and therefore utterly perfect in every way.

By Rob Kesseler

NEXT, SOME CLASSIC HOUSE FROM THE SEEMINGLY-IMMORTAL SEB FONTAINE!

THE SECTION WHICH KNOWS THAT IT SHOULDN’T ATTEMPT TO LECTURE ANY OF YOU ON POLITICS AND KNOWS THAT IT’S TECHNICALLY NONE OF ITS BUSINESS, BUT, EQUALLY, WOULD LIKE TO ENCOURAGE ANY AND ALL OF YOU THINKING OF VOTING TORY NEXT WEEK TO PLEASE FCUK OFF, UNSUBSCRIBE AND READ ANOTHER BLOGNEWSLETTERTHING IN 2020 THANKYOU, PT.2:

• Ecology Photographs of the Year: Apologies for the slightly shonky slideshow link here, but, bafflingly, despite this being the official selection of the British Ecological Society of the best ecology photos of the year, they don’t actually appear to have published them anywhere on their own site; still, if you don’t mind the slightly annoying slideshow interface, there are 30 gorgeous shots of nature here to enjoy. My personal favourite’s the one of the cow and the bird of prey chilling out together in the Andes, which is a sentence I can honestly say I don’t imagine has ever been written before in the English language, so well done me.
• Cloze: Do you sometimes feel that your friendships and personal relationships are, well, fine, but perhaps lacking the rigour and structure of your professional interactions? Do you wish that you were able to manage all aspects of your life in the same way that you do your work? Are you some sort of monster? That’s the only explanation I can come up with as to why anyone in their right mind would want to use Cloze, a service which offers to keep all the information about all your personal contacts and relationships in one place, to let you simply and cleanly manage all your interactions optimally. It’ll keep track of who you see when, what people are interested in, their birthdays and significant dates, and will basically outsource the business about gving a fcuk about anyone other than yourself to a machine, which is…vile, frankly. The worst thing about this – and there are many, many aspects to hate – is the line in the blurb about how the software ‘will learn who is important to you’, which, by implication, means that it will also determine who isn’t. Imagine explaining that to an old mate who you’ve not seen for a while: “yeah, sorry man, my virtual relationship manager algorithmically determined that you’re simply not a high-value stakeholder in my life any more”. Jesus fcuking wept.
• The Top 25 News Photos of the Year: As picked by The Atlantic. Number 23 in particular is a masterpiece imho.
• The LIFE Photo Archive: Seeing as we’re doing photos, this has been online for AGES but I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly linked to it; Google’s full archive of LIFE Magazine’s photography, searchable and browsable by decade, going back to the 1860s. Lose yourself in the past; staring at photos of the Great Depression is a surprisingly effective way of making oneself feel generally more positive about the state of the world in 2019, oddly enough.
• Fund They Work For You: They Work For You is a great website on which a surprisingly-large amount of other webstuff rests; I probably don’t need to explain it to you, but, in case you’re foreign or politically disinclined, it’s a site designed to present an easily-accessible record of the political activity of each member of the UK parliament, from their voting record to their extra-Parliamentary interests. It needs 25k in the next couple of weeks to guarantee its existence into 2020; at a time when the state of this countries political landscape is about as bleak as it’s been since the 80s, you sort of feel it would be a shame were one of the more effective mechanisms to shine a light on the festering sump-pit of our elected representatives to go under. Chuck them a tenner if you can spare it, it’s hugely worthwhile.
• Buried Treasure: A brand-new website, set up by John Walker who used to work on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where he’ll review obscure and un-appreciated indie games for the benefit of the wider world. If you play games and want some recommendations for things to play that are, well, a bit more interesting than COD, this is definitely worth a look.
• Nothing Much Happens: It’s odd how cultural and social mores shift; a decade ago, the idea of a website or app featuring ‘bedtime stories for grownups in which nothing much happens except some gentle narration of some pretty banal things, delivered in a soothing American burr’ would have prompted widespread laughter and derision; now, though, you’ll all be sitting there stroking your chins and thinking things like ‘ASMR’ and ‘self-care’ and ‘wellness’. Hm. Anyhow, this is exactly that – if you’re after a regular series of sleep-aid audio tracks, this isn’t a bad place to start. Doesn’t quite hit my specific ASMR trigger points, but that’s not to say it won’t tingle you right up something chronic.
• Forbidden Snacks: A great subReddit, featuring stuff that looks a lot like appetising food but which really, really isn’t.
• The Carpentry Compiler: This is the future of IKEA, or of someone else’s business if they can get there first. Honestly, I think there’s a brilliant idea and business in this just waiting to happen. It’s an academic paper, so I’m presenting it more as an idea for you all to marvel at than something entertaining to click on, but, look: “Our carpentry compiler converts high-level geometric designs made by users to low-level fabrication instructions that can be directly followed to manufacture parts. The compiler performs multi-objective optimization on the low-level instructions to generate Pareto-optimal candidates.” So what that means is that the researchers involved in this have developed a model which will take any 3d design and automatically work out what sort of component parts would need to be manufactured to construct it. Which means, FLATPACK ON DEMAND, sooner rather than later; imagine being able to sketch out a bespoke wardrobe or whatever, sized to your spec, and then in the click of a mouse have software work out the exact number and dimensions of bits of MDF you’ll need to construct your very own personalised Billy. Honestly, this sort of thing will be revolutionary when it comes to manufacturing, although equally you can guarantee that even in this future timeline they will somehow contrive to include an insufficient quantity of tiny dowel connectors.
• Andrea Animates: The website of animator (whodathunkit) Andrea Love, who works out of the US and whose work involves the creation of gorgeous, felt-and-wool worlds which are painstakingly animated in stop-motion. The craft on display here is absolutely astonishing, and there’s something pleasingly 70s and Trumpton-esque about the vibe of a lot of the pieces. Love runs a whole animation studio, so I imagine she’s available for commissions should you feel inspired by this – honestly, it’s so, so lovely.
• Libro: Christmas is very much a time when it’s quite hard to force myself not to use Amazon – DAMN YOU MECHABEZOS WITH YOUR INCREDIBLY CONVENIENT GIFTWRAPPING AND SHIPPING SERVICE – but I feel marginally-better about my lapses when I find things like this, which offer new and hitherto-unimagined ways to slip the octopus-like grasp of the world’s ‘everything’ brand. Libro is an audiobook platform THAT ISN’T OWNED BY AMAZON! That’s right! Audiobooks, and Jeff doesn’t see a penny! Instead, profits from sales can be allocated to independent booksellers, which is a fabulous idea and one that should be celebrated. I haven’t done an extensive dive into the catalogue yet, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be reasonably comprehensive; please, if you do audiobooks, do give this a try, if not to fcuk Jeff then to unfcuk your friendly neighbourhood booksellers.
• The Deep Sea: It’s really, really deep. Scroll though this lovely site as it takes you down, down, down…past the weird anglerfish, past the goblin sharks, past the blobfish, to the very deepest parts of the sea where only the very, very gelatinous can survive. Mesmerising, and it taught me that there is a sea creature whose ACTUAL NAME is the ‘Terrible Claw Lobster’ and now I am full of questions. ‘Terrible’ as in ‘inspiring of terror’, or ‘terrible’ as in ‘not particularly good’? If the latter, how does it fail at lobsterness? Anyone?
• Jellycam: You want a livefeed of the jellyfish at Monterey Bay aquarium? Well, click this link during opening hours (try from around 4pm UK time) and ENJOY!
• Smash Illustrations: There was a piece in the longreads a few weeks ago about the incredible ubiquity of the flat, cartoony art-style popularised by millennial-targeting lifestyle brands of the late-2010s; this site is doing nothing to reverse that ubiquity, instead presenting a variety of this style of illustration for designers and artists to use as they desire. On the one hand, potentially a really useful and crucially cheap way of getting some decent-looking illustrations for your website; on the other, know that it will look like EVERYTHING ELSE out there. Win some, lose some.
• The Powerpoint Game Jam: Which is the most powerful of the MS Office tools (and is there a less-engaging opening conversational gambit that you can imagine?)? Is it Excel? After all, this year we’ve seen a fcuking drum machine built out of spreadsheets. No, no it is not. It is POWERPOINT, because you can literally make videogames in it. Slightly simple games, fine, but still.The Powerpoint Games Jam is inviting anyone and everyone to build a game in Powerpoint and submit it for consideration; it only started on Sunday and runs til the end of the year, so it’s light on entries at present, but there are four ‘games’ there already; honestly, do try at least one of them. With a bit of luck you can probably pass it off as ‘work’; if nothing else, it will give you a few new ideas to enliven your next set of pointless, overthought slides. Here’s an idea – why not present your next ‘deck’ (you fcuks, STOP CALLING THEM THAT) as a piece of interactive fiction? It won’t make you any more likely to win the business but it will make your working life marginally-less stultifyingly dull for the time it takes you to build it.
• Shania Twine: A short piece of interactive fiction. I imagine you can probably guess the gag at the heart of this, but, if not, ENJOY!
• Curious Expedition: This is just a demo, fine, but there’s enough fun and replayability in this charming tiny, browser-based pixelated exploration-simulator to keep you distracted for a good 25 minutes or so. You play as an explorer, undertaking an intrepid journey into the unknown to find a golden temple or somesuch. Fight your way past wildlife! Meet the natives! Battle hunger, thirst and insanity! Ignore the slightly tone-deaf colonialism of the whole thing! This is, my pointless wokery aside, absolutely lovely (and the full game, also playable in-browser, is only a tenner if you like it enough to shell out).
• Push The Button To Win: Finally in this week/year/decade’s selection of miscellania, this is a simple game whose premise you can guess from the title. I didn’t expect it to affect my quite so deeply, though. I’m not joking – it properly shook me in a way few other games have managed this year. I’m not sure if I like it or not, but I am hugely impressed by the mechanic and idea. Try it out, see what you think (and, more importantly, feel).

By Lydia Blakely

LAST UP IN THIS DECADE’S MIXES, A CLASSIC OF FAST BREAKS AND BASS FROM SEVEN YEARS AGO BY MACHINEDRUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Graffiti Removal: POSSIBLY NOT A TUMBLR! Sorry, can’t be bothered to check the source code here, but this is a great selection of images and videos of blanked-out, covered-up graffiti, which in each instance creates an odd artwork out of its absence.
• Adam Apples: DEFINITELY NOT IN FACT A TUMBLR! But very much ought to be, so, well, here! Adam’s Apples involves the titular Adam writing all about different types of apple. Adam, it’s fair to say, is very much an apple enthusiast, and I applaud his indefatigability in attempting to eat every single varietal in the world.
• Someone Tell The Boyz: This is great: “I run datasets of iconic feminist texts through a simple textRNN, generating new feminists texts in the legendary words of bell hooks, Simone De Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Audre Lorde. Some are funny. Some are poetic. Some make no sense at all and some are way too real.”
• Gromm-it: “An art/media project by journalist Paul Lukas, explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.” This is…unsettling.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Lucas Zanotto: Wonderful, pleasing, soothing, cute, whimsical 3d CG animations. Honestly, these really are lovely.
• Trees of Rotterdam: Insert your own unfunny horticultural gag about Dutch Elms here.
• Kagensound: This is a great feed, by a carpenter who makes those wonderful, intricate puzzle boxes of the sort we all used to keep our drugs in when we were 16/17 til we realised that the more battered we became the more impossible it became to access our stash. I want ALL of these.
• Hipdict: Like Urban Dictionary, but on Insta – anyone can submit their own definition for approval, which might get used in a post. The quality varies but there are occasional nuggets of comedy/surrealism gold in here.
• Sh1t London Guinness: An account dedicated solely to outing crap pints of Guinness being served in the UK’s capital. Would be immensely improved by explanation of exactly why the pints in question are so sh1t – as a non-Guinness drinker, these all look like the same slurry to me, but I’m sure connoisseurs of the black stuff will get the nuance here.
• Laira Maganuco: The most horrible little silicon sculptures you ever will see. Proper nightmare fuel, this, and the sort of thing that will give you a nasty little scare when it pops up in your feed in between dogs of Insta and Rupi fcuking Kaur.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The NPR Book Concierge: Not so much a longread as a longread sourcing tool, this is NPR’s annual service which lets you browse their selections for books of the year, and compile your own potential Christmas book-buying list based on various tags and filters you can apply, from ‘Book Club Favourites’ to novellas. It’s a US list, which has pluses and minuses; on the one hand, it contains loads of things that simply didn’t cross my radar as a consumer of UK book reviews; on the other, there are a few on here which won’t be available in the UK til next year. Regardless, it’s a really good tool for working out which books you’ll be using to avoid talking to your family over the festive season.
• 52 Things I Learned in 2019: I think this is the third of these annual lists I’ve featured in Curios now, and, as per, it’s once again the best and smartest and most illuminating summary of the past 12 months that you’ll see anywhere. It’s exactly what it says – a list of 52 facts, with citations, which Tom Whitwell has learned this year, connected by no particular theme whatsoever; oddly, though, these 52 things coalesce to create a very real-seeming ‘this is where we are at the end of the 2010s’ feeling about the whole thing. Honestly, SO interesting, and if you’re a planner/strategist type there are at least a dozen things in here that you can cobble a workable ‘insight’ out of (words I never want to hear again in the decade to come: insight).
• The Era of the Political Influencer: I don’t want to sound smug here, but I totally called this (admittedly I called it about a month ago, around Twitter’s political advertising ban, and actually this isn’t about Twitter at all, so, er, I should probably shut my maw) – this piece looks at the growth (in the US at least) of politicians and parties paying online influencers to shill their message on their behalf. Want a vague idea of the future in store for us all? Jake Paul delivering pro-Trump sponcon, wearing a MAGA hat. Fine, it may not be him, but just you wait.
• The Future of S*c**l M*d**: Or at least an imagined future for it. This is an interesting NYT piece which takes a speculative look at how the next ten years might see our relationship with the platforms and each other change; it’s airy rather than particularly precise, but there’s an interesting line about ⅔ of the way through which alludes to the predicted increased importance of curators and gatekeepers rather than the untrammeled, unfiltered firehose of everything from everyone that characterised the early days of the s*c**l m*d** boom – which, obviously, is great news for me and my continued railing against the inevitable onset of senescence and obsolescence. Curios for ALL!
• The Smartphone Election: This is a good piece of reporting by the Guardian, who got people to agree to have their smartphone usage monitored over a short period during the election to show how they consume news and behave online. The findings are largely unsurprising – they get news from Facebook, they consume the reaction gifs rather than the event, they comment without reading and they bait their opponents and, generally, display the same largely-unpleasant traits that we all tend to when experiencing life via a screen. Except, well, the general thrust of this is to generally go ‘look, phones are ruining everything and our politics is just one example’; but, er, isn’t the problem here not the tech but the people? Isn’t it just that we’re (I’m totally including myself and you all in this too) all stupid and lazy and facile and mean and cruel and vindictive and tired and bored and scared and easily-distracted and all the phones are doing is magnifying these traits? Whose fault is it that we’re getting our information on the party manifestos from a 1-minute ‘explainer’ vid on LadBible? I don’t – and, trust me, it pains me to say this – think that it’s Zuckerberg’s.
• Jonah Peretti’s Decade: After last week’s chat with Insta’s Systrom, this week we can enjoy a wide-ranging and surprisingly-candid interview with Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti, a person arguably as influential in shaping the world we now find ourselves in as many of the silicon valley lot. Peretti’s always an engaging interviewee, and quite obviously a very, very smart person indeed; I found a lot to enjoy in here, not least his thoughts on how the collision and merging of news and entertainment has affected politics and the discourse around it. I did find his comments about VC money somewhat disingenuous, though; Jonah, mate, HOW many hundreds of millions of their cash have you burned through?
• Oil Is The New Data: Here’s a cheering article, describing the increasing symbiosis between the big oil and big data industries, and in particular how the big Cloud players have been quietly and effectively building up massively lucrative relationships with Exxon et al to help them continue to extract fossil fuels more effectively than ever before. Couple that with the environmental burden of the huge server farms which are the very physical reality of the whimsical ‘Cloud’ of one’s imagination and we’re heading for a point in the not-too-distant future where I think we’re going to see these companies get an absolute kicking for their planetary impact (for all the difference that will make).
• Fact Checking Online: Consider this your annual act of familiar public service – send this guide to every single family member you have. They’ll think you’re a patronisingh fcuk, in all likelihood, but if it lessons the likelihood of even one of them believing some blatantly made-up rubbish on Facebook then, well, it’s probably worth it. This is a genuinely good and clear series of precepts and principles by The Verge, and it’s especially worth sharing with your kids should they be of an age where it’s starting to concern you how much Joe Rogan they’re consuming.
• Grindr Worldwide: Honestly, the revamped FACE has been publishing some really excellent journalism of late, credit where it’s due. This is a look at what it’s like using Grindr in countries around the world in which homosexuality is either illegal or still not culturally acceptable, and is a decent reminder of the less-than-perfect status of LGBTQx rights worldwide. It’s full of lines like this, which is lovely but also incredibly poignant: “For the longest time I thought I was the only queer person in my hometown, which is outside Kampala. Then when I was home for Christmas break after I got Grindr, I saw a bunch of people online. I was like: ​“Where the hell were these people when I was living here?!” My sexuality is easy to spot – I’m like a giraffe in a sea of buffaloes – but no one had ever approached me before.”
• A History of the New York Subway Map: A beautifully-designed interactive in the NYT, detailing the history behind their (less good) version of the tube map. Interesting historically, but included here mainly because I adore the art style and page direction (if that makes sense).
• Inside Twitch’s Wildest Talk Show: This is fascinating, and absolutely a version of the future. Twitch is doing its best to pivot from just being about gaming to instead being seen as a viable ‘future of TV’ platform; formats like the one profiled in this piece (from gaming website Kotaku), in which a bunch of popular streamers effectively take part in some sort of extremely noisy, borderline-incomprehensible chatshow, very much feel like the sort of thing that mainstream broadcasters are going to be starting to experiment with soon. Seriously, I’d put money on someone at the BBC or Channel 4 currently attempting to pitch a Twitch-based extension to an existing show or as a new talent play.
• 27 Hours In An Airport: It’s fair to say that Singapore’s Changi Airport has relatively little in common with, say, Luton or Stansted (other than the fact you can presumably fly from there – the piece is light on the actual ‘air’ bits); it’s basically some sort of weird, liminal-international-themepark-boutique-mallspace (a designator which I can already tell is going to catch on – you read it here first!), and this piece, in which the author spends more than a day hanging out there, is weirdly conflicting. On the one hand, it does sound fascinating and future and incredible, and the sort of thing that any self-respecting connoisseur of odd futurestuff very much ought to wander round; on the other, it’s another example of the peculiar flatness of the everynowhere international aesthetic which characterises so much of middle-to-upper-middle-class experience wherever you are in the world, and which is becoming quite boring to me.
• The Twitter Art Tshirt Scam: Not particularly long, but very interesting, look at how bots scour Twitter for art to steal to print on tshirts which are then drop-shipped for profit, and how the artists decided to fight back. The extent of the automation of production here is slightly mind-blowing.
• Death Stranding: Death Stranding is a game I am comfortably certain I will never, ever play, but one I am delighted exists so that I can read essays about it like this one. Even if you’re not interested in games or gaming, please give this a go – it’s clever, well-written and asks lots of interesting questions about what games are for, what they can tell us about things, and the nature of ‘fun’ as a concept. The game, the author argues, “is a genuine success in asking what empathy is possible in a world where the delivery of commodities by bedraggled and brutalised workers has become the primary means of human contact.” Come on, don’t you want to read all about it?
• Pahologic: Another piece about games – sorry, but this one’s great too, and, per the last one, deserves to be read even if you’re not a gamer. Seriously, if you’re any interest in narrative design and systems interactions and user experience then it will be a properly rewarding read; and if you just like reading about videogames, it’s equally good. It’s about an old Russian game called Pathologic, widely renowned as one of the most punishing and un-fun expressions of what a game can be, and at the same time hailed as one of the most unique artistic achievements yet-created in the medium. It’s another game I will never, ever play, but about which I could read volumes; honestly, this is SO interesting, I promise you.
• More Pathologic: Ok, so this isn’t an article – it’s, er, a two-hour YouTube dissection of the game described in the last article. It won’t be for everyone – I mean, it’s two hours ffs – but if any of the stuff in the last article appealed to you then PLEASE WATCH THIS. It’s one of the most impressive pieces of in-depth criticism of a work of art I have ever seen, and the way it explains and highlights the amazing narrative design and construction of the game is masterful (no hyperbole, it really is that good). The YouTuber in question is about as pleasant company as a YouTuber can be (although they are still very much a YouTuber and possibly may have watched a tiny bit more ZeroPunctuation than is necessarily good for them); I NEVER watch this sort of thing, but sat mesmerised through the whole thing on Tuesday evening while a rather bemused cat sat on my lap and watched with me (thanks Lebowski). Take punt on this, I promise it’s more interesting than you think (but you do need to be into videogames, probably).
• The Clout: A lovely pen portrait of what’s presented as a pretty archetypal US teen – obsessed with their online rep and making it in some way online, in this case through meme accounts on Insta. What’s been interesting over the past few years has been the shift amongst kids from wanting to be YouTubers to now just wanting to be famous – the observations in here about the myth that YT created around ‘being paid to just live your life and be yourself online’ must be one of the most pernicious canards of the modern world (he says, both pretentiously and old mannishly!).
• Kunt: Last year, one of my Christmas books was “I, Kunt: How I became (and remained) a minor internet hit singer”, the autobiography of one-man-internet-sensation and occasional chart-botherer Kunt, whose Casio-backed paens to some pretty awful stuff were one of my favourite online things in the early-00s. It is, I promise you, one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life; not, fine, a great work of literature, but I read it all in about three hours and regularly had to stop to wipe the literal tears away. Kunt has jacked in showbiz now and is back to being a painter and decorator, but did this interview with John Fleming and I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Please, please read this, if you’re not familiar with his work – and then go and check out the best political song ever written, which will give you a feel for the man’s style.
• Archiving the 20teens: This is VERY arch-theoretical, but no less interesting for it; a comprehensive look back over the semiotics of fashion over the past decade. This should give you a feel for the style – I love it, but I can see how some might find it a bit hard work: “It’s strange to still participate in the tradition of year end lists, of reviews and summaries, at a time like this. Recollection feels like the ritual of a simpler time, this was a year ignorant of history. 2018 encompassed an era—transformative shifts that typically take much longer to unfold established themselves faster than they were named and traditional record keepers couldn’t be trusted to keep track. Cable news networks were white noise machines. Pundits and columnists debated questions the answers to which are already abundant in the injustices of the world. National papers scrambled to give Nazis the benefit of the doubt, the suits employed at legacy media outlets identified more with the authority of fascists in neckties than with the people targeted by them. In the meantime, the only industry keeping a healthy sense of the times was fashion—an industry rarely credited for having a healthy sense of anything. Perhaps the intuitive collective choices of its community around the world, has yielded a usable record for this era. If the future can be read in tea leaves, the present can be read in how people get dressed.” Regardless, this is a really interesting look at fashion, culture, society and politics over the past 10 years
• The Future is Menopausal: This is brilliant, and neatly embodies a lot of what I’ve seen and heard older women saying and writing over much of the past couple of years: “The “arc of history,” as we were all sharply reminded in the wake of Trump’s election, doesn’t bend toward sh1t. Progress will always need a solid push. And the hill is particularly steep right now, with nothing short of the fate of humankind threatened by climate change. Increasingly, as Klein notes, we’re forced to acknowledge that climate denialism and misogyny go hand in hand. As we age into this new feminism, all those women who are embodying their new post-reproductive normal have the opportunity to not just change the future of their aging lives but the future of the world.”
• As A Teenager: Megan Nolan is, as I’ve said here before, an excellent writer; this is her latest piece in the New Statesman, about the memory of the intensity of emotions felt when young when contrasted against the pale simulacra you feel as you age. Beautiful, beautiful prose.
• 63 Up: Last up this decade, and fittingly so, this is from the NYT and it’s about the Up’ series of films which for five decades have followed the lives of a group of people who were selected to take part in a documentary about British society and social mobility in 1964. This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year, and I’m not ashamed to say I wept copiously at points throughout (it’s been that sort of week tbh). Please, please read it – all of human life is here.

This was me almost exactly a decade ago. Look into my eyes before you unsubscribe forever (picture by Vincenzo Cosenza)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This sounds like it should be soundtracking a very, very cool film indeed. That’s a compliment, in case it didn’t come across as one – it’s gorgeous jazz by Jeff Parker, and it’s called ‘Max Brown’ and I think it would make a lovely soundtrack to Christmas morning, personally:

1. Hinds are very cool, and I love their Spanish-accented English, and indeed this song, which is called ‘Riding Solo’ and has a touch of Paper Planes about it imho:

1. This is by Dolci Rain, and to me sounds almost exactly like the phantom music you occasionally get in the back-left of your skull at the afterparty at around 530am. It’s called ‘Free Your Heart’ and it’s glacial and skittering and excellent:

1. I went to see Max Cooper at the Barbican a couple of months ago and it was AMAZING, both musically and visually; this is the latest track to be released from his new album, which deserves fullscreen and your full attention, ideally with a decent paid of headphones; it’s called ‘Circular’:

1. HIPHOP CORNER! I think I first featured Zebra Katz 3 or 4 years ago; this is his latest double-video for the pair of tracks ‘Lousy’ and ‘In In In’, both tracks are fcuking great, and the film’s beautifully shot. Give this a go, it’s worth the time:

1. Plan B’s not done rapping for ages, but I remember seeing him…Jesus, 12ish years ago when he was just starting out. He’s back to it again, for this single – no video for it, but as an explanation of how politics works and what you might be voting for it’s genuinely brilliant. Seriously, you wouldn’t think a track called ‘First Past The Post’ would be any good, but, well, it is:

1. Just watch this. It’s BRILLIANT. Really, really brilliant. It’s called ‘Gimme Summn’ and it’s by TNGHT:

1. Lovely, lovely Japanese indiepop by Hazy Sour Cherry – it’s called Tour De Tokyo, and it reminds me a lot of that period in the late-90s/early-00s when the NME were wnking themselves silly over Japanese acts like Cornelius and Boom Boom Satellites:

1. Finally this week – AND THIS YEAR! – it’s the now-traditional Web Curios ‘Song of the Year’ selection, which noone at all cares about but is a nice opportunity for me to look back at the music I’ve included and what stood out. For various reasons, there’s only one possible track for this slot – Sharon Van Etten’s ‘Seventeen’, from all the way back on 11 January. And…that’s it. I LOVE YOU THANKYOU FOR EVERYTHING SEE YOU NEXT YEAR AND PLEASE HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

It’ll all be over in two weeks, just think of that. 

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO IT WON’T THIS IS JUST WHAT LIFE IS LIKE ON THE ISLAND FOREVER!!! How much more election do you think we’d able to take before we all collectively decided that normal social mores no longer applied, that the rule of law could go and fcuk itself, and we all just descended on the party headquarters with pitchforks and barrels of burning pitch? 

Still, on the plus side, it’s almost December! Which means it’s almost CHRISTMAS PARTY SEASON! Which means – and this is the really good bit – NOONE CAN TELL YOU OFF FOR BEING DRUNK ALL THE TIME! Seriously, what with the election and the parties and the general sense that the handcart’s hellbound and we’re all crammed in right, you’d be absolutely within your rights to spend the next month or so comfortably maintaining a three-pint buzz at all times. 

Not yet, though, my children, not yet. First, I am taking my girlfriend to lunch and then going to hang out with her cat (he’s a very special little guy), and YOU have this week’s words’n’links to get through; another strong, long draught of gently mind-altering webspaff, drawn especially for you from the…barrels (yes, let’s call them ‘barrels’) I keep in my private cellar, and designed to offer you some modicum of transport from the chilly fingers of real life and realpolitik. Drink deep, drink long, and don’t you dare spill a drop – this is Web Curios, and it stains terribly. 

By Rogan Brown

FIRST UP, WHY NOT CHECK OUT THE GREAT MIXES AVAILABLE FROM THE FACE? THERE ARE TEN SO FAR AND, SEEMINGLY, THEY ARE ALL QUITE ACE!

THE SECTION WHICH GENUINELY QUITE LIKES THE IDEA OF TWITTER TAKING ALL THE MEMORIALISED ACCOUNTS IT’S NOW COMMITTED TO CREATING AND LEAVING THEM TO FOREVER REPLAY ALL THEIR OLD TWEETS IN A SEPARATE, SHARED VERSION OF THE APP, SORT OF LIKE TWITTER HEAVEN, THAT ANYONE CAN GO AND WATCH WHENEVER THEY LIKE:

• Facebook Testing Microsharing Service: It does rather look like we might in the future look back on the Great Sharing Boom of the early-to-mid-00s as something of a cultural aberration (“you what? You used to post that on main? Where anyone could see?”); the news that Facebook is testing a new feature, Favourites, to effectively allow for the creation of its own version of Instagram’s ‘Close Friends’ – users in test coterie are able to share content to this closed group of friends via Messenger. Which, of course, is just a rethink of Facebook’s existing, never-used ‘Lists’ feature (which itself was basically Google+’s ‘Circles’ – God I miss Google+, you know, those were simpler times). No guarantee that this exact version of a limited-sharing service will come to pass, but one would imagine that something similar will eventually roll out.
• Facebook Recruiting New, Paid, Data Sources: Given Facebook knows everything about your hopes, dreams and fears anyway, why not get paid for ‘sharing’ (ha!) all that information with them? Well why not download Facebook Viewpoint, a new app which pays users to answer specific questions about themselves to feed the ravening hunger Zuckerberg’s overgrown, sinister pet feels for human behavioural and interest data? Answer questions, win points, and get paid for your answers – what’s not to like? To be honest, at least this seems reasonably transparent, and there’s nothing that says you have to tell Mark’s minions the truth – Facebook maintains that it will at all points be clear about how the data is being used, and it doesn’t seem that it’s going to be used as part of its ad targeting setup, though one might be forgiven for nipping off to investigate the price of salt mines at this point. Sadly if you’re not over 18 and in the US you’re currently unable to glory in this bounty, but fear not! It’s set to roll out into other territories next year, so perhaps next year even us povvos here in the UK will be able to use this as a source of baseline income as society collapses around our ears.
• New SparkAR Options Announced for Insta: If you’re interested in AR lenses for Insta – AND WHO ISN’T I THINK OF NOTHING ELSE ON THE DAILY – then you probably ought to know about this. Look at all the things you can do! Here: “target tracking, which allows AR effects to be anchored to specific images or objects in the real word, and Native Slider, a new optional controller that can be called up directly in the Instagram app that lets users pick and make fine adjustments to an effect.” Are you excited? I’m EXCITED!
• Twitter Letting Users Schedule Tweets From Twitter Dot Com: I’m basically of the opinion that if you don’t use Tweetdeck on desktop you’re not really a proper Twitter user (that sort of delightful, bargain-basement nerd snobbery is what secures my rich and varied social life!); still, even those normie Tweeters will be able to experience the almost-unparalleled frisson born from the ability to Tweet into the future at a predetermined time. Or, er, they will when it’s finally rolled out to everyone. Look, it’s coming, ok?
• Twitter Launches Conversation Insights Tool: Or rather, it does if you’re one of the privileged users with access to Twitter’s Media Studio, it’s fancy content creation and analytics suite for larger brands or companies. This basically does a lot of the work of the average social media listening platform, promising that brand owners will be able to track broad conversations about their brand or product through the platform’s analytics rather than simply seeing data on direct interactions. Potentially useful, though frankly I’d imagine that most of you with a Media Studio login probably get all this stuff elsewhere already. Still, THANKS TWITTER!
• Twitter To Memorialise Old Handles and Make Them Available Anew: Or at least it will…at some point. On Monday (was it Monday? Was it Tuesday? I mean, it really doesn’t matter, does it? Why do I care? WHY AM I STILL TYPING THIS? FFS Matt, this – this exact stuff, this pointless typing that adds nothing and which noone cares about, least of all you – is the reason this bastard thing regularly clocks in at the fat end of 10k words and why noone reads it WILL YOU NEVER LEARN?!?!?! Hm, evidently not it would seem), Twitter said it was going to remove access to accounts that had been dormant for significant amount of time, presumably with a view to freeing them up to users who might want them; by Thursday, faced with growing backlash from people who quite liked the fact that they could look back on the old Tweets of their departed friends and loved ones and weren’t too happy about the fact that the platform was planning to oubliette these in one fell swoop. So what we have now is a weird waiting situation where Twitter now can’t do anything til it’s worked out how it’s going to sort out a memorialising process (akin to Facebook’s, one would imagine) for these accounts. Let’s revisit this one in a few months, eh?
• Alexa, Why Are You Crying?: I can’t remember if I mentioned this or not (apologies if I did – then again, Christ, you get ALL THESE WORDS FOR FREE, you can’t really complain if they’re occasionally a touch on the recycled side), but this year I saw what was one of the worst creative concepts I’ve witnessed in years (since, in fact, I was once involved in an app creation workshop with a bunch of PR people and one group of charming-but-somewhat-academically- challenged kids came up with the idea of an app that would charge your phone – DO YOU EVEN UNDERSTAND ELECTRONICS OR EVEN PHYSICS FFS????) which I can’t tell you about in too much detail for fear of, well, not being able to get paid ever again, but which featured the ability to make Alexa miserable based on what you said to it. Yes, that’s right, they wanted to pitch an app that let you bully a virtual assistant. Nice one. Anyway, perhaps it wasn’t such a stupid idea after all (it was, it really was), as Amazon’s now developed a feature whereby those making Skills for Alexa can give it one of three vocal tones when it responds to users – excited, neutral or disappointed. The options here are quite interesting, at the very least for some potentially more emotionally-nuanced storytelling options and things like that, but were I, say, Spotify, I’d be thinking about the fun/silly stuff you can do with this; switch Alexa’s tone to ‘disappointed’ when your kids shout “ALEXA PLAY BABY SHARK!” at it for the ten-millionth time, say.
• Return of the Likes: No idea if this still works – if it does, it probably won’t work for too long – but if you’re one of the people affected by the Instagram ‘No Likes’ test and want to, well, bring them back, this Chrome extension should do the trick.
• Digital & The Arts: I edited this collection of essays earlier this year on behalf of arts organisation The Space, which exists to help arts institutions use digital a bit better; they’re all about, er, digital and the arts, and you might maybe find them interesting (but if you don’t I won’t judge you or be offended or anything, just gently disappointed). Oh, one of the people featured is ACTUAL FAMOUS PERSON Rankin, the photographer, in case that’s a particular draw for you.
• Ungifted Secret Santa: It’s happened. I’ve become a TEDIOUS ANTI-WASTE BORE. I am sorry, I don’t know exactly when the switch flipped but I’m now the sort of person who writes stuff like this: “Hey, advermarketingpr office monkeys! Why not do Secret Santa this year but, well, DIFFERENT! Why not do it using this not-terrible website by creative environmental…agency? Magazine? Collective? Whatever, it’s by Do The Green Thing, and helps you do Secret Santa with friends or colleagues in a way that doesn’t involve buying £5-10 worth of pointless plastic crap that will be landfill by the 24th. A Good Thing.
• Gucci Grip: I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past year or so fetishizing Gucci’s current webdesign, which has tended towards the overblown, luxurious and hand-painted – which is why this, a pixelart game apparently also made by Gucci, in which you play a very simple ‘avoid the obstacles, grab the tokens’ infinite scroller, confused me slightly. It doesn’t really look very Gucci, and doesn’t, as far as I can tell, link out to anything at all (although I presume I’ll be seeing ads for accessories from now til I finally rattle out my last), but it is oddly soothing and the aesthetic’s actually quite nice in a slightly 90s vaporware sort of way, and the soundtrack’s lovely, so, well, THANKS GUCCI!!

By Bang Sangho

NEXT UP, WHY NOT GIVE THE NEW EP BY DAN LE SAC A TRY? IT’S VERY FILMIC AND WOULD MAKE A GOOD SOUNDTRACK TO ANY WINTER’S AFTERNOON SO WHY NOT THIS ONE?

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY DOES ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH THIS VIDEO REGARDLESS OF YOUR POLITICAL PERSUASION BECAUSE, HONESTLY, THIS KID IS AMAZING AND DESERVES TWO MINUTES OF YOUR TIME, PT.1:

• The Runway Palette: There’s not even any competition this week; this is absolutely the best website I’ve seen, one of the best of the year in fact. It’s by Google’s arts and culture team, in partnership with fashion industry trade bible The Business of Fashion, and it’s basically an analysis of the colour palettes used in outfits seen on the catwalk – 144,000 of them, in fact, which have all been analysed by AI and categorised based on their core palette. They’re then grouped by colour similarity, and visualised in this…oh, just click it, it’s gorgeous; a sort of pixel-tapestry of colour palettes which you can see as an explorable 3d landscape. Click on any palette and you will see the outfit it’s drawn from, alongside other, comparable looks from other designers; it clearly shows you the fashion house, the venue and year where it was first shown, and gives a clear, visually pleasing way of exploring trends in colour and design over recent seasons. Honestly, this is SO SO GOOD, and a genuinely great example of how actual AI can be actually useful.
• Shardcore on LinkedIn: Shardcore asked me what happens on LinkedIn. I told him that, to fit in, he should “”write long, doublespaced, self-aggrandising, autofellatory screeds about how ace you are, disguised as heartwarming homilies about LIFE’S LESSONS.” So he trained a neural net to do just that, and is posting the results to LinkedIn. Go and ENGAGE with it.
• Visit Eroda: You may or may not recall the other week that I linked to an essay in the longreads section that was all about Halo 2 and its marketing campaign and ‘I Love Bees’, the ARG that ran in parallel to it; well they’re (sort of) BACK, baby! Visit Eroda is a tourist website encouraging visitors to take a trip to the mysterious island destination; the site description says it was built in 2004, but it only appeared in the last week or so, and is being heavily promoted with ads across the socials to drive traffic there…and obviously Eroda doesn’t actually exist…WHAT COULD IT BE?!?!? Er, apparently it’s a campaign to promote the new Harry Styles album (the link here goes to Andy Baio’s writeup of the thing – HI ANDY!!). I know, miserable isn’t it? There was me hoping for some sort of genuinely exciting rabbithole to fall down (only to get discouraged after about 15 minutes when I realise that the game requires far, far more investment than I’m willing to make), only to discover that it’s everyone’s favourite ex-One Directioner giving his rabid fanbase something to obsess over. I’m curious to see how far this goes, though, and whether there’s anything more to it than this – there are some funny references to odd-numbered days, and pigs, which hint at maybe some sort of broader story or link to some sort of additional content. I imagine if any of you are Styles fans then you’ll already be all over this like the sky, but, if not, fill your boots.
• Lost Cities: Coral’s amazing, isn’t it? Some of the best bits of the Blue Planet series were those in which David Attenborough’s hushed tones guided you through vibrant, bejewelled undersea gardens full of clownfish and anemones, telling you in gentle, soothing detail about exactly how we as a species are contributing on a minute-by-minute basis to its increasingly rapid destruction. Lost Cities is an interactive, online documentary about coral and the damage we’re doing to it; it’s been filmed and edited by a team at the University of Hawaii, one of whom, Dr Ruth Gates, died last year. Gates’ voice is the one heard throughout, making this not only a stunningly-shot, instructive and timely film about the destruction of one of our most beautiful natural habitats, but also a memorial to a scientist whose life’s work was to study it. Genuinely gorgeous, but also quite, quite sad.
• One Dollar Hotel: You may have seen this story doing the rounds this week – in case not, though, this is a Chinese hotel owner who’s decided to drum up business through this ingenious PR stunt. You want a room for a preposterously low price (no idea if it’s actually 1$, but it’s certainly VERY cheap)? GREAT! The only catch is that there’s a camera in your room and it’s livestreaming to YouTube 24/7 (but don’t worry! The bathroom’s off-camera!) – still interested? Judging by the current streams, there are at least a couple of people who don’t mind this; frankly the entertainment value to viewers at present is…low, as one of the rooms is currently empty and the other features a young man sitting on the bed watching his laptop. Still, maybe he’ll start cracking one off soon, so best keep watching. This is obviously VERY SILLY, but equally I feel you can probably rip this off as a stunt in the UK next year when the internet has forgotten all about this.
• Creepyface: I recently discovered the BEST agency website I have ever seen (thanks to Josh, iirc), in which every time you hovered over one of the staff portraits it animated, like the newspapers in Harry Potter, showing them doing some sort of ‘funny’ office activity, like answering the phone, or, er, typing – it is honestly AMAZING but I can’t link to it because it’s a really small company somewhere outside London and, honestly, it would feel like kicking a puppy. Anyway, in semi-related news (seamless, as ever), Creepyface is a site that lets you create quick-and-easy animated portraits of yourself or indeed anyone else you’ve got access to photos of in the classic ‘watch as my eyes follow the mouse pointer’ style – simply upload photos of you looking in 8 different directions and VOILA! Your very own follow-y gif! Please, can one of you persuade your office to down tools this afternoon and make one of these for all of you? Come on, you can turn it into some sort of festive digital game or something. It’s not like you’ve got any work to do (HA! LOL! WHY DOES EVERYONE DECIDE TO PUT BRIEFS OUT IN DECEMBER YOU ABSOLUTE FCUKERS???).
• Red Bull Illume 2019: Or, more sensically, ‘A bunch of great photos of people doing outdoorsy, exercisey, extreme sports-y things, submitted to Red Bull as part of their annual photo competition celebrating exactly those sorts of pursuits’. Some wonderful images here, as you’d expect, though if you’re anything like me your aesthetic appreciation might be tempered a bit by a general feeling overwhelming physical guilt at your own indolence and lack of anything resembling visible musculature. Small aesthetic observation here – all these really are wonderful pictures, but man is HDR deadening as an effect after a while; supersaturation really does breed contempt.
• Bauhaus Everywhere: The second Google arts & culture project in here this week is this comprehensive, fascinating look back at the Bauhaus School – the institution itself and the style it birthed. Bauhaus stuff has been everywhere this year, given it’s its centenary, and this is a superb anthology of information about the school and the artistic movement as a whole, looking at its most famous alumni, the influence of its aesthetic not only on art but on design, architecture, fashion and beyond, AR models of Bauhaus designs, 360-degree videos…there is SO MUCH in here, and if you’ve any interest at all in the visual design of the 20th Century then you’ll adore this. Semi-related; this novel, about the Bauhaus school during the rise of Nazism in 1920s Germany, is WONDERFUL and one of the best things I’ve read this year.
• Beards and Moustaches: The US National Beard and Moustache Championships was recently celebrated in the US; this is a collection of photos of some of the celebrated attendees. On the one hand, there are some quite incredible facial hair styles on display here, and the degree of sculpting and grooming and facial topiary here is astonishing; on the other, every single person in these images gives me very, very strong “Hi, I’m really into craft beer and Rick & Morty and a few not-totally-leftfield-but-still-quite-intense conspiracy theories; want to chat?”-vibes. Maybe I’m just jealous.
• The Designer’s Republic: Older Web Curios readers and those who pay close attention to my prose (AHAHAHAHAHAHA WHY DO I BOTHER?) will remember The Designer’s Republic and the great affection I hold in my heart for their work, which for me sort of defined the mid-90s aesthetic for a while at least. Anyway, they are BACK! This is their new website and it’s LOVELY and, honestly, I want to find a reason to work with these people, if only so I can get them to design me my very own Wip3out ship.
• Diagram Codes: This is very clever – a bit clunky, not that pretty, but very clever indeed. This site lets you build out charts in your browser, but putting together simple natural language commands; you can create flowcharts with conditions and dependencies and suchlike. If you code, you’ll be able to start using this immediately (but, then again, you can probably use proper tools to make these things so, well, you probably won’t need this), but even though it might look a bit daunting at first I promise you that it’s really not. Can the people behind this make a prettier version, please? Says the entitled little fcuk in the corner.
• Dima K: I am an absolute sucker for voxel art – that is, that design style that creates digital images that look a little bit like they’re built in Minecraft and then viewed in tilt-shift – Dima K is a rather good voxel artist who makes lovely little semi-rural scenes showing autumn colours and scarecrows and steam trains passing by, all in the manner of tiny, slightly cute videogames. I am, as per, describing this appallingly badly, but do take a look despite my failings; this is gorgeous, and a style that’s horribly underexploited in terms of advermarketingprcontent imho.
• Robbie Barrat: Barrat is a digital artist who’s done a reasonable amount of quite high-profile work around the intersection of AI and art; this is his website. On the one hand, I APPLAUD the extent to which he’s leaned in very hard to the late-90s aesthetic; on the other, it, well, doesn’t really work very well in terms of anyone being able to find out much useful information about him. Which maybe is the point. Still, another entrant in this year’s strong field of contenders for the coveted ‘Matt’s favourite unnecessarily fun creator’s website of 2019’, which I’m sure will prove a great comfort.
• 3d Printed Pokemon: I know that I have banged on here more than necessary about the fact that I was too old to get into Pokemon as a kid and so therefore don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about; this week was another moment where I observed popular culture going sort of mad about a new Pokemon game and was forced to just sort of shrug in bewilderment. HOW DOES IT MEAN SO MUCH TO SO MANY PEOPLE? Honestly, I’ve read three individual personal essays with memories of Pokedex past as a central theme in the past five days alone and I have QUESTIONS, let me tell you. Anyhow, if you are part of the generation(s) for whom Pokemon is more than just a slightly-enhanced version of Rock, Paper, Scissors and instead is something more akin to a religion then you will LOVE this YouTube channel (finally, we get somewhere) in which a Japanese person slowly, methodically and with quite incredible skill recreates individual Pokemon using a 3d printing pen. The artistry here’s remarkable, and there’s something VERY ASMR about the films; also, though LOOK AT ALL THE POKEMON! You weirdos.
• The Cannabot:A Twitter bot which punts out imagined varieties of weed along with short descriptions of the strain’s effects and tasting notes. This is remarkable in terms of how well it’s nailed the tone and style of these; well done to the creators for paying close attention to cannabis marketing materials. One of the few likely downsides of the legalisation of weed is the prevalence of terrible weed bores (see also: coffee, beer, wine) who will wang on at you forever about the optimal indica/sativa mix required to attain a really persistent left-brain concentration high with a slow glide-down – MATE IT’S LITERALLY JUST FLOWERS THAT MAKE YOU A BIT STUPID STOP WANGING ON PLEASE.
• Quote Replies: A genuinely useful Chrome plugin which lets you see all the quoted replies to a given tweet with the touch of a button. If you’re a CONTENT FARMER who ever needs to do roundups of ‘today’s funny viral thing on Twitter’ then this will be a GODSEND (for the rest of us, it makes deskbound timewasting and distraction significantly easier than it tends to be, and for that I give thanks).

By Eelus

NEXT, GIVE THE LATEST EDITION OF JONATHAN MAY’S INTERNATIONAL AIRSPACE A LISTEN? HE PLAYS CRACKING TUNES FROM ALL OVER THE SHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY DOES ENCOURAGE YOU TO WATCH THIS VIDEO REGARDLESS OF YOUR POLITICAL PERSUASION BECAUSE, HONESTLY, THIS KID IS AMAZING AND DESERVES TWO MINUTES OF YOUR TIME, PT.2:

• Surveillants: This is, sadly, not an online project, and you’ll only be able to see the actual thing if you’re able to make it to a gallery in New York next week, but I love the idea (and, frankly, the name) so much – SURVEILLANTS! DO YOU SEE! It’s an artwork made with ants, “tracking the behaviors of a colony of living ants, visualizing their movement patterns over time. It’s a visual exploration of collective intelligence and connections that can be drawn between the guiding instincts of life at all levels.” Basically it traces the movements of the colony over time, generating visuals from said movements to create an artwork;SO many ideas from this, not least one about getting a brand to get its new logo design or overall brand from some sort of ant-based starting point. Why? WHY NOT FFS WHO SAYS THERE NEEDS TO BE A COHERENT RATIONALE BEHIND ANYTHING IN 2020??? That’s it. I’m calling it, someone’s going to launch the world’s first arthropod design atelier next year (they’re not).
• Who Can Use: Not interesting but useful for the designers amongst you – who can use lets you input your colour palettes and will then tell you if there are any obvious accessibility issues resulting from your choices. Useful if you care about inclusive design (which you should, you monster).
• Predicting Human Bloopers: Well, not quite, fine, but it’s a slightly catchier title than the original. This is only a research paper at present, but the idea contained within it – to whit, that machines can be trained on videos of people fcuking up in comedy, slapstick ways and through said training develop an understanding of what the conditions for us stacking it are likely to be and, as such, begin to start predicting when we’re about to take a massive, slapstick tumble – is GREAT. On the one hand this presages all sorts of fascinating safety features – if you extrapolate this (very) far into the future, along with improvements in drone technology, you get to a point not a million miles away from Iain M Banks’ Culture in which small flying robots are always unobtrusively around to stop you tripping and falling off cliffs. On the other, just IMAGINE this being applied to every single security/CCTV camera in the world – a neverending stream of perfect FAIL vids, enough to keep the Candid Camera morons happy for millennia! Whichever way we choose to use this imminent technological bounty, I think we can all agree we’re in for some pretty special times ahead.
• Unlocked Recordings: I was convinced I’d featured this already, but seemingly not – this is the Internet Archives collection of vinyl recordings – small at the moment with only 750-odd exemplars, but seemingly growing all the time as library collections of old vinyl get uploaded. As I type, I’m enjoying the ragtime sounds of Knuckles O’Toole; you can stream all the recordings, complete with the crackle and hiss of a AUTHENTIC OLD RECORDS, as well as downloading the audio files in a variety of formats; if you mess around with music, this is a pretty incredible place to dig out obscure samples with that pleasingly lo-fi aural aesthetic that’s so in vogue right now.
• Unapp: A collection of minimalist, useful, single-purpose apps. Really nicely designed, and a few of these – like the one that lets you share a link to let anyone upload files directly to your Dropbox – are really quite useful indeed.
• Puff: I mean, this isn’t particularly clever or funny, but at the same time I couldn’t help laughing (more than I ought) at this bong, which is in the form of a rubber chicken; take a pull, the chicken squeaks. The third or fourth time you end up nearly coughing your lungs up because you find the squeak SO HILARIOUS when you’re battered may be the time you decide to consign this to the cupboard, but if you know someone who’d really, really like a smoking device shaped like a ‘comedy’ prop fowl then, well, LUCKY YOU!
• Divorced Birds: A slightly leftfield subReddit, whose stated purpose is to collect photographs of birds who look like serial monogamists and who are recently divorced. Interestingly, the description specifies that the birds must look like they’ve been married ‘at least twice’, which is a peculiarly specific aesthetic; what does the twice-married person look like that the once-married doesn’t? Is there a certain haunted cast to the eye? Regardless, enjoy these – basically the captions are all things like “Cheryl never lost the baby weight and Gary hadn’t touched her in years. After the divorce, she completely redid her wardrobe and today, she finally had the confidence to head out to a singles event” and, well, I DIE.
• Dutch Graphic Roots: You’ll probably need to be really interested in the history of Dutch design to get the most out of this site, fine, but if you are really interested in the history of Dutch design then WOW are you going to enjoy this. Profiles of dozens and dozens of the most iconic figures in the history of Dutch graphics work; fine, this probably isn’t really for general consumption, but I like to think that there will be one of you who’s enthused by this.
• House of Sweets: A just-launched Kickstarter for a small, independent horror comic book by Fraser Cambell and Iain Laurie; I first stumbled across Iain’s work earlier this year and featured it in here, and since then I’ve become slightly obsessed with his very, very dark little vignettes and accompanying short, short stories. There’s something in these that reminds me of the most frightening of short stories, the ones that stick in your head because of the things they don’t quite tell you; there was a collection called ‘These New Puritans’ a few years back which contained a story about three people copying snuff tapes at scale in a remote seaside cottage and which, honestly, still gives me the fantods even now; Iain’s work’s a bit like that. Which doesn’t sound like much of a recommendation, I know, but I promise you it’s wonderful – if you like comics, this is worth a punt imho.
• Cocoon: A new social network! Just for families! WHY??? WHY DO WE NEED ANOTHER ONE? WHY ARE FAMILIES NOT ABLE TO USE WHATSAPP GROUPS AND FACEBOOK GROUPS LIKE THE REST OF US?!?! Oh, that’s right, they are able to use Facebook Groups and Whatsapp groups like the rest of us, thereby condeming Cocoon to inevitable failure and obscurity. Sorry, that sounded meaner than I wanted it to, but if your app’s success hinges on people deciding for some reason to not use the most popular platforms in the world and instead choosing yours instead because…actually, to be fair, there are quite a few nice features in this, from the easily-distinguishable threaded chats to enable multiple conversations at once, to the ‘you’re both on the app right now, why not chat?’-type functionality, which is cute. Still, I can’t see this being quite enough to encourage people to attempt to teach Grandad another interface, though if you’re after a family project this Christmas then why not try persuading everyone to sign up and take control of the onboarding process? It’ll be GREAT FUN!
• The Teletext Font: Who doesn’t want this? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Wowen Wilson: I can’t quite tell (though I could probably find out quite easily – readers, it turns out I JUST DON’T CARE VERY MUCH) whether this is an old website preserved in amber or some modern, retro-style ironyfest. Regardless, WHO CARES? Click the link, turn up the volume, and attempt to guess which film each of these recordings of Owen Wilson saying ‘wow’ is from (you see what they’ve done with the URL right? SO CLEVER!). You might not have known that one actor could imbue one single-syllable word with quite this degree of nuance and emotional heft, and yet that’s exactly what Wilson has achieved – an artiste.
• La Blogotheque: One of those links that makes me think that the past 10 years have been for naught and I’ve barely seen any of the internet at all – this has apparently been going for a decade and I’ve only just discovered it, which is a shame as it’s got some GREAT stuff on it. A YouTube channel which presents small, intimate sessions with a range of artists – the hook here is the breadth of performers, who are (based on my admittedly light-touch trawl through a decade’s worth of material) a little more varied than your standard ‘hey look here’s someone you know from electro tracks BUT WITH AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR!!’-type Live Lounge experiences. Basically if you’re the sort of person who broadly agrees with Pitchfork you’ll probably like this stuff a lot.
• Half: Last up in the miscellania, a beautiful little piece of interactive fiction, built in Twine with a few nice graphical flourishes; half is about being of mixed heritage and..oh, here: “”Half” is a series of vignettes detailing the experience of being on the fringe of two identities and the invisible toll it takes. Pulled from memories both good and bad.” Lovely.

By Tom Wesselman

FINALLY THIS WEEK, AN INSTRUMENTAL MIX BY JOSA PEIT WHO IS A FRIEND OF INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE AND THEREFORE KNOWS THEIR WAY AROUND THE DECKS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Raven Kwok: Raven Quok is a digital artist working with procedural generation and other code types to produce unusually beautiful imagery and video, which (to my mind at least) is less coldly mechanical than a lot of the proc-gen stuff you tend to see.
• Cursed Tattoos: I mean, the title really isn’t lying. Some of these might be a little close to NSFW, although I am yet to find anything on there to match up to the gayest tattoo in the world (on the one hand, this is probably quite NSFW; on the other, it’s so jaw-dropping in scope and execution that there’s no boss in the land who wouldn’t join you in gazing open-mouthed in wonder at its magnificence (NB WEB CURIOS DOES NOT GUARANTEE THAT THIS WILL IN FACT BE YOUR BOSS’S REACTION)).

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Mini House Flip: Thankyou Lauren Epstein for drawing this to my attention – Mini House Flip is a feed documenting the owner’s project to remodel an old doll’s house which, fine, may not sound like the most compelling thing in the world but OH MY GOSH IT IS ALL SO SMOL! SUCH SMOL TABLES AND CHAIRS! Basically, tiny stuff is compelling and ace, don’t @ me.
• Beautiful News, Daily: The news, but presented in really nicely-designed Instagram images by the smart people at Information is Beautiful.
• Coolest Cleats: Or, for the non-Americans amongst you, football boots (or, more accurately, American football boots, baseball shoes, etc). This feed showcases the frankly mental footwear sported by many of the US’s professional sportspeople; the sort of people who get annoyed at the fact that footballers no longer wear simple black and white three-stripes (I, er, may be one of those people, sometimes) will have absolute conniptions at this stuff. Odell Becker Jr’s collection is frankly INSANE.
• Niharika Hukku: Lovely, gentle artwork, often painted on porcelain or pottery, in a modern interpretation of classic Japanese style.
• Aquamike: You know that Russian fisherman who posts all those mental deep see creatures that he finds when trawling the Marianas Trench for sturgeon (or, er, something like that)? Well this is basically the opposite – LOOK AT ALL THE CUTE SMOL TURTLES!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Kevin Systrom Reflects On The World He Has Wrought: Kevin Systrom, lest you forget, is one of the founders of Instagram; he quite noisily quit Facebook last year (was it last year? Sorry, I can’t be bothered to check – see, kids, JOURNALISM!) with an unconscionably fat wodge of cash, and this is the first proper interview I think I’ve read with him since. It’s fascinating – Systrom is clearly a very smart man, and, in contrast with lots of pieces of this type, doesn’t shy away from some of the negative elements of the world that Instagram has created. The funny thing is, the idea of writing that sentence even five or six years ago would have felt hyperbolic to the point of ridiculousness, whereas now…just imagine having invented something that has changed so much of the way in which large swathes of an entire species live their lives. Whilst Facebook’s obviously had a huge impact, it’s not hard to make the argument that Instagram’s been more obviously significant across a wider range of areas; food, architecture, culture, fashion, aesthetics…all of these have been visible altered in ways that can clearly be traced back to the rise of Insta. That’s insane; credit to Systrom for managing to come out of this piece about as well as someone who’s ruined the world can do (OK BOOMER!).
• Is Google Making Us Stupid?: I can’t quite recall how this piece came across my radar this week (because, obviously, Google has made me stupid), but it was fascinating to look back – it’s from 2008, in the Atlantic, and it’s amazing to look back 12 years and note that, firstly, that we were already worried about the web’s effects on our cognitive function even in those relatively early days of mass-adoption, and, secondly, that we are absolutely no closer to having answers to any of the questions raised in this piece, plus we now have a whole load of other interesting toys messing with our brain function to worry about. It’s a really interesting and well-written piece, but it’s perhaps hard not to read it without a slight sense of ‘hm, we…we never really nailed this, did we?’
• The Most Important Politician of the 2010s: I’ll put the spoiler right here – it’s Anthony Weiner. “WHO??” I hear you all cry, along with “Also Matt, why is all this stuff so US-Centric all the time? Where’s all the hot UK election analysis?” To which I respond “look, there is literally nothing interesting to say about the UK election; all participants are dreadful mediocrities and the only reason most people are going to bother voting at all is because one of the mediocrities represents a party which might well be considered to be actively a bit evil rather than just crap”, and “And also, there’s quite a lot to learn from the tale of Anthony Weiner, who you will I am sure recall when I say ‘d1ckpics’ and ‘sexts’ and ‘embarrassing disappearance from US political life’”. Anyway, this is perhaps a bit of a stretch – Weiner isn’t really very important at all – but it does an excellent job of showing quite how mad and unhinged politics has been over the past 10 years and the way in which it and the web now codepend in a way that was unimaginable ten years ago.
• Arundhati Roy on Modi: This is a wonderful, in-depth piece on Modi’s India by the fabulous Arundhati Roy – it doesn’t, unsurprisingly, paint a hugely positive picture of the country and the direction its going in, with the bulk of Roy’s ire being directed at Modi’s effective desecularisation of India as a nation, and the effect that that is having – and is likely to continue to have – on what is in many respects such a diverse country. With the year China’s had we’ve heard less about India this year, but the next decade is going to be absolutely fascinating for the country.
• A Hipster, Green, Vegan Economy Is Not Sustainable: A-FCUKING-MEN AL JAZEERA! Thankyou, Vijay Kolinjivadi, University of Quebec post-doc and author of this piece. It’s so incredibly refreshing to read something that looks at our current preoccupation with ‘being a bit more green’ and points out that it’s not quite doing the hard work of fixing the species-level consumption habits and demands that are sending us careening at a million miles an hour towards an unsunny-seeming future (or, rather, a slightly too sunny-seeming future). “On a global scale, capitalism is most certainly not “cool”… it is literally burning our planet. An aloof, detached, apolitical coolness which centres on individuality and imagery is simply not going to cut it any more.” Well, quite.
• Seizing the Memes of Production: A collection of essays centering on meme culture – “Post-Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production takes advantage of the meme’s subversive adaptability and ripeness for a focused, in-depth study. Pulling together the interrogative forces of a raft of thinkers at the forefront of tech theory and media dissection, this collection of essays paves a way to articulating the semiotic fabric of the early 21st century’s most prevalent means of content posting, and aims at the very seizing of the memes of production for the imagining and creation of new political horizons.” Contains an essay by Friend of Curios Jay Owens which I featured in here last year when it was first written; I’ve only checked out a couple of the others, but they were interesting enough to warrant recommending to you.
• Flying Taxis of the Future: Maybe! Or maybe not! This is a look at the current hype around the potential future flying taxi market – you may not think there’s a lot of hype, but in certain circles this is A BIG THING – and whether it’s justified. I’ve done a bit of research around this market for a few work things in the past, and it’s genuinely fascinating, but, equally, the logistics around how to make traffic work across three planes is, well, mind-fcukingly hard maths. Not to mention the (probable) insane cost of the vehicles themselves – perhaps, as the piece sort-of concludes, the future’s less likely to be democratised access to magical sky-chariots and instead far more likely to be the preserve of seventythree plutocrats, grown rich through evil.
• Microtasks: This week’s dose of ‘well, I didn’t think white collar work could become morelike factory production line work if I tried, and yet here we are!’ comes in the form of this piece in WIRED, which explains how various businesses have experimented with the introduction of ‘microtasks’ into workers’ days; the specific example given uptop of a company surreptitiously inserting tiny data-classification tasks into workers’ Facebook feeds was darkly brilliant. I can totally see how this is an efficient and effective means of getting people to complete small tasks at scale without really noticing it – O HAI GAMIFICATION! – but I can’t help but think it feels not only a bit intrusive (though you could argue that staff shouldn’t be wasting time on the web whilst at work – you shouldn’t, though, you monster) but also like a creep towards a point where you’re encouraged to complete small, piecemeal tasks wherever and whenever you have a spare 5 minutes. Staring off into space and having a little daydream? STOP IT AND CLASSIFY THIS DATA NOW!
• Environmental Degradation As A Service: Wasn’t really expecting to read this in The Face, I must say, but this look at the environmental impact of Cloud Computing is really interesting and not a little worrying; the stat suggesting that nearly 15% of global greenhouse emissions can be attributed to data and IT is a sobering one, not least as this is one area of human activity that we don’t appear to show any inclination in slowing down.
• An Oral History of the Poop Emoji: The second-or-third worst emoji in existence gets an exhaustive explanation of how it came to be. Less interesting on emoji, but far moreso on the cultural significance of the symbol’s usage in the far east, and how its meaning shifts across cultures. Also, the guy who designed the Gmail version talking proudly about how happy he was with the little animated flies is SO cute.
• Meet Jeffree Starr: Films that I don’t think get quite enough credit for being sort-of culturally prescient, part x of y – The Fifth Element. Bear with me here – just read this piece on Jeffree Starr, YouTube makeup community superstar and purveyor of al the tea, take a look at Starr’s aesthetic and watch a few of their videos, and tell me that there’s not a clear throughline from Chris Rock’s character in that movie to this. Anyway, this is a profile of Starr which does quite a nice job of explaining who he is, his position in the ever-shifting pantheon of superstar YouTubers, and how he along with Pewdiepie and a few others embody a sort of post-cancel culture position in online culture. Fascinating – though I’m sure if you’re more familiar with this particular corner of online culture than me it’s probably unforgivably basic.
• How WoW Changed Videogames: World of Warcraft, that is, should the acronym mean nothing to you. I never played WoW, but I did briefly do the PR for it – when we won the account we bought a gaming PC and I desperately tried to see the appeal but, well, no. Still, tens of millions of people really did see the appeal – the numbers Blizzard was doing from WoW in its heyday were insane, and when you read these accounts of people for whom the game very much became their lives you begin to understand why. It does rather become clear reading these stories that whilst the game is obviously designed to be addictive in some borderline-nefarious ways, these are all individuals with some reasonably deep-seated parallel issues and that possibly it’s not all about the evil pixels.
• Inside the Fall of WeWork: Yes, I know, ANOTHER WeWork piece – but this is Vanity Fair, and so contains all the wonderful gossipy details you’d hope for. The quotes that have done the rounds from this are all about Neumann’s hubristic belief that he was one of three people who could ‘fix’ the Middle East, but there’s nearly-equal joy to be found in his wife’s behaviour – I mean, look: “Last year, Rebekah fired a mechanic for WeWork’s Gulfstream, two executives told me, because she didn’t like his energy.” Quite astonishing.
• Hairdryer Turkey: What with being half-wop and spending all my Christmases in Rome, I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten festive turkey (certainly not in adulthood, at least); this year I’m making boeuf bourgignon, from this recipe should you care. If YOU, though, are planning on shoving an outsize bird into your oven in four short weeks’ time, you might want to take a look at this recipe which made its writer, Helen Rosner, briefly famous when she tweeted about it last year. It involves a hairdryer. Aside from anything else, this is a really, really nicely-written recipe which I wish I could say more often.
• Hmong Radio: This is such a wonderful story, about how sometimes technology can be used in unexpected ways by unexpected people to unexpected ends. The Hmong diaspora in the US – an ethnic group from Laos, in the main – have developed a means of communicating with others in their community, regardless of location or distance, by using conference calling. No, really, CONFERENCE CALLING. Someone’s actually found a good use for it! Huzzah! This is such a charming essay, and the image of the auntie DJs keeping it all going behind the scenes is wonderful.
• Ketamine: There’s nothing particularly interesting about Ketamine – apart from in the medical sense – but this piece from NY Mag in the US is sort of quaintly-wonderful, trying to position ket as a sort of mindfulness-aiding calming drug instead of something that makes you literally incapable of feeling your legs for hours at a time. There’s a broader point in here about generational anxiety pointing towards a trend for tranqs rather than uppers (try telling that to the clench-jawed masses across the UK capital, mind), but in the main I just like the fact that I can imagine all the anglos reading this and sort of just thinking ‘aw, bless’.
• Feminism and Feeling Nothing: All about how disassociation, or at least the performative expression of disassociation, is the new hotness in terms of feminist self-expression, and how it’s been embodied or depicted in culture by both Fleabag and Girls. I found this more interesting than enjoyable – on the one hand, I agree that there’s something interesting and revealing about shifts in the way in which a whole class or category of individuals choose to talk about or express themselves; on the other, I also think we’re spending far, far too much time reading a lot into what are equally readable as joke trends that are no more significant than “LOADSAMONEY!!”. Oh, and a personal plea (and I realise quite how hypocritical this is; forgive me, please) – can editors please start commissioning fewer first person pieces about the author’s emotional travails? I don’t mind the travails, honest, it’s the fcuking ‘I’-ness of it all that makes me want to vomit my ring. Thanks!
• Clive James Essays: This links to Clive James own website, which itself links out to some of his writings. I didn’t want to pick one; he was so, so brilliant. As an aside, did anyone else find it weirdly jarring that most of the BBC news pieces (on the Radio at least) referred to him almost-exclusively in the context of TV reviews? Way to reduce a proper polymath, kids.
• Leroy’s Revenge: Finally this week, absolutely one of the best pieces of writing I’ve read all year. Fair warning – it’s about dog fighting, so please don’t read this if you find descriptions of violence committed by and on animals upsetting. If you can stomach it, though – and it is a bit gruesome – then the storytelling and prose here is absolutely superb. It’s an old piece, from 2013, but it stands the test of time quite wonderfully. Apart from anything else it made me wonder whether any of the people in this are still alive – part of me doesn’t really think so. There were several points in this that made me exclaim out loud; it really is that brilliant.

By Katja Farin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Are you planning on doing a lot of acid this weekend? Or even a little? In which case cue this up and ENJOY – it’s a 3d mandelbrot thing and it’s quite, quite mesmerising:

1. This is called ‘Slumlord’, it’s by Baxter Dury, and it’s like a sort of weird funk beat poetry…thing, which gave me really strong ‘Keith Talent from London Fields’ vibes (the line about ‘murder shoes’ in particular is pure early-Amis). It’s ace:

1. This has more views than I’d normally countenance, so apologies if you’re already familiar with it or if it’s famous on the radio or something; it’s GREAT, though, so not too many apologies. It’s by Black Pumas, it’s called ‘Colors’, and it’s an absolutely cracking song:

1. This is ‘Single Mothers’ by the wonderfully-named Nihilist Highlights, and it’s shouty and gobby and angry and punky and very, very NOW indeed. Maybe this Universe is cursed:

1. Finally this week, this is the second time I’ve featured Mattiel on here this year – the voice is still absolutely fcuking amazing, she sounds like Nico, and love it and I love her and I LOVE YOU BYE IT’S TIME TO GO BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND I WILL SEE YOU IN SEVEN DAYS’ TIME FOR ANOTHER LOVELY, FRIENDLY FEW THOUSAND WORDS OF WEBSPAFF BUT IN THE MEANTIME HAVE FUN TAKE CARE BE WELL AND TRY NOT TO WORRY BECAUSE FRANKLY YOU MAY AS WELL JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS AND TRY NOT TO CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!!:

20 days left. 20 days. At least there’s one less ‘leader’s’ ‘debate’ to get through (both those words doing an AWFUL lot of heavy lifting this week), but otherwise this week’s been largely free of positives. Although I did meet a friend who’s standing as an MP (no, I don’t understand either) and got to hear first-hand about the CRACK SUPPORT TEAM they’ve been granted by the party – sadly I can’t talk about it, but know that however amateurish and two-bit you imagine local party politics to be, well, man, you have NO IDEA. 

Anyway, I am having friends over this afternoon and I need to make some sausage rolls (yes, that is exactly the sort of person I am, what of it?) and wash and not be in my pants and stuff, so I’m going to cut this bit short this week. Console yourselves with the fact that there are some genuinely CRACKING links this week (THEY ARE CRACKING EVERY WEEK FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOU FCUKING INGRATES) and they will take you all the way through til hometime if you let them. Take a breath, sit back, flex your clicking finger and prepare to get Clockwork Orange-d by a whole week’s worth of webspaff, firehosed into your face like some sort of lumpy, information-rich soup (let’s call it soup; it’s safer) – I’ll be back to wipe you down later. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you may not want this but you certainly need it. 

By Eloy Morales

FIRST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, LET ME ONCE AGAIN PRESENT NICK WALKER’S SPECIAL MIX FOR CURIOS LISTENERS, MAINLY BECAUSE I MANAGED TO BALLS UP THE URL LAST WEEK (SORRY NICK)!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER THAN BANNING POLITICAL ADVERTISING ON S*C**L M*D** WOULD INCREASINGLY PREFER IT IF WE JUST BANNED POLITICS INSTEAD:

• Twitter Fixes The Thorny Issue of Political Advertising Once and For All!: HA! FOOLED YOU! It’s in fact done nothing of the sort! The fact that there have been more column inches devoted to analysing the Tories’ ‘Factcheck’ stunt on Tuesday than to this suggests that either noone actually bothers reporting on detail anymore, instead choosing instead to focus on announcements (seriously – number of articles in the UK press lauding Dorsey’s decision to do this a couple of weeks ago? Dozens. Number of articles offering a nuanced appreciation of the eventual policy since it was published last week? Fcuk knows, but I’ve not seen any), or that everyone’s looked at this and gone ‘well, it’s just sh1t, isn’t it?’ The new rules – which apparently come into force today – offer a reasonably simple definition of ‘political’ ads which are no longer allowed: “content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome.” The trickier bit comes with its changes to the terms around ‘issue’ ads, which will restrict targeting of ads which “educate, raise awareness, and/or call for people to take action in connection with civic engagement, economic growth, environmental stewardship, or social equity causes”, and which prevent for-profit organisations from running ads which have “the primary goal of driving political, judicial, legislative, or regulatory outcomes; however, cause-based advertising can facilitate public conversation around important topics.” Which, clearly, is an incredibly elastic definition. How does Twitter distinguish between an advert seeking to ‘facilitate public conversation’ on, say, immigration, with one designed to drive an electoral outcome designed to loosen or tighten controls? What’s the difference between an advert designed to stimulate healthy debate around a woman’s right to reproductive choice and one actively advocating for a specific regulatory framework on abortion? Who knows? Clearly not Twitter’s legal team, who can expect to spend countless hours debating the philosophical minutiae of questions such as these. Bad news for anyone hoping to get clarity on how social platforms’ influence on society can and should be regulated; GREAT news for lawyers who can expect to get fat off the profits from these sorts of arguments!
• Facebook Launches ‘Whale’: Or at least in Canada they do. Whale is the latest toy to emerge from Facebook’s NPE team (the internal skunkworks set up earlier this year to drive innovation / shamelessly copy the featuresets of other, cooler platforms), and it’s basically a meme-creation tool; upload photos, play with templates, create photo stickers, draw freehand…basically it’s like all the creative tools from Insta and Stories all sort of chucked into one place with a vaguely ‘Hi, Fellow Kids!’ vibe to it; you’ll need a VPN to get it if you’re outside the snowy wilds of Poutineland (I could probably have just typed ‘Canada’ again there and saved myself the trouble, on reflection), but it doesn’t really seem worth it.
• Facebook Adds New Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers: Basically this is a series of updates which makes it easier for brands to limit the type of content their ads will feature alongside when buying inventory on Instant Articles or the wider Facebook ad network; selected brands can now upload whitelists of approved sites (this will roll out to everyone in the near future), and advertisers can now apply white/blacklists at a campaign level rather than an ad set level, making it easier to ensure that you’re promo for baby food doesn’t end up on something from The Daily Stormer. Sensible, and the sort of thing you ought to be aware of if your clients are as tediously risk-averse as mine tend to be (WHY WON’T ANY OF YOU LET ME RUN A CAMPAIGN ON PR0NHUB FFS???).
• TikTok Tests Social Commerce: We’ve spoken often enough about the way in which the web has meant everything now runs at 100x speed, and things that might have taken years to reach maturity now have the average lifespan of a Mayfly; so it is with TikTok, which started the year as THE HOT NEW THING SHINING A LIGHT ON THE MAGICAL DIVERSITY OF THE WORLD, morphed into a worldwide talent show to be stripmined by creative directors the world over (I SEE YOU, PERSON BEHIND THE M&S CHRISTMAS ADVERT), and is now hurtling towards the cynical monetisation phase; I predict the first raft of ‘why TikTok is played out’ thinkpieces to land in mid-February 2020. Anyway, that’s by way of a pointlessly-digressive way of introducing the news that the platforms soon going to let you sell rubbish to children directly through the app, with a ‘link in bio’-type feature. It’s hardly an e-commerce innovation, fine, but watch the TikTok meme merchandise economy go mental as soon as this gets rolled out fully.
• Snapchat To Fact Check Political Ads: Just in case you were a political party and needed to know if you could lie on Snap or not. There was an interesting piece the other day about the cost-efficiency of video ads on Snapchat and how Labour had managed to get 1m+ views for a spend of about 3k or similar; the fact that everyone’s now moved on to gazing lustfully at TikTok means that you’re not competing with that many other advertisers for eyeballs, making it a potentially really cost-effective route to young hearts and minds. Interestingly (to me), you can also download the full inventory of political ads placed on the platform in 2018 and 2019 from the site; you get ALL the info, from the person who bought the ads, to the targeting options selected. See Facebook/Twitter – if Snap can do it, why the fcuk can’t you?
• Google Maps To Integrate Local Guides’ Tips: This is interesting. Google is set to experiment with adding content from ‘Local Guides’ to map listings in a variety of locations, including London. The deal is that users in the selected cities “will soon see top Local Guides featured in the For You tab of the Google Maps app. When you follow one of these Local Guides, their recommendations will be surfaced to you in Google Maps, so you can get inspired with ideas of things to do and places to go.” Local Guides are, I think, just Google’s name for ‘people who leave loads of reviews and tips on Google Maps’, but, if this becomes a Thing, they’re also potentially very influential people indeed, particularly if you’re in the food/booze/bar/club business.
• Google Clarifies Political Ad Policies: And another one! Basically this says ‘no lying, and no targeting aside from geography, age and gender’, but it’s worth reading the whole statement. This will be enforced in the UK starting next week, as far as I can tell, so, you know, BE AWARE.
• Changes To Kid-Focused YouTube Content: This is quite big, I think, but hasn’t received that much attention. YouTube’s asking creators to start specifically flagging content they upload that is aimed at a child audience, basically to help secure kids’ safety on the platform; to quote the piece, “if creators mark a video as directed at kids, data collection will be blocked for all viewers, resulting in lower ad revenue, and those videos will lose some of the platform’s most popular features, including comments and end screens.” Exactly what constitutes ‘kids’ content’ isn’t clear (this seems to be something of a running theme at present; shall we just turn off the web for a while and spend some time just really nailing these definitions?), and YouTube is seemingly saying that it’s up to creators themselves to determine whether or not the stuff they make falls into this category. Oh, and you could be sued if you don’t declare something as being ‘for kids’ and then YouTube decides that in fact it is. This sounds like an INCREDIBLE mess, coming to a channel near you in 2020.
• How To Recognise AI Snake Oil: Not strictly to do with advermarketingpr, fine, but I really would love every single one of you to give this at least a cursory skim; it’s a really useful, well-written guide to some of the most prevalent bullsh1t AI claims, which will be useful not only as it’ll help you determine when clients or prospects are lying through their teeth about their products, but also (hopefully) because reading it will make everyone in this bloody industry stop spaffing the term ‘AI’ all over the place without having the faintest inkling of what the everliving fcuk they are talking about.
• Orchard Station, Singapore: Finally this week in the ‘vaguely professional’ bit, this is one of the nicest sites about an ongoing construction project I have ever seen. It’s to inform people about an ongoing development happening on the Singapore Metro, being undertaken by a company called (I love this name) Soletance Bachy, who apparently do foundation and excavation work. Regardless, LOOK how lovely this is; it sort of reminds me of Wip3out, if you know what I mean, and it’s proof that you can make even something quite mechanical and industrial look interesting and appealing with some smart design choices.

By Alexey Kondakov

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE CENTENARY EDITION OF JED HALLAM’S LOVE SAVES THE DAY NEWSLETTER PLAYLIST, WHICH I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING FOR THE PAST HOUR AND I CAN HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

THE SECTION WHICH IS NOW INCAPABLE OF LOOKING AT NIGEL FARAGE WITHOUT SEEING SOME SORT OF WEIRD KNOCK-OFF MUPPET BEING USED IN SOME SORT OF END-OF-THE-PIER ‘ADULT’ PUPPET SHOW, ALL FAGSMOKE AND UNPLEASANTLY-STUFFED FELT MEMBER, AND WHICH IS SORRY FOR SHARING THAT THOUGHT WITH YOU BUT, WELL, TOUGH, PT.1:

• Emoji Storm: Honestly, it’s all I can do to not just open this up and stare at it for the next 5 hours, Curios be damned – thankfully for all of you, I’ve got iron self-control. Emoji Storm is a neat little bit of coding by software engineer Robert Lesser which displays a constant falling stream of every single emoji being used on Twitter, in realtime. It’s MESMERISING, like some sort of realtime emotional barometer of (a very small percentage of) the planet, and I suggest you put it up on a telly in the office and just let it run all afternoon. I would love to see this during a major international news event; it would be a fascinating reflection of global mood. Still doesn’t explain the inexplicable popularity of the cry/laugh emoji (the most basic of ALL the emoji, please don’t @ me), though.
• NASA’s Visual Universe: This is lovely – a wonderful combination of smart use of AI (it really is AI, promise) and excellent, fascinating photography. This is a Google Arts project, which has taken hundreds of thousands of photos from NASA’s archive and used machine learning to analyse and classify them; the interface then presents the images in associated ‘clusters’ based on what they depict. This is presented as a sort of zoomable constellation of thematic clusters, which you can navigate around to explore the images; this is SUCH a wonderful and fascinating collection, and the interface is beautiful, and it’s such an on-point illustration of what you can use this stuff for (to whit, brute force taxonomical classification at scale) – as well as being an absolute timesink if you’re into space and the history of its exploration.
• AI vs AI: Another machine learning project, this time focused on language rather than imagery. I have no idea who this project is by – there doesn’t seem to be any ‘about’ info on the site, so no clue whether there’s some sort of political agenda behind it – but it’s an interesting idea; “The media landscape of Russia is monopolized by the government. Russia-1 channel – the key figure in this monopoly – uses propaganda techniques to influence the worldviews of Russians. TV Rain on the contrary is the only independent liberal media that gives its audience many different perspectives on life in Russia and abroad. To demonstrate a subtle difference between the news on both channels and how they affect people worldviews we created two pristine AIs. They were like twin kids who didn’t know anything about this world and had no life experience. Their minds were pure, so we brought them up on the news programs of Russia-1 and TV Rain channels respectively. In six month each AI had its own worldview formed through the lens of the media it was watching. The differences in their worldviews and vocabularies proved one thing.” As with all these projects, the output from the machines is a bit clunky; there’s no doubting the clear difference in the worldviews espoused, though, and it’s fascinating to see the world through two such distinct prisms. I’m not sure what this usefully tells us about anything – after all, noone consuming this sort of information is doing so in a vacuum, unlike the AIs – but as a piece of digital art I am very much a fan.
• The Information is Beautiful Award Winners 2019: Another year, another tip-top selection of glorious dataviz selected by David McCandless and team (is there a team? If it’s just you, David, blimey you work hard); there’s some truly stellar work, as ever, some of which I’ve featured on here before but much of which is totally new to me. Pick your own favourites – I’m personally slightly in love with the ‘mountains of light’ work, visualisation light pollution as topography, but basically every single thing here is very, very good indeed.
• Laniakea: An interesting way of displaying information from a document set (thrilling description, I know, but bear with me), Laniakea is (I think) a product being peddled by Fathom, a data-wrangling company; the idea is that it analyses a document set and maps what it finds according to the most ‘meaningful’ content, allowing for quick oversight of themes, topics and connections. They’ve got a few examples on the site, including one displaying the ‘map’ (they end up looking vaguely cartographical) of a section of Wikipedia; it’s really, really interesting, and a potentially really useful way of getting an overview of a complex wodge of information, though I’m slightly annoyed that I can’t zoom and pan around the visualisation (it’s disgusting how entitled I am, really).
• Create Your Own Google Earth Tours: This is SO COOL. Google this week opened up the ‘Tour Creation’ feature of its Earth product to everyone – meaning that now anyone can make a swooping, soaring, magical 3d tour of the globe, based on whichever waypoints they choose. Want to map all the holidays you’ve ever taken and take a zooming tour of them? Go for your life! Want to create a poignant, sad journey around every single place you’ve ever broken up with someone? Ok, you miserable fcuk! The tours are obviously shareable, and I am genuinely excited to see what (more creative) people (than me) make with this; I think there will be at least one BEAUTIFUL music video. Please, give it a try and see what you come up with (and share the results with me).
• FakeTextFinder: Not the technical name, but at least it’s descriptive. This is a browser extension (available for Chrome and Firefox) which will, it claims, identify GPT-2-generated text on a webpage at the touch of a button, thereby protecting you (in part) from the scourge of fakery and LIES. I tried it out on the algoCurios over at webcurios.co.uk and it flagged all of them; a relatively low bar, admittedly, but still. If you’re paranoid that everything you read on the web might be a machine-generated lie then, well, you’ve got problems, mate, but this might also provide some small crumb of comfort.
• The Brexit Party: This week’s reminder, if you’ve not seen it, of the importance of buying your domain names.
• No-Wash Trousers: At the time of writing this has 6 hours left to go on Kickstarter – it’s 10x-funded, which is testament to exactly how many people really, really hate doing laundry. Would you buy a pair of trousers that advertised themselves as ‘self-cleaning’, or would you think ‘hm, no, that sounds a bit disgusting and also I quite like clean clothes’? ‘The outside repels liquids and semi-liquids [what the fcuk are ‘semi-liquids’?] while the inside is anti-bacterial and odour repellent’ – lovely, eh? Whilst on the one hand the idea of trousers that you can’t stain is…good?, the implication that ‘you don’t need to wash them!’ is a touch less appealing. Also, now I come to think of it, the term ‘odour repellent’ is…odd. Does it bounce smells away? No, I don’t think I’m going to buy a pair. Also, FCUK ME THEY ARE 100 QUID THAT IS MENTAL.
• The Open Diaries: Oh blimey, there is a LOT in here. The Open Diaries is an app for diary-writing; no particularly interesting frills or features, other than that you can choose whether you want your diary to be private or public; if public, anyone can read it on the accompanying Open Diaries website. There’s a surprising number of people using this, and agreeing to make their personal musings publicly visible to the world, and, honestly, I could spend all day on here. The quality of the writing is…variable, and as ever with stuff like this you wonder to what extent the writing would differ were there no audience, but this is basically an emotional voyeur’s dream. I promise you, if you’re in any way curious about people and their inner lives, you will find a lot to love in here. Also, as a place to experiment with an epistolary novel this isn’t bad (because I know that that’s what you’re all desperately searching for, right?).
• Rosebud AI: This is an interesting idea, but one which really doesn’t work at all at the moment. Rosebud’s a service which is hoping to create an entirely AI-driven stock photography market, with images manipulated by machine to enable people to change the faces of the models at will; the idea being that you only need a relatively small library of images, because you can swap the ethnicity and facial features of the models at will. At present, the platform has a bunch of stock photos on it that you can switch the ethnicity of; there’s an ‘upload your own photo’ feature coming soon, which will in theory allow you to graft anyone’s image into any photo you like. Except, well, it really doesn’t work at all; the current setup makes every single person look a bit like an eerie space alien, whichever face you apply, and it’s hard to see how the specific software models its running on will ever be quite good enough to make this work in a way that anyone might actually use. Don’t get me wrong, this will absolutely become A Thing; I just don’t think it’ll be this particular version of the tech.
• All of the Decade Reviews: Rex Sorgatz is doing God’s work by compiling all of the lists raking back over the past 10 years in one place. Here you’ll find all the ‘best films of the 2010s’, ‘best albums of the 2010s’, ‘best games of the 2010s’ and, bafflingly, ‘the 19 most iconic Keanu Reeves moments of the 2010s’ (thanks, Buzzfeed!), just in case you really want to wallow in nostalgia as this sh1tty, sh1tty decade draws to a wheezing conclusion.
• Trump Only Listens To Trump: A cute idea, taking clips of Donald Trump’s voice, cutting them up, Cassetteboy-style to make it sound like he’s acknowledging the reality of climate change, and giving you the opportunity to tweet these clips at him in the almost certainly entirely futile hope that he’ll listen and have some sort of Damascene moment. Interestingly, this is made by a LARGE AGENCY GROUP which is too craven to actually talk about it publicly because their big bosses are worried about alienating Republicans – the bravery of adland is always a genuine joy to witness.
• Ht The High Notes: Matt Round’s had a very good year creatively, churning out excellent webtoys and silly gubbins at a rate of knots. His latest is this brilliant, very silly browser game, which I advise you to make everyone you work with play this afternoon. It’s a simple challenge – the site asks you to hit the same note as a bunch of different famous singers singing famous songs as a fun way of testing your vocal range; it’s literally impossible not to smile whilst doing this, and I promise you will hate your colleagues marginally less when you’ve seen them tunelessly-straining for a high C in front of a bemused office.
• Laser Discontent: I said to someone earlier this week, whilst acknowledging the banality of the observation, that 2019 really has been the year in which we drop the ‘sci-fi’ from the phrase ‘sci-fi dystopia’; the footage from Hong Kong this week was quite astonishing, from the anime-stylings of the protestors to the very, very scary futurefashy look of the police (I know that fashion is not the point here, but aesthetics are culturally interesting to me) – this collection of photos showcases the other massively sci-fi thing that’s become a real thing this week, the use of laser pointers as a surveillance disruption technique. These are some incredible images, which I would love to be able to send back in time about 30 years to scare 90s me out of his lazy, stoned complacency.
• The Comedy Wildlife Photo Winners 2019: Comedy critters! So many comedy critters! You might have seen a few of these already – the one of the buffalo having its swingers threatened by a peckish lion is a bona fide classic – but I promise you that the whole selection would cheer you immeasurably. Whoever titled the images wants shooting, mind.
• Speaking: A site collecting all sorts of potentially useful tips and advice on public speaking, for those of you who don’t enjoy showing off in front of an audience. Amazingly, ‘imagine the audience naked’ isn’t one of the pieces of advice.
• Recursive Design: This is…oh, look, here: “Built to maximize versatility, control, and performance, Recursive is a five-axis variable font. This enables you to choose from a wide range of predefined styles, or dial in exactly what you want for each of its axes: *Proportion, Monospace, Weight, Slant, and Italic*. Taking full advantage of variable font technology, Recursive offers an unprecedented level of flexibility, all from a single font file.” This may not sound interesting, but click the link and have a play and prepare to have your tiny mind BLOWN. This really does slightly baffle me, in the best possible way.
• Border Tuner: In my opinion a far better and more interesting US border artwork than the swings from earlier this year, this is a project currently being undertaken by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at the US/Mexican border; “Three interactive stations on each side of the border will control powerful searchlight beams using a small dial wheel. When lights from any two stations are directed at each other, microphones and speakers automatically switch-on to allow participants to talk with one another, creating cross-border conversations.” It’s worth reading the ‘concept’ page in full; it’s a really thoughtful piece, subtle and effective.
• Red Panda Finder: Red Pandas are obviously PREPOSTEROUSLY cute – this site lets you search the world’s zoos to see which ones currently have one in their collections, and helps you find the nearest one to your location. At a loss as to what to do this weekend? Why not go and see a red panda? It’ll be fun!

By Xiao Zexie

NEXT, WHY NOT CHECK OUT SLIPBAK, A PRODUCER FROM KENYA WHO MAKES WEIRD, UNCOMFORTABLE, SLIGHTLY INDUSTRIAL, GLITCHY BEATS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS NOW INCAPABLE OF LOOKING AT NIGEL FARAGE WITHOUT SEEING SOME SORT OF WEIRD KNOCK-OFF MUPPET BEING USED IN SOME SORT OF END-OF-THE-PIER ‘ADULT’ PUPPET SHOW, ALL FAGSMOKE AND UNPLEASANTLY-STUFFED FELT MEMBER, AND WHICH IS SORRY FOR SHARING THAT THOUGHT WITH YOU BUT, WELL, TOUGH, PT.2:

• Looom: This isn’t technically out yet, but you can sign up for the waiting list; if you have any interest at all in animation, this looks like an amazing app. The blurb says it’s been inspired by music composition tools, which I am personally slightly baffled by, but the videos of it in action show a tool that is beautiful (really, really lovely interface) and seemingly pretty simple to use. Definitely worth checking out, whether you’re already an animator or if it’s just something you’d be interested in playing around with.
• Football In Qatar: I’ve featured Goal Click on here before a couple of times, and it’s made my a couple of friends of mine; no shame in featuring it again, though, as they’ve just launched a whole load of really fascinating content about football culture in Qatar ahead of the World Cup in 2022. It’s nice to see stories of real Qataris talking about what the sport and the tournament means to them, and the photos – taken by local residents using disposable film cameras, as is always the Goal Click way – are great.
• The Soup Map: Thanks to Joe Muggs for featuring this in his (excellent) newsletter and thereby bringing it to my attention. It’s a map! Of European soups! If you ever wanted to go on an entirely soup-led pilgrimage around the continent, sampling watery delights from everywhere from Hungary to Finland then this is almost certainly the planning tool you’ve been dreaming of. Even if not, who doesn’t love an exhaustive deep dive into the joys of soup? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Onomatopoeias: A selection of those onomatopoeic ‘POW’, ‘BIFF’, ‘CRASH’ signs from old-school Batman. Tell you what, I would really like it if the next decade saw a reversal of the 2010s trend for ‘gritty’ reboots and instead went the other way, reimagining entertainments as boldly-coloured, ridiculous 1950s pastiches. I want to see Breaking Bad but redone in the style of I Love Lucy, basically.
• The Lockpicking Lawyer: Would you like to watch a series of videos in which a faceless, anonymous lawyer picks hundreds of locks with quietly dispassionate skill, all the while narrating his progress with a series of incredibly arcane and (to me at least) borderline-nonsensical terms. There is no reason why this should be as compelling as it is, but, honestly, I just fell into a small, unexpected ASMR trance while one of these played in the background. No idea if it’ll teach you how to become a master criminal, though.
• The Food Place: The Good Place is the only famous TV show of recent years I’ve watched (I was suckered in by the philosophy) (he says, like the appalling, pretentious snob he is); this is a lovely little fan site by Lynn Fisher, presenting a menu for a Good Place eatery and featuring a bunch of gags and callbacks referencing the show’s characters and situations. You’ll need to know the programme for this to make any sense, mind.
• Buy A Missile Silo: Do you have a spare $400,000? If the answer to that is ‘yes’, then please stop reading this immediately and drop me a line as I have an exciting and foolproof business proposition for you! Or, alternatively, why not invest in this well-appointed (if a little rusty) Arizona missile silo? Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, 20 minutes from Tucson, and very much the sort of thing that an aspirant supervillain might consider as a starter lair. To be honest I’m less interested in the Silo itself than I am in who the eventual buyer might be; to does feel a little bit like it might end up as the final resting place of a doomsday cult, but here’s hoping I’m wrong about that.
• The Cash Railway Website: Cash railways, for those of you not already familiar with the concept, are those systems used in shops back in the day to move money or small inventory items around a large space with minimal effort – like the vacuum tubes that you occasionally see in opticians, for example. This website is an exhaustive celebration of the cash railway in all its many forms, and it’s the sort of pleasingly-shonky hobbyism that Curios basically exists to celebrate. The man behind the site is called Andrew – Andrew, I applaud your dedication to, and love for, the cash railway. HAIL ANDREW!
• Open Memory Box: Oh wow, this is a historical goldmine. Open Memory Box is an online collection of old home movies from the former GDR, capturing East German life between the 50s and 1990 in all its glorious beauty. There’s SO MUCH to enjoy in here, and there’s always something particularly beautiful/poignant about watching strangers’ home footage, I find; there’s a sort of sad ephemerality about it , a sense that noone you’re watching exists any more and you’re peering through the net curtains of their past (or there is if you’re me, at any rate). The videos cover a huge range of events, from weddings to street parties, birthdays to scenes of domestic ennui – honestly, this is a quite incredible website and quite incredible resource, and I could watch clips like this one all day.
• Placement: This is an interesting model. Placement is a jobsearch service – the gimmick being that they promise to find you a healthy salary increase in exchange for you paying them a percentage of your new salary for 18-36m (depending on the terms you select). It’s a US service, and it sort-of makes sense there, where it’s far more normal for people to up and move halfway across the country to a totally new city for the sake of an extra $20k a year; Placement will take care of moving, help you find an apartment, and a bunch of other stuff; the cost seems HIGH, frankly, with the examples they give on the website seemingly suggesting that you’ll effectively be netting out at a couple of hundred bucks a month additional income while you’re paying the fees on your salary; which, frankly, doesn’t sound like a good enough reason to up sticks and move to Incest, Idaho for A N Other marketing gig.
• Good Sign Offs: A list of creative alternatives for you to sign off your emails with. There are some beauties in here; I particularly like “Nobody is above the law’ as a sober sign-off, although “See you in hell” is also a strong contender.
• Make Your Own XKCD-style Charts: You’ll need a bit of light codewrangling ability to do this, but should you wish to make all your graphs look like Randall Munroe’s signature hand-drawn style then this will teach you how.
• Legit: I can’t imagine this ever taking off, but I do rather like the concept. Legit is an app that lets users publish lists of stuff they’re watching, reading, eating, etc, alongside their reviews and ratings; anyone can follow anyone else’s feed of ratings, turning the whole thing into a neat-sounding reviews and recommendations site. The appeal here is the light-touch sound; I quite like the idea that I could just quietly post one-line reviews of the books I read and that anyone could equally-quietly follow said reviews if they for some unaccountable reason gave a fcuk about my opinions. I know that there have been variants on this idea before, and none of them have really caught on, but I do think there’s something in the idea if not this specific execution.
• Qello: I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this; Qello gives the impression of something that’s been going for ages, but oddly has never crossed my path before. It’s a really impressive resource – subscription-based, fine, but if you’re into live music and music documentaries, etc, it’s got a staggering libary of official gig footage available to stream on demand – although sadly no Jandek. Particularly good if you like CLASSIC ROCK, but there’s a reasonable amount of recent-ish stuff too.
• FYTA: A PODCAST! This is a reader submission, sent in by Foivos Dousos (THANKYOU FOR READING, FOISOS DOUSOS), and it sounds really rather interesting: “FYTA present a series of 26 thematic shows, one for every letter of the english alphabet. Each show introduces concepts, philosophers, poets and music projects whose name starts from each specific letter. In alphabetical order, FYTA re-examine and re-define the world of proper names. The ABC of FYTA heralds the coming of a new language; it is essentially a dictionary of pulses and pauses, a study in nominalism, a post-punk pilgrim, an educational radio program for the masses who struggle to understand the new reality of our times. From Theodor Adorno to Alekna Zupancic and from Aunt Sally to die Zwei the ABC of FYTA will categorise an impossibly chaotic world of influences and contradictions.” I mean, that sounds basically perfect, doesn’t it? Give it a listen.
• Guess My Word: This is brilliant. Simple, but brilliant. Each day, a new word is there to be guessed. You type in a guess, hit submit, and the site will tell you whether the word you’re looking for is ahead or behind the one you submitted in the alphabet. Rinse and repeat til you’ve guessed the word of the day or you give you (DON’T GIVE UP). This shouldn’t be as much fun as it is – and maybe, if you’re not me, it’s not fun at all – but I’ve played it every day this week and am genuinely looking forward to doing so again later (my life is so empty).
• The 2019 IF Competition Winners: I know I featured this earlier in the year, but I make no apologies about doing so again now that they’ve picked the best of this year’s entries. If you’ve never played an IF ‘game’ before, PLEASE give one a go now – it’s such an interesting medium, and people are making some truly great stories across styles and genres; if nothing else, I think this is a hugely underexploited medium for BRANDED CONTENT (no, really), so maybe that will be enough to tempt you in (but, if it really took a mention of ‘branded content’ then perhaps it’s time you maybe reevaluated your priorities). Try Turandot if you want a flavour; fun, ribald, pacey and nicely-written.
• The Bastard Game: I mean, it’s not technically called that, but it’s pretty much the best description I can think of for it (thanks Sherlock for sending it to me); try playing Tetris and Snake, simultaneously, using the same controls. Lose in one, lose in both. Death is inevitable (in game as in life), but how long can you stave off the inevitable for? This is basically like rubbing your belly and patting your head simultaneously while riding a unicycle or something.
• Tweetjam: Finally in this week’s selection of miscellania, the entrants to Tweetjam, in which participants were challenged to come up with tiny games, the code for which would fit into two Tweets. The ingenuity on display here is AMAZING, and a couple of the games are actually quite fun which is far more than I was expecting. There are 60-odd games, so there’s bound to be something in here which will prove more appealing than work for the rest of the day. I mean, look, it’s TINY GOLF ffs!

By Drew Simpson

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THIS SUPER-CHILLED CLASSICAL/AMBIENT MIX BY SANTILLI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Fcuk Yeah Book Arts: Books! Art! Art made from books! All of that! In a Tumblr!
• Eating Streatham: There are, apparently, 60 eateries on Streatham High Road. The person behind this is going to review all of them. They’re only one down at the moment, but I wish them all the luck and perseverence in the world; I imagine there will be some absolute horrorshows as part of the series.
• Beeple: Excellent, weird, pop-culture scifi art. One of the pictures is called ‘Buzz Lightyear Nuclear Holocaust’, which probably tells you all you need to know about the style here.
• The Best Crap Estate Agent Photos Ever: Fine, this is a single post rather than a whole Tumblr, but I promise you that these are worth it. Even if you think you know bad property photos on the internet, even if you’re jaded by the seemingly-neverending parade of ‘cursed X’ memery, I promise you that there will be stuff in here that will make your eyes widen in confused disbelief.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Bernhard Lang: Bernhard takes aerial photos. This is his Instagram, full of, er, his aerial photos. These are SUPERB.
• Fashion For Bank Robbers: ‘Contemporary Masks and Headpieces’, runs the description, but trust me – this is Cremaster-era Matthew Barney-levels of odd.
• The Greater Bombay: I had no idea at all that cabbies in Mumbai often paint the ceilings of their cabs in vibrant designs; this feed collects photos of said taxi ceilings in all their glory.
• Coin Op London: Launderettes, in all their slightly dowdy, 70s-scented non-glory.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Hong Kong in Photos: Not just in photos – this is a really interesting take on the protests by California Sunday Magazine, which in this photo essay presents a series of accounts of the lived experience of the protests by a variety of native Hong Kong citizens, some involved, some not. There’s been relatively little reporting that I’ve seen of the wider public attitudes to the movement amongst the ‘average’ residents of the territory, and it’s fascinating to hear the gently contrasting opinions here canvassed.
• Chinese Millennials: A very non-LRB article in the LRB this week (which itself is I suppose quite an LRB thing), painting a picture of the ‘millennial’ class in China (though, as here, ‘millennial’ is a silly and unhelpful classifier; Chinese youth tribes tend to be stratified by decade of birth rather than as a single lumped-together coterie. Taking you through attitudes to fashion and commerce, to politics, love and relationship, this is a neat, if necessarily superficial, portrait of a generation.
• Suppressed Reality: This is actually a recent edition of Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s newsletter – Boris is CEO of The Next Web, and writes weekly about tech and…stuff. This essay intrigued me; his observations about Apple’s latest Airpods feed into a lot of things I’ve read this year (some of which I’ve included here) about the strange way in which Airpods change our relation to each other and the space we’re in, and the slight…well…rudeness inherent in not signalling to others whether you’re listening to them or not. This piece specifically looks at the various noise-reduction/cancelling options available to users of the new kit – and made me think, a lot, about a future in which some of us can basically tune out stuff we don’t like and others, well, can’t.
• The ‘Magic’ of AR Glasses: A companion piece to the previous one, this looks at the parallel tech developments in visual AR which will mean that, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we might be able to wander around with fancy tech-specs which magically filter out all the ugly or unpleasant things we don’t want to see, or make the world generally look shinier, more exciting and more appealing than it in fact is. On the one hand, GREAT! Let’s BLOCK OUT THE UGLY! On the other, does anyone else feel that people wearing digital blinkers to hide some of the unpleasant realities of life (like, I don’t know, the homeless) from their vision feels a bit, well, appalling? Anyone? Oh.
• Livestream Shopping: As we prepare to embark upon the annual Western orgy of needless consumption that is Black Friday (and absolutely fcuk you MechaBezos for making this a think the world over), it’s worth looking at China’s just-passed Singles Day for a glimpse as to how this might all evolve. Aside from the numbers being terrifying (Alibaba alone did nearly $40bn of business on Monday – that is a MENTAL sum, and only a fraction of the total spend), there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff happening from an advermarketingpr point of view – this piece looks at the phenomenon of Livestream selling, where influencers stream their shopping experience and earn revenue from affiliate marketing when viewers purchase something linked from their feed; I reckon there’s DEFINITELY some PR mileage in being the FIRST (well, ish) UK retailer to do something like this; liveshop the Boxing Day sales, anyone? I mean, it would be a hellish and slightly evil thing to do, but it would probably do you good business, so, well, here we are.
• Pixar’s Sand: In the main, I try and avoid linking to stuff that I really don’t understand, mainly because I worry that I’ll misexplain it horribly and will end up looking like a moron. Still, I am linking to this one despite only understanding about one word in seven (this is only a slight exaggeration) because I understand just enough to grasp what an incredible thing it is that it’s describing. Basically, if you want the precis, this is all about exactly how Pixar animates sand – honestly, it’s MIND-BLOWING.
• The UX and UI of Bongo: A serious exploration of the design of bongo sites, specifically the various Tubes, and how that aesthetic and UI works on us on a psychological level – and how certain tricks and techniques are bleeding into more mainstream digital design practice. Really interesting, even if you’re not a designer – there’s a throwaway line at the end of the piece, about the extent to which refinements and developments in bongositedesign have to a degree impacted real-world sexual behaviour, which really feels like it’s worth a separate essay and deeper investigation.
• Even Nobodies Have Fans Now: Long-term readers, or indeed anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of working with me, will have heard me quote Momus’ observation that ‘in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people’; this essay is about that very thing, specifically the slightly odd intimate connection that develops between podcasters and their listeners. There’s undoubtedly something quite particular about the experience of having someone’s voice inside your ears for prolonged periods of time that forges a certain connection, but I might make the case that the same applies to writing as well. Except obviously it doesn’t, because I don’t have any fans (this is the moment where should any of you feel compelled to do so you might want to write in and say “No Matt, I am a fan!”, at which point I will doubtless succumb to some sort of unpleasant swelling of the ego and will start referring to myself the third person or something).
• Sofar, So Bad: I had vaguelyu heard of Sofar before this piece, but didn’t really quite know what it was about – which obviously means I’m too old and uncool to be part of the target market for their ‘music events for people who don’t like music very much but quite want to have something inoffensive on in the background’. I’m not, it’s fair to say, hugely miserable about it. The piece is very good on the general trend toward the commoditisation of culture as lifestyle accessory, whether for brands or individuals; it feels very much like this sort of thing is the next iteration of the ‘Museum of Icecream’-type Instapalace; events that combine a narrow range of generic-youth-interest-elements in aesthetically-pleasing fashion but with no depth whatsoever, designed to present the idea of something rather than the thing itself. Do you know what I mean? I can’t imagine you do, that was spectacularly ham-fisted writing. Sorry. Anyway, read the piece and then maybe you’ll see what I mean. Maybe.
• Audiobook Stars: From the Guardian, so apologies to any of you who’ve already seen this one – it’s great, though. Tim Dowling’s a gently brilliant writer, and this look at the audiobook industry (specifically the people who record them) is fascinating. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any extended periods of time reading aloud (obviously if you’re a parent this probably isn’t news to you), but it tends to make me INCREDIBLY sleepy; I have no idea how Stephen Fry managed the Harry Potter books, I’d have been narcoleptic by the first mention of Hogwarts (maybe the money helped) (and speaking of money, it’s interesting that at no point here is there any mention of how much you trouser for this sort of thing…).
• Babies & Vegetables: A really interesting look at the baby food business, and whether or not kids have an innate dislike for vegetables or not. Not just about that, fine, but there’s a lot in here about how you can maybe trick your kids into eating more kale when they’re small.
• Stopping Being A Nazi: Truly fascinating and weirdly uplifting Reddit thread in which former members of White Supremacist groups share the stories of the moment they decided to stop being Nazis. There are some crazy tales in here, but it’s interesting that there’s a commonality of experience amongst many of the authors; lots of them simple realised that the people they were hanging out with were, well, cnuts, and so stopped. Which also, now I think about it, does rather make me wonder whether they sorted out the ‘racism’ thing or simply just decided to stop being friends with other racists. Hm. Anyway, this is interesting and the sort of thing that I at least had never really read before.
• 75 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With Peanut Butter: If you’ve ever worked in the industrial content production business then this piecein McSweeney’s will be so, so close to the bone that it might well make you weep.
• How To Begin A Novel: I tend not to really enjoy ‘funny’ AI stuff that much, in the main because the vast majority of it is so doctored by human hands that it’s not actually anything to do with AI at all (I’m looking at YOU, all you ‘we fed an AI all the scripts of Friends and this is what it came up with’ articles – I KNOW YOU ARE LIES); this, though, is by the ever-excellent Lewis & Quark and so I know it’s legit. This article looks at the first lines of novels produced by the updated GPT-2 software which I featured the other week – these are GREAT, and I would totally read a book of short stories where each one starts with one of these lines (actually that’s not a bad idea; someone commission that).
• Squish Me Tender: On ASMR and eroticism, and the slightly uncomfortable place where the lines between the two things intersect and blur a bit. “ASMR has built a sensuality that is not, in every case, intended to be sexual but may be indicative of a populace that craves to be held. One of the most enduring stories in Christianity is the idea that Mary gave birth without having sex – the divine infant written into being like code. I wonder if it’s the kind of imaginative leap that would help to think through ASMR. In some ways it’s a similar act: its inexplicability is part of its power. Would ASMR be half as fun or healing if we knew exactly how it worked? ASMR does something to us that is not altogether sexual but might be verging on intimate in an immaculate kind of way.” IT’S NOT A SEX THING FFS.
• I Bought An Elephant: An amazing story in which the author starts out investigating the elephant trafficking business in Laos and ends up getting more involved in the process of large mammal liberation than he might originally have envisaged. This is a great piece of journalism and a wonderful story, but it’s also very depressing from the point of view of the elephants. I don’t imagine that the treatment in Chinese zoos is…great (although part of me – a bad part, I concede – does rather fancy the idea of driving through the lion enclosure in a Chinese safari park in a car with steak stapled all over it, which apparently is A Thing (sort-of)).
• My Life as a Child Chef: The author writes about his passion for French cookery as a child, and how he dreamed of being a professional chef, and then how he slowly lost that dream as he grew older. This is lovely, not just in terms of the writing about food (which is knowledgeable and passionate) but also because of the slightly elegiac tone of the whole piece, particularly on the abandonment of childhood dreams.
• What Is A Website?: I love this SO MUCH. Laurel Schwultz writes here about what a website is in a philosophical sense, and, honestly, if you have any interest in the idea of the web as a space then this is a must-read. Even if you don’t, please do give it a go – it’s clever like little else I’ve read this week, and it made me think genuinely differently, which is no small praise from someone as tediously-predictable as me.
• Gimme Shelter: Finally this week, an essay about living in a shed in San Francisco. Beautifully-written – look, have the opening paragraph and then make yourself a cup of tea and read the whole thing, it’s superb: “That year, the year of the Ghost Ship fire, I lived in a shack. I’d found the place just as September’s Indian summer was giving way to a wet October. There was no plumbing or running water to wash my hands or brush my teeth before sleep. Electricity came from an extension cord that snaked through a yard of coyote mint and monkey flower and up into a hole I’d drilled in my floorboards. The structure was smaller than a cell at San Quentin—a tiny house or a huge coffin, depending on how you looked at it—four by eight and ten feet tall, so cramped it fit little but a mattress, my suit jackets and ties, a space heater, some novels, and the mason jar I peed in.”

By Lindsay Pickett

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. Let’s be clear, a whole decade’s worth of pop songs condensed into one 3m mashup is an unholy, godless mess – but, well, it’s also an amazing aural picture of the past 10 years. I wonder if it would be easier to do this between 2010-20 than it would have been between 2000-2010 due to the homogenisation of production styles that we’ve seen over the past decade? Or am I just being an old person complaining that IT’S NOT EVEN MUSIC ANYMORE FFS? Hm. Anyway, this is DJ Earworm, and this is appalling:

1. This, though, is SUPERB and such a clever idea; a timelapse of NYC made entirely from other people’s Insta shots of the city’s landmarks. Brilliantly made – if a bit dizzying – and proof that everyone really is basic when it comes to tourist photos:

1. This is by Vegyn, and there’s no way I can explain this but this track made me marginally more optimistic about life and the world than I was before I heard it. No idea why, but it might do the same for you. It’s an excellent, oddly beautiful instrumental called Debold:

1. This is called ‘Melatonin’, it’s by Vogue Dots, and I cannot understand how it only has :

1. HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week, this is called ‘Pesto’ and it’s by Web Curios favourite Wiki (who I’m pleased to see still hasn’t fixed his teeth), and it sounds quite a lot like the feeling of being really quite unpleasantly stoned on badly-cured weed (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky) and THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK EVERYONE THANKS AS EVER FOR JOINING ME ON THIS WEEKLY PILGRIMAGE THROUGH THE FRINGES OF THE WEB AND PLEASE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND I’LL SEE YOU BACK HERE IN A WEEK (UNLESS YOU UNSUBSCRIBE WHICH OF COURSE IS FINE BUT KNOW THAT I WILL MISS YOU) AND THAT WILL MEAN THAT THERE WILL ONLY BE THREE WEB CURIOS LEFT IN THE DECADE AND OH GOD I REALLY HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR ABOUT TEN YEARS THAT IS HONESTLY MENTAL PERHAPS I SHOULD GET HELP ANYWAY I DIGRESS I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU PLEASE COME BACK I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HI EVERYONE! An extra special HELLO to any of you who are reading this for the first time, having taken the ill-advised decision to sign up to this as a result to me telling you to at the end of a lecture!

It’s been…well, it’s been another week, frankly, and that’s the best I can say about it. I know that reusing stuff you previously wrote elsewhere is a really rubbish thing to do, and it’s even worse if the ‘elsewhere’ is Twitter, but I honestly don’t have better words to describe my feelings about Christmas advert season so I’m just going to go with what I wrote yesterday, to whit: the species-level cognitive dissonance required to live in a timeline where we both rail against the climate crisis AND annually celebrate ads from companies whose sole raison d’etre is to get us to buy more stuff we don’t need at massive cost to the planet is *dizzying*. MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, OUR CEASELESS DESIRE FOR MORE STUFF, SHIPPED ALL OVER THE WORLD TO ARRIVE CONVENIENTLY AND HAPPILY ON OUR DOORSTEPS WHENEVER WE WANT IT, IS PART OF THE FCUKING PROBLEM HERE AND THE SORT OF THING WE MIGHT WANT TO PERHAPS LOOK AT ADDRESSING.

Oh dear, and I’d largely managed to keep the rage in check whilst writing this week’s edition. Hey ho! I’m off to attempt to calm myself down via the medium of a long, long lunch; if I were you, I might consider some valium or some ethanol or some skag. Or maybe just take a deep, deep draught of the digital laudanum that is Web Curios – thick, bitter and not a little soporific, and guaranteed to provide at least a small degree of comfort or distraction, at least until the awful things manage to claw their way through the fug. 

I am Matt; this is Web Curios; don’t let it get you down, whatever you do. 

By Ted Pim

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH THIS SUPER-ECLECTIC SELECTION BY NICK WALKER WHICH HE COMPILED ESPECIALLY FOR *YOU*!

THE SECTION WHICH IS QUITE GLAD THAT IT’S WRITING THIS BEFORE THE PUBLICATION OF TWITTER’S ‘HOW THE WHOLE BAN ON POLITICAL ADS IS GOING TO ACTUALLY WORK’ GUIDELINES LATER TODAY AS THE THOUGHT OF TRYING TO MAKE SENSE OF THAT BASED ON A CURSORY 5-MINUTE READING AT 6AM ELICITED ACTUAL HORROR ON WAKING THIS MORNING:

• Facebook Pay: Another expansion to the Facebook ecosystem with the announcement of Facebook Pay, which, in the US at least, will roll out in the coming weeks and provide a single, seamless payment experience across the Facebook app ecosystem (or at least across FB and Messenger – Whatsapp and Instagram integration is a bit down the line), integrating either a users debit or credit or their PayPal account. The best bit? YES THAT’S RIGHT KIDS IT’S ANOTHER FCUKING AD TARGETING DATAPOINT! The small print acknowledges that, whilst specific information about your card and bank account won’t be available to advertisers (I mean, you’d sort of hope that would be the case – not really sure that this is the reassuring news you were hoping for, Mark), you will see ads based on the stuff you buy! The example given in the announcement is the banal, benign ‘buy a baseball bat on marketplace and you might see an ad for a baseball glove’, but the announcement is interestingly light on exactly how this will expand the portfolio of options available to advertisers; actual purchase information is hugely valuable stuff, and Facebook being able to let you target ads at ‘people who’ve recently bought product category ‘X’’ would be no small deal. Another potential way to target people with EXCITING BRAND-RELATED MESSAGING? Truly, it is a blessed day to be alive!
• Messenger Updates for Brands: I find it moderately hard to get excited about – well, anything at all, frankly (such a ball of anhedonic ennui here!), but specifically Messenger updates. Still, if you’re more able to feign enthusiasm for tweaks to chat interfaces, then perhaps this suite of announcements (relating to ‘Click to Message’ in-app ads, automated conversational openers for brands to implement, and a small quality-of-life update which makes it easier to track which message in a conversation a business is referring to) will make you momentarily joyful.
• Instagram Continues Testing Like Removal: First in the US and now globally, it seems that the platform’s doubling-down on the idea that hiding ‘Like’ counts is the thing that’ll magically make using Instagram better and healthier for everyone. It’s being tested with a ‘small’ proportion of global users, and is definitely still not definitively going to be implemented across the whole app, but, well, it’s seemingly only a matter of time. Cue ANOTHER raft of ill-thought-out thinkpieces about what this will mean for the influencers (WON’T SOMEBODY THINK ABOUT THE INFLUENCERS?!?) – frankly I’d be more worried about what it will mean for agencies. I mean, how are they supposed to pull together spurious, ill-considered lists of suggested influencer partners for their clients without the ability to scan for like numbers? Anyway, this is still a test, so everyone can keep the grifty merrygoround going for at least a little bit longer yet.
• Instagram Reels: Or, Facebook Does TikiTok! In Brazil! Reels is, let’s be clear, a total rinse of the Chinese sensation, offering users the ability to “make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories, with the potential to go viral on a new Top Reels section of Explore. Just like TikTok, users can soundtrack their Reels with a huge catalog of music, or borrow the audio from anyone else’s video to create a remix of their meme or joke.” Sound familiar? It’ll be interesting to see how this experiment goes; regardless, consider this another step in the inexorable march towards all of human experience being communicated via the medium of vaguely-sassy viral dance moves by 2025.
• Twitter Set To Roll Out Changes To RT Mechanics: Or at least that’s what this article says; I’ve not seen any other evidence of this, but apparently it’s a-coming. Basically it’ll start giving people the option to RT with an emoji, thereby, the platform homes, limiting people’s desire to use the quote-RT as a mechanism to ‘dunk’ on people, as they term it (or, in British English, to sh1t all over them and their STUPID opinions with a withering put-down or a simple ‘look at this cnut, let’s all make their life a living hell for the next 24h or so’). No brand implications here other than the opportunity to make some sort of extremely-online joke about the changes for approximately 730 likes when they eventually hit.
• Twitter and Deepfakes: Who should decide what Twitter’s policy on deepfakes is? Jack Dorsey? Twitter’s legal team? Their ethics counc…HA! THEY DON’T HAVE AN ETHICS COUNCIL! No, the decision rests with us, dear Twitter users, who this week have been asked to fill in a survey to offer our opinions on the measures Twitter ought to take to attempt to guard against the spread of false information in the shape of faked audio or video. My pointless snarking aside, this obviously isn’t a terrible idea at all – I mean, why not ask the users? – and the general principle they seem to be leaning towards (that of flagging and clearly marking such material as being contested or downright faked rather than removing it) seems like a sensible one.
• Bank With Google!: I suppose when you’ve won advertising you might, like Alexander, get to weeping at the thought that there are no more kingdoms left to conquer; unless you’re Google, of course, in which case you would simply look over at an adjacent kingdom like, say, banking, and think ‘yeah, OK, I’ll have that too’. This is the announcement that Google’s going to be joining Apple and launching its own bank; called ‘Cache’ (at least right now), details are reasonably scarce, but, as with Facebook, the big draw for Google (aside from world domination) is the sweet, sweet flow of consumer data available to the people who hold the purse strings. Nothing really to see or do here at the moment, certainly for those outside the US, but don’t expect Google’s encroachment into new products and services, ostensibly far removed from its tech origins, to stop at this.
• Snap Launches Specs v3: This really didn’t generate much news at all – unsurprising, perhaps, as it’s an iterative update rather than anything truly ‘new’, but also a reflection of the fact that there’s still no real mainstream demand for smart glasses at the moment. Still, this long-ish review of the product is quite interesting in terms of the directions in which the tech might develop; the lines from Spiegel about the slow change in usage patterns of phone cameras, and the way this has changed our relationship with photography slowly-but-inexorably over time, are genuinely interesting. Oh, these glasses also look a little less like something you might get free in a Christmas cracker, should that sort of thing matter to you.
• WordPress Adds Recurrent Payment Options: You can basically run a Patreon-equivalent monthly fan subscription service directly through WordPress should you so desire. Might be useful, might not.
• Strategy Is Your Words: This has done the rounds of the STRATEGIST NEWSLETTER ECOSYSTEM (I am officially declaring this a thing, whether you like it or not), and whilst I don’t know Mark Pollard at all, and whilst I have never knowingly read a business book in my life, much less one on ‘strategy’ (a word that, honestly, I hate SO much it makes me slightly angry every time I type it), lots of people whose opinions I respect have spoken about him and this book in glowing terms, and it’s funded on Kickstarter with just under three weeks to go and so, look, here. It might be really useful, and Pollard’s at pains to describe it as not in fact being a business book, so that’s good enough for me. It’s about the practice of doing ‘strategy’ (ugh) in agencyland, and seems, from what I can glean, to be quite sensible-sounding. Worth a look if, like me, you have a stupid, made-up job in which you think far too hard about largely meaningless, pointless things relating to brands.
• Remembrance Island: It was Remembrance Sunday last weekend, as I am sure you were all aware, and whilst England decided to basically go full Mark Francois by dressing a football mascot as a poppy and carpet-bombing the white cliffs of Dover with poppies from a WW2 bomber (of all the mad things to happen this year, that might be my favourite – the most Brexit thing EVER), the Canadians decided to…er…MAKE A MEMORIAL IN FORTNITE! To quote the release, they created “a custom Fortnite island featuring recreations of First World War trenches, D-Day beaches, a Canadian military cemetery, the well-known Vimy Ridge memorial cenotaph and more.” On the one hand, this is a genuinely bold way of educating a whole new generation about history (or at least it would be if any kids actually used this – it’s a custom Fortnite map, meaning players needed to actively opt-in using a specific code, meaning I would be willing to bet the actual number of kids reached with this is approximately nine); on the other, can you IMAGINE the Mail, Express and Telegraph’s reaction had this been done in the UK? Mark Francois would have EXPLODED. Or, possibly, done a livestream with Ninja. It’s really hard to tell here at the fag end of the second decade of the twentyfirst century.

By SAEIO

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS OF GREAT SONGS YOU MAY NEVER HAVE HEARD OF BEFORE, WHICH INCLUDES THE FANTASTICALLY-NAMED ‘IT’S CHOADE MY DEAR’ BY ONE CONNAN MOCKASIN!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY GOLDSMITHS STUDENTS WHO STUPIDLY SIGNED UP THIS FOR WHAT YOU’RE CURRENTLY READING, PT.1:

• WikiTribune Social: A NEW SOCIAL NETWORK! FROM WIKIPEDIA! FOCUSED ON NEWS! Except you can’t try it out yet, sorry – instead, you can sign up to it and join the waitlist for it to start slowly letting people in; the idea, though, is that it’s a development of the existing WikiTribune platform, layering on a bunch of social features to the existing news-focused site. Exactly what these social features are going to be and how it’s going to work is unclear; what is clear is that the site is VERY KEEN to get you to pay for it. Which, frankly, seems reasonable enough, although I’d be a little more inclined to part company with cash if, in exchange, Jimmy Wales gave me some sort of minor inkling as to what I’m forking out for. The only sort of detail was provided in Wales’ interview with the FT, in reported that users will be able to participate in discussions in a news feed similar to Facebook. Will this break Twitter’s monopoly on newschat? Will it become the new home of slightly-angry, largely ill-informed political chat for the masses, like Facebook? No, I don’t think it will, but I’ll be more than happy to be proved wrong.
• The Big Tactical Voting Comparison: I was listening to the Moral Maze this week on Radio4, because that’s the sort of high-octane middle-aged life I lead when I’m not writing my fingers to bloody nubbins for you, and they were debating the morality of not voting; I have never before felt so strongly that we really, really need a ‘none of the above’ box on the ballot paper, to help properly gauge the level of popular disgust with the available options and to offer a way out for people who firmly believe they should vote but who really, really don’t want to back any of the current shower. Anyway, there’s been something of a kerfuffle about tactical voting recommendation sites over the past few weeks; this site offers an overview of four of them, so you can plug in whichever constituency you like and it’ll tell you how a selection people recommend you cast your vote to keep the Tories out.
• The Constituency Data Motherlode: If you’re of a wonk-y bent, this is a really good site, collecting a vast quantity of per-constituency information; demographics, voting records for the past three elections (General and Euro), that sort of thing. Detailed and very much for the political scientists, lobbyists and, well, politiconerds (not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things. Except for the lobbyists).
• The Amazon Chat Dataset: This is REALLY useful, or at least it is if you’re in the business of attempting to develop conversational interfaces or just if you want a massive corpus of natural-language conversations to mess around with. The corpus of conversations is taken from human-to-human interactions on Mechanical Turk, and is broken down by subject and conversation-type; the idea is that this can all be used to train conversational interfaces or neural nets to better-simulate natural chat. This is, obviously, HUGELY techy and of no practical use to most of you, but it’s also indicative of the sort of data sets that are increasingly just being thrown out there for researchers to mess with; I’m fascinated to see how this sort of thing accelerates the development of language interfaces over the next few years.
• Soundboard Games: That’s not what this website’s called, but, well, I have no idea at all how to describe it, and the url’s just confusing. Basically, as far as I can tell, this is a series of (delightful, beautifully-made) soundboard experiences – choose your card from the deck, click one of the robot icons that appear (I have no idea what the difference is between them, perhaps you will find out), and experience one of a series of unique little sound games; I played one in which I got to create music with an alien and a robot, and another in which I had to play a ‘Simon’-style music memory game in which the sounds are pig farts. It was great! This is rather lovely, and the art style’s very cute.
• Seuss Yourself: The site’s actually called ‘Your Ham Face’, and it’s a promo for the new ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ animated series which is apparently out soon/now; regardless, what it ACTUALLY is is a little webtoy that lets you create a Dr Seuss-style character to resemble yourself, much in the manner of the one that did the rounds a decade ago when the Simpson’s Movie came out and there was a brief flurry of everyone on Facebook having a jaundiced, cartoon avatar. I’ve had a bit of play around with this and am seemingly incapable of creating anything that doesn’t look like some sort of sinister, cartoonish sexual predator, but perhaps that’s more down to my questionable aesthetic choices than any inherent flaw in the tool itself.
• Minecraft Earth: Weirdly I’ve not seen this get any coverage at all this week, which seems strange given how much chat there was when it was announced earlier this year. Still, IT’S NOW HERE! I haven’t tried this, if you or your kids are Minecraft fanatics then I can’t imagine there’s any reason why you wouldn’t be into the mobile AR version – the scope and potential here is huge, and if there’s even a fraction of the enthusiasm for this that there is for the standard version then expect to see an AR universe of blocky ziggurats and, doubtless, crudely-constructed cocks to spring up in digital space in no time at all.
• Unmixer: Second week in a row that I’m featuring a very, very clever audio remixing toy; Unmixer is VERY smart indeed, letting you upload any audio file of your choice and then isolating the individual looping elements to let you easily cut, chop and remix tracks to your personal taste. Do this with multiple tracks and you can then do some really rather cool things by fiddling with the individual layers of each in unison; it’s far, far easier to understand if you stop reading my pitiful attempts to explain it and instead just have a go with their pre-uploaded example tracks – honestly, I just had a go and was bopping up and down in my kitchen chair turning loops on and off and basically imagining myself to be some sort of musical alchemist, so Christ alone knows what someone with any form of actual talent could make with it.
• The Goop Holiday Gift Guide: On the one hand, BUY LESS STUFF FOR FCUK’S SAKE OUR ETERNAL OBSESSION WITH CONSUMING THINGS IS WHAT IS FCUKING THE WORLD; on the other, don’t let that stop you from enjoying the now-traditional seasonal pastime of laughing (crying) at the insanity that is the Goop Christmas Gift Guide. This is obviously a smart, savvy piece of marketing by Goop; the insanity of much of the assorted goods is designed to make this go viral, and the online ridicule matters not one iota when there are people out there who’ll look at this and go “Hm, yes, actually the ormulu-and-ostrich-skin condom holder is exactly the stocking filler Charles deserves!”. Click through and find your favourite example of the insanity of late-stage capitalism, or let Chris McCrudden guide you through the highlights in his annual, highly-entertaining Twitter analysis of the best (worst) examples of excess. The $75k family photo album is an obvious highlight, but the marble edition of Connect Four for $1500 is my personal favourite ‘my god you really are a cnut, aren’t you?’ alarm.
• Droplabs EP01: You’ve got your incredible, high-fidelity headphones – what more could you want? Yes, EXACTLY – a pair of shoes that let you FEEL the music through the soles! An innovation literally no people have ever asked for, and yet one which is now HERE, and all for the low, low price of $550. Yes, that’s right, the fat end of five hundred quid for a pair of shoes which will, I guarantee, make the soles of your feet itch like buggery. The blurb suggests it will intensify your experience of music by making you feel like you’re at a gig or club, or make your gaming even more immersive by…er…what, making your feet vibrate slightly if you get shot in Fortnite? This feels very much like the sort of thing that was dreamed up in a PR or marketing brainstorm and which has become reality almost by accident.
• Nourished: Fair play to whoever’s doing the PR for these at the moment, this has been EVERYWHERE this week. Not that it makes me like it any more, but credit where it’s due and all that. Nourished is a new range of PERSONALISED VITAMIN SUPPLEMENTS – you answer a series of questions about your lifestyle, health, etc, and the site will recommend a ‘personalised’ vitamin regime JUST FOR YOU; said vitamin regime is then 3d-printed into edible ‘stacks’; basically colourful hexagonal nutrient-packs that you…chew? Suck? Gnaw on? Anyway, these are supposed to provide a tailored, bespoke nutritional supplement boost to your diet, all created on demand for you for the low, low price of…£40 a month! Yes, that’s right kids, it’s SUPPLEMENTS AS A SERVICE! This is a very smart idea on some levels – it pairs appealing futuretech (3d printing! Exciting colourful spacefoodhexagons!) with a very ‘now’ business model and an even-more-now focus on the need for individual, personalised treatments based on the fact that we are all special and unique; except the way they determine the right ‘stack’ for you is via the medium of an online questionnaire, which, while it does offer a lot of potential combinations based on your choices, is actually quite a long way from a proper, bespoke treatment based on your actual physiology.
• Swimply: AIRBNB BUT FOR SWIMMING POOLS! I mean, that’s literally it – obviously based out of LA, Swimply lets anyone with a pool offer it up as a hangout destination, charging people to come along and use it for a set period of time. Which on the one hand sounds like a smart idea – why not make use of an asset that will be lying idle for a significant period of time during a normal week? – and on the other sounds like a recipe for horror. How likely do you think it is that the people dropping by to use your pool for a couple of hours will treat it with the care and respect you’d wish for? HA YOU NAIVE FOOL! Look, maybe I’m betraying my fundamental pessimism about human nature here, but I’d be amazed if you don’t find your pool slightly p1ssier than when you left it. That said, I have just spent three minutes looking at the LA listings and my God what I wouldn’t give for a go on some of those, p1ss be damned.
• Civic Signals: An interesting project, this, seeking to convene ‘urban planners, technologists, designers and community leaders — to tap into the wisdom of physical spaces and envision better digital ones.’ The project’s looking to launch in Spring next year, and is founded by Eli Pariser who you’ll remember as the person who coined the concept of the filter bubble all those many years ago; it’s unclear exactly what the outputs will be, but you can sign up for updates. The idea of a specific institution or research body to examine how to determine the acceptable parameters of civic interactions in digital space seems like a useful one,
• Smore: A new dating app! Which isn’t yet live in the UK! And may never get here! Still, it seems like it has a few interesting gimmicks which could see it gain a bit of traction; its particular gimmick is that it’s not a looks-focused network, instead providing users with information about a potential match without showing you their face. The more you demonstrate an interest in the person, the more physical detail will be revealed to you, with the idea being that you can develop a REAL BOND BASED ON INTERESTS rather than pure animal lust. Which is nice and all, but does sort of rather neglect the fact that physical attraction is quite an important component of dating and that without it all the shared interests in the world won’t make you want to let someone put things inside you.
• Video Game Console Logos: You want a very, very comprehensive collection of logos of old consoles? OH GOOD HERE IS THAT VERY THING!
• Misato Town: This website is all in Japanese and because of the way it’s build it only partially-translates with Google, so I have no real idea what is going on here – anyone able to tell me? I think it’s a website for Misato Town (I am SO CLEVER at reading urls!), but beyond that…nope! Still, regardless, it’s SO LOVELY – the way the parallax works to swoop you down and into the cartoon version of Misato is genuinely thrilling (yes, I need to get out more, fine), and it’s been a while since I’ve seen a site where this sort of thing works so well. As a bonus, the visual style is very cute indeed, and each of the elements as you zoom through is clickable and takes you to an article about some aspect of the town’s life, complete with some rather lovely photograhy. This is charming.
• The Github Archive Programme: We’ve seemingly now got the message that stuff online won’t last forever, that code degrades, that digital storage isn’t necessarily infinite, and that some things are perhaps worth taking care to preserve; to this end, Github’s announced its archive programme whereby it will take open source code and archive it in the Arctic Seed Vault in Svalbard for future generations (feels like a hopeful statement in 2019, frankly) to pore over and make use of. The whole thing feels weirdly hopeful, and made me more cheerful than I imagined the idea of burying computer code under a few hundred feet of permafrost would.
• The Uzbek Underground: These are a year or so old now (THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE FFS) but they’re new to me and perhaps to you too; Amos Chapple visited Uzbekistan and took photos of the metro system in Tashkent. My GOD they went hard on the architecture; it rather puts Oval to shame, even with the book swap scheme and the pot plants.

By Peter Hoffman

NEXT, TRY THIS PLAYLIST OF CERTIFIED CONGOLESE BANGERS!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO ANY GOLDSMITHS STUDENTS WHO STUPIDLY SIGNED UP THIS FOR WHAT YOU’RE CURRENTLY READING, PT.2:

• The Most Incredible Comicbook Art Auction: Fine, that’s my assessment rather than an objective one, but none of you come here for objectivity, you come here for ME (you don’t, you come for the links, the words are an unwelcome distraction, I know this and there’s really no need for you to tell me, I promise)! This is taking place in the US and closes in just over a week, and if you’re interested in owning some original Golden Era DC comic art then MY GOD will you be into this – of course, to do that you’ll also need to be willing to drop $300k (at least), but that’s obviously a small price to pay for the original inking of memetic classic ‘Batman slapping Robin’. There are quite a few things under $100 too, so if you know anyone who really wants a Rob Liefeld original (this is a bit of snark that I can’t imagine more than three of you will get, but still) then fill their boots.
• Smol Glass Spiders: Just in case you know anyone whose life would be made marginally better through the acquisition of a smol, hand-blown glass spider. These are weirdly cute, even for a moderate arachnophobe like me, and are really, really (almost suspiciously) cheap; possibly down to the fact that they ship from Ukraine, or possibly because this is all a massive scam. Still, there are plenty of positive reviews, so if you know someone who’d like a vitrine arachnid then this might be the place to get them one.
• US Jingles: There’s a pleasing lack of information or context to this site; it’s just a map of the US that you can click on, state-by-state, to select where you want your jingles to come from; the site with then present you with a seemingly-infinite selection of local adverts from the state you selected, complete with their jingles. You may not think this will be of interest to you, and then you will stumble across something like the Furniture Loft Pennsylvania jingle and your life will be forever transformed.
• Steinunn Hardardottir: Thankyou SO MUCH Dan for sending me this – one of the best (in a certain sense) artist websites I’ve seen in an age, this is the website of Steinunn Hardardottir and her solo musical project ‘Airplane and Spaceship’. MAN is there a strong aesthetic here – the musical style’s described as ‘electronic horror music with a space twist’, but that doesn’t even begin to get to the bottom of quite how marvellous the whole site is. Fun, silly, eye-bleedingly ugly, and even featuring a playable web game to distract you with, this is just charming. Also, as our friend Charlotte put it, the music sounds like the Clangers doing electro, which should be the only endorsement you need to turn it on and turn it up loud.
• The Most Beautiful Shots of the Decade: This is a lovely list, and an unusual twist on the ‘XX of the decade’ roundups. Film experts One Perfect Shot here collect their pick of the best 100 individual shots from the past 10 years of film and television; there are some beautifully-composed images here, but there’s also a series of very clear themes and visual tropes that become apparent as you scroll. Keen students of the Blue/Taupe trend in cinema will be pleased to see that it’s not gone anywhere in the past 10 years.
• Make Your Own Great Bear: Not a massive ursine mammal, sadly; this instead refers to the artwork The Great Bear, which you might not know by name but probably recognise. In it, Simon Patterson took the London tube map as designed by Harry Beck and replaced the station names with artists, musicians, footballers, etc, with each line representing a different category of thing. Terrence Eden decided that he wanted to make his own version; this documents the steps he took to do so, pulling Wikidata to populate the map using some very neat coding. All the necessary bits and pieces required to make this are up on Github, so those of you who like fiddling with data and wrangling code can make your very own version out of whatever Wikipedian datasets you like; this is the sort of thing that would make a WONDERFUL custom gift for a particular type of person.
• The Archaeology of Taste: Oh I love this project! Exploring the way in which food impacts memory and the way in which we recall tastes and flavours and experience, this website collects a series of interviews with a variety of subjects, identified only by their name and age, about their relationship with food, their memories of it, the events and people and places that they associate with specific flavours and dishes…if you’ve ever sat and read Elizabeth David for the writing not the recipes, or enjoy Nigel Slater’s almost pornographic delight in describing his meals, then you will absolutely adore this. Simple, small, often slightly banal personal food histories – I could honestly read this all day.
• The Food Timeline: Literally that – a timeline of foodstuffs, when they were first made (or in some cases invented/marketed), from prehistory to the now. Very, very ugly indeed, but contains a lot of seemingly well-researched information on the history of human nourishment and cuisine.
• The Areo Browser: Would YOU like to explore 3d models of the surface of Mars, right here in your browser? Would you? WOULD YOU? Good, thank Christ for that. The Areo Browser presents a variety of ‘slices’ of Martian landscape which you can zoom and rotate, each presented topographically so you can get a feel for the terrain. I don’t think we’re ever quite as amazed by this stuff as we ought to be – look, ffs, you can examine the surface of an ACTUAL OTHER PLANET while you sit earning money in your pointless white-collar job! Even if you think modernity is awful and frightening (and if you don’t, please, please share your drugs with me) this is still pretty amazing.
• Jackets: The Smithsonian archive is always great, but I stumbled across this very particular slice of its archive this week and it made me oddly happy so I thought I’d share. This is a collection of ALL THE JACKETS in the archive, and despite having all the style and elan of corduroy I was transfixed by the tailoring here; there are some seriously natty threads, not least the Miles Davis-worn number you see right at the top of the page; I like to think at least one of you will look at that and go YES MATE and make it your signature fashion statement for 2020, so please don’t let me down.
• Procedural Generation: An excellent subReddit in which programmers share examples of their procedural generation work, mainly used in the context of world creation in game development but also stuff around faces, character models and the like. There’s loads of really interesting work in here, and it’s a decent primer on exactly what you can achieve with procgen (and by extension what you can’t).
• The World According To Sound: A PODCAST! THAT I HAVEN’T LISTENED TO! However, I feel reasonably confident recommending it as a) it sounds really interesting, being as it is a series in which each episode contains “a neat little story about an evocative, unusual sound rendered in intense aural detail”; and b) each episode lasts around 90s, meaning it’s a welcome respite from the endless, self-indulgent procession of flabby, unedited ‘two mates who find each other HILARIOUS’ audiodumps cluttering up the lower reaches of Spotify.
• Dogs Playing Poker: You are, of course, aware of the SEMINAL artwork by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge in which a bunch of REALLY GOOD BOYS play a hand or two of Texas Hold’Em; this website lets you create a version of that painting with each of the possible 6.6 quadrillion combinations of playing cards on display. One the one hand, this is probably quite an impressive bit of coding; on the other, WHY?!?!? That said, if you know anyone whose life has been determined (ideally negatively) by a specific hand of cards, this could be the PERFECT thing to remind them of it (honestly, now I think about it, if I knew anyone who’d lost big on the cards then a version of this featuring their losing hand would be SUCH a good rinse).
• Leaf Origami: The Twitter feed of a very talented and, I am guessing, slightly obsessional Japanese person named Inori who makes origami shapes out of leaves (I’m sure they do other things, just that that’s what’s on their Twitter feed). These are gorgeous, and would make rather wonderful animations I think.
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Pictures: Exactly that. I might have mentioned it here before, but the fall of the Berlin Wall can literally be attributed to poor comms planning; at the press conference at which the plans to lift restrictions on free passage between East and West were being announced, the official briefing the press was asked exactly when these changes would take place; having not been given a line on this (BAD COMMS PLANNING, SEE?) they blustered and eventually spluttered out “Er, now?” and the rest, as they say, is history. My God, that was ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE there, I’m almost impressed with myself.
• Just Tell Me How You Feel: A small, gently-interactive narrative game, telling a short story about communication through poetry. Very smol and very lovely.

By Joanne Nam

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HERE’S AN AWESOME CRATEDIGGING SESSION BY MR THING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Hawkeye Initiative: Old-but-good Tumblr which draws attention to the frankly mental way in which women were drawn in comics for most of the 90s by redrawing male characters in the same back-breaking poses.
• Awesome People Hanging Out Together: Literally that – look! Famouses hanging out!
• Really Bad Blackout Poems: These are very, very good. Find your own favourite and then perhaps consider a career in which you use a similar technique to become a famous Instapoet!
• Wormcore: Not a single Tumblr, but instead a tag I discovered this week. Did you know that there was whole weird subcommunity on Tumblr posting worm-related content (fortunately non-sexual worm-related content, though this is Tumblr and I’m not making any promises here as to what you might find if you dig deep enough)? If no, then welcome to another Web Curios-curated learning experience! If yes, WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME?

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Akin Kollective: The Insta feed of the artistic practice of former adland person Enni Kukka (who I know in real life but who hasn’t paid me for this OH SO VALUABLE Web Curios endorsement, honest); Enni’s practice is all about using art to increase or facilitate empathy, and she’s got some interesting projects in progress, not least her “Be A Cnut” boardgame which I am very eager to have a play with. Interesting ideas.
• Nord Korea: Not in fact North Korea; I honestly have no idea who takes these photos or where they are taken, but I LOVE the aesthetic here (which, were I to describe it, I’d probably call ‘weird stuff in Central Asia’).
• Baller Busters: This got a reasonably amount of press this week – it’s a feed which exists to call out and expose people on the ‘gram who are presenting themselves as influencers or SUCCESSFUL HUSTLERS MAKING BANK (sorry, I won’t talk like that ever again) but who are in fact either broke, delusional or actively grifting. I’m a bit conflicted about this; on the one hand, there’s something undeniably satisfying about seeing these people get called out, but on the other there’s something a bit mean and hatemobish about it. See what you think. Mind you, as a means of surfacing some truly MENTAL ‘influencer’ types, it’s second-to-none.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Politics is for Power, Not Consumption: An excellent essay, timely for those of us in the UK, which posits that the increased level of political discourse that we’ve seen in the past decade, fueled by the web and social platforms and, of course, the increasing madness of the political landscape worldwide, is having a serious and negative impact on people’s willingness to actually engage with politics on a meaningful level; that we are confusing talking about politics with actually doing politics. This rings horribly true; I highly recommend you read the whole thing, but this quote gives you a flavour of the argument: “If you feel unfulfilled, melancholy, paralyzed by the sadness of the news and depth of our political problems, there is an alternative: actually doing politics. Citizens who want to empower their political values would be better off if they spent less time consuming politics as at-home amateurs and instead fell in line to help strengthen organizations and leaders. Rather than kibitzing with their social media friends, they could adopt some of the spirit of the party regulars, counting votes and building interpersonal relationships in their neighborhoods.”
• 2029 Predictions: It’s refreshing to be able to include a predictions list at the end of a year which is doing something more interesting than looking ahead to next year (let me fill this year’s set in for you, while you’re here: AR (again), VR (again), games-as-important-media-vertical, personalisation (again), small groups rather than big networks (again), slowness and disconnection (again)…can we stop now? Good!). This is a really interesting, wide-ranging and smart series of predictions for 2029, based on things that happened in 2019; so, for example, this covers the idea that Geotagging will become a social faux-pas in the future as it becomes ever more important for people to have unique experiences and not expose areas of natural beauty to further human degradation by telling people they exist, or the slightly less interesting claim that Travis Scott will be the Kanye of the next decade (really?). Whatever you’re interested in, there will be something in this that speaks to you – and for those of you whose jobs involve a degree of futuregazing and trend forecasting, this is probably professionally useful as well as fascinating.
• The NYT Does The Internet: A special edition of the NYT Magazine focusing on THE INTERNET and WHAT IT’S TURNED INTO and stuff; there’s a lot of content linked from the homepage, and the two or three pieces I’ve read (on the increasing dominance of the Chinese internet and a few other topics) have been good, but I’m slightly grumpy about the way it’s presented which makes the whole thing annoying to navigate and basically isn’t quite as cool-looking as it thinks it is.
• YouTube Tries Livestreaming (Again): Ostensibly about YouTube’s latest efforts to get gamers to take it seriously as a viable streaming platform, this is also a really good overview of the current streaming ecosystem and how the different players (Twitch, Mixer, YT in the main) are each approaching the market. The description of Twitch as effectively positioning itself as ‘the future of telly’ or thereabouts seems like a smart take; the company’s clearly attempting to expand its appeal beyond the core audience who are there for the Minecraft tutorials, whereas YouTube seems to be doubling down specifically on gaming to tie in with the imminent launch of Stadia. There’s a LOT of money here, meaning we can expect to see quite a lot of interesting jockeying for position – it’s also worth noting that the big players I named here are, behind the brands, Google, Amazon and Microsoft. YOU CAN’T ESCAPE BIG TECH HOWEVER HARD YOU TRY!
• An Oral History of Limewire: Aged 20 and living in Washington DC and working (I say ‘working’ – I was of no value WHATSOEVER!) at the BBC there, I was, at least for the first few weeks, quite lonely and a bit scared (and VERY COLD – man, DC in January is bleak) but there was a iMac in the apartment and onto it I downloaded Limewire and for those first few days I was able to create a soundtrack for my new home and make it feel a little less distant. Limewire, for the children or non-pirates amongst you (like non-pirates even exist anymore), was basically Napster on steroids (gah! Ok, so Napster was the first mainstream peer-to-peer filesharing network which basically introduced the concept of free, infinite music to a generation and was the first small step towards the streaming economy we have today – got it, kids?) and you could get ANYTHING on it, from music to computer programmes to an AWFUL lot of bongo; this is a really interesting look back at its genesis and impact, and, as with much of the web at the time, how noone involved made anywhere near as much out of it as you somehow feel they ought.
• The Emoji Changelog: I don’t know how many of you are in the market for an exhaustive exploration of all the changes which have been implemented in the latest Unicode update to the empoji set, but I promise you it’s more interesting than you’d think.
• The Emoji Popularity Dataset: And, specifically, what it means in terms of what emoji Unicode should make more of. If you recall last week’s explainer on how to submit emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium, this is a useful companion piece – seriously, all brands should take a look at this stuff and work out what emoji they can usefully propose. This piece outlines the most- and least-used emoji types, and explores some of the potential reasons as to why the rankings are as they are; basically, WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE FLAGS.
• Videogame Class War: Another in the occasional series of ‘when videogames create great stories’ pieces, this is about Fallout76, which I’ve featured here before. A recent update to the game allowed certain players to pay a (reasonably punchy) annual fee to access in-game perks; this has created a strange sort of class divide in the game, where players with the premium subscriptions were initially ostracised by the non-paying community and have since leaned into this hard by setting themselves up as a de facto aristocracy within the game. Which is sort of weird but lightly benign, until you start to read about the rather unpleasant undertones which seem to be creeping in. ‘Games as social petri dishes’ is something I will never get tired of reading about; I do think as this stuff becomes more and more mainstream there’s some hugely interesting socio/psychological research paths just waiting to be investigated.
• Remembering Halo 2: I never played Halo, shooters not being my thing, but its marketing campaign is the stuff of legend – huge, multilayered, fiendishly clever and responsible for ensuring that every single fcuking meeting in any sort of creative communications agency for about 7 years had, by law, to include at least one person passionately advocating for TRANSMEDIA (a term that still causes slight PTSD-style twitching in many of us who worked through that era). This is a hugely comprehensive look back at the game, its design, its launch and the marketing – if the phrase ‘I Love Bees’ means nothing to you and you work in advermarketingpr, you really do owe it to yourself to read this and catch up. But, please, let TRANSMEDIA rest in peace in its lonely, unloved grave.
• The Anatomy of a TikTok Hit: Pithcfor dissects the particular aural qualities that seem to characterise the current wave of viral TikTok soundtrack bangers – to whit, distorted bass, BIG dramatic tone-or-pitch shifts, and anything that affords the opportunity for some sort of big twist or visual reveal-type moment with a big aural cue. If you’re looking for a blueprint to viral success then, well, there’s no such thing, but you might be able to pick up a few general pointers here.
• Real Life Superheroes: Many, many years ago, in the mid-00s when I had just started working and was eking out my days as a lobbyist (a very, very junior and ineffectual lobbyist) and had JUST discovered the one, beautiful truth about modern work (to whit, unfettered, high-speed internet access and a whole web’s worth of stuff to read – I did NO work at all, it was amazing), I remember reading a spate of pieces about the burgeoning ‘real life superhero’ movement in the US, where odd little men who called themselves things like ‘Tovian’ and wore armour made out of old styrofoam packing materials and scavenged kevlar. There was a brief revival of interest in the story about 5 years ago, but then nothing until this piece, which follows a group of caped do-gooders around the streets of San Diego for an evening. I love these stories, mainly for the insight you get into the sort of people who think wearing a colander on one’s head and patrolling the streets helping put drunk people into the recovery position is a good idea.
• Messing With Google Maps: Apparently there’s a ‘thing’ in the States where kids are uploading odd, upsetting or just strange photos to their school’s listing on Google maps; is this a thing here too? Regardless, I would like ALL of you to spend this afternoon thinking of the perfect cursed image to upload to your place of work’s entry on GMaps – then DO IT. Go on, make the web marginally more interesting than it was yesterday and cause The Man (or, more accurately, the poor, confused people in marketing) some minor conniption.
• Suzy Batisz’s Empire of Odour: In further proof that there’s money in poo, meet Suzy Batisz, the inventor of ‘Poo Pourri’ – you know, that spray that’s designed to prevent the smell of faecal matter from invading your nostrils post-defecation. This is one of those great profiles which presents its subject in an ostensibly perfectly-flattering light, but in so doing allows them to demonstrate JUST enough crazy to communicate exactly how clenched-teeth crazy they really are. The segue from ‘I sell stuff that helps you forget that you are a machine for turning food into sh1t’ to ‘this is a wellness and self-help movement’ is quite, quite special. Never underestimate the hubris of the middle-aged white millionaire, eh?
• The 100 Best, Worst and Weirdest Things On The Web Since 2010: On the one hand, it really would be a terrible shame if all the things we sought to remember and lionise and preserve from the thick, coruscating, lumpy stream of online culture were the memes; on the other, MAN this is a cultural rollercoaster. It’s a US site doing the listing (The AV Club), so your mileage will vary a bit, but so many of these are global web phenomena that your hit rate should be reasonably high. There’s a whole afternoon of workplace ‘OH MY GOD DO YOU REMEMBER’ memechat here if you’re in the mood; personally I’m just glad to have been reminded of the dog driving stick.
• Finding The Real Diceman: You may well have seen this as it was in the Guardian last weekend; if not, though, it’s a great read. For those not familiar, the Diceman (not, thankfully, Andrew Dice Clay on this occasion) was a hugely popular late-60s novel about a man who decided to let his life be governed by the whims of fate; the identity of its author, and the extent to which some or all of it was autobiographical, were much-debated; the author of this article tried to find the truth. It’s a great, mysterious read, and has motivated me to pick up a copy of the author’s new essay collection.
• The Magic of Generating New Ideas: By a mathematician, but hugely interesting (and potentially useful) for anyone. I love this anecdote about legendary mathematician Paul Erdos: “Erdős was a person of extremes, and he also fuelled his ideas through a don’t-try-this-at-home technique: he used stimulants such as Ritalin and Benzedrine for much of his career. At one point, a friend, worried about Erdős’s health, challenged him to go off the drugs for a month, and Erdős agreed, but when the experiment was over he said that, on the whole, mathematics had been set back by his weeks of relative indolence.” I mean, way to back yourself there Paul.
• Margaret Atwood: Atwood, interviewed for the Paris Review in 1990 as part of their ‘The Art of Fiction’ series in which writers discuss their work and their practice. I confess to finding Atwood an author whose interviews I enjoy reading more than their novels; this is a really wonderful conversation which takes you from the business of writing to sex to critics to commercialising one’s art and to all sorts of other places besides.
• The Humanoid Stain: A brilliant, wide-ranging, discursive, fascinating essay by legendary writer Barbare Ehrenreich, about cave paintings and what they tell us about the way we see ourselves as a species; and, subsequently, what that tells us about who we are. Honestly SO smart and so erudite, I guarantee this will add at least one IQ point to your total and is a cracking piece of writing to book.
• The Feminist: Finally this week, one of the best short stories I’ve read in years and one which, if there were any justice in the world, would receive the same sort of buzz as Cat Person did. It won’t, but you should read it anyway and tell all your friends to read it to – The Feminist is a very funny, very sad, very horrible story about one man’s lonliness and the steps he takes to try and find romantic, emotional, sexual connections with women. Its author, Tony Tulathimutte, is very much part of a current cool literary scene at the moment; I confess to not loving his (very funny) debut novel, but this absolutely blew me away. I promise, it’s really, really good.

By Lara Verheijden & Mark Stadman (link a bit NSFW)

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. It was only a matter of time before someone used a GAN to make a music video with all the weird melty faces; it’s a shame it’s not a better song or more interesting video, really. Can someone do this…better, please?

1. Apologies if you’ve all seen this – it does have 9million views, which is about 9million more than the stuff I usually post here, but nearly all the comments are in Spanish which makes me think it’s not quite crossed over to anglotube yet. Anyway, this is Rosalia with ‘A Palé’; there’s a LOT going on in here, none of which I have any idea about. My favourite comment on this simply reads “Some artists make you question your sexuality; Rosalia makes me question if I even speak Spanish”. Awesome video too:

1. This is that very now combination of intensely emotional and sort-of-miserable lyrics with glacial production, as though you’re listening to something slightly too shiny on a comedown (or at least that’s what it feels like to me). I really like it – it’s called ‘Baby Little Tween’, and it’s by Okay Kaya:

1. I LOVE THIS SONG. 100-odd seconds of pop-punkish perfection, this is ‘Tiny Planets’ by Remember Sports. SO GOOD:

1. UK (I think) HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week, here’s a genuinely standout track by Biig Piig – honestly, I love this immoderately and it made me feel a bit like when I first heard Cantona by Loyle Carner or Here by Alessia Cara, in that this person ought to become VERY famous. See what you think (if you don’t like this you’re a nonce) – the song’s called ‘Roses and Gold’ OH HANG ON WE HAVE COME TO THE END THAT WAS UNEXPECTED BUT NOW THAT WE’RE HERE LET ME WISH YOU A HEARTFELT AND SINCERE ‘HAPPY FRIDAY’ OR ‘HAPPY WHENEVER’ REALLY AND LET ME WISH YOU THE VERY BEST OF LUCK IN LIFE AND LOVE UNTIL WE NEXT MEET BECAUSE PLEASE REMEMBER, ALWAYS, THAT I LOVE AND CARE FOR YOU ALMOST AS I DO THE INTERNET SO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF AND EVERYONE ELSE AND HAVE FUN AND I’LL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE BYE BYE!

You know what? I have to say, despite my initial reluctance and general distaste for the whole thing, I’ve quite enjoyed the first week of the election.

Of course, it’s partly the novelty of it all, and the fact that it’s all still quite fresh (ignoring, of course, the fact we’ve basically been being campaigned at solidly for 3 years) – right now we’re getting that slightly-odd politics high that you always get at the outset of a campaign; like being in a wind tunnel, fine, but one into which people are constantly lobbing icing sugar and amphetamines. Of course, the closer we get to December 12th, the more the sugar and speed will be swapped out for knives and bricks, but it’s sort-of thrilling while it lasts, particularly as EVERYONE seems to be making a total pig’s ear of it. 

But you’re not here for that! What are you here for, exactly? Presuming the answer is ‘stuff to fill the increasingly hollow and empty void between birth and death’ then WOW are you in the right place – get used to the sound of this voice, because there’s going to be around 8800 words’ worth of it INSIDE YOU by the time you’ve finished. 

I’m Matt, this is Web Curios, and this is what the inside of my head feels like most of the time. 

By Maxime Imbert

LET’S KICK OFF WITH AN EXCELLENT MIX OF GRIME INSTRUMENTALS!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT BEING COMMISSIONED TO DO A REBRAND AND RETURNING WITH ‘THE COMPANY LOGO, BUT IN BLOCK CAPITALS, IS SOME PRETTY MASTERFUL GRIFTING:

• Facebook’s New Brand: Ok, fine, it’s not a full rebrand – the new logo will only appear on Facebook’s family of products, to help users realise that the lovely, shiny, happymaking product they use to stare at a neverending stream of generic photographs of people’s existence, or to send an increasingly-desultory string of HILARIOUS messages to the Groupchat, are both in fact owned by the Big Blue Misery Factory itself. No relevance AT ALL to anyone, and yet it hasn’t stopped untold column inches being expended on the ‘news’, which rather suggests that we (by which I obviously mean ‘people like me’) really need to get a grip on ourselves.
• Facebook Launches ‘Work Groups’: Slightly odd, this – I mean, why? – but here it is nonetheless. Facebook ‘Work Groups’ are, well, Groups – except there’s now a new setting that admins can apply to any Groups they administer to both limit the amount of personal information Group members can see about each other, and to enable Group members to message each other even if they’re not friends. Which is, I suppose, useful for colleagues who don’t use Whatsapp or Telegram or Email or whatever other fcuking communications platform you care to mention. This might as well be called ‘I don’t like you very much and I don’t want you to become any more of a part of my life than you already, unfortunately, are’ Groups tbh.
• FB Launches Text Variant Ads: This is smart – as far as I can make out from the not-particularly-well-written description, this will let advertisers submit multiple variants of their ad text, for Facebook to automatically select which version to show to achieve the best results. As the post points out, there’s a potential cost implication; FB will need a reasonable amount of data to work with before this optimisation can start, meaning there will be a bare minimum threshold in terms of ad impressions you’ll need before it kicks in, but I can imagine that, at scale, this could be really useful.
• Twitter Trails New Features: As the linked article points out, Twitter has become quite good at promising useful-sounding updates and then never actually delivering on the things. Still, this is a raft of new features which were pretty heavily-trailed by the company’s head of Design & Research, and which include the genuinely useful-sounding ability to toggle whether one’s tweets can be RT’d, the ability to remove oneself from a group conversation, block @mentions of your username without your permission, and to remove @mentions from old tweets (AN EDIT FUNCTION!!! Will you all shut up about that now? It’s a terrible idea). These all seem broadly sensible, specifically in terms of being able to limit the horror of other people, so we can look forward to none of them becoming reality til about 2023.
• Twitter Rolling Out ‘Topics’ Feature: What with all s*c**l m*d** news happening twice now – once when it’s announced, and then again when it’s launched, because why WOULDN’T you want to read about it all twice?! – there’s every chance I’ve told you about this before; still, it’s SO exciting you probably want to hear about it again. Twitter Topics will let users follow…TOPICS! The idea being that you’ll be able to subscribe to interest areas to have relevant Tweets about stuff that you care about injected into your TL without the need to follow individual accounts. It’ll be interesting to see how the curation of said topic feeds works, and how it integrates with the existing ad product; given Topics are seemingly just interest categories, it doesn’t feel like it will change that much, though, honestly, I’ve not really got any idea what I’m talking about here.
• Third-Party Apps Get TikTok Integration: You can now add ‘Share to TikTok’ functionality to your app! ISN’T THAT EXCITING??!?!?! On the one hand, this seems like a broadly-useful idea and is sort-of a no-brainer if you want to appeal to kids and have a suitable bit of software; on the other, though, I do wonder whether this is going to mark the point where TikTok slowly and inexorably starts looking like every other video platform in terms of aesthetic. PLEASE NO OMNIPRESENT AR FILTERS FFS.
• LinkedIn Improves On-platform Translation: That’s really all there is to say, sorry. You want to be able to automatically translate posts from foreign into your native tongue? You want to be able to read your Ukrainian colleague’s daily updates on how they are KILLING IT, or the coruscating insights from your team in Shanghai about the Seven Things That Content Marketers Can Learn From Soup Dumplings? Fill. Your. Boots.
• YouTube Launches Shopping Ads In Search: You want to be able to sell people stuff directly from YouTube search results? GREAT! In fact there are a few updates to YouTube ads in general, which you can read about here: they’re all focused on product sales, so if you have tat to flog in the runup to the most magical time of the year you may well want to click this one.
• YouTube Launches SuperStickers for Creators: Honestly, this is one of the things I find most baffling about streaming culture; I get that you might pay someone for the service they provide in entertaining you, but the idea of spending actual cashmoney on a virtual sticker that will flash up in the chat in the hope that they will notice you…no, sorry, I can’t quite get my head round it. Still, if you’re a ‘Creator’ you can now give your fans the opportunity to buy SO KAWAII! little stickers which will show up in your chat as proof of their devotion and which will accrue you a small monetary reward as a result. MADNESS.
• Whatsapp Launches Catalogue Feature: Ooh, this is a GREAT idea. Whatsapp’s Business version has just launched this feature, where any business can add a product catalogue to its Whatsapp account, enabling customers to browse their goods in-app; for businesses that don’t have a website, or that don’t want one, this is a very useful alternative; I can imagine this will be huge in the second/third world, but also for sole traders, markets and the like.
• You Can Now Limit Who Can Add You To The Groupchat on Whatsapp: I find it hard to believe that any of you could begrudge your membership of the two-thousand doubtless HILARIOUS Groupchats that you’re in. However, if the prospect of being added to an additional two thousand (“MistleHOES!” “DICKS IN BLANKETS!”, “LET’S TRY AND GET ONE MEETUP IN BEFORE CHRISTMAS GUYS!”) fills you with a degree of pre-Christmas anxiety, then you will welcome this new feature which lets you determine who can and can’t add you to Groups. The wonderful thing about this, by the way, is that normies won’t know about it for a while yet, so you can continue to exert some sort of weird social tyranny over them by adding them willy-nilly, whilst happily absenting yourself from the horror.
• Tumblr Launches Group Chats: Literally no commercial application I can think of here, but, well, Group Chats on Tumblr! The only really interesting bit here is that all chats will be publicly visible (although only invited users can participate), meaning, if Tumblr’s still, well, Tumblr, that this is going to become a GREAT place to source ‘WTF’ content (possibly about furries or otherkln – God, remember otherkin? GOOD TIMES) for Reddit or your desultory Buzzfeed article.
• Shopify Launches Email Marketing Features: Do you use Shopify to power your online store? DO YOU? If you do, GREAT! You can now plug it into your email newsletter, which will pull inventory from your shop into your email, track sales and generally make it easier for you to flog your rubbish to the idiots who were stupid enough to hand over their details in the first place.
• Adobe Launches Content Authenticity Initiative: Nothing’s really happening here yet, but the announcement is worth noting – Adobe and the NYT have announced a joint initiative to explore how best to implement a sort of travelling attribution and content modification tracker to stuff online; the principle being that it’s important to know who made online content, where it generated from and how, if at all, if has been modified as it traverses the web. They are very much at the ‘hey, look, we’re announcing a thing!’ stage of all this, but they’re actively seeking partners; one would imagine that there ought to be a variety of media institutions with a vested interest in contributing in some way. I don’t think I’ve ever thought this before, but this sounds a bit like the blockchain could actually be useful here.
• It’s Our Time: Having used last week’s Curios to publicly rail against the tedious spectacle of middle-aged people on Twitter shouting at each other to REGISTER TO VOTE, I now include a link to…er…a ‘get the vote out’ initiative. It’s Our Time is a project asking ‘creatives’ in advermarketingprland to devote some of their time and effort to developing messages and materials that will motivate the young and environmentally-concerned to vote on December 12th. There are details on the site should you wish to get involved in some way; if you’re a bored team of designers, there are probably worse ways of spending a Friday afternoon (that’s a serious endorsement, right there).
• Seeds of Dreams: This is really rather lovely, and quite smart to boot. High Street unguent-peddlers L’Occitane de Provence have launched this sweet little browser game, which takes vaguely-Tamagotchi-ish mechanics and lets you care for a selection of plants in a lovely, cutesy, lightly-Japanese-styled virtual garden. Even better, the more you play, the more likely you are to receive small, redeemable rewards, offering you discounts on the brand’s products. This is available in multiple territories, presumably with regionally-distinct offers for each, and is just a really smart piece of digital marketing (as well as being weirdly, compellingly addictive – or, at least more weirdly, compellingly addictive than what I was being paid to do on Wednesday morning).
• The Best Illustration of the Madness of Venture Capital You Will Ever See: Seriously.

By Mi Ki Kim

NOW, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BLADE RUNNER SOUNDTRACK SEEING AS IT WAS BLADE RUNNER DAY THIS WEEK?

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE HAPPY IF IT NEVERS SEES THE TERM ‘SH1TPOSTING’ EVER AGAIN, AND WISHES WE COULD GO BACK TO JUST CALLING IT TROLLING WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, PT.1:

• The Three.js Library: Oh this is GREAT! A single website containing LOADS of examples of really excellent little webtoys, from simple wind simulators to little games to small art-type projects to full album websites; there are quite a few of these that I’ve featured in Curios over the years, including the GORGEOUS J Dilla ‘Donuts’ tribute site from about three years ago, but they are ALL worth revisiting. You could lose the whole afternoon here, and, should you be lucky enough to luxuriate in the joy of a working position with an unsurveilled computer screen, I suggest you do that very thing.
• The Size of Space: There have been a variety of ‘Space – it’s really, really big; I mean, seriously, you won’t believe the size of it’ websites featured in here over the years, but this is very much the best one I’ve seen. You start with an astronaut and then scroll…and scroll…and scroll, until finally your facing the vast immensity of the cosmos and you feel very, very smol indeed. This will do nothing for your sense of self-worth if you’re already feeling a bit like an insignificant speck on the shoe of the universe, but should you be feeling a touch, well, grandiose today then it might be just the thing you need to take you down a peg or two.
• Talk To Transformer REDUX: Yes, I know I featured this when it came out, but it’s been UPDATED! The GPT-2 neural net – the one where you plug in some words and it keeps writing for you, and which churns out surprisingly good copy as long as you don’t look too closely – is now supported by the largest version of its learning model, meaning it’s now even MORE sophisticated; you can read all the technical gubbins here, “… and, if you haven’t already seen it, there are two versions of the image-recognition software that can be used to identify objects in photos: The free, in-built, ‘Google-built’ version, and the more powerful, proprietary, ‘Apple-built’ one. Which one do you go for? Which one should you buy? Which one are you?” That last bit, in inverted commas, was autowritten by the machine just now – whilst it’s obviously impressive it’s not that impressive, and it should make us realise that all the guff spouted by its creators at launch, when they talked about not wanting to release the FULL POWER OF THE MODEL into the world for fear of what ill it might wreak, was, well, guff. Still, we’ve now got a browser version of what is alleged to be the best writing AI ever invented; if you don’t attempt to get the machine to do at least part of your client updates this afternoon, you’re a coward and a weakling. I mean, come on, it’s probably smarter than most of your clients anyway.
• Teachable Machine REDUX: ANOTHER re-up for an old link now (look, I’m sorry about this, but they are GOOD UPDATES and worth telling you about); I first featured Teachable Machine when it launched in October 2017, but it’s now been JAZZED UP and so is worth another look. Should you for some reason not have the same sort of encyclopaedic knowledge of links from 25 months ago as I unaccountably do, let me refresh your memory – this site lets you create simple machine learning models in-browser, so you can quickly and relatively easily make something that can, say, recognise different types of fruit, or recognise simple hand genstures. This new version has been updated to allow for more inputs and larger training sets, and is generally a bit shinier and more user-friendly than it was back in the day; there is SO MUCH to play around with in here, and for anyone mildly curious about how one goes about ‘teaching’ a machine to recognise, interpret and classify inputs (which, I promise, is SO much less dry than I made it sound) it’s a goldmine. Honestly, for the right type of curious tween this could be LOADS of fun; although, of course, they may well just end up creating some sort of bongo-delivery mechanism that works with hand gestures.
• Google Cardboard Goes Open Source: Very technical and only of interest to the developers amongst you, really, this is the news that Google’s Cardboard project, having been shut down the other week, has now gone fully open-source; meaning if you want to create slightly-crap ‘VR’-ish experiences for use on a mobile then it has NEVER been easier. I’m being slightly unfair here – there were a few really cool things built on Cardboard, and this now affords anyone who wants to mess about with VR a relatively easy way of so doing. You’ll need to know coding, though, so don’t get any unrealistic ideas about your ability to suddenly make The Lawnmower Man or something.
• Dog Vision: Would you like to experience the world as your lovely, faithful canine friend does? Well now you can, or at least one small part of it – whilst this website won’t let you experience the glorious nasal cornucopia of doggy existence, it will allow you to upload an image and doctor it so that you see it as a dog would. The main overriding feeling this gives me is ‘man, I’m really glad that dogs have amazing noses because their vision is RUBBISH’. Still, ROFF!
• Friended: One of those apps that occasionally crop up and which make me think that perhaps its creators exist in a totally different version of the world to that which I do, one in which people are fundamentally nice and benign rather than, well, questionable, in the main. The premise of Friended is that there’s something wonderful about interactions with strangers online, but the mass nature of many networks renders the whole process a bit fraught and public and stressful. In this app, anyone can post whatever they like to the wider world – the gimmick being that all responses to that start new, one-to-one conversations, which means you can throw anything you like out into the ether and get individual replies from the world. Which, in all honesty, sounds like a dreadful concept – like opening your Twitter DMs to anyone who wants to call you names – but which they seem to think will lead to ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’ and ‘kindness’ and all that jazz. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of moderation in place to prevent users sending each other horror, but, wonderfully, they do ask that users sign up to the ‘kindness pledge’ before using it, which I am certain will stamp out any sort of nasty behaviour at all. The ‘kumbaya let’s all hold hands and love each other’ vibe is also slightly undermined by the fact that they’re trying to shill a £5 a month premium version – hey, what do you want, kindness costs, baby! iOS-only, should you fancy seeing what this particular corner of the online bearpit is like.
• Huge Spiderman: A Twitter account in the persona of Spiderman, but incredibly swole. This is almost certainly some sort of fetish account, fine, but there’s something oddly pure about this massive Spiderman tweeting out things like “banned from club penguin”.
• History TikToks: Another in the list of ‘very unexpected but equally excellent things on TikTok’, this is a wonderful Twitter thread collating examples of a recent meme in which TikTok kids do short skits enacting moments from history – so, I don’t know, the treaty of Versailles, or Pearl Harbour or something. I think one of the reasons TikTok fascinates me and terrifies me so much is that this is a style of humour and communication I simply can’t do – I mean, I’m not a particularly funny person at the best of times (should you want to tell me RIGHT NOW how much Curios makes you…well, not ‘laugh’, fine, but maybe ‘smile through thin lips’, that would be great), but this brand of visual gag is SO beyond me that I’m just slightly awed at the fact there are so many people worldwide able to tap into it. Anyway, if there are any teachers reading this there HAS to be a way you can integrate TikTok into your classes, although I guess perhaps you don’t want to turn your pupils into even greater attention-seeking clowns than they are already.
• Ethena: I quite like the strapline to this new business: ‘sexual harassment training your employees won’t hate’ is an admirably honest assessment of how much anyone enjoys any sort of HR training process, and a pleasingly low bar to set themselves. The thinking behind it is that most sexual harassment training in the workplace features laughably-stilted videos in which Karen from accounts gets goosed by the photocopier by Scurfy Jim from planning, whereas Ethena’s materials will be a bit more nuanced and fitting for modernity. I sort-of hope this is of no use whatsoever to any of you, but, well, just in case, eh?
• Crying Sephora: Lovely/sad/odd art project by Connie Ye, in which she pulls custimer reviews from the Sephora website – the caveat being that all the reviews feature mentions of tears or crying. There’s a whole Phd thesis to be written about the relationship between makeup and emotion in modern femininity, but, presuming you’re not in the market for any of that jazz, this remains a weirdly poignant and strangely voyeuristic window into womens’ relationship with their cosmetics.
• The Excel Drum Machine: Do you think you’re good at Excel? Do you think you’re special because you know lookup charts and pivot tables and you can MAKE GRAPHS and JUGGLE MULTIPLE DATASOURCES? Pah! You are NOTHING! Go away and don’t come back until you can do what this absolute lunatic has done; to whit, make a functioning drum machine in a fcuking spreadsheet programme. WHY??? Still, it’s quite amazing – you’ll need to download the file and open it in actual Excel rather than Google Sheets, but once you’ve done that you can basically noodle around to your heart’s content. The wonderful thing is that if you have headphones in then it will be near-impossible for anyone to be able to tell what you’re doing; your colleagues will think you’re doing some fiendishly-complex datawrangling exercise whereas in fact you’ll be desperately attempting to program the drum fill from ‘In The Air Tonight’. You can see a video of how it all works here, should you need instructions, but I suggest you just download it and go for it.
• One-Sentence Breakups: A Twitter thread in which people describe their worst breakups in one sentence. Some of these are silly gags, but a surprising number are genuine, kick-in-the-guts devastating. Also, I really want to know the story behind the simple-but-properly-intriguing “After him, I smelled of garbage for days”. If nothing else, there’s a wealth of writing prompts here should you need the inspiration / exercise.
• The Last McDonald’s: “In 2009, McDonald’s closed in Iceland and on October 31st that year, Hjörtur Smárason bought the last McDonald’s hamburger in the country. Smárason kept the burger, accompanied by fries, in a plastic bag for three years during which it remained unchanged. The hamburger, which still shows no signs of decomposition is now exhibited at Snotra House in Þykkvibær.” 10 years on, this website keeps a webcam trained on the burger and fries so that you too can track its eerie non-decomposition for yourself. If I were in charge of an office, I would have one television which was permanently tuned to this – I think it is ART.
• Peppa Pig LIVE: It’s perfectly possible that every single one of you with small kids will already be aware of this and will not thank me for reminding you of it; if not, though, this could be a godsend. A YouTube channel that does NOTHING ELSE but stream Peppa Pig, 24/7 – you can literally put this on your phone, give it to your child and leave it to basically starve to death as it falls into the Peppa attentionvortex forevermore. If you don’t have kids, why not try putting this one one of the office televisions and hiding the remote? I reckon you could probably get them to evacuate the place after three hours of this stuff on a loop.
• Sidebearings: Are you interested in fonts? OF COURSE YOU ARE! Would you like to learn more about them, and about typography design and all sorts of associated things, courtesy of this beautifully-designed website which collates all sorts of information and resources about type; as its creator acknowledges, it may be a bit basic for the more experienced designers amongst you, but those still learning might find quite a lot of useful bits and pieces in here.
• Why The Fcuk Was I Breached?: As we’re doubtless all aware, cyberattacks are happening at an unprecedented rate at the moment; if you’re a company with valuable data knocking about on your servers, expect to be targeted…well…now, basically. When the inevitable happens and you get pwned (SUCH a contemporary reference there, Matt, you zeitgeist-surfing bastion of modernity! ffs), why not turn to this website which will generate your very own excuse as to why it happened. “The fcuking competition used hacking drones to transfer 7 petabytes of data. But we have since hired external consultants, so it will never happen again.” Seems legit tbh.

By Rachel Campbell

NEXT UP, HOUSE WITH LEO ROTH!

THE SECTION WHICH WILL BE HAPPY IF IT NEVERS SEES THE TERM ‘SH1TPOSTING’ EVER AGAIN, AND WISHES WE COULD GO BACK TO JUST CALLING IT TROLLING WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS, PT.2:

• Drone Registration: This is, fine, VERY BORING, but you might want to know about it. It’s soon going to be a legal requirement in the UK to register ownership of any drone in your possession, presumably in order to prevent any repeats of last year’s Gatwick funtimes, or to make it harder for people to airlift 2 kilos of China White into HMP Park. If you have a drone, register it here; if you’re planning on getting one for someone over Christmas, register it here. Or, of course, don’t, if you fancy being a wild and crazy outlaw operating on the very fringes of society, it’s entirely up to you.
• The 200 Word RPG Challenge: This is ACE – the 200 Word RPG Challenge is, er, a challenge whereby people try and create the best roleplaying game they can within the limitations of a 200-word ruleset. ‘Role-playing’ is quite a loose designation in this case – there are a few in here that are very much of the classic d’n’d-type variety, but equally there are loads of odd, esoteric, curious creations, games about trying to pick people up in nightclubs or playing American Football or being at work. Honestly, if you like the people you sit near at work then this is a GREAT way for you all to pass the rest of the day together. If you don’t like the people you sit with at work, then maybe YOU are the problem, not them.
• Dots Bot: In the latest iteration of ‘X…but CREATED BY A BOT!’, we have this lovely little project which presents a variety of different mobile wallpapers…CREATED BY A BOT! These are all free and downloadable and vaguely-reminiscent of mid-20th century abstract impressionism, and will make a nice change from the photo of your family which you grudgingly keep on there in case your spouse picks up your phone.
• Songsterr: Not a particularly novel site, but a seemingly VERY comprehensive one – Songsterr lets you see guitar tabs for over 500,000 songs, along with accompanying video resources to help you learn how to play Stairway to fcuking Heaven (actually it’s probably not that anymore – what’s the modern go-to example of ‘the sort of tediously cliche guitar bit that everyone who fancies themselves as a bit of a muso plays whenever they pick up an instrument’?).
• Decisionise: Are you currently on the horns of a dilemma? Are you torn, uncertain of whether to stick or twist, to stay or to go, to TAKE THE RISK or stay put like the craven weasel you know in your heart you are? If so, Decisionise could be the help your addled, confused self needs. The site lets you input your problem, the potential benefits and disbenefits, and then performs a calm, cool-headed calculation about which option will afford you the greatest benefit based on the information you’ve given it. Let’s be clear – this is not any sort of magical AI-powered scrying machine, delving into your psyche with spindly digital fingers to pluck out the deepest truths from the warp and weft of yourself. It’s morelike a digital version of Bertie Wooster’s ‘Credit/Debit’ column assessments of his own situation, often undertaken when in a prison cell – but, still, it’s actually not a bad exercise to go through when weighing up a couple of different options, not least as it forces you to think quite methodically about the potential costs and benefits of each. Try it with the decision about whether to stay in your current relationship! Who knows what you’ll learn about yourself!
• Compliance Signs: We’re getting to the point now when you probably ought to start maybe thinking about what pointless tat you’re going to buy your nearest and dearest in an attempt to bridge the growing emotional divide between you; if you’re in possession of at least one friend or family member who’s notoriously difficult to buy for then, well, why not try something from this AMAZING site, which offers the opportunity to purchase any one of a staggering range of regulatory compliance signs! Want something that reads “CAUTION: FALLING OBJECTS” or “CARELESS DRIVING COSTS LIVES” to give to a baffled partner or relative in six weeks’ time? GREAT! Honestly, who wouldn’t want to receive one of these?
• Alf.io: A ticket reservation system, but one that’s all open source – free, secure, and seemingly a great alternative to Ticketmaster et al, this is worth a look if you do events, etc.
• Dekks: “Presentations, but not on Powerpoint (or Keynote)!” is something I am genuinely bored of reading about, mainly because none of the alternatives are ever any less bad than Powerpoint (which, frankly, is no mean achievement). Does anyone remember that period about 10 years ago in agencyland in which every time there was a vaguely interesting-sounding pitch for a halfway-cool client, some bright spark would inevitably say something like “Why don’t we do something really creative with this pitch, yeah, like making it in Prezi?!”, and then everyone with a working knowledge of exactly what a fcuking nightmare, sickmaking, car-crash of a horrorshow Prezi is would spend the next 10 minutes trying to walk back from the horrifying workprecipice that you suddenly all found yourselves on the edge of? Yeah, well, it was HORRID. Still, Dekks looks like it might be genuinely useful – collaborative, modular, easily-compatible with modern multimedia formats and embeds and the like…it’s not quite ready yet, but they’re taking signups for early access if you’re interested in the potential for a future with no more .ppt in it (please God).
• Animals on the Playing Field: The photo series you didn’t know you needed but in fact very much do need indeed. O ROFF! O MAOW!
• Blot: Another in the recent series of ‘extremely minimal website offerings developed seemingly as some sort of personal challenge’, this may well the the simplest way of setting up a website I’ve ever seen. Blot lets you create a site simply by adding files to a folder – text files become the copy, image files become the pictures, you can use simple markdown for formatting…it’s surprisingly flexible, and as a means of keeping a minimal web presence updated seems like a smart solution (if, probably, a bit more fiddly than is strictly necessary).
• Spleeter: Ok, so this requires coding knowledge but if you have it could be the most fun thing you see all week. Spleeter is a tool published by Deezer (you know, the streaming site that isn’t Spotify) and which lets you isolate the individual elements from any track you feed it. Want to pull the drum line from Eye of the Tiger? Want the vocal from Wannabe? GREAT! It’s not perfect, and you won’t be able to make club-quality tracks from the output, but if you don’t mind slightly rough edges then you can have SO much fun using this. Will this lead to a resurgence of the mashup? I do hope so – back in 2001 I worked at the House of Commons whilst doing my MSc, and spent most of my time there using the uncommonly-good (at the time) internet connection to download every single mashup I could steal off the internet before going to a club in a basement on Rathbone Street where people like Freelance Hellraiser and Osymyso would play their latest cuts each week. It was called, I now recall, ‘Bastard’, which makes me inordinately happy; if you’re interested, I just found this account of the ‘scene’ (ha) which has given me a right nostagiafrisson.
• Reflectacles: Shipping in April 2020, apparently, these are a new brand of glasses deisgned specifically to fcuk with facial recognition software; the various models they’re peddling will, they claim, block most forms of 3d facial mapping and 2d recognition tech. They’re not super-cheap – $150ish – but then again WHAT PRICE ANONYMITY?? Only joking – no such thing anymore!
• Game Chronicles: The latest in the seemingly-endless procession of websites created by Japanese aviation company ANA and designed to, er, persuade everyone that Japan is COOL! I’ve featured a few on here before, and this latest one is as charming as ever – it’s a side-scrolling platform game which takes you through the history of videogame development, with coins giving you historical snippets about various games and consoles developed in Japan, and additional content in the form of interviews with game designers and the like. If you’re into your games history, this is rather lovely – the platforming’s gently diverting, and there’s something oddly-compelling about collecting all the factnuggets. Fun!
• Five Secrets: I don’t want to tell you too much about this – read the description from the site, and then go and spend five minutes slowly fiddling with this ‘game’. It’s LOVELY: “A gentle afternoon ritual, summoning your grandmother who passed away some years ago. If you can figure out the four rules, you can see her one more time. Each object carries its own significance, both to you personally, and to the summoning ritual.” Even the slightly plinky soundtrack is delightful.

By Ana Minimoshvili

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, AMBIENT & VAPOURWAVE MIXED BY DJ NOVA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS SADLY OUT OF TOWN THIS WEEK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Marin Mushrroms: You want an Insta feed of beautiful mycological photography? YES YOU DO! Mushrooms are very cool.
• Andrew J Rae: Andrew is an artist and illustrator with a lovely style of vaguely-cartoony illustration; I found this feed thanks to his recent series of photos in which he adds fantastical elements to images of people staring at their phones. So good; I reckon there’s a campaign in this if you fancy commissioning him.
• Hunger 4 Words: This is sort-of amazing. Christina Hunger is a speech language pathologist who’s set her dog up with a soundboard – there are a bunch of buttons on there, each which when pressed says a word – Ms Hunger is attempting to get her dog to ‘talk’ to her using the buttons, much in the same way that scientists have done in the past with apes and (I think) corvids. It’s impossible to tell whether the (very cute) dog in these videos has any idea at all about what it’s ‘saying’, but let’s imagine that it knows exactly what it’s doing (in which case, the video in which it just keeps saying “LOOK! LOOK! LOOK!” is the most perfectly doglike chat EVER).
• The Museum of Anything: A new Insta feed by the people behind the excellent ‘Things Magazine’, this will be a collection of interesting objects and accompanying words and, if it’s anything like their other output, will be pleasingly art-ish.
• Red Dead Modders: Grand Theft Horse, aka Red Dead Redemption II, is out on PC now, and as with all PC games there’s a vibrant modding scene attached to it. This feed posts some of the best / most interesting examples of mods being developed, including a lovely line in skeletal steeds for your intrepid outlaw to command.
• Johnson Tsang: Thanks to Rich for this one – Johnson Tsang makes genuinely unsettling sculptures of faces which may remind you of the cover to ‘Music for the Jilted Generation’ but, er, in clay.
• Mregfx: Jaw-dropping motion graphics work. So, so impressive.
• The Sh1tty Food Blog: Crap food photos come to Insta. You can guess the type of thing, I am sure, but very little will prepare you for that hotdog/gherkin abomination which is almost like an act of violence against the mind.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Drone Wars Are Here: On the current state of conflict across the middle east, and how the theatre is increasingly being characterised by its status as the first, real-life, on-the-ground testbed for the new warfare, and what that means for both actors and acted upon. It’s not that the use of drones is new – after all, it’s almost 20 years that the US has been deploying them in one form or another – and more that now everyone has them, and this parity of resource has made some fundamental differences to the nature of combat and how both the fighting and the politics functions.
• The Crisis in Physics: Any of you who read the Three Body Problem will feel a slight frisson of fear at this (briefly, the novel imagines a scenario where human scientific progress is artificially-halted by an alien race); I am no physicist, but even I was able to broadly understand the thrust of this argument, which, broadly, is that there is a problem in physics – and indeed in broader scientific progress – due to scientists having effectively cul-de-sac’ed themselves by exploring dead-end maths. “All these wrong predictions should have taught physicists that just because they can write down equations for something does not mean this math is a scientifically promising hypothesis. String theory, supersymmetry, multiverses. There’s math for it, alright. Pretty math, even. But that doesn’t mean this math describes reality.” Really interesting.
• On Rawls: Anyone who’s had the misfortune to spend any time with me will have heard me wang on about John Rawls and the veil of ignorance; this essay, taking as its starting point a new biography of the man, outlines his theories for those of you unfamiliar with them, and examines how they might perhaps be reexamined nearly 40 years after they were published. What I’ve always found fasinating – and a little depressing, if I’m honest – is the lack of any sort of big-ticket blockbuster followup theorists to the big hitters of the mid-20thC. There were the multiculturalists of the 90s/early00s, fine, but I can’t think of any new thinking (when I say ‘new’ I mean ‘post-70s’ that has any of the power or resonance of Singer, Rawls et al. Can anyone point me at something that would change my mind about this? I’m sure this is my ignorance talking rather than the fact that noone’s thought anything worth bothering with for four decades.
• The Cancelled Club: Thanks to Barack Obama we’re STILL talking about ‘cancel culture’ (Ok, boomer!). This article takes a slightly different slant, looking instead at some of those who’ve been most prominently ‘cancelled’ (in the US) and how they’ve ended up finding an odd sort of kinship with each other; I find the central question (or at least what I took from this to be the central question) of ‘is it a good idea for us to force all these people into a common club of opposition?’ quite an interesting one, but, even more, I want to be able to eavesdrop on what all these people say when they’re together.
• Are Neighbourhood Watch Apps Making Us Safer?: Or, ‘the unintended and unexpected side-effects of all this surveillance tech being employed at a local level’; this is a really interesting look at how communities are changing as a result of their adoption of tech like Ring and Nextdoor, and how these services are having the (presumably unintended) consequence of highlighting and exacerbating underlying tensions and inequalities from postcode to postcode. This is all in the US, but given Amazon’s planning to roll out it’s Neighbourhood Watch-type functionality for Ring in the UK next year, it’s not unreasonable to see this as a potential taste of what’s to come. There’s something really interesting about the extent to which community character shifts when it’s taken online; although, I suppose, one might equally argue that anything that engenders any sense of community is a broadly-positive alternative to the atomisation of modern urban living over the past 20 years or so.
• TikTok in Pakistan: Yes, I know, ANOTHER TikTok piece – and yes, I know, the first part of it goes over all the stuff you already know about how it works and what a phenomenon it is – but this one’s interesting precisely because it does such a good job of explaining the app’s broad appeal. The range of people using it in Pakistan, or at least the range described here, is wonderful – from rural villagers to wannabe film stars to the standard procession of memeing kids, there’s a wonderful sense of the freedom afforded to people by an app that needs literally nothing from you other than your ability to do something on camera. I know that the algo is very much the point of TikTok, but if I could set it up to show me only stuff that didn’t come from the West, for example, I would be far more interested in it.
• What Is AppleTV+?: Or, “are you going to want to shell out another fat wedge every month to watch this stuff?”. This is a pretty good explainer of the business model and seeming strategy behind Apple’s new subscription service, and how it might affect the streaming landscape in the short-to-medium-term.
• The Mainstream Media and Games: A good appraisal of the generally p1ss-poor state of videogames writing and criticism in the ‘mainstream’ media (God I hate that term), looking at what has been tried before, what worked and what didn’t, and looking at the major publishers’ latest efforts to try and turn games into something that even people who don’t play games might want to read about. Credit to them for calling out the Guardian, who back in the day when I did games PR were basically the only paper to actually bother taking the things semi-seriously. I do think that there’s a real opportunity to get some good, non-games writers onto this sort of stuff, writing about games in the way they do about anything else; alternatively, one of the broadsheets could just give Nate Crowley a weekly column and be done with it. Obviously ALL the editors of the nationals read this newsletterblogthing, so expect this dream to become reality in no time at all.
• How To Make an Emoji: Or, more accurately, how to go about making one and then submitting it to Unicode for approval in the official pantheon of emoji. This made me think about what a significant degree of power this is – the ability to create a new, canonical form of human expression is pretty fcuking amazing. EVERY SINGLE CREATIVE TEAM READING THIS – make it your mission in 2020 to submit at least ONE emoji for consideration. It is far more impressive than a Cannes fcuking Lion.
• Welcome to Asgardia: I always used to refer to asteroid-bothering ex-parliamentarian Lembit Opik as ‘elbow-faced sexpest Lembit Opik’, as a result of his being (in)famously handsy and having a very, very wonky face; I recently learned that his wonky face is the result of a very serious injury, though, and feel bad, so will from hereon in only be referring to him as ‘sexpest Lembit Opik’. Anyway, sexpest Lembit Opik is no longer cropping up in obscure indie music videos or fingering Cheeky Girls; instead, he’s heading up the nascent parliament of newly-imagined SPACE NATION Asgardia! That’s right, a SPACE NATION! It’s not currently in space, or indeed much of a nation, and there appear to be one or two problems with the model, both ethically and institutionally (want to join what appears to be a massive space impregnation programme, ladies? One imagined by a slightly odd-sounding Azerbaijani millionaire? No, I didn’t think you would tbh), but that doesn’t appear to be doing much to dent Lembit’s enthusiasm. This is wonderfully bonkers – credit to the man, if nothing else, for his indefatigable enthusiasm for weirdness.
• The Story of Threatin: You may recall Jared Threatin from last year, when he became moderately notorious for having seemingly invented a career for himself as a rockstar – fake reviews, fake music videos, and a real world tour in which he’d bought all the tickets in advance to kid the venues that he was popular, but during which he played to crowds in single digits. WHO IS JARED THREATIN? This is a fascinating article, in which the author meets Threatin and tries to get to the bottom of the story – it’s uncertain whether he succeeds, but it’s a great read. Threatin is apparently hoping to return to play London this month – anyone fancy going? I mean this entirely seriously.
• The Strange, Sad Story of Ken’s Crotch: I honestly had no idea that the strange, sexless lump sitting between Ken’s nicely-sculpted thighs had been the subject of quite so much wrangling and hand-wringing; nor indeed how oddly tied-up it was with the story of the original model for the Ken doll’s first incarnation. This is a great story about commerce, society, sexual politics and the difference a couple of milligrams of injection-moulded plastic can make; there’s a moment in it where it will be almost impossible for you not to imagine an anatomically correct Ken and, well, just lean into it.
• NHL Dentists: If you’re squeamish about teeth and dentistry, I strongly advise against you clicking this link. No, seriously. There are words like ‘stubs’ and ‘nubbins’ and ‘enamel dust’ and ‘shards of bone’ and ‘exposed nerve endings’. The rest of you, though, ENJOY – it’s pretty viscerally horrible, but the writer’s obviously getting a kick from all the different ways they can find to describe someone with a mouth like a punctured tin can (a phrase once used to describe X Factor contestant Rik Waller; one of two reality TV contestant descriptions I will always remember, the other being a Big Brother contestant whose breasts were referred to as being ‘like two carrier bags full of orange juice’, which I WISH I had come up with myself).
• The LRB: Technically a profile of Mary Kay Wilmers, the editor of the London Review of Books, but just as much a profile of the publication as the person behind it. I adore the LRB, even though I had to stop subscribing as it made me feel guilty (I read a LOT, but even by my standards that dose of highbrow every week was a bridge too far); this article does a wonderful job of explaining quite what makes it special, and does an equally good job (perhaps because it’s written by a US journalist) at pinpointing the very peculiar sort of upper-middle-class North London intellectual environment which it is so utterly redolent of.
• Omurice: Thanks Alex for this piece, which is a sweet little love letter to the Japanese rice omelette, a comfort food staple and something that will be familiar to you if you’ve ever read Haruki Murakami. I love this sort of writing, all about the very specific pleasures associated with a single thing, and all the different memorypoints attached to it.
• The Muse at her Easel: I didn’t look at the byline when I read this, but now that I look I see it’s Zadie Smith again which explains why it’s so excellent (HOW IS SHE THAT PROLIFIC AND SO GOOD, DAMN HER? I mean, I write a lot, fine, but it’s all crap). This is a review of Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait, in which she discusses her career as an artist but also her relationship with Lucien Freud; Smith uses the review as a chance to examine the relationship between muse and artist, and the peculiar power dynamics that it engenders. What’s interesting to me about this is the gravity Freud exerts throughout; Smith is clear that her essay is about Paul, and Paul’s novel, and yet Freud can’t help dominate the account. Wonderful, wonderful writing about a genuinely fascinating subject (in all senses).
• How To Play Games Sober: An unexpectedly wonderful piece of writing, about what it’s like to get sober and continue doing something that you always associated with being drunk. The ‘play games’ bit here really is immaterial; you could substitute ‘knit’ or ‘watch football’ and the piece would still work and the prose would still be excellent. Really, really good, and unexpectedly so given it was published on Kotaku.
• Destroying the Ancient D1ck: This is Jenny Slate, absolutely one of my favourite writers at the moment, talking about the patriarchy and spicy food and the ancient laws inscribed by the Mespotamian king that characterised gender relations for millennia. This is angry and smart and very funny, and you will enjoy it a lot.
• Bright Leaf: On why the author loves smoking so much. This is not only beautifully-written, but it’s so nice to read someone unashamedly talking about how much they enjoy something they shouldn’t, with no trace of guilt or real regret. The descriptions of time whilst smoking are almost perfect – that sense of a moment of separation or dislocation from the present, of self-indulgence and slightly-transgression. Glorious.
• In The Dream House: Finally in the longreads this week, this is an extract from Carmen Maria Machado’s new novel, which explores the abusive relationship she had with her first female partner. It’s not, I promise, as bleak as that description sounds (although, fair enough, it’s not a barrel of laughs); the extract shifts between vignettes and genres swiftly and elegantly, and the writing throughout is just perfect. I am about to buy and absolutely inhale this book this weekend – you may feel the same after reading this.

By Maya Ben David

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. This is an odd, slightly wonky, heartbreaking little song and video, about the death of the artist’s mother. It’s really not my sort of thing AT ALL, but I found it hugely affecting and the video had me slightly in pieces. It’s called ‘Janet’, by MT Hadley:

1. Next, this is Thom Yorke with ‘Last I heard (…He Was Circling the Drain)’, and the video is not only a beautiful piece of animation but also the most November thing it is possible to imagine:

1. Thanks to reader Gerard Raatgeep who sent this in, saying that these people deserve more views and he likes their ‘happy vibe’ songs. He is right! They do deserve more views! This is pleasingly woozy and a bit homespun, but it’s genuinely charming – the song’s called ‘Broken Things’, and it’s by That Kid Is You:

1. Next, if you like cooking then you will LOVE this – basically like one of those Lurpak foodporn ads but with real cooking and more meat and viscera. This is BEAUTIFULLY shot and generally gorgeous – it’s called ‘Degustes’:

1. Finally this week, this reminds me of an odd mix of early Jamie T and the Libertines, which may or may not appeal (but certainly places it in a very specific period in the mid-00s); this is by Badgirl$ and it’s called “Next Up II” and it’s sort-of terrible but also the best thing I heard all week and OH LOOK IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN AND I NEED TO GO AND PUT SOME CLOTHES ON AND HAVE A SHOWER AND SAY BYE! BYE! BYE! SEE YOU NEXT WEEK! BYE! I HOPE YOU HAVE A FABULOUS WEEKEND, OR IF YOU’RE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO SAVES CURIOS FOR MONDAY AS A BARRIER AGAINST THE WORKING WEEK THAT YOU HAD A GOOD WEEKEND AND THAT YOUR WEEK LOOKS OK AND BASICALLY WHAT I AM TRYING TO SAY IS THAT I WISH ONLY THE BEST FOR YOU AND I HOPE TO SEE YOU AGAIN NEXT WEEK BUT EVEN IF I DON’T I WON’T BE RESENTFUL OR ANYTHING TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HABEMAS ELECTIO!

See, it sounds almost like a good thing if you imbue it with a bit of unnecessary papal glitz (or, depending on either your Catholicism or your vintage, make it read like a spell in Harry Potter)!  Maybe it will all be FUN after all? 

It won’t though, will it? A few short days into the campaign proper and already I am wishing for the sweet release of death (theirs, not mine, to be clear). Still, at least it’s only five weeks or so and then everything will be sorted out and made BETTER, and we definitely won’t end up with a hung parliament and several weeks of unpleasant horse-trading dominating the festive season and oh my god please no. 

So, then, consider Web Curios to be your weekly escape from all this – not, let me be clear, an escape in any sort of ameliorative sense, but at least you’ll be swapping the political horror *out there* for the…different horror in here. Think of this as a bit like Spice – it’s not good for you, the effects are probably massively-debilitating in the long-term and it absolutely ruins your ability to get anything done, but it does have the pleasing ability to make you forget about the outside world for a while as you disappear into a confused and confusing landscape of the weird and half-imagined. 

Web Curios – it’s like taking really, really horrible, cheap, synthetic drugs! I work in communications, you know – this is what masterful PR looks like. 

By Christian Mio Loclair

FIRST UP, WHY NOT CHECK OUT THIS RATHER EXCELLENT KLF REMIX?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE YOU ALL TO TAKE A MOMENT TO WRITE A WORKABLE DEFINITION OF THE TERM ‘POLITICAL’ SO THAT WE CAN COMPARE NOTES WITH JACK WHO DOUBTLESS HAS IT ALL WORKED OUT:

• Twitter Set To Ban ‘Political’ Advertising: I feel like a bit of a curmudgeon here – I don’t, to be clear, consider this a bad idea; it’s more that I am not totally convinced of its enforceability, or indeed of the possibility of arriving at a working definition of the term ‘political’ which is either practical or widely accepted. Still, no need to worry about these pesky details now – Jack done an announcement and got all the PR! Exactly what the terms of this are going to be is…unclear; Jack’s Twitter thread referenced the need to ban not only ads from political candidates, but also what he loosely referred to as ‘issue’ ad, but how one might categorise an ‘issue’ that is ‘political’ in nature is…unclear! No matter, though, as Twitter’s legal team have all of TWO WEEKS to come up with the framework for this – the framework will apparently be announced on 15 November, with the policy coming into force on 22/11. If you want to read a reasoned breakdown of all the reasons why this is harder than Jack’s rather blase statement made it sound, this Thread by Manuel Beltran is smart and covers most of the obvious points; the other thing that struck me is what a potentially GREAT opportunity this is for the creation of a whole new type of influencer – THE POLITICAL INFLUENCER! Pay me cashmoney and I will espouse whatever political position you’d like me to on the TL!
• Facebook’s Latest Earnings: More ads, more money, and, remarkably, more users, even in Europe and North America.There are a lot of staggering numbers in here – 2.45bn monthly users! 1.62bn daily active users! – but the one that really floored me was the revenue figure, which is not only mind-flayingly high at $17.6bn but also grew a quite astonishing 29% year-on-year, which whichever way you look at it is…good.
• Facebook Launches ‘News’: The latest attempt by Facebook to ‘help’ the floundering news media industry comes in the shape of its News initiative, launched last week to muted fanfare. It’s testing in the US at present, though will, it’s presumed, roll out internationally over time, and is basically another dedicated section within the app where a human-curated selection of news stories will be presented to readers, pulled from a range of approved partner media outlets who meet certain criteria around audience size, quality of reporting (which, obviously, explains Breitbart’s presence on the initial list of partners), etc. The ‘News’ section will exist alongside the Newsfeed, where content from publishers will still appear, so it’s not a question of taking news out of the rest of Facebook; it’s simply giving it a new home. It’s hard to tell whether this will take off or not, or whether this will be the move that FINALLY SAVES JOURNALISM (Facebook is paying publishers whose content populates the ‘News’ section, so this creates a potentially-lucrative revenue stream for those selected as partners), but, well, let’s see shall we?
• Facebook Moves Into Healthcare: Well, ish. “In the US, people can search for Preventive Health in the Facebook mobile app and find out which checkups, such as cholesterol tests or mammograms, are recommended by these health organizations based on the age and sex they provide. Reminders for flu shots will also appear at the appropriate time of year. The tool allows people to mark when tests are completed, set reminders to schedule future tests and tell loved ones about the tool to increase awareness of preventive care. People can also learn more about each checkup and find affordable places to receive care.” This…this doesn’t seem like a bad or creepy thing, and the announcement post talks up the privacy element and explicitly states that user activity associated with this feature won’t be used for advertising purposes…but, equally, I’d be amazed if this didn’t end up becoming some sort of pay-to-play marketplace, with different private providers being offered the opportunity to jostle to the front of the recommendation queue in exchange for a few quid.
• Instagram Tightens Rules on Self-Harm-Related Content: Said Adam Mosseri: “We will no longer allow fictional depictions of self-harm or suicide on Instagram, such as drawings or memes or content from films or comics that use graphic imagery. We will also remove other imagery that may not show self-harm or suicide, but does include associated materials or methods.” This, obviously, ought not to have any brand implications at all, unless you’ve gone down a very dark route with your community management.
• IGTV Adds ‘Series’ Option: Basically this means that it’s now easier for people making stuff on IGTV (ie, noone) to bundle their content together for easy discovery and to enable notifications, etc, when they drop new ish. Will this be the shot in the arm that finally makes episodic scripted vertical video a thing? What do you think?
• Snap Launches ‘Creative Kit’ For Web: Do YOU have a website? Would YOU like to add a ‘Share to Snapchat’ button on that website? Actually if your website’s aimed at children this isn’t a terrible idea and is probably worth doing.
• Snap Launches 3d Painting Feature: This doesn’t really feel like ‘news’, to be honest, but, well, here we are. You can now use Snap to create 3d AR doodles! I KNOW, RIGHT??? There’s probably a few quick-win novelty things you can do here as a brand – although you’ll probably need to rip the video and post it to Insta if you want anyone to actually see it, obvs.
• LinkedIn Posts Record Engagement Rates: If you want an indication of the less-than-stellar state of the world, surely this is it – everything is so terrifyingly, bafflingly dreadful that even spending time on LinkedIn is preferable to engaging with the real world. Upsetting as it is to countenance, the platform’s undergoing something of a resurgence at present and you can probably sell your clients some overpriced strategy work looking at how best to ‘leverage the visibility of LinkedIn with KOLs and thought leaders in key verticals’ in 2020 (for those of you who occasionally wonder what it is that I do for a living, read that last sentence back to yourselves and understand why it is that I teeter weekly on the edge of a professional breakdown).
• Spotify Launching Dedicated Kids’ App: This went live in Ireland this week, and will presumably be a global thing…soon; parents whose algorithmically-curated Spotify playlists have been brutalised by their kids’ insistence on playing the Hey Duggy ‘Stick’ song on repeat will be able to keep their children’s content in a separate app, ensuring a safe listening experience for weans and a nursery rhyme-unclattered algo for the grownups. “The content within Kids is hand-picked by a team of editors, who have nearly 100 years of combined experience curating content for kids. They come from some of the most well-respected brands in this space, including Nickelodeon, Disney, Discovery Kids, and Universal Pictures”; this would suggest that there’s an opportunity here for publishers or brands to get their content inside this walled garden, so maybe worth thinking about.
• Google Adds ‘BERT’ To Search: So last week I included a longread in the section down there which was all about machines’ (in)ability to understand language, which focused on BERT, Google software which is currently the ne plus ultra of the linguistic processing code out there; this week, Google announced that BERT is being added to Google search, meaning the platform will in theory get better at interpreting natural language queries and users will be able to move away from the current keyword-based search protocols towards something more organic and natural-feeling. No immediate action here, I don’t think, but it’s worth being aware of this as there will doubtless be some sort of (boring, complicated, technical) SEO implications down the line (which I will not understand AT ALL).
• Google Brings .new Domains To The Web: This is interesting. I think I mentioned MONTHS ago that Google had added the ability to open its Office-type products (Docs, Sheets, Slides) simply by typing ‘new.slides’ or ‘new’sheets’ into your browser; now it’s extending that to any web app, meaning that anyone can register a ‘.new’ domain which will launch their product immediately. Spotify, Microsoft and others have jumped on this at launch, and it’s the sort of thing you can probably get some light PR from if you follow suit reasonably sharpish. pizza.new to launch your Papa John’s order, shopping.new to start a new Ocado order, that sort of thing. No, it’s not a particularly good idea, fine, but it’s an idea, and it’s 739 and frankly what have YOU come up with so far today? Well quite.
• Wikilytics: This might be common knowledge, but I had no idea this existed (so thanks Shardcore for finding it for me) – this is basically Google Trends but for Wikipedia Pageviews, and as a strategy/planning tool it is GREAT; you can make SO MANY ASSERTIONS using it, and basically make any argument you like for anything at all based on the relevant change in interest in stuff on Wikipedia (because that’s what ‘strategy’ is about, right? Right?). Bookmark this one, it’s really quite useful.

By Ana Yastrezhembovskaya

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY THIS RATHER LOVELY ALBUM OF JAPANESE AMBIENT ELECTRONICA?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE WORST THING ABOUT THE COMING ELECTION IS THE FIVE WEEKS OF MIDDLE-AGED, MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE SHOUTING AT OTHER MIDDLE-AGED, MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE ON TWITTER ABOUT REGISTERING TO VOTE AS THOUGH ANY OF THEIR FOLLOWERS ARE ANYTHING OTHER THAN MIDDLE-AGED MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY REGISTERED TO VOTE, PT.1:

• The Election Tech Handbook: I featured this a few months ago when it launched, but it’s worth re-upping; if you’re interested in getting involved in the upcoming bunfight in any practical fashion, this site collects all sorts of useful things, like policy summary sites, activism projects and, yes, a bunch of tools and resources designed to help ensure young people are registered. Aside from anything else, this is a really good overview of the current state of digital political hackery, whether or not you can be bothered to participate in the horrorshow beyond despoiling your ballot on the 12th.
• Ganimal: NVidia’s latest Gan-based webtoy, this time focused on THE LOVELY CRITTERS! Feed it a photo of your cat, dog, parakeet or bunny (or indeed any animal, though I get an odd feeling that it might struggle a bit with an axolotl), identify where it’s face is, press a button and WATCH it churns out a bunch of other animals based on the source image. Want to know what your cat would look like as a doberman? GREAT!
• The Poo Project: In a year in which the term ‘AI’ has been used with such abandon as to have been rendered largely meaningless, it’s good to know that there are some projects taking the technology seriously and using it to solve some big problems. Witness this website, part of a project which is asking everyone to ‘give a sh1t for science’ and create the world’s largest-ever database of photos of human scat, which will in turn be used to train an AI to recognise and classify human faecal matter against the Bristol stool chart to help speed up the process of classification and diagnosis of conditions from crap samples. As the site points out, this is not a hugely pleasant task for medical professionals, and so the ability to outsource it to the machines to be welcomed – this is a generally good idea, and a smart, practical use of AI, but there is a very small part of me that wonders whether this is an elaborate scheme set up by a tech-savvy coprophile to secure photos of strangers’ crap. Regardless, if you’ve ever wanted a legitimate reason to take a photograph of your own bowel movements, here it is!
• Triller: TIKTOK IS DEAD LONG LIVE TRILLER! TikTok is not, of course, dead, but it’s reached a stage of maturity that means it’s inevitably going to spawn MILLIONS of copycats seeking to steal its crown; Triller is onesuch app, offering a pretty much exact ripoff of TikTok’s signature lipsyncvideoremixculturesharing experience – except Triller’s not made in China, and therefore is not (yet) tarred with accusations of spying or datathievery or any such badness. No idea whatsoever whether this will ever become a thing, but it’s interesting that the current/coming wave of popular apps are so focused on presenting the individual in a performative context; in the future, EVERY kid is going to be a Sylvia Young kid! Now I type it, that’s a genuinely terrifying thought.
• Litterati: This is an interesting idea. Litterati is an app which effectively seeks to gamify the process of picking up rubbish, letting people map where they find litter in their community, set and participate in rubbish collection challenges, and name-and-shame the brands whose waste is most commonly found in their local area. Fine, it might not quite have the ludic appeal of a Pokemon Go! or any of the other identikit Niantic AR offerings, but you’ll be able to feel smug in the knowledge that you’re saving the planet while you do it.There are several rather neat features in here, including a light element of global competition with leaderboards for the best litterpickers worldwide, though whether that’s actually going to be enough to motivate people to wonder round picking up other people’s discarded McDonald’s wrappers is unclear.
• Overview: A website which collects aerial imagery – “Seeing the Earth from a great distance has been proven to stimulate awe, increase desire to collaborate, and foster long-term thinking. We aim to inspire these feelings — commonly referred to as the Overview Effect — through our imagery, products, and collaborations. By embracing the perspective that comes from this vantage point, we believe we can stimulate a new awareness that will lead to a better future for our one and only home.” You can sign up for daily emails containing a single, beautiful image – everything they post can also be bought as a print, which is a nice touch.
• The Argos Book of Dreams: To be honest this really ought to be up there in the worky section, what with this being a piece of marketing for Argos, but, well, I know that loads of you don’t read that bit because it’s (more) boring and crap(per) and not all of you have the sort of jobs that mean you need to pay attention to news about Facebook (what’s that like? How does it feel? Can you help me be more like you?). Argos have put ALL their old catalogues online, meaning that anyone born in the UK between the 70s and now can get an instant hit of pure nostalgia by finding the ones that they spent hours belly-down on a slightly brown carpet poring over; reactions to this on Twitter have ranged from the genuinely heartwarming to the tooth-grindingly smug (honestly, there’s nothing guaranteed to make me hate you more than you saying things like “Ooh, I had everything on that page!” YOU SPOILT LITTLE SH1TBAG (can you tell I never, ever got the Mr Frosty I craved? Can you?)), but absolutely everyone has been charmed by this and you, I promise, will be too. Basically an object lesson in how brands can tap into their history and heritage (although as Rich pointed out they could have made the site a bit shinier).
• The Polaroid Lab: This isn’t so much a Web Curio as it is an actual product that made me boggle a bit. The Polaroid Lab is a new bit of kit from (CAN YOU GUESS??) Polaroid which, seemingly by magic, takes photos from your phone and prints them – not only that, there’s an accompanying app which turns said photos into magical Harry Potter-ish AR-enabled moving images. Honestly, click the link and watch the video and try not to get a bit childishly excited at how cool it all seems; fine, if you’re brutal then perhaps you might question the long-term utility of this, but it’s just SO FUTURE.
• Fango: Disappointingly this is just a proof-of-concept rather than an actual thing, but it’s such a good idea; artist/coder Martin Nadal has come up with the idea for Fango, or, to give it its full name, “the Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google Obfuscator”, a phone charger which, when a phone’s plugged in and charging, will take control of it and perform a series of randomised searches across Google, Facebook and YouTube to add random noise to the signals they’re collecting about your browsing habits and interests. I would really like someone to make these for real, please.
• This X Does Not Exist: You remember at the start of the year when there was that spate of sites churned out which demonstrated how incredibly good computers now are at generating entirely-imagined faces/houses/cars/examples of human genitalia? Of course you do! This site collects all of the different variants on this theme currently out there, from cats to, most remarkably, ceramics; there’s DEFINITELY an art project in actually making the pottery imagined by the machine and then flogging it, should you be a potter in need of inspiration (Web Curios, the premier resource for inspiration-deprived potters worldwide!).
• TooYoo: A sensible-sounding service, this, whose purpose is to offer users the ability to plan their entire digital legacy before they die; the site will let you create a death checklist which you can then keep stored in a ‘digital safe’ based in Switzerland. Upon your death – confirmed via a ‘trusted person’ who you nominate, and validated by a death certificate – the ‘checklist’ is released to those who you’ve specified to receive it; the idea is that this will give them all your clear instructions about how you’d like your death handled, your assets disposed of and your vengeance finally secured (fine, maybe not that last one). This seems like a genuinely good and useful service, though obviously the quality of these services rests on the quality of your executors; if the person you choose as your post-mortem buddy turns out to be a bit of a prick and ignore your wishes, no amount of checklists will help.
• Glitch: Add ‘fashion designer’ to the list of professions apparently set to be rendered otiose by the rise of the AIs. “GLITCH explores whether AI can inspire us to create things that wouldn’t have existed otherwise: an asymmetric dress with a normal sleeve accompanied by a bell sleeve, a shiny sequin dress accompanied by hotpink feathers, a black & white minimalistic dress? GLITCH is founded by computer scientists turned fashion designers Pinar Yanardag and Emily Salvador at MIT. This creative duo shares the passion of using artificial intelligence for creativity as well as increasing representation and participation of women in computer science.” There’s currently only one garment for sale on the site, but there’s 10 or so pieces in total which are ‘coming soon’; anyone who’s ever met me knows that I have all the natural sartorial acumen of Helen Keller, so I can’t really comment on the quality of the designs, but I’ll be fascinated to see what this comes up with over the coming year or so.
• Homestuck 2: For some of you, this will be VERY EXCITING; for others this will mean literally nothing – and if you need the explanation, you’ll almost certainly fall into the latter camp, which makes me wonder slightly why I’m bothering posting this in the first place. Hey ho. Homestuck was a VERY long-running and quite cultish webcomic which began in 2009 and which I honestly can’t begin to explain other than to say that it was VERY EXTREMELY ONLINE and had a definite whiff of Cheeto and Gatorade about it if you know what I mean (of course you know what I mean!); this is the direct sequel to it. Even if you have no idea about the original, or interest in getting into a kilometric, potentially-years-long new narrative, it’s worth a quick look purely for the aesthetic and feel of the whole thing, which is oddly like getting into a time machine back to the Old Web.
• Anyword: There’s apparently a reasonable degree of evidence to suggest that the best approach to getting over an artistic blockage is to just write, regularly, regardless of content or audience (feel free to insert your own cruel, unfeeling joke about Web Curios being the result of my decade-long blockage here, should you feel like being mean); this site is designed to facilitate just that, offering a blank canvas on which to type whatever you like upto 750 words, and it incorporates the Seinfeldian trick of creating ‘streaks’ to motivate you to continue: “The concept is simple: beside your journals, there is a digital calendar, it will put a red circle around the date once you’ve done your writing for the day. After you keep doing the writings everyday for a while, the calendar will create a chain of circles. If you don’t get a circle on a date, then the chain will be broken. So psychologically you will want to keep doing it everyday, to avoid breaking your beautiful chain.” Or at least that’s what they say; regardless, though, this could be a useful way of forcing yourself into daily output.
• Niche Museums: A website celebrating small, odd museums. Annoyingly there’s only one London listing – it’s for the WONDERFUL Novelty Automation Museum, which if you’ve not visited I recommend unreservedly – but if you’re in (or visiting) North America then there is a whole hatful of stuff to plan your road trip around. Who, for example, wouldn’t want to make a pilgrimage to “a working hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento to San Joaquin River Delta System, approximately the size of two football fields. Built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s to study the impact of proposed changes to the delta”? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO!
• Threads of Our Game: A truly obsessional website, collecting illustrations of seemingly every baseball uniform ever worn by any team ever in history. Honestly, this goes back to the early 19thC and includes designs sported by obscure third-rung collegiate teams and I confess that the degree of detail and comprehensiveness scared me rather when I stopped to contemplate its vastness. Still, if you’re into the history of baseball (and WHO ISN’T???) this might prove a diverting little weboubliette.
• Recompose: What would you like to happen to you when you die? I’ve personally always been a big fan of the Parsi custom whereby the deceased is placed on ‘The Tower of Silence’ to be eaten by vultures, but I’m informed that it’s unlikely I’ll be allowed to do that and so perhaps I’ll consider this instead. Recompose is a service designed to offer a different post-mortem solution; instead of burial or cremation (or something I featured in here a few years back, where your body was basically used as a growbag for a tree), in this system you basically get put in a drawer and composted, with the output being a few kilos of soil for your loved ones to then grow tomatoes in or something. It’s not launched yet, but the first site at which they’ll be doing the composting is set to open in Seattle; they seem to think it could become a global thing, and frankly I’m all for it – given the opportunity I am ABSOLUTELY doing this and then giving all my godchildren a tomato planted in ME in my will.
• Speechless: An artwork in the making, Speechless is a project by Yuri Suzuki which is sourcing sounds from around the world to create a collage/installation “integrating audio clips sourced from across the world into a 6-foot spherical sculpture for a fresh take on the traditional globe. Each spot will represent a different part of the world where visitors can place their ears on its surface to hear a corresponding sound from that region.” Anyone can upload a sound to take part, so head on over to the website and upload a clip of whatever audio you fancy (part of me thinks it would be very funny if 4chan got hold of this and simply flooded it with Spongebob audio or the Kylie Jenner ‘Good Morning’ memetic audio, but I imagine Suzuki would be…less pleased.
• Hellvetica: It’s Helvetica, but with unpleasantly and inconsistently-fcuked kerning. You can see an example of it in action in this piece on the Imperica website; I find it genuinely upsetting to look at.
• The Insight Project: I have to say, the word ‘insight’ has lost all meaning for me after a while working in agencyland. I’ve taken to calling everything an ‘insight’, just to fit in. This, thankfully, has nothing to do with the utterly spurious definition applied to the word in adland; instead, it’s a project by game development studio Ninja Theory (responsible for the BAFTA-winning exploration of mental health Hellblade) which is going to explore the role that games and play can have in coping with and treating mental conditions such as anxiety and the like. To quote the project, “We plan a programme of gaming, technological and scientific development that will lead to self-contained, individualised and absorbing game experiences, within which people can become expert at recognising, responding to and ultimately controlling their own unique patterns of physical and physiological signalling that are the driving force behind fear, anxiety and other negative subjective experience. The work will be underpinned by scientific principles to ensure its validity and it will adhere to strict standards of ethics and data management.” – this sounds like a fascinating project, and one worth tracking if you’re interested in games, therapy, mental health and associated issues.
• Phonocut: In many ways, this is a throwback to the early-00s when hipsters were still a thing, the Instagram aesthetic was all Russell Norman and faded coffeeshops and sailor tattoos, and absolutely every tedious prick in the world had an obsession with vinyl; it’s also SUCH an archetypal Kickstarter campaign. MAKE YOUR OWN VINYL ON DEMAND AT HOME!!! Yep, that’s basically it – this is a (2x funded with a fortnight to go) piece of kit that will literally etch a vinyl as you watch, from whatever audio you choose. SO much potential for this – if nothing else, so many wonderful presents you could make for people. There’s something genuinely beautiful (to my mind, at least) about the idea of presenting someone with a one-of-a-kind record which plays the sound of a loved one’s voice reading a letter or a poem or somethimg (Jesus, that was unusually sentimental, sorry about that).
• Reconstructions: Debra Broz is an artist who makes ceramic mashups, taking bits of old, slightly kitch statuary from charity shops and frankensteining them together to occasionally-unpleasant chimerical effect. These are, as you’d expect, unsettling and creepy and GREAT.
• The Open Book Project: This is on Github, and is VERY TECHNICAL, but basically it’s a project to create an open source e-reader – “The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works. It should be extensible, so that a reader with different needs can write code and add accessories that make the book work for them. It should be global, supporting readers of books in all the languages of the world. Most of all, it should be open, so that anyone can take this design as a starting point and use it to build a better book.” It’s a work-in-progress, so I wouldn’t expect to be able to build a Kindle-standard device just yet, but if you’re the sort of person who enjoys a bit of domestic tinkering and fancies a new project through which to hide from the world then this could be just the thing.
• Toast Me: Occasionally Reddit throws up some truly lovely things – such as this subReddit, existing as the antonym to the now-infamous ‘Roast’ sub (in which people post photos of themselves and invite other users to verbally brutalise them in the comments) and which is full of photos of people wanting a bit of a boost; the idea is that rather than the negativity of a roast, this is a place where people share all the positive things they can think to say about the individual in question. Honestly, this is SO CUTE (I don’t know what’s wrong with me this week, sorry, I appear to have developed feelings).

By Beau White

NOW, WHY NOT TIME TRAVEL BACK TO THE 80s WITH THIS REMARKABLE PLAYLIST OF MTV HITS (WHICH IS ON YOUTUBE, MEANING YOU CAN WATCH ALL THE VIDEOS TOO IF YOU LIKE!)?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THE WORST THING ABOUT THE COMING ELECTION IS THE FIVE WEEKS OF MIDDLE-AGED, MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE SHOUTING AT OTHER MIDDLE-AGED, MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE ON TWITTER ABOUT REGISTERING TO VOTE AS THOUGH ANY OF THEIR FOLLOWERS ARE ANYTHING OTHER THAN MIDDLE-AGED MIDDLE-CLASS PEOPLE WHO ARE ALREADY REGISTERED TO VOTE, PT.2:

• Nomad Rest: Digital nomadism is very much an established THING now, and seems unlikely to peter out anytime soon given the increasingly laptop-based nature of most (generic media w4nker) jobs; my friend Alex is currently doing a bit of it himself, working from what I imagine to be a hammock in Taiwan at present (HI ALEX!), and of course everyone in adland is familiar with Faris and Rosie, who seemingly pioneered this sort of lifestyle (at least for our coterie of people) several years ago. Nomad Rest is a resource for people who want to find accomodation across the world that’s suitable for working travellers; places with decent wifi, space to work in, etc etc. Potentially useful if you’re either currently nomad-ing or if you’re contemplating jacking it all in so you can do community management from a Goan beach while subsisting solely on a diet of banana pancakes and having increasingly tedious, empty conversations in pidgin English with a succession of largely-homogenous but very pretty Northern European teenagers with nascent dreadlocks who want to have sincere chatswith you about the ‘vibes’.
• Art or Not: Like the excellent (and very much Art) Twitter account Art Decider, this app will offer you a quick, simple assessment of whether or not something is in fact art. Anything at all – just take a photo, let the app analyse it, and get your verdict. This is very, very silly, but also quite excellent (and also includes a library of actual artworks to peruse as well).
• Manime: Nails…as a service! Actually i don’t think this is a subscription service, but it feels like it could be one; Manime offers bespoke, home delivery stick-on nails, the gimmick being that they will create them to fit EXACTLY based on a photo you submit of your fingers; to be honest I had never thought that nails were so unique in size and positioning to require this degree of personalisation, but, well, I’ve never worn stick-on nails. There are loads of designs to choose from, and I can imagine this becoming a genuinely big business over time (which means it will inevitably fold within a year – sorry lads); US only, though, sorry anglonailfans.
• Caulculus Made ‘Easy’: Fine, those are my inverted commas around ‘Easy’ in the title; they might say it’s easy, but calculus was the point when I realised that there was very much a hard limit to my ability to understand maths and that I had very much reached it. Still, if you or someone you know needs to learn what it is and how it works, this site – which is basically just an HTML version of an old textbook, fine – might be useful. I still don’t buy the ‘easy’ bit though.
• Goodnessbot: Thank GOD – I thought I was losing my cycnism, but then I saw this and scoffed so hard I nearly choked, so I think I’m going to be OK. Goodnessbot is a project (for some reason associated with Monica Lewsinsky) which seeks to redress some of the BAD STUFF on Twitter; here’s the spiel: “Whenever you see a rude or abusive tweet, simply reply to it with “@GoodnessBot” and I’ll magically turn it into a positive tweet. Ta-da! Just like that you’ve made Twitter a kinder place.” Leaving aside the question of whether a procession of positive bromides delivered automatically by an unthinking, unfeeling machine can be considered to be ameliorating the world in any way, this is more fun than I’d expected, not least because the way it works makes it look a bit like anyone invoking it has a really, really weedy mate fighting their battles for them.
• Mundane Hallowe’en: For a few years now in Japan there’s been a trend of people doing ‘mundane’ Hallowe’en costumes – dressing up as things like ‘commuter who forgot to put sugar in their coffee’, or ‘person nodding off on the subway’, you get the idea. This is a Twitter thread collecting some of the best examples from this year; lots of these don’t have English explainer text, so half the fun is trying to guess the exact look that’s being recreated. Special shout out to the person who did ‘person who faceswapped themselves with the mermaid on a Starbucks cup”; near-perfect.
• The Bedbug Registry: A place where people who’ve been bitten by bedbugs in the US can report it, letting anyone else check whether the hotel they’re about to book is likely to leave them with unpleasant welts. You may not think this is useful, but if you don’t then you’ve probably never had bedbugs.
• Nannyfinder: There’s a frankly ridiculous number of people in my social circle who either have three kids or who appear to be punting towards that number – JESUS CHRIST ALIVE, DO YOU WANT YOUR LIFE TO BECOME NOTHING THAN AN EXERCISE IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND GANTT-CHART MAINTENANCE??? – and who as a result are increasingly in the market for childcare assistance. This looks like a useful service (obviously untested with me not having progeny) which is designed to let people find others in their area who might have similar needs and who might be able or willing to share the cost of a nanny with – according to the blurb, “In a nanny share, instead of having their own nanny, the children of two local families are looked after by one nanny at the same time. This means parents save around 30% on the normal cost of a nanny, the nanny gets paid around 25% more, and the children get to spend time together.” Which, in theory, sounds like everyone wins – unless, of course, the other children are feral little sh1tbags (not your kids though).
• Sound Control Software: This is potentially LOADS of fun, and certainly worth a look if you dabble in coding and playing around building digital stuff: “Sound Control is free software that can be used by anyone to create new musical instruments using their choice of movements, sensed with a variety of off-the-shelf devices (including webcam, Leap Motion, micro:bit, mouse, microphone, etc.). Sound Control uses machine learning to enable users to create new musical instruments by demonstrating examples of motions and sounds, so no programming or musical expertise is necessary! These new instruments can be used to play and manipulate musical material, which can be either new material recorded by users or taken from third-party sample libraries.” Go and play with this, it sounds ace.
• Slow Watches: Horophiles really do puzzle me – those men (inevitably men) who spend tens of thousands on massive, rare, planet-sized timepieces which they inevitably then don’t wear but instead keep in presentation boxes, occasionally taking them out to reverentially buff their bezels (Gary Shteyngart’s latest novel features just such a man as its protagonist, should you care). Still, if someone in your life is in the market for a new STATEMENT TIMEPIECE then perhaps you might want to consider one of these; slow watches are special by dint of their only having one hand, which moves in a 24h rather than a 12h rotation; these aren’t cheap, but I can imagine that a certain type of person (*cough*plannersandstrategistsand’creatives’*cough*) might be quite into them.
• The Bilbcast: A podcast which features the sound of a cat purring. Nothing else. If you work for Pedigree Petfoods then a) why have you ignore all of the ideas I’ve flagged to you in here over the past decade you BASTARDS; and b) you really ought to get on this with some sponsorship.
• Resistory: On the one hand, this is a really interesting-looking game (currently in development) which is designed to facilitate thoughts and discussions amongst its players about issues of power and representation in (North American) society, through roleplaying mechanics. On the other hand, this also reads like literally every single over-the-top parody of left-wing identity politics ever written; I mean, really, listen: “Resistory is history as it happens: those with a lived story to tell attempt to inspire the nation to provide equity to marginalized populations, only to find their efforts thwarted by the privileged majority, aiming to squash their stories and hold onto the imbalance of power…Build your in-game character from 24 identity categories: Nationality, Assigned Sex, Race, Legal Name, Ability, Height, Weight, Age, Health, Class, Parent/Guardian, Language, Religion, Trauma, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, Politics, Education, Employment, Relationship Status, Dependents, Service, and Recreation…The competitive scenarios on each Resistory card include writing a headline, handling hacked emails, designing a logo, coming up with a hot take, pulling off a publicity stunt, managing a scandal, hosting a talk show, and even producing a campaign video.” Still, regardless, if you’re interested in how games can be used as educative tools or means of intellectual exploration, this is very much worth a look.
• One-Page Dungeon Generator: A tool to generate smol dungeons for use in D&D. Hit ‘enter’ to churn out a new one; this is very cool (in a very, very geeky sort of way), especially the cute little ‘instances’ it peppers the maps with for additional storytelling prompts.
• Editorial.New: A font – not a hugely remarkable one, although it is nice, but one which is presented on a genuinely GREAT website; lovely design, this.
• Photos in Super Mario Galaxy: Dan Cordero is a wedding photographer, according to his website; I have literally no idea whatsoever why said website contains a whole section dedicated to photos that Dan has taken while playing Super Mario Galaxy, but, well, he has! Having checked his bio, he’s based in Tulum, Mexico, so I imagine he wanted a break from snapping identikit beach ceremonies populated by doughy Americans.
• Hebei Pangzai: The internet has gifted us many things, but is there anything better than the realisation that there are some people out there with some very, very bizarre talents? NO THERE IS NOT! Hebei Pangzai (the name translates as ‘Little Fatty’ apparently) got famous on TikTok but has now started crossposting to Twitter; you might not think that videos of a portly Chinese guy chugging unconscionable quantities of booze and looking strangely cool whilst doing so would be the most compelling content you’d see all week but, well, here we are. BONUS FATTY CONTENT – an interview with the man, who seems pleasingly bemused by his relative fame.
• Pwnagotchi: I like this very much indeed. Basically this is a hackertoy, designed to help anyone crack wifi passwords, wherever they are; the cute face really makes this, imho.
• The Orgasm Sound Library: This is a project by a company which makes fancy sextoys, but which has decided as part of its wider commitment to exploring sex and sexuality to create a repository of audio recordings of the female orgasm, ostensibly to showcase the range of ways in which people express pleasure and to educate (probably men) on what a female orgasm actually sounds like. What this means in website terms is a slightly clunky but rather wonderful archive of orgasm sounds which you can browse and listen to at your leisure. Each orgasm has an accompanying visualisation, which you can download and keep should you find it pleasing (the sounds are also available to download). The BEST thing about this is the file descriptions and the hashtags, imho; I just listened to “RECEVOIR LE PLAISIR ANAL #Male stranger #Deep #Anal #Anus #Hot #Convenient #Erotic #Sensual #Carnal #Relief #Bedroom #Shivering #Out of control #Ecstasy #Scheduled #Enjoyment #Spicy #Erotic”, which is ABSOLUTELY the set of hashtags I am usingh when I post this on LinkedIn in a couple of hours.
• Werewolf Stories: Or, to give it its full title, “A Series of Choose Your Own Adventure Stories Where No Matter What You Choose You Are Immediately Killed by a Werewolf”. These are not only seasonally-appropriate, but also very, very funny – enjoy!

By Nishida Tadashige

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THE EIGHTH ANNUAL HALLOWE’EN MIX OF HIPHOP AND ELECTRONICA AND OTHER STUFF FROM RL GRIME!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The IKEA Tarot: You may have seen this mentioned in the advermarketingPRsphere over the past few weeks, but this is the actual site and the full set. LOVELY, and contains proper explanations to the thinking behind each card.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• 90s Anxiety: “An acute appreciation of elegance, sophistication and a distinctive appearance.” SO MANY GREAT HAIRCUTS AND OUTFITS! Also, is it justr me or do all these photos give off a faintly sleazy vibe? Have the entire 90s now basically been tarnished in light of our newly-acquired sensibilities around what is and isn’t ok (and all the sexual predation and pedoing)?
• Zizi Drag: I don’t really understand this, but it freaks me out quite a lot and so OBVIOUSLY it merits inclusion. The strapline to this reads “London’s first AI drag kid” but this doesn’t quite capture the odd, GAN-ish horror of the images it’s churning out. Lovely/horrid.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The Fight in Catalunya: Subtitled ‘an account from the frontlines’, this is an interesting from-the-ground piece of reportage on the recent protests in Spain, focusing less on the whys and wherefores and more on the practical experience of what it’s been like in the heart of the protests. Regardless of your position on this particular protest, it’s really interesting to read something from someone who feels so passionately about the cause they’re fighting for and who are practically involved on the frontline; it’s also does a good job of communicating the anger felt by so many Catalans at their (as they see it) political persecution.
• Chile: The second piece about popular protest in this week’s longreads, this is a really decent explainer of what’s currently happening in Chile, why it’s happening, and why it wasn’t really about the cost of a tube ride at all. I’m sure it’s true that at any given moment there are popular protests and uprisings happening in a fairly constant percentage of the world’s countries, but it does rather feel like we’re living something of a moment in terms of people being, well, a bit fed up with stuff. This is a good article, though I personally could have done without the use of that bloody Joker film as a framing device (though in fairness it’s one Chileans have seemingly embraced).
• The Trouble With Chocolate: Look, I don’t mean to be a downer, but it turns out that chocolate is…problematic. This is a fascinating article that taught me lots that I didn’t know, namely the extent to which the confectionary industry (specifically chocolate production) contributes to deforestation, which in turn drives major environmental and social issues across (mainly) Africa. I think this stuff is HUGELY important to share and speak about; it’s stories like this that start to help develop an holistic (sorry) picture of exactly how literally EVERYTHING WE DO is fcuking the planet and the cups and straws are very much the tip of the unpleasantly large iceberg. THE ONLY WAY TO PRACTICALLY HELP THE PLANET IS TO CONSUME LESS. It’s quite a simple message, really, but unfortunately the entire capitalist superstructure is designed to make us consume more, so, well, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• The WSJ on Influencers: If you do the sort of job where you have to vaguely know or care what influencers are and how to make use of them, then this article will tell you very little you don’ty already know; I thought it notable, though, for the fact that it might be a shark jumping moment for the influencer grift. If even the Wall Street Journal is reporting on the fact that the whole racket is a bit shady and possibly all built on lies, then perhaps the end is nigh; certainly, expect those of your clients who read the big papers to start asking awkward questions about exactly what the point of all this stuff is at some point in 2020.
• The Loneliness of Instagram: By contrast to the last one, this piece made me think about Insta in a way I hadn’t before. The piece focuses on the particular, peculiar aesthetic of the modern female Instasleb, which is increasingly characterised by a life lived alone; photos tend to be of themselves in their apartments, perhaps creatively-arranged but basically speaking to the ISOLATION AND DISCONNECT OF MODERN LIVING and all that jazz. I particularly liked the characterisation of the domestic bubble as part safe space, part studio space, and the idea that a degree of domestic isolation was almost a necessary part of the content creation and aesthetic compact that Insta (and the marketplace of attention) demands.
• How The Hypebeast Replaced The Hipster: I very much enjoyed this, not least because it seems to almost-perfectly describe about 70% of the people who make up Young Trendy Journalist Twitter (you know who you are, lads). This describes the evolution of the hipster into the hypebeast, along with a decent primer as to what the signifiers of this latter evolution are (Aesop soap, expensive-but-normcoreish clothes, and tasteful domestic accessories); take a moment to think of the planning and creative department in YOUR agency and see how many of these boxes they tick!
• Ok, Boomer!: This has been EVERYWHERE this week, but in case you either missed it or didn’t read the source material, here’s the original article highlighting the growing antagonistic rift between Gen-Z and ‘boomers’ (which, I get the impression, simply means ‘anyone over about 35 as seen by anyone under-23’, but which technically ought to refer to people in their…mid-50s to mid-60s, I think?) and how ‘Ok Boomer!’ as a clapback/kiss-off response has achieved memetic lightspeed. I give it less than a week before this gets used in ‘brandter’ by Wendy’s and the whole thing is killed stone dead.
• Iceland and Overtourism: A genuinely great piece of travel writing, exploring the idea of overtourism as a function of the Instagrammification of everything, specifically through the prism of Iceland. It’s a really smart essay, encompassing travel culture in general, Iceland in particular, and the broad questions that arise about ‘real’ experiences and authenticity when being a tourist (and the extent to which these are things that should even be aspirations when we travel).
• Pivot To Burnout: This very much made me feel old, I have to say. The piece profiles a company called ‘Pattern’, which grew out of uber-trendy brand and marketing consultancy Gin Lane, which for a while did the launch of basically every single millennial-friendly ‘X as a service’ brand out there (the mattresses are THEIR FAULT) and as such basically defined the aesthetic for about a three year period of marketing at young people. Then they decided that they weren’t happy doing that, and flipped the company to become Pattern, whose goal is to…well, it’s a bit muddled actually, but seemingly to provide products and services which exist not only as physical objects or useful things, but also to help people manage their feelings of stress and burnout and anxiety and…and I honestly don’t understand what the everliving fcuk this has to do with them selling expensive cookware. Can someone explain what these people are trying to do and why?
• Hippie Living: An article that neatly reinforces every single stereotype and prejudice you will already have about people who live in LA and are into ‘wellness’, this is a fascinating picture of a communal living setup for the EXTREMELY YOGIC, where people pay $1000 a month to live in a dormitory with 100-odd other wellnessmongs; you’re not allowed to have sex onsite, quiet hours from 10pm, a blanket ban on snoozing your alarm (I’m not joking), and a rolling programme of activities including ninety-four types of Bikram yoga (probably) and gong baths (actually). It’s a pretty straight piece, doesn’t really mock the people or the place, and, my inevitable snark and scepticism aside, makes it sound like a not-totally-awful idea; that said, though, just read this: “This summer it hosted a “star energy healing” event described as suitable for both beginners and experts of safe interdimensional travel. “Bring your crystals and water,” read the flier.”
• Lana Del Rey and Authenticity: The reappraisal of Lana Del Rey, as documented in this piece, is fascinating to me; from being derided as a manufactured industry creation, brute-forced into the collective consciousness by a lot of money and some savvy marketing, to her current status as tortured chronicler of modern trash Americana. This article does a good job of explaining why this might be – it’s very much worth reading, in part as a decent primer on BIG CULTURAL QUESTIONS AND TRENDS, but also for this observation which I am totally stealing: “Lana Del Rey is made up, and it is precisely what makes her great. A real person could never contain all the ideas that a fictional persona can.”
• Hot Ones: The YouTube chatshow Hot Ones (in which famouses eat very hot wings and answer questions about themselves) is one of those things I know a reasonable amount about despite never having actually experienced the show in question (see also: Joe Rogan, Fleabag and, to my distress, My Little Pony). This piece seeks to explain its remarkable popularity, but more than that is a really interesting look at how to make a violently successful content format; there’s a lot of detail in here about the considerations they made when establishing the format, which is useful to anyone thinking about embarking on their own CONTENT CREATION JOURNEY (I just had a small mental flash of a child, about 8 years old, earnestly telling a careers advisor that they just want to be the best content creator they can be, and, reader, the last remaining motes of my soul just evaporated).
• Conde Naste: You wait ten years for Web Curios to feature Conde Naste and then you get it twice in two weeks – WHAT ARE THE ODDS? Whilst last week was a profile of the founder, this is a (superb, in-depth) portrait of the modern business, focused inevitably on Anna Wintour, whose gravity tends to warp the fabric of any article she’s mentioned in tbh, but who is always a fascinating subject to profile. If you’re interested in fashion (specifically, the business thereof), publishing or modern media, this is a great read.
• The War of Tim Vs Tom: One of two great, silly essays this week about great, silly web culture. Did you know that there is a subReddit celebrating the name ‘Tom’ and all ‘Toms’ worldwide? Did you know that there was a parallel sub dedicated to lauding the glory of the name ‘Tim’ and all ‘Tims’ worldwide? Did you know that they had been AT WAR with each other? You probably did not, so click the link and educate yourself on one of the greatest conflicts of modern times. This is obviously very, very dumb, but it’s worth reading for the creeping sense that this is a very elaborate collaborative art project that you’re simply not quite getting. Do you think that Sir Tim Berners Lee could ever have envisaged that his creation would be used for stuff like this?
• Meet The Milk: One year at secondary school, some people I knew decided it would be interesting to see what happened if they hid a sealed container of p1ss in the back of one of the cupboards of the history classroom over the Summer holidays (turns out, if the weather’s hot – as indeed it was that year – the p1ss sort of just reduces down to a quite remarkable black sludge that smells, honestly, like nothing else on earth – I’m telling you this so you never have to undertake this line of scientific enquiry yourselves; you can thank me later). This is basically that story, but replace “a bunch of adolescent boys at a sh1tty comprehensivein Swindon” with “some of the world’s leading minds at MIT” and “p1ss” with “milk”. This is, honestly, great, I promise, and not gross at all (unlike that anecodote, which I’m now starting to think perhaps I shouldn’t have shared).
• Minecraft Shrek Larping: I have never played Minecraft, ever, and I am not hugely interested in the mechanics of it overall BUT this story about a group of friends messing around in the game is literally the most perfect evocation of how great games can be, and how the sort of virtual playground exemplified by Minecraft affords the most incredible opportunities for storytelling and worldbuilding. Honestly, this is genuinely funny and quite brilliantly surreal – Nate Crowley, the author, is a very, very funny writer indeed who you should all be following on Twitter if you’re not already. Even if you’re not into games this is, I promise, worth your time.
• Fermenting Culture: A brilliant piece of writing, going into remarkable depth about how Noma discovered and developed the fermenting obsession which came to characterise its cuisine and which, as a result, has been one of the most formative influences on restaurant and food culture in the West of the past decade. This is SO interesting, both on the technical side of fermentation as a practice, but also the philosophy (I know, I know, but I promise it’s better than that) that it embodies. If you like food and cooking, you must read this.
• I’m 72; So What?: One of the best pieces of writing about what it is like to age, from a female perspective, that I’ve read in a while; in it, Catherine Texier explains why her experience of being 72 doesn’t feel like that traditionally expected by society, and how she deals with the constant and pernicious ageism which infects pretty much every aspect of society. There’s some interesting stuff in here, too, about the odd way in which, pace the ‘Ok Boomer’ piece up there, there’s a sense that, for all the tolerance and embracing of diversity espoused by the young, that the old are the one demographic to whom they don’t always seem to want to extend the courtesy of respect.
• Autopsy: Before you click, know that this is a very dispassionate account of what it’s like to perform a forensic autopsy on the victim of a stabbing, and that it includes quite a lot of large, hi-res photos of the stabbed corpse in question. You see wounds, basically, and fat, and just quite a lot of corpse in general. As long as you’re ok with that, this is a brilliant piece of writing (translated from the original Danish) – whether it’s a function of the translation or a deliberate stylistic choice by the author, there’s a cold precision to the writing which perfectly mirrors the subject matter.
• The Great American Press Release: An essay on blackness in America, and the steps that black people – in this essay, particularly men – are required to take to make a mostly white world a place they can live. “Over the years, I had adapted my look—adapted my whole life really—to reduce the number and variety of my police encounters. I stopped tinting my windows. I removed my killer sound system. Red cars were out, as were aftermarket sweeteners like spoilers or flashy rims. I kept my hair high and tight or shaved. No dreads, no braids, no cornrows. Nothing to draw an officer like a kitten to catnip. I got a college degree. First in my family. Became a lawyer. First in my family. I wished to be invisible to the hungry gazes of police officers—first in my family there, too. But my parents always said I was prone to fancy.” Beautifully-written.
• The 2010s Broke Our Sense of Time: Finally this week in the longreads, Katherine Miller of Buzzfeed looks back at the decade that was, and how it’s been characterised by a sort of temporal-flattening which has conditioned our reaction to media, news, culture and each other like little else. Do we call this post-post-postmodernism? Is this the real gift of the web, this decoupling from temporality and a shift towards an always-on existence? Is this…ok? Christ knows, but it’s interesting asking the questions. I have thought about this a LOT since I read it last weekend, which at the very least suggests it might be worth a look.

By Joanna Concejo

AND NOW…ACTUALLY THIS WEEK THERE ARE NO MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS I’M AFRAID AS I HAD SOMETHING OF A SOURCING ISSUE BUT NEVER FEAR NORMAL SERVICE INSOFAR AS THAT IS EVEN A THING WILL RESUME NEXT WEEK AND SO I’LL SIGN OFF HERE WITH MY NOW-TRADITIONAL BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE HAPPY NOVEMBER ENJOY THE FIREWORKS AND BE SAFE AND WRAP UP WARM AND MAYBE CONSIDER SPENDING SUNDAY MAKING WARMING STEWS OR SOMETHING BYE BYE I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!!!

On the one hand, no one wants an election (you may think you do, but you really don’t). On the other, THIS COULD BE OUR CHANCE TO ACTUALLY MAKE HIM THE LEAST-SUCCESSFUL PRIME MINISTER IN HISTORY. Of course, so doing would mean finding someone else worth voting for, which at the moment looks a touch problematic to be honest. 

Yes, that’s right, we’re in PRE-ELECTION FEVER! Distinguishable from ACTUAL ELECTION FEVER by the absence of any actual election on the horizon, and the creeping feeling that this is all an elaborate bluff to distract us from the fact that NOTHING IS HAPPENING! Are you excited? I’M EXCITED!

I am not, of course, excited; I haven’t in fact been excited since approximately 2003, frankly. I am bored, tired, and increasingly of the opinion that, honestly, maybe climate catastrophe’s actually not that bad a thing after all. Shall we just call it quits, kids? Shall we just, well, stop?

But then, of course, I think of all the websites out there to scour and catalogue, all the weird and slightly-creepy artworks and kickstarters and fetish sites to share with you, all the words that would go unwritten and, honestly, I realise that it’s my OBLIGATION to keep doing this for as long as I’m capable, if only to keep distracting the rest of you from the slow, ineluctable entropy of everything (yes, that’s right, this is a PUBLIC SERVICE, what of it?). 

So come with me as we once again avert our gazes from the bloody, toothy mess that is meatspace and instead turn our square eyes back towards our magical, promise-filled screens. Out there it’s all meat and gristle and hatred, whereas in here…well, it’s also all meat and gristle and hatred, frankly, but at least it’s the digital twin rather than the real thing.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios and, as ever, you’ll be glad when it’s over.  

By Chris Austin

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS NEW MIX COMPILED BY FRANK OCEAN!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF THE WORST THAT HAPPENS IS A LOT OF GAGS ABOUT HIS DEAD EYES AND CRAP HAIRCUT THEN MARK ZUCKERBERG GOT OFF PRETTY LIGHTLY THIS WEEK TBQHWY:

• Facebook Continues To Preserve Democracy!: No matter that the boss isn’t exactly clear on why a Nazi and a Nazi politician ought to be treated differently on his platform; they are CLEANING UP THE SWAMP! Sorry; it’s just quite hard not to jump on the ‘let’s kick Mark!’ bandwagon, even when it’s your bandwagon and you’ve been riding it for years and frankly you’re starting to get a bit irritated at how crowded it’s getting with all these bloody arrivistes hopping on at any opportunity – most of the stuff in here is perfectly sensible. This post summarises a slew of new initiatives being undertaken by FB (across both it and Insta) to help minimise chicanery around the US elections in 2020; these include greater transparency around who owns or administers Pages, clearer information about political adverts (where they appeared, better breakdown of overall vs regional spend, etc), and more prominent flagging of posts sharing stories that have been debunked by third-party fact-checkers. This is all generally Good Stuff – and, regardless of the fact that it’s sloooooowly being introduced in the US with no details of how long it will take to expand more widely, this is all worth knowing about, as there’s no way this isn’t going to become standard procedure worldwide. The stuff about Page transparency is most interesting, imho; the eventual requirement for all Pages to be linked to a registered business or individual, and for this to be public, would, if I’m understanding it correctly and if it becomes universal, be a hugely significant change.
• Facebook Protect: Announced in tandem with the above slew of electoral safeguards (ha!), Facebook Protect is a programme of measures designed specifically to help politicians and adjacent actors secure their Facebook / Instagram presences against outside interference; this “offers candidates, elected officials, federal and state departments and agencies, and party committees, as well as their staff, a way to further secure their accounts. By enrolling, we’ll help these accounts (1) adopt stronger account security protections, like two-factor authentication, and (2) monitor for potential hacking threats”. Which, again, is smart and sensible, will almost certainly be rolled out more widely in 2020, and hopefully means that the governing classes won’t be able to roll out the tedious, barely-believable ‘I was hacked!’ excuse next time they drunkenly share close-up photography of their various mucous membranes with a stranger.
• Facebook Adds Search Results to Standard Ad Placements: I could explain this but, honestly, you don’t need me to: “All new ad campaigns using Automatic Placements will automatically include the Facebook Search Results placement. You can also manually select the placement when setting up your campaign. Once you opt-in, ads will be eligible to appear on search result pages which includes general search and Marketplace search – and will both respect the audience targeting of the campaign and be contextually relevant to a limited set of English and Spanish search terms.” DO YOU SEE? Good!
• Facebook Testing Ads In The Group Tab Feed: It’s almost advertising to Groups, but not quite! FB is slowly starting to experiment with flooding one of its few as-yet-untouched pieces of real estate with ads, as some advertisers are being offered the opportunity to place their ads in the Groups tab of the FB app. This doesn’t currently afford said advertisers the ability to target based on what Groups people are members of, but, well, give it time.
• Facebook Adds Restrictions To AR Lenses: The Facebook SparkAR studio – the bit where you can make your own filters and lenses for FB, Insta et al – this week announced that it was launching a few restrictions on what users can create on the platform; specifically, filters which are ‘associated with plastic surgery’. Exactly how far this extends is…unclear; whilst this is obviously designed to limit the ability of devs to create those weird apps which filter people to look like they’re being fitted for a facelift or, even more weird, like they’ve just had one (complete with technicolour bruising and post-op swelling, because WHY NOT?!), it’s not immediately apparent as to whether this would kibosh anything that offers exaggerated CG-style facemodding, or even any ‘lip filler preview’-type lenses. Worth being aware of if you’re thinking about creating anything in SparkAR which involves facial deformation, however ostensibly benign.
• Insta Testing Better Account Cleaning Features: This is likely to do not-great things for branded Insta accounts. The platform’s apparently testing the ability for users to group the Insta accounts they follow, along lines like ‘least interacted with’ and ‘most shown in feed’; you’d imagine that many of the ‘least interacted with’ will be corporate Instas BECAUSE NOONE WANTS TO INTERACT WITH A BUS COMPANY’S FCUKING INSTAGRAM FFS, and that this feature might see quite a few of them getting unfollowed as a general hygiene thing.
• It’s Now Even Harder To Instastalk: Users attempting to browse Instagram on desktop will now have to be logged in to access or view anything more than a very minimal selection of a feed’s content, meaning…well, meaning not very much, I don’t think, other than a slightly-annoying additional step to go through when doing desk research and, in all probability, an even worse experience when trying to use any sort of social media analytics software on the fcuking platform.
• Twitter’s Q3 Earnings: It’s not particularly great news! More users (but still, really, not very many) and falling ad revenue, and Nazis (they don’t mention the Nazis, but they’re always there)! Still, as I feel occasionally compelled to point out, until someone invents a better and faster way for people to share news – you may scoff, but whatever you think of Twitter it really is unparalleled for this – then it is unkillable (please note that this is not the same as ‘a great and profitable business’, just that there are a few industries for which it’s basically infrastructural at this point and that’s not a bad position to be in).
• Better Employee Engagement Stuff on LinkedIn: Harass your staff into sharing your company’s THRILLING UPDATES on the world’s worst platform! “With Employee Notifications, Page Admins can now alert employees of important posts, which employees can then engage with or share to their LinkedIn network. This makes it easy for your employees to share your organization’s content and amplify your messages.” So not only do you now have to ignore the email from marketing asking you to PLEASE SHARE the CEO’s doubtless-inspirational essay about how “creativity is at the heart of everything the business believes in” (fancy that!), you have to ignore a nagging notification on LinkedIn too! There’s some other stuff in here about Page Admins now also having the ability to give badges and ‘kudos’ to particularly high-performing wageslaves within the company, too, which I’m sure will make not getting a bonus this year easier to swallow.
• Snap’s Q3 Earnings: It’s surprisingly OK news! More users! More ad revenue! A decent AR platform! Maybe it’s all going to be ok!
• Snap Launches Dynamic Ads Offering: Basically it’s exactly the same as the dynamic inventory ads you can already run on the big platforms: “With Dynamic Ads, advertisers can now automatically create ads in real time based on extensive product catalogs that may contain hundreds of thousands of products. These ads are then served to Snapchat users based on their interests using a variety of templates provided by Snap.” So expect to see the same bullsh1t Wish.com ads you see all over Facebook and Insta on Snap as well, as we continue to explore the cognitive dissonance inherent in ‘really wanting to save the planet’ and simultaneously ‘really wanting to buy whatever pointless crap we’re fed on the internet regardless of the fact it’s all made of plastic, produced under questionable labour conditions and shipped from the other side of the world because look it’s just so FUNNY!!!1111eleventy’.
• Twitch Testing Watch Parties: Amazon’s usually pretty quiet about its link to Twitch – there’s relatively minimal interlinking between the platforms, at least to the casual observer – but this creates a more explicit connection, with the news that streamers will (probably) soon be able to livestream films and TV shows for ‘watch parties’ with their audiences, using Prime Video as the delivery mechanism. This is, I think, very smart indeed, and the sort of thing that you probably ought to be aware of if you work in entertainment marketing or somesuch (HELLO TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN OSTERLEY!).
• The Latest We Are Social Global Statistical Jamboree: It’s that time of year again, when the diligent people at the We Are Social workhouse churn out another of their comprehensive compilations of statistics about global s*c**l m*d** usage. Want a vaguely-plausible-sounding figure for the number of people using Insta in Tuvalu? GREAT! As ever, perfect for constructing whichever straw man argument you fancy as to why your client MUST pay you five figures for a ‘TikTok Strategy’.

By Christian Schmidt

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY SOME SPARSE ELECTRONICA MIXED BY ANDREY ZOTS?

THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.1:

• Stealing Ur Feelings: It feels – perhaps unfairly; SORRY to all the creators of excellent interactive web experiences whose work I am unfairly dismissing here – that there’s been a bit of a dropoff in innovative webwork in the past 18m or so; not that I’ve not seen loads of interesting or beautifully-made work, more that it’s been a while since I’ve seen something which makes me think ‘ooh, I’ve not seen that before’. Which is why this pleased me so much – it’s, I think, something I’ve never seen before. Built in partnership with Mozilla, this is a video all about how facial recognition tech is being used by apps and websites without us necessarily being fully aware of what it’s doing or how it’s working, and does an excellent job of explaining how the tech can be implemented and to what ends; what’s EXCITING about it is the way it dynamically pulls in facial recognition information from your webcam, changing elements within the film based on your reaction to them. I have NO idea how this is compiling it all on the fly, but it’s very, very impressive. Also, MAN I look tired and baggy of face this morning. FFS, WEBCAM!
• Skin On: You will, I am sure, have seen this story somewhere this week – it was even in a NIB in the Metro ffs – but it’s worth clicking on the actual creator’s website to get the full horror. Skin On is a project by technologist/designer Marc Teyssier, which involved him creating an artificial ‘skin’ for his phone, which he was in turn then able to use as a new gestural control interface. Rather than tapping, stroking or swiping the screen, Teyssier found himself instead able to pinch, tickle, tug and prod his newly-epidermised device to control it, in the most Existenz-mimicking thing I’ve ever seen in real life. Honestly, you HAVE to watch the video; there’s something so amazingly, viscerally-unpleasant about the ‘skin’ – I think because it reminds me of how sticky toys look after you’ve lost them under the bed for 6 months and then they emerge all befluffed and unsticky and weirdly old and flabby – but also so incredibly satisfying about the tactility introduced by the fauxflesh. Wonderful, horrible, and the sort of thing that I guarantee at least one person will discover a new and moderately-disturbing fetish as a result of.
• Digital Wellbeing Experiments: It’s not even the sort of thing you can call ‘bleakly ironic’ anymore, really; welcome to the latest suite of tools designed to help us cope with the horrors of technology, designed by…one of the creators of the horrors of technology!! This selection of ‘Experiments’ by Google are small pieces of code which can be downloaded – or fiddled with, as it’s all Open Source – designed to help us manage our digital distractions better. So, for example, there’s one which lets you select a variety of different settings for your device to limit notifications and alerts to selected apps, or something which gently shows you how many times you’ve unlocked your phone in the past 24h, or one which lets a group of people all set a collective lock on their phones to ensure they all STAY IN THE MOMENT TOGETHER… Cynicism aside (ha! ONLY JOKING), these are all very smart pieces of design (as you would expect), and there are some small-but-wonderful germs of ideas in here. I just sort-of wish this wasn’t done by Google.
• Bruno Simon: Right, developers – RAISE YOUR GAMES. This is the new high watermark for ‘ridiculously flashy and overdesigned CV/portfolio websites’ in 2019 and beyond; take a bow, Bruno Simon, because this is just superb. It’s one of those ‘website that’s also an interactive experience’ things, specifically an interactive experience in which you drive a little RC car around an isometric-3d environment complete with RAMPS and JUMPS and STUNTS and, weirdly, BOWLING. Oh, yes, you can see Simon’s work and CV and stuff, should you so desire, but frankly it’s the jumps that will keep you interested. Hire this person, just so you can get them to add a 360-degree loop-the-loop to this.
• The White Tower: If you’ve ever wanted to explore a comprehensive history of the constructivist movement in architecture and design and its specific relevance to the construction of the water tower of Uralmash in Yekaterinburg, Russia, then this will please you no end. If, on the other hand, you’ve never wanted that, trust me when I say that you will find this interesting regardless. There’s a VR version to experience for those of you with access to the kit, but for everyone else this is a genuinely fascinating piece of arthistoricalarchitecturaldesignhistorystorytelling, with some nice webwork and design flourishes thrown in.
• Flipfit: Has anyone ever made the ‘social shopping’ thing work as a business yet? I mean in a platform sense rather than just ‘managing to sell stuff using socials’ sense – I don’t think I can recall anything having any sort of significant breakout success, but perhaps Flipfit will be the exception. This doesn’t feel like its hugely different from ideas I’ve seen before, or indeed like it’s economically sustainable, but, well, I am pretty much the opposite of a businessperson, so. The idea is that users shop through Flipfit, get outfits sent to them, then post photos of the clothes and get their followers to vote on what to keep, with the initial buyer able to return all the stuff they don’t want; users to attract new users to the platform will earn credit within the app, as will users who vote on other users’ looks – obviously designed to get people onboard fast (as is the app’s pretty aggressive influencer engagement programme), but equally obviously the sort of customer acquisition strategy that’s very much not financially sustainable (unless Softbank is backing them, of course). Oh, there’s a social justice element to it to, with users able to use the platform to return old clothes to be donated to charitable causes, which is a nice touch. I may be wrong, though, but I can’t see any way in hell that this can become a sustainable proposition (watch as it becomes Amazon by 2025).
• Quick AI Avatars: To be clear – this is not ‘AI’, and the ‘quick’ bit is, well, questionable. Still, though, if you want to make your own, slightly-shonky, question-and-answerbot, delivered in equally-slightly-shonky 3d humanoid fashion, then lucky you! The deal is that you type in questions and answers into a spreadsheet, along with notes on emotes that you’d like the avatar to express when delivering certain phrases, and VWALLAH! You’re very own 3d answerbot! If you want an example of how widely the term AI is being abused, this is perfect – they are literally peddling a lookup sheet as being somehow ‘intelligent’, which is, well, quite the reach. All that aside, it’s sort-of fun to fiddle with for five minutes if you fancy making a humanoid CG minifig which will give ‘humorous’ answers to childish questions (yes, that is exactly what I did – don’t you dare judge me).
• Did You See This?: A new content format by Buzzfeed in the US which I found quite interesting; it’s a multi-presenter ‘let’s chat about the NEWS’-type magazine show, but delivered via the medium of the Groupchat – so the video content is literally the screenrecording of a groupchat conversation, with the participants narrating in v/o. This sounds terrible but, honestly, works surprisingly well, particularly when they bring in multimedia elements; it reminds me of something that launched a few years back and whose name I forget and which briefly got hyped before, inevitably, dying, whereby users could livestream their messenger conversations to interested parties, but, er, less fundamentally-pointless. There’s definitely some ‘creative inspiration’ *cough* to be taken from this I think.
• Camera Rescue: Do you have an old analogue camera knocking about that you know that you will never get round to getting fixed, despite your 2019 new year’s resolution to ‘get back into analogue’ staring guiltily at you from the frontpage of your diary? No matter, give it to these lads! “Camera Rescue is an organisation from Finland dedicated to preserving cameras for future generations. So far we have rescued just above 46 000 cameras, but we are just getting started. From one to thousands at a time, we rescue cameras from any time period old or new, working or broken. Trade in your old or unwanted camera equipment for cash, and help us with our goal of rescuing 100,000 cameras by 2020.” Embarrasingly I am VERY late to this, but I think it’s a lovely project and deserves support if you fancy donating your Box Brownie or whatever (nice contemporary reference there, well done Matt).
• Magic Spoon: It’s an online recipe scrapbook…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! No, I have no idea why either, but it’s nice to know that I can secure my personal selection of culinary picks to an immutable decentralised ledger. I…I honestly don’t understand who this is aimed at or why it would be a thing – is this for people who are worried for the imminent collapse of everything and feel that this is the only way that they can ensure that their favourite recipe for one-pot chicken survives the Great Inevitable Mainstream Web Breakdown of 2020? Baffling.
• Creepy Professional Anecdotes: Hell of a question, this, on Reddit: “What is the creepiest thing you don’t talk about in your profession?” Now were I to answer that as a ‘non-specific generic media w4nker stroke advermarketingprdrone’ I’d struggle to come up with anything really unsettling, other than, perhaps, the weird, unspoken thing that in PR agencies people will STILL parade attractive young female staff in front of middle-aged male clients like they’re pieces of fleshy collateral (and if you work in PR and you don’t believe that this still goes on then, well, you’re an idiot). Thankfully, though, the people responding to the question work in more interesting or esoteric jobs and MAN are there some genuinely unsettling things in here. A lot of it – caveats, as ever – is quite upsetting, so be aware that there are references to abuse, death, injury and the like throughout. That’s not, now I come to type it, any sort of appealing description, but I promise you that this is really interesting (if, obviously, bleak).
• The Book Cover Archive: Like books? Like design? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is a wonderful archive, though it’s a US site and, frankly, I don’t think they do book covers as well as we do – although actually, looking more closely, I think they feature examples of design from around the world so SHUT MY FACE. A lovely project.
• Superpatron!: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any and all human beings in possession of 4g or broadband access are CREATORS here in the year of our Lord 2k19. And creators need to EAT. Thanks, then, to Patreon CEO Jack Conte who has created this $50k endowment for ‘creators who are ready to solely focus on making art’. There’s no elaborate form to fill in – you just give your name and details and a short proposal – the only criteria is that your application must be short enough that it can be reviewed in three minutes. So, if you want to jack it all in to MAKE STUFF for the next 12m, and you have an artistic practis/praxis that can be distilled into <180s, GO FOR YOUR LIFE! If this isn’t all hoovered by by kids who want to make TikToks fulltime, though, I will be STUNNED.
• The Evolution of the Scrollbar: The design history you didn’t know you needed. It’s a small touch, but I like the fact that the scrollbars all, well, scroll.
• The 2019 Photomicrography of the Year Award: SMOL THINGS CAPTURED ON CAMERA! This year’s Nikon-sponsored celebration of photos of really, really tiny things rolls round again; once again, these are all astonishing. To my mind the spider’s the standout, but, honestly, this stuff just blows my mind in general.
• Hey Robot!: The creation of games for Amazon Echo isn’t a new one – Sensible Object made ‘When In Rome’ a few years back, and I’ve seen a few other variants on the theme since. This is a new one, funding on Kickstarter and already funded with a month to go, which has a really smart premise; the idea is that each team competes to get the voice assistant to say a specific word, the catch being you can’t use any form of that word in your question. Sounds simple, but you can easily imagine the slightly contortionistic fun you could have as you attempt to work out how to get Alexa to say ‘diarrhoea’.
• Toilet Duck As A Service: There have been a few REALLY dumb ‘as a service’ things in recent weeks, but this one’s a strong contender for dumbest of the lot – and yes it’s 10x funded on Indiegogo with a whole week left and, honestly, what is the MATTER with people? Shine describes itself as ‘automatic cleaning and toilet maintenance’, but is – let’s be very clear about this – simply AN ADDITIONAL FLUSHING MECHANISM YOU ADD TO YOUR TOILET. There is a LOT to love (not in fact love) in here – from the opening sentence of the crowdfunding page which boldly asks “We all start preparing for the day in the bathroom, but how are we expected to prepare ourselves for the world, when the bathroom we use isn’t prepared for us?” (a pretty fcuking fundamental question, I think we’ll all agree), to the accompanying app (OF COURSE) which lets you check into the operational status of your toilet wherever you may be. Oh, and you can tell Alexa to clean your toilet for you, thereby sending a blast of ELECTROLYSED WATER (for that is what Shine uses to keep your porcelain spick and span, you see) to sanitise the bowl. EVERYONE IS MAD. EVERYONE.

By Shannon Tomasik

HOW ABOUT TRYING OUT THIS OH-SO-BEAUTIFUL AND VERY RELAXING MIX OF ECLECTIC BEATS AND SOUNDS BY BREAK MODE?

THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.2:

• Fesshole Ipsum: If you’re not already following Rob’s anonymous confessionbot Fesshole on Twitter, do it now. Fesshole Ipsum is a small, silly toy built on the Fesshole corpus, which will generate Lorem Ipsum-type copy for your website needs from all of the horrible confessions people have added to the back-end. Web devs! Please, please, please use this to populate a slightly-hidden Page in your current least-favourite site build and see if anyone notices; bonus points if anyone can get a site live with some of this copy still on there.
• Programming Hero: It’s increasingly clear to me that I’m going to be almost entirely unemployable within about a decade or so (which is fine, because I’ll probably also be nearly dead) – were it not for the fact that I’d honestly rather eat my own face than procreate, I’d probably be banking on my kids to be able to take care of me in my capitalistically-useless dotage. If you’re more sensible than me, though, and have spawned, consider using this useful-looking app to TEACH YOUR WHELPS TO CODE! I know, I know, we’re all over the idea that simply knowing a bit of HTML will make the blindest bit of difference to one’s actual prospects, but this teaches Python and, apparently, will add more languages in the coming weeks and months. I know that this isn’t a cast-iron guarantee of quality, but the fact that the devs are answering all the reviews and messages on the Play store makes me think this is probably A Good Thing (God I am SO NAIVE).
• The Squirrel Census 2019: Why the FCUK doesn’t this happen in St James’ Park?! There has been a SQUIRREL CENSUS in Central Park in New York! They now know how many squirrels there are, and where they hang out, and you can buy a glorious map displaying this incredibly significant information! I slightly wonder whether this isn’t organised and paid for by the dogs of NYC, but, regardless, I love that it exists. I case you wondered, by the way, there are ‘approximately’ 2,373 grey squirrels living there at the time of going to print.
• Stones/Water/Time/Breath: I am a bit of a sucker for pieces of art / music which are sort-of open source and can be performed / created anywhere, by anyone, and which are determined by the setting in which they exist and as such are always inevitably unique each time – see also John Cage’s 4’33, for example. This is SUCH a wonderful idea and I love it – “Dean Rosenthal’s Stones/Water/Time/Breath is experimental music in which a participant or participants choose any body of water and perform a set of actions designed to create a musical performance. It was born from an impromptu performance by the composer in May 2012 on Martha’s Vineyard that was later written down as a set of performance steps that can be performed by everyone.” You can see videos and hear recordings of various instances of its performance over the years, and get the score so you can perform your own version – if you’re stuck for something to do this weekend, I guarantee there are NO more pretentious options than this.
• The Goodsell Gallery; David Goodsell is an artist specialising in representations of elements from structural biology, microscopy and biophysics; what that means in practice is that his work presents the molecular structure of cells as beautiful, semi-abstract, colourful canvases. You can find a selection of his drawings here available to download under creative commons – these would make SUCH beautiful large-scale prints, to my mind.
• Free For Dev: Not exciting AT ALL – unless you’re a dev, in which case it might be a bit exciting. “Developers and Open Source authors now have a massive amount of services offering free tiers, but it can be hard to find them all in order to make informed decisions. This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers. The scope of this particular list is limited to things infrastructure developers (System Administrator, DevOps Practitioners, etc.) are likely to find useful.” See? TOLD you it wasn’t exciting. Still, there are about three of you who might find it practically helpful, and that’s the sort of incredibly-specific reader service you get with Web Curios – I know none of you care, but I do, dammit.
• Dr Lava’s Lost Pokemon: Whenever I come across Pokemon-related stuff it feels very much the sort of thing I ought to include in here, given it’s such an immense cultural lodestone for a whole generation of people just a tiny bit younger than me; at the same time, though, I’m equally slightly amazed that that kids’ card game has had such an incredible legacy with millennials. WHY?!?! Anyway, this Twitter account is a fascinating look into WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN – whoever Dr Lava is, they have access to all sorts of information about imagined Pokemon which, for whatever reason, never made it into canon; you want to know all about the specific evolutionary trees of the Blastoise family, and how there are SECRET COUSINS you never knew about? Christ alone knows why, but here you go.
• VGMaps: Would you like a website collecting images of videogame maps from throughout the history of the medium? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! The site is…basic, and a bit clunky, but I just travelled back in time 23-odd years and reminded myself of the map of level 6 of Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System and, well, madeleines have NOTHING on this, is all I’m saying.
• Tattoo Votes: Not so much a link to a good website as a link to a GREAT (if a bit mean) idea. Click the link and DO IT.
• One Rothko Per Hour: I mean, what else do you need me to tell you? Put it on a big screen and feel like you’re in the Tate Modern except without all those other irritating fcuks (I once tried to chat someone up in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern. It went SO badly I still feel actual, physical pain at the memory. GOOD TIMES!).
• Open Doodles: A free library of open source doodles and illustrations, for all your ease of use. It’s worth reading the ‘about’ Page, which is a lovely articulation of why the creator has bothered to make all their work freely available like this, and their support for the principles of open design; one of those rare moments when you think ‘aw, isn’t the internet NICE and OPEN and FREE’, before you remember that it’s not, really.
• Mac OS Screensavers: A Github repository of all the old Mac OS screensavers you could possibly ask for, and several more besides.
• The Worst Garfield-related Facebook Group You Will Ever See: I mean, I’m not lying to you. Want to click and find out exactly how awful? YES YOU DO. This is a *bit* NSFW, but I reckon you can probably get away with it if you’re careful (you’re tempted now, aren’t you? I CAN TELL).
• Virtual Mate: The latest in Web Curios’ occasional series of dispatches from the dark frontiers of teledildonics and sextech, say a big, sticky, slightly awkward HELLO to Virtual Mate! What is Virtual Mate, I hear you ask? TAKE A WILD FCUKING GUESS. It is, unsurprisingly, some sort of cocksheath which you can connect to software, OBVS, except the gimmick here is that the accompanying software will REACT TO YOUR ONANISM! Yes, that’s right, it’s FULLY INTERACTIVE DIGITAL W4NKING! Even better, the makers claim that you can add literally ANYONE YOU LIKE to the software – as long as you have their consent! That…that couldn’t possibly be abused, could it? There is SO MUCH horror here – this is obviously a crowdfunded project, and with a week to go it’s raised $120k – the amazing (disturbing) thing, though, is that there are only 700 backers – meaning on average they have each paid 5x the suggested retail price for this BECAUSE THEY WANT IT SO MUCH. Who are the men who want a $1000 dollar luxurywankingmachine, and can afford one, and can we please quarantine them all somewhere. Be aware, btw, that whilst technically sort-of SFW this is a VERY sleazy website indeed.
• ASCIIDent: Finally this week, the most impressive ASCII game you will ever see. Ever. I am not joking, this is INCREDIBLE and one of the most insane labours of love I think I have ever seen. Please, do click, this is honestly quite, quite jaw-dropping.

By Danny Galieote

LET’S FINISH THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH SOME GOOD OLD DRUM’N’BASS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Kitchen Ghosts: Foodie cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs were ACE, weren’t they? Can we make them a thing again please?
• Hidden Architecture: Maps, plans and drawings of historical buildings and monuments, if you’re into those sorts of things.
• Warning: Graphic Content: Not in fact anything gross at all, this is instead a great Tumblr compiling dataviz-type stuff (there’s a newsletter too if you prefer your information delivered that way).
• Wikihow Illustrations: The images on Wikihow are some of the most consistently-baffling things on the web. This Tumblr collects them – please, just marvel at the wonder of some of these; there’s a glorious caption competition game waiting to happen here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Alpacas of Instagram: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
• Spenser Little: Little makes art out of wire (not only that, but there’s a lot of it); there’s something beautiful about the style here, which reminds me oddly of a certain school of Italian illustration from the 70s.
• Chandler Holding Your Favourite Album: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
• John Waters Divine Trash Page: Like John Waters? Like Divine? Like trash and schlock and pulp? GREAT, you’ll love this feed then.
• Ricardo Oliveira: You may have seen the heartwarming clip doing the rounds this week, of the kid with cerebral palsy skateboarding thanks to a specially-made rig that holds him upright and supports his muscles; Ricardo Oliveira is the skateboarder who made that kit. This is his Insta feed, full of his own rather good ‘boarding exploits.
• Nick Walker: This is my friend Nick. He is, in his own words, gorgeous and hilarious, and he mentioned to me that he felt somewhat slighted by the number of Insta followers he had, so I said I’d chuck him in Curios and see if that helped. Look, I’m not expecting loads to happen here, but if NONE of you follow him I will look really stupid so, er, please? I promise I will never, ever, sully the purity of my blognewsletterthing with this sort of shameless friendplugging EVER AGAIN.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Best Thing You Will Read About WeWork: Not ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most in-depth or informative’, but certainly ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most likely to make you snigger at the very real madness at the heart of this whole story’. When you consider the bare facts – that despite utterly fcuking a bunch of people, almost certainly committing some pretty creative acts of fraud and being pretty much the new dictionary definition of delusional, asshole founder, Adam Neumann is still walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars – there’s an argument to suggest that this superb piece of satire-adjacent writing by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine maybe doesn’t go quite far enough.
• How Softbank is Breaking the World: Susbtitute ‘Softbank’ for ‘the very practice of venture capitalism’ and you’re closer to the truth, imho, but the premise still holds. I know I’m by no means alone in this, certainly not some sort of visionary seer, but it’s nice to finally see a little more mainstream consensus forming around the idea that the problem, perhaps, is the funders in these cases as much as the founders. I found this line particularly telling: “Deep-pocketed VCs understand that while continually pumping money into a company can prop up valuations, it’s not enough. You also have to pretend business is something that it’s not. Vision Fund investments need a vision, after all. It doesn’t matter whether Uber or WeWork actually work—or what happens when they fail—but that they have a vision that sounds profitable.” Apply that lens to EVERY SINGLE ‘X as a Service’ business you’ve seen of late – it’s true, isn’t it?
• The Dark Power of Keyword Signalling: Amongst all the rubbish talked this year about the DARK GENIUS OF DOMINIC CUMMINGS (please, can we all acknowledge that the only person who benefits from this narrative is Dominic Fcuking Cummings himself, and that perhaps we ought to maybe give it a rest?), possibly the best/worst was all the stuff about Boris’ speeches being carefully tailored to replace old search results with new, silly ones – see the ‘I like to play with buses’ example. This story is adjacent to that, but more sinister, and explores how right wingers in the US are working to insert specific words and phrases into the public discourse, which if searched for will lead the curious down a rabbithole of fashy conspiracy – genuinely smart, if deepy iffy, tactics, these.
• Jakarta is Sinking: So the XR people have gone dark again, at least for a few weeks, and so we can all forget about the climate emergency for a bit. Except, well, try not to! This piece, all about exactly how fcuked Jakarta is, is one of the most sobering things I’ve read about the actual, imminent impact of environmental catastophe; the prospect of having to imminently find new homes for 30million people is so utterly, mind-flayingly daunting. What’s interesting (read: miserable) about the article is the sense it gives of how systemic the problems are; the very fabric of the city, as it currently exists, is simply not sustainable, and this problem is almost certainly going to be replicated across the developing world multiple times over the next five decades or so.
• Social Credit In Practice: A really interesting look at the differing practical realities of several local Social Credit schemes across China; this does a really good job of explaining how the system is a largely regionalised set of experiments rather than a full-scale national programme, and how different schemes in different reasons differ practically in the function and philosophical approach to the idea. It won’t necessarily make you think that Social Credit is any less creepy as an idea, but it might make you wonder which elements of it could reasonably be incorporated into a less-obviously-creepy setup (can anyone say “slippery slope”?).
• The Obamanauts: A fabulous essay, ostensibly a collected review of the post-White House memoirs of several Obama staffers but in fact more of a review of his Presidency, as well as a series of musings on the nature of legacy and biography. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in here, not least the offhand dismissal of 75% of the books reviewed as little more than protagonistic fanboying; this is a really great piece of criticism and analysis.
• Useful YouTube Tricks: Ok, this is neither an essay or a piece of journalism or indeed good writing – it is, though, REVELATORY (or at least it was to me) on what you can make YouTube do. Honestly, there will be at least one trick in here which you will find properly lifechanging (oh, ok, FINE, that’s shameless hyperbole, but it’s still pretty good, I promise).
• Viewingbots On Instagram: The latest engagement-baiting technique on Insta uses Stories as the hook – there’s a spate of bots and software plugins available which will automatically make your profile ‘view’ thousands of Stories a day, thereby exposing YOUR profile to thousands of potential new followers who might be flattered enough by your interest to offer you a follow and thereby (presumably goes the thinking) make you marginally, incrementally more likely to be able to pass yourself off as an ‘influencer’ than you were before. This is a good overview of how it works, how to spot it, and, if you’re BLACK HAT, exactly what sort of apps can do this for you.
• 20 Years of Blogging: Unless you’ve spent a LONG time online this may not speak to you; to me, though, this was a genuinely lovely, strangely poignant essay, by David Liebowitz, who’s been blogging for two decades; here he looks back at why he started, why he’s kept going, what’s changed and what’s not. It’s an almost-perfect distillation of what was beautiful about blogging and the early internet back in the day; no expectation of audience or reward, just the small joy of carving out a tiny piece of cyberspace (LOL SO RETRO) all of your own, which anyone could stumble across and enjoy. I am obviously getting old, because this made me ever-so-slightly sentimental and misty-eyed.
• Ghost Hands: Sub-headed ‘A history of art and AI’, this article looks at the historical use of technology and automation in the creation of artworks, from the self-playing pianos of the early-20thC; its conclusions aren’t startling, fine, but as an exploration of man/machine creative collaboration and the history of the ‘Centaur’ (see Curios passim), it’s fascinating.
• Machine Reading: More on AI, this time the particular advances being made in machine analysis of texts, and the idea that we might one day be able to ‘teach’ a machine to ‘read’. What’s most interesting here is the breakdown and analysis of how we analyse language as humans (or at least how we understand ourselves to understand language) and how machines currently parse text; even the latest iterations of the very best software, based on code by Google nicknamed BERT, can’t be said to do anything so complex as ‘understand’ language so much as being a wonderful, sophisticated system of pattern recognition. There’s a nagging part of me that wonders whether the really interesting questions here don’t revolve around what we currently mean when we say ‘understand’, and how that meaning might require tweaking as we start to grapple with the mechanics of machine intelligence in a serious way.
• BBC Voice and AI: The BBC this week updated its Alexa Skill for News, with the added functionality of being able to ask for more depth on any given story; using voice commands, users will be able to access additional reporting from the BBC on any news item they here. Regardless of the fact that it’s a very smart idea, the tech and thinking behind it is really interesting; here, the BBC’s Tallulah Berry, involved in the project, explains some of the considerations and thinking – technical and user-focused – involved in its creation. As a primer on how to think about voice tech, this is really good.
• Instagram, Censorship and Art: It’s long been a bone of contention among the art world that Instagram’s ‘don’t offend ANYONE’ prudery effectively limits the platform’s efficacy as a vehicle for art. This is the account of a recent roundtable between a varity of arts practictioners and the powers that be at Facebook/Insta, discussing where lines can and should be drawn and how the platform can and should evolve to become more hospitable to the creators it claims to value so highly. Nothing conclusive emerges, but it’s interesting to see the arguments presented, and the fact that this conversation’s even taking place would suggest that changes are a-coming.
• An Oral History of Clerks at 25: I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but I actually prefer Mallrats. Still, Clerks is a GREAT film, and this look back at it around its 25th anniversary is interesting if you’re a fan, funny in general, and VERY 90s. I love the idea of Jason Mewes getting cast simply because he was quite funny and just sort of around; there’s something so pleasingly shambolic about the whole thing that should give heart to anyone who’s ever wanted to make anything but never quite known how.
• Meet Condé Naste: I had NO IDEA until I read this article that Condé Naste was a real man, but I am now obsessed with the idea of someone I know calling their kid ‘Condé’ (seriously, HOW FABULOUS WOULD THEY BE?? Also, how bullied?). Anyway, this is a profile of the publishing magnate, and the very singular vision thatr powered the creation of the modern empire that is ‘The Nasty’. As a credo, this is on the one hand quite horrid but on the other the clearest articulation of a vision you can hope for: “The publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and the circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others.”
• Journalist as Influencer: This Guardian article got a lot of love on the TL this week, mainly from other female writers strongly endorsing its perspective – to whit, that there is something inherently character-driven and performative about modern journalism, particularly for women, whereby it’s not solely about the act of writing but also about the act of being seen to embody and espouse a lifestyle or character that will resonate and be relatable, and that this lifestyle or character is as important in attracting readers and commissions than the content or quality of your prose. As a non-bylined journalist (this is not journalism) I’m in no position to speak – I found elements of the article a little bit self-indulgent and self-pitying (part of me thinks, for example, that the pattern described here simply doesn’t apply to the very best writers regardless of gender), but the overall thrust seems true. What struck me is how much the central theme of performance as a necessary component of professional practice applies almost as much in advermarketingprland, with the endless AWARDS and BLOGS and TWITTER FEEDS and HUSTLES and THINKPIECES and POLEMICS and oh god I am just part of the problem aren’t i?
• How To Write Great Mystery Plots: By Charles Finch, himself a writer of mystery novels, and one of the best things I’ve read in ages about the practice of writing. Smart, funny, self-deprecating, a tiny bit catty, this is just delicious.
• The Case for Checking a Bag: Does Roxanne Gay ever write anything bad? This is a short-ish essay on why it is always a good and sensible thing to pack hold luggage when travelling on an aeroplane, and it has no right to be this good.
• My Broken Bladder: You may not think that the (very) personal tale of the author’s struggle to stop peeing so often would be the funny, uplifting story of (sort-of) triumph against (sort-of) adversity you needed today, and yet here we find ourselves. This is very, very funny (unless you yourself are a bit incontinent, in which case it’s probably a bit close to the bone).
• Welcome To The Land: One of two wonderful pieces of travel writing in here this week, this is Adam Karlin’s trip to the Northernmost point of the United States – Utqiagvik, Alaska (no, no idea how you pronounce it, sorry), “a place that is not just a cardinal direction but so far away from everything that it is defined by its liminality, its edge-ness, like reality had a border where the night is the day and the road is the beach and the bears.”
• Parenting and Panic: I can’t vouch for this beyond the quality of the writing, but if you can get behind the following sentence then you will enjoy this a lot I think: “Parenting has a lie built right into its name: we should’ve called it childing, because that’s who is in charge.”
• Under The Knife: A very honest and rather sad account of the author’s own labioplasty procedure – why she had it, how it felt, and how it made her feel. It’s dispassionate, and well-written, but there’s something so dispiriting about the eventual and unsurprising realisation that perhaps the issues they were trying to fix were perhaps not fixable by a ‘simple’ act of surgery.
• Electronic Dawn in Uzbekhistan: This is SUCH a brilliant essay – as a piece of travel writing, as a piece of music writing, as a general ‘wow, isn’t the world and human culture just fcuking AMAZING’ exclamation of delight…Tom Faber was recently at a techno festival in Uzbekistan, a place it may not surprise you to learn doesn’t host loads of them as a rule. Honestly, if you can read this and not have at least a small flicker of believe at the unifying power of 140BPM sounds and a campfire then, well, what’s wrong with you? Truly superb, even if you would rather perforate your own eardrums with rusty nails than listen to this sort of stuff.
• The Essential Harv: Finally in this week’s selection of longreads, this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year. I have no idea who Harvey Mayes was, nor indeed does that matter. I don’t think he was particularly famous or notable on a global scale, but that doesn’t matter either. This is an essay written earlier this year on what would have been his 75th birthday, by the man for whom Harvey was a first ever boyfriend. In 25 small vignettes he paints a wonderful, vivid, human picture of someone we’ve never known and will never meet and who, by the end, you are genuinely sad never to have hung out with; it’s one of the most intimate essays I can remember reading about anyone, ever, less in the quality of the details and more in the general sense of love that permeates the whole thing (yes, I know that sounds AWFUL, but trust me on this – I am the most repellently cynical person I know, and if I think this is cute then I promise you it really is). Please enjoy.

By Tina Berning

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is called ‘Humanoid’, it’s by ‘Fcuk It’, and it reminds me of a sort of souped-up version of the dirty breaks tracks I’d get on Botchit & Scarper compilations around 1996. Excellent digitalartwank video to accompany it, too:

This track’s refrain is basically tailor-made for love and relationships in 2019. It’s by Common Holly and it’s called “Crazy OK”:

This is the most preposterously-woke song you’ll hear all year – honestly, hands-down – and it feels like it was composed specifically to soundtrack an end-of-year compilation of footage of XR protests worldwide, but her voice is quite wonderful (shades of Beth Gibbons, to my mind, along with some soul/country artists I can’t quite place) and the video is, whilst as-discussed preposterously-woke, generally a pretty hopeful montage of kids who, as the title suggests, are having none of it. This is by Frazey Ford, see what you think:

Next, a truly brilliant video for a really excellent song- this is ‘I See You’ by Pumarosa:

Last up this week, this is the new one by Clipping which I have decided are my current favourite US hiphop outfit. Per the rest of their output, this is creepy and quite horrible, but this time there’s more of a spoken word / visual art edge to the whole thing and, honestly, they are SO GOOD. Suitably creepy given we’re coming to Hallowe’en – this is called ‘All In Your Head’ and BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE DON’T FORGET THE CLOCKS GO BACK THIS WEEKEND WHICH MEANS AN EXTRA HOUR IN BED SO WHY NOT TREAT YOURSELF TO THAT EXTRA DRINK ON SATURDAY, WHY NOT GO TO THAT SECOND PARTY, WHY NOT SAY YES TO LIFE, BECAUSE GOD KNOWS IT MIGHT ALL BE OVER SOON AND THERE WHERE WOULD WE BE ACTUALLY DON’T ANSWER THAT DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT INSTEAD FOCUS ON THE WEEKEND AND THE WARM FEELING OF MY ENTIRELY PLATONIC LOVE ENVELOPING YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BUT IN THE MEANTIME TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

 HERE I AM HELLO! I was meant to be in Venice this weekend, but due to Circumstances Beyond My Control I am in fact NOT in Venice! I am in my kitchen! Radio4 is on! I have been typing for approximately 6 straight hours and my fingers hurt! I should be heading towards art and culture but instead here I am in my pants, spaffing out what I would conservatively estimate to be around 8,000 words about ‘things what I saw on the web this week’! GREAT!

You will note, dear readers, that I am not at all annoyed about the cancellation of my trip. That lack of annoyance will doubtless shine through in the measured equanimity of my prose this week – or perhaps I’m just mollified by the prospect of maybe finally doing a Brexit up ourselves (although if any readers would like to enter into a small wager as to the likelihood of this deal getting parliamentary approval then, well, I am ALL EARS. Wagers to be of the hideously and humiliatingly biological variety, for preference). 

Regardless, it’s late, I have written too much and I am DONE. Watch as I fling this poorly-cobbled-together bundle of words and links casually to one side and stroll on into my future; fall onto my leavings like the information-starved foundlings I know you all deep in your hearts to be (ha! information starved! in 2019! chance would be a fine fcuking thing, eh?); read my words, click other people’s links and generally let Web Curios ease you into the weekend the in the same gentle way that a trepanning spike ‘eases’ its way into your skull.

I, as ever, am Matt, this, as ever, is Web Curios, and one way or another this will all be over soon enough. 

By Polly Penrose

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS ABSOLUTELY BANGING SPOTIFY PLAYLIST BY JOE MUGGS WHICH IS BASICALLY THE UR-GUIDE TO UK DANCE MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF FACEBOOK REALLY WANTS TO TRY AND HUMANISE ZUCKERBERG THEY OUGHT TO DO A BETTER JOB OF WRITING HEADLINES FOR THEIR OWN RELEASES WHICH SOUND LESS LIKE THEY ARE SPOKEN BY A POORLY-CODED ATTEMPT TO PASS THE TURING TEST:

• Mark Zuckerberg Stands For Voice!: No, really, that’s actually the headline – “Mark: He Stands For Voice!”. Good to know that one of the most powerful-yet-famously-inscrutable people on the planet has finally put a line in the sand and told us what they really care about – it’s VOICE! The amorphous concept of vocalisation! It’s what motivates him to get up in the morning! This link is actually to the text of Zuckerberg’s speech yesterday all about his (and by extension Facebook’s) ideas on free speech and free expression (he’s a fan!), and what he thinks of China (not so much of a fan, despite having commercial ties with Chinese businesses which earn Facebook hundreds of millions each year!) and TikTok (it’s not a platform for free expression like Facebook, which is bad! Racist boomer groups = good, memetic dance crazes = bad!). Basically we all just need to stick together, get through this, and keep on using Facebook as it’s probably the best means we have of healing the fundamental divisions which threaten to split our society asunder like an overripe melon. Got that? Great!
• Twitter Clarifies Content Exceptions: The past few weeks’ furore over Facebook’s refusal to block factually incorrect political advertising has led to other platforms seeking to clarify their somewhat-murky policies as to what you can and can’t get away with posting; this week, Twitter has published this reasonably-clear guide to how its ‘public interest’ exception functions – that is, the criteria by which it assesses whether content which would ordinarily be removed from the platform stays up when it’s posted by a public figure. This is actually all reasonably sensible, but there’s a wonderful kicker at the bottom. The types of content that they will never apply the public interest exception to? That featuring “child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and violent sexual assault”…oh, and anything featuring a copyright claim. Good to know that a President or Prime Minister can literally lie about whatever they like, but heaven forfend they post an uncleared clip of the Champions League.
• Instagram Offers Users Better Data Controls: It’s one of those weeks in which none of the s*c**l m*d** news is actually particularly relevant or useful to brands; what I ought to do at times like this is just keep this section brutally short and get on with the bits I actually enjoy writing, but instead I always get a misplaced sense that if I do that I’m not quite giving yout the full Web Curios experience (yes, you’re having an ‘experience’ – did you not realise? This is all laid out in the Web Curios ‘Mission & Values’ document which I must publish one day) and as such end up padding these entries out with exactly the sort of rambling inconsequentialisms that you’re reading right now. Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of telling you that Insta “is now adding a new feature that allows individuals to “manage all of the third-party services they connect to their Instagram account””. Worth going through your settings and checking exactly who you’re sharing your posting history with, should you still be interested in such outmoded concepts as ‘digital privacy’.
• LinkedIn Events Is Here!: I know! I’m excited too! One of the newsletters I read (sorry, I forget which; I’m upto what feels like about 10 a day at the moment and I confess that it feels like I might be a bit full) described LinkedIn as being ‘Facebook in slow-motion’, which I rather liked; this feature addition rather bears that out, with LinkedIn introducing the ability for users to create Events on the platform, just like you’ve been able to do on Facebook for a decade or so. It’s all pretty limited at present – you can’t promote events, the functionality doesn’t allow for integration with ticketing services or anything like that – but you’d expect over time that it’ll become more sophisticated. Still, if you’re the sort of person who unaccountably wishes to actually meet Oleg, this could well be the best thing you’ll see all week (it really oughtn’t be, though).
• Trump On Twitch: It does make quite a lot of sense for Trump to be on Twitch from a demographics point of view, but it’s also a sort-of perfectly 2019 move; the idea of ‘the most powerful man in the world’ (he’s not, obviously, but he thinks he is) taking to a platform on which blue-haired anime enthusiasts broadcast themselves playing digital card games in their pants to an adoring audience of hundreds-of-thousands of obsessed and addicted children (and yes, I also know this is a hugely-reductive description of Twitch, but still) is in and of itself basically a plotline from a videogame (SMASH!TV, sort-of). SO META! Oh, this isn’t really related but I don’t quite know where else it fits; Twitch’s account of its recent rebrand is a really nice, clear presentation of the thinking behind design and is worth a look if that’s your field / interest.
• The Giphy Arcade: This is potentially quite fun, and certainly a clever move from Giphy, which this week launched Giphy Arcade – a service where anyone can create their own customisable videogame from a series of templates, from Breakout clones to Flappy Bird ripoffs. You select the type of game you want to make, swap out the template sprites for your own choices from the vast Giphy archive, fcuk with the palette and the feel and the pace and a bunch of other variables, give it a name, and then bingo, play and share and LOL to your little heart’s content. Obviously there’s a brand play here – Wendy’s was one of the launch partners, and has created a bunch of small burger-themed games to give an idea of the sort of thing other brand’s could do were they so minded; the games that you make are all mobile-friendly and embeddable and, frankly, if you want to create some light-touch ludic digibollocks you could do worse than have a play around with this.
• LAST CHANCE FOR LAST QUESTION TICKETS: Well, not quite the last chance, but if you want to attend on 28 October and hear such luminaries as Martin Wiegel and Anjali Puri discussing whether marketing has lost its personality then CLICK HERE. NB – Imperica’s getting paid to promo this, which I feel honour-bound to disclose, though let me make clear that I am not personally making any money at all here and so this recommendation is as pure as the driven snow.

By Daniel Dichter

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY LISTENING TO THE VERY SPOOKY SOUNDTRACK TO THE SCANDI FILM ‘THE CIRCLE’ WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY NONE OTHER THAN BENNY FROM ABBA!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY ISN’T AT ALL BITTER ABOUT NOT BEING IN VENICE RIGHT NOW, PT.1:

• The Earth Archive: There’s not a lot to see at this link – FFS MATT SELL THE LINKS, JESUS CHRIST THIS IS WHY NO FCUKER READS THIS BASTARD THING – but the idea behind it is wonderful. The Earth Archive is a project which wants, eventually, to create a 3d map of the entire Earth’s surface, laser-scanned using a technique called LiDAR – “LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it. Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points.” In my head, this means basically making a sort of Microsoft-Kinect-style representation of three-dimensional space – which (and this is where it gets scifi and interesting) would in theory give anyone and everyone a topographically-accurate digital twin of the planet’s surface to play around with. Which offers quite incredible opportunities for virtual exploration, virtual travel, games…who cares that the surface of the planet is a boiling mess of death and dust? LET’S PLAY VR SAND SURFING! This is a quite preposterously ambitious project, and given the fact that it doesn’t seem to be backed by any massive corporations and is currently seeking funding (and the website’s an off-the-shelf Squarespace job) I’m not particularly confident in it ever getting off the ground, but, well, just IMAGINE.
• Real Talk About Suicide: This is, I think, actually a year old; I believe it was made for National Suicide Prevention Day in 2018, but for whatever reason it only passed across my field of (internet) vision this week. This is an interactive film in which you’re presented with Jason, who’s struggling with suicidal thoughts; at various points in the narrative you’re offered dialogue options to try and help Jason and get him to seek help, with the site helpfully explaining to you why some options and techniques are more effective than others when dealing with the very depressed. This is really nicely made, the interactivity’s handled well and the performances in the video are better than they tend to be with stuff like this – it’s also quite a hard watch if you’ve any experience of this sort of thing, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
• The Rotten Library: I occasionally get all misty-eyed about the halcyon days of the earlyish web on here, and one of the sites that gives me a proper hit of nostalgia is Rotten.com – now defunct, but in the 90s one of the urls that every teenage boy had committed to memory (it wasn’t hard to recall tbh) as a place to find weird and, in the main, incredibly gross stuff. Rotten was a weird collision of viscerally-unpleasant photos (often literally visceral), creepy miscellania, odd bongo and everything inbetween, and was generally the sort of place you’d send people who were first starting out on their tentative internet journey of discovery in the hope of scarring them forever. This is a mirror of the Rotten Library, a collection of articles written by…someone, about a very, very broad range of topics including, but not limited to, history, death, art, culture, George Washington’s testicles and optical illusions; the navigation’s horrible and the quality of the content is…variable, but it’s a window into a very different internet. Just FYI, from what I have seen at least, there doesn’t appear to be any horrible photography on the site, so you can browse without fear of suddenly happening upon a flayed human leg or something (probably).
• Give Your Face To A Robot: In fact, sell your face to a robot! How much do you think your likeness is worth? What amount of cash would you require to sign over yourt physical likeness to a corporation for them to use…well, potentially however they see fit? If the answer to that question is “why, Matt, the nice round sum of £100,000!” then this website could be exactly what you’ve been looking for. Without a doubt one of the dodgiest-sounding seemingly-real things I’ve seen in a while, I think that this is probably a bit of link-generation PR by Geomix, a data-driven manufacturing company, but I couldn’t be certain. Look, here’s the blurb: “A few weeks ago we were approached by a robotics company asking if we could help it with the finishing touches of a state-of-the-art humanoid robot it’s been working on. Details of the project are scarce due to a non-disclosure agreement we’ve signed with the designer and his investors, but this is what we do know. The company is searching for a ‘kind and friendly’ face to be the literal face of the robot once it goes into production. This will entail the selected person’s face being reproduced on potentially thousands of versions of the robots worldwide. Obviously, this is not our usual remit of request, which is why we’re making this public appeal to try and find the right person. The designer knows that this is a big deal, and has agreed a fee of £100,000 to license the rights to the right face.” SO MANY QUESTIONS! What are the terms of the license? If I win, am I still allowed to use my own face or do I have to use the 100k to fashion myself a new one? WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS BUYER???? Nah, there is no way this is a real thing – still, worth keeping an eye on to see what the real story is – should any readers feel confident enough in their own physical beauty (and, er, confident in the benevolent intent of the project over all, which strikes me as far bigger reach) to apply, please do let me know how it all goes.
• Click-to-Pray: This did the rounds the other day after it was announced, with coverage driven by the fact this is seemingly fully-endorsed by the Holy See (it’s also available for sale on Amazon, suggesting the Vatican’s more keen on frictionless drop-shipping than it is on the upholding of global labour rights) – it’s the SMART ROSARY that all good Christians have been waiting for! It’s honestly impossible to make fun of this (and not just because I’m a good Catholic and couldn’t possibly mock something which has been endorsed by His Holiness Pope Francis) – it is already utterly beyond parody. CLICK-TO-PRAY FUNCTIONALITY (the parallels with the infamous Call Of Duty interactive funeral (“Press ‘F’ To Pay Your Respects”) are too delicious to ignore – IS GOD JUST PLAYING US LIKE THIS IS ALL SOME SORT OF DIVINE FPS???)! Rudimentary fitness tracking! A pedagogy of prayer delivered through audio classes to better connect with the divine! PEACE IN THE WORLD!!! (it really, honestly, genuinely has that at the bottom of the Page). Please, click through – regardless of your thoughts on Catholicism or Christianity or religion, this is so utterly ridiculous that you will not fail to be slightly cheered by it. The only thing that could make this better would be for me to start noticing an aggressive campaign of parallel social media advertising, a la Caspar Mattresses or those fcuking slippers, to start following me around – if the Vatican has embraced digital marketing then, well, EVERYTHING is up for grabs, kids.
• Microstudio: A free game development environment, currently in alpha, for all your simple game-creation needs, Sprites, maps, editors, all can be accessed within the site simply by creating a free account; it’s technical and requires you to have a vague idea of what you might be doing, but as a free, simple way of beginning to explore some of the concepts of rudimentary game design (and quite possibly more than rudimentary for some) it looks genuinely useful.
• Name The European Cities: There was a smol game in here a few weeks back in which you had to name as many US cities as possible; this is that, except with European cities, and again it ought to be really boring but instead you will find yourself compelled to add more and more and more cities to the map and you will start sweatily attempting to remember how to spell Vladivostock without checking, and at some point in the mid-afternoon you’ll get the other people on your pod involved and then that’s it, you’ll basically have become geography nerds. I’m just warning you – that’s EXACTLY what will happen.
• BBC BASIC Bot: For a certain vintage of nerd, this will be like a hug. The BBC BASIC Bot lives on Twitter and has one simple feature – Tweet @ it with some lines of BASIC (keeping within the single-tweet 280 character limit, obvs) and the bot will reply with what that code will do when it runs; so you can have it fill the screen with “HELLO MATT!” (10 PRINT “HELLO MATT!” / 20 GOTO 10 / RUN – nb if I have somehow contrived to fcuk even that very simple bit of coding up, please do not feel compelled to tell me) or love hearts or whatever you like. I am immoderately in love with this.
• A Thread of Female Protest Art from HK: Literally that – from the opening Tweet: “A Women’s Place is in The Resistance – a #HongKong protest art thread. While HK govt’s depiction of women in the movt has reeked of misogyny – they can only be mothers, sluts or virgins – HK art shows a fuller spectrum of womanhood and what female righteous anger looks like.” There’s no way to say this without sounding quite spectacularly-shallow, but I find the aesthetic of the HK protests particularly fascinating; better cultural historians than me (that is, any actual cultural historians) would I am sure be able to tell me, but has anyone done an analysis of the visual semiotics of the HK movement? As an aside, as I type this it’s 831am and this is the first really pseudy thing I’ve written, which personally I am quite proud of – WELL DONE MATT.
• Sandspiel: A very soothing little falling sand webtoy – sand falls, you change the colour and volume and the like and sculptures will slowly form in the grains. Utterly pointless but very relaxing indeed.
• Spareplace: About 5 or 6 years ago I was very loosely involved with a startup called ‘Proffer’, which wanted to effectively become the last-minute app of choice for London, enabling anyone to see up-to-the-moment availability for theatre tickets, restaurants, bars, etc; I never took any money from them because, well, I’ve worked with startups before and they have an unpleasant tendency to believe that they own your soul as soon as they’ve shelled out a tenner, which turned out to be the right idea as by the time it launched it had become something totally other and it died and ignominious not that long after launch. Which is all by way of long-winded explanation that Spareplace seems to do exactly what Proffer promised but didn’t deliver – to whit, last-minute restaurant inventory. It’s pre-launch, so there’s no indication to how well it will function, but if you’re the sort of person who’s potentially in the market for last-minute cancellation-hijacking, or a venue that wants to minimise its liability for no-shows, this could be worth a look.
• Joymode: Or “Stuff, as a Service!”. Joymode’s the latest iteration of the ‘subscribe to rent tech’ model, except here it’s not just tech, it’s seemingly everything. Pay your $30 a month ($22 if you sub for a year) and you can rent a seemingly-limitless array of things as part of your subscription. From Nintendo Switches to garden furniture, the site offers a range of ‘bundles’ – you can have one ‘bundle’ at a time rented out, but any time you want to swap they’ll deliver a new one and pick up the old. The value of this obviously depends on the extent to which the packages of things that they offer match your own needs, but it’s an interesting model; US-only (obviously), but there’s no reason a similar sort of service couldn’t work over here.
• Stream: A digital artwork by Leander Herzog, which presents a neverending stream of minimalist representations of s*c**l m*d** posts, passing across your screen as a bleak representation of what we spend so much of our lives doing. There’s a small fulscreen button in the top-right of the Page here, which I would recommend clicking for the full, numbing effect – oh, and there’s some slightly-uncomfortable audio too should you desire it. Enjoy!
• YOLOv3BOT: A Facebook Page which posts photographs in which the objects within shot have been identified by the Open Images dataset, except those identifications have been replaced by words picked at random from Urban Dictionary. Which is obviously a slightly-nonsensical description,but I promise you that this is ART. No, really, it absolutely is.
• Boardreader: I know most of you will be people working for BIG AGENCIES and will therefore have access to Sysomos or Brandwatch or somesuch tool and won’t have need of this at all, but for any of you who don’t have the means to pay the five figure subscriptions this might be of use. Boardreader is a search engine for Forums – it looks crap, but there’s a decent ‘Advanced Search’ functionality buried in there if you dig, and the results it throws out are seemingly pretty decent. Worth a look.
• Historical Records: This is an ASTONISHING archive, all maintained by one person (hello Dani Gal in Berlin!), which collects vinyl recordings of political speeches from the 20th Century. “Historical Records is an ongoing project of collecting commercially released vinyl records that document political events of the twentieth century. The collection contains over 700 LP’s of speeches and interviews of those who were in power and others who objected this power, of wars and peace agreements, human rights struggles and other radio broadcasts, of the events that shaped history from the invention of the phonograph to the fall of the Berlin wall. The project examines how recorded political events were commodified and what role sound documentation has in the interplay between personal and collective/national memory.” Any 20thC historians reading this, enjoy.
• The Cherry Picks: A site for film criticism and recommendations whose gimmick is that all reviews and opinions are drawn from women and non-binary people – “Each of our film pages includes an excerpt and hyperlink to the original published film review to introduce readers to a wider range of critical voices. We also created our own CherryCheck system which keeps tabs on the movie industry by highlighting existing programs to respond to the growing demand for representation and equity on-screen and behind the scenes.” If you’re after a place to read film criticism and appreciation from a non-male perspective, this might be a useful site to bookmark.
• No Context Chick Tracts: VERY long-term readers may recall that I had a bit of an obsession with fundamentalist Christian hate-mongering comic book artist Jack Chick back in the very distant past when I wrote this for H+K (speaking of which, why not journey back in time to 2010 and ‘enjoy’ historical versions of Web Curios for yourself – not least to observe how little my writing style has evolved or improved in the intervening decade – FCUK YOU GLADWELL WITH YOUR 10,000 HOURS); this is a Twitter account which exists solely to share out-of-context panels from Chick’s hateful oeuvre (honestly, the comics are SO horrible – you can check them out here if you so desire). The main theme you’ll quickly discern here is that of a God who REALLY likes punishing those who stray from His chosen path, usually via the medium of heavily-signposted-but-always-unexpected-and-often-very-brutal death – bleakly amazing, as long as you don’t think too hard about the fact that there are people out there who genuinely believe that stuff like this is an acceptable way of teaching kids about ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
• Birds of America: ANOTHER Curios appearance for the Audubon Society, North America’s bird enthusiasts’ club, which here presents nearly-500 illustrations of THE BIRDS OF AMERICA for your ornithological pleasure. “John James Audubon’s Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again” – not only this, but you can download each and every one of the images as a hi-res jpg, meaning you can create your very own little avian art collection. See what the angriest-looking bird you can find is; some of these lads look FURIOUS.
• Dracula: The Evidence: Another wondeful literary Kickstarter, this is an experimental-retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which seeks to tell the classic tale via the medium of various artefacts and ephemera presented as a collection of objects in Van Helsing’s briefcase – effectively the sort of prop setup you’d find in a Punchdrunk experience, say. It’s nearly fully-funded with a month to go, so it seems safe to say it’ll make its target; this is a potentially wonderful way of exploring the Dracula mythos in immersive, creative fashion, though its success will rest on the quality of the finished product; still, as a means of storytelling it’s a fascinating idea although the pricetage (£300-odd quid, and that’s the discounted version) is eye-watering.
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019: You will doubtless have seen the winning image this year, that of the terrified rodent being chased by a fox, but the rest of this year’s winning entries are also very much worth exploring (as they always are). The navigation’s a bit horrid, frankly, and they don’t make these hugely easy to find on-site, but, leaving those (incredibly petty) gripes aside, there are some wonderful pictures here; personally my favourite is Charlie Hamilton’s shot of the CUTE STREETRATS, but please pick your own (no, really, DO IT).

By Christoffer

NOW WHY NOT ENJOY SOME CLASSIC HOUSE STYLINGS COURTESY OF GRAEME PARK?!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY ISN’T AT ALL BITTER ABOUT NOT BEING IN VENICE RIGHT NOW, PT.2:

• Nowhere Stairs: Or, to give this photo series its correct title, L’Architecture D’Entrainement. My title’s better, though – this is a series of photos of buildings with stairs that lead nowhere; I think these are taken mainly in France, but the ur-examples of these always seem to be in Greece as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, this is by French photographer Eric Tabuchi – I think I’ve featured his shots in here before, specifically the ones of off-season nightclubs, but it’s very much worth exploring if you’re not familiar.
• The UK Rail Map: ALL OF THE UK’S RAIL LINES! ON A MAP! ON THE INTERNET! I sort-of imagine that anyone who would really enjoy this site probably knows about it already – I mean, you’d think that any train obsessives worth their salt would have Googled ‘UK rail map online’ at some point in the past decade, but on the offchance that YOU are such a rail enthusiast and you’ve unaccountably never done that then, well, merry Christmas!
• Be Kind Rewind: A relatively-new YouTube channel which provides in-depth-but-accessible analysis of Hollywood past and present; each episode is 20-odd minutes, and to date they’ve covered such topics as ‘The Blind Side’s White Saviour Complex’, Vivien Leigh’s Oscar win, an analysis of the film ‘Judy’…if you’re a cinephile, this might be worth subscribing to.
• No Stress Booking: We all know, yes, that when we’re browsing stuff on a website and a popup appears telling you that you MUST BUY IT NOW THERE ARE 73 OTHER DESPERATE WEBMONGS ABOUT TO STEAL YOUR HOLIDAY BUY IT NOW that it is in fact totally made-up rubbish and there are in fact NO other desperate webmongs attempting to gazzump you? Good. Still, if you find the ceaseless cajoling and hurrying of websites such as Booking et al to be a touch on the enervating side then you might enjoy this Chrome extension which claims to block all that sort of fcukery from your browsing experience.
• Social Justice Kittens 2020: You know that the year’s drawing to a close when the annual Social Justice Kittens calendar rolls around again. This year’s offering features another selection of impossibly-cute, impossibly-woke cats, each accompanied by a real quote culled from the socials and, the calendar’s creators claim, presented entirely in the context it was intended. I think I mentioned before when featuring this that I am 99% certain that this comes from a position of postivity, gently mocking the more…preposterous bits of the social justice movement whilst being broadly invested in it – honestly, I’m as pinko and lefty as the next kitten, but if you can’t see the ridiculous in phrases like “When I’m discussing my pain, your job is to listen” then, well, we’re probably not going to be friends tbh. The link up top is to the purchase page, but if you want to get a closer look at this year’s kittens before you pony up the cash, you can see them here.
• Quotes Uploader: This is odd. A YouTube channel which seemingly does nothing more than publish videos featuring a bunch of fairly generic inspo/motivational/hideously normie quotes over the top of stills from the recent Joker film. It’s basically like a vaguely redpill version of the Minion meme craze, but made slightly sinister by the moderately-incelish tone of some of this, along with the imagery, and the viewcounts which are frankly insane. Who are the 200k+ people who watched a video titled “15 Ultimate Boys Quotes” and whose thumbnail reads “80% of boys have girlfriends; Rest 20% [sic] are having brain”? And, er, who’s treating them?
• Mudita: ANOTHER minimalist phone, another successfully-funded Kickstarter which I am a tiny bit skeptical about (but maybe I’m being unfair). Mudita is a very nice-looking concept, all slick and minimal and with an e-ink display which is a first for me; it’s also going to retail for £300-odd quid, which to me seems like an awful lot of money for a featurephone with no browser (though there is a mindfulness feature, THANK GOD). Still, if you’re in the market for a phone which simultaneously signals your unique aesthetic AND your effortless ability to decouple from the digital treadmill then this may be for you. You dreadful, dreadful poser.
• Wheelhouse: ANOTHER NEWSLETTER! But this one’s specifically for people who make stuff with their hands, and features updates about materials and design and making techniques, and looks like it would be genuinely useful if you’re someone who actually makes things as opposed to the sort of useless cultural parasite who just spaffs out words and opinion and likes to pretend that that’s ‘creativity’ (it’s not creativity).
• Analogue Pocket: I sort-of believe that even at the very tail-end of civilisation, when the seas are boiling and the sun is a gigantic red death-orb filling our field of vision with fiery death, there will be a healthy cottage industry dedicated to keeping old console formats alive; there are, seemingly, certain men for whom the ability to play old Gameboy cartridges is simply the single most-important concern in their lives. Should you form part of that subset of humanity (emphasis here on the ‘sub’) you’ll be thrilled to hear of the Pocket Analogue, due to launch next year, which is a(n admittedly beautifully-designed) new handheld console designed to be compatible with all the Gameboy models you can think of, as well as a few other consoles like the Atari Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket. It’s not going to run emulator software, it will be coded from the ground up, will have a SUPER HI-RES SCREEN (on which to play very lo-res old games, not sure how that’s going to work tbh) and the ability to throw the games to your TV (ditto) – despite my snark, if this is the sort of thing that floats your boat then it does look rather cool; it’ll sell for $200 when it launches next year.
• Very Ugly Plates: The artist’s statement speaks for itself: “I’m an artist serving bad humor on Very Ugly Plates. I’m located in Berlin and all my plates are wall plates.” Honestly, these are fcuking wonderful (presuming you like the nature of the gags here, which are halfway between ‘classic millennial distant affect’ and a particular type of birthday card) and are for sale at around 40 Euros a pop; excellent Christmas present potential here for the right person.
• Your Wild Journey: This is quite incredible – the CHUTZPAH! Wild Journey is a meditation app, offering you a series of ‘journeys’ and ‘meditative experiences’, all presented through the medium of sounds from the natural world overlaid with relaxing words and soothing messages; you can choose what sort of natural landscape you want to experience, and there are suitable accompanying graphics to help get you into the mood…oh, and there’s a £7 MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION FEE! TO HEAR SOME FOREST-TYPE SOUNDS! Honestly, fair play to the creators here as this is some truly astonishing grift.
• Crate Labels: You didn’t, when you woke up all those many hours ago, imagine that you’d be rendered speechless with joy at a collection of old labels from Floridian crates of citrus fruits, did you? And yet here we are.
• Tawktube: Potentially REALLY useful tool, this – plug in any YouTube video you like and get it converted into a podcast (ok, fine, it’s literally just an audio file) for free. You can seemingly do this for an entire YT channel, though I’ve not tried it, which, if it automatically splits videos into individual audio files, is an incredible service.
• The Maths Genealogy Project: I sent this to my friend Ed this week, who’s the most mathematical person I know – his response was “that’s an odd website” which basically is what I live for when I send people stuff. This seeks to maintain an active archive of the pupil/tutor relationships in the mathematical world, presumably to attempt to make some sort of record of the spread of concepts / ideas within the academic world. It’s obviously of no interest whatsoever to anyone who doesn’t have a burning need to know exactly how many students Paul Erdos tutored in the 1950s, but if you do have that burning need then, well, YOU’RE WELCOME!
• Giant Military Cats: Cats, photoshopped into photos of military ordnance. Oddly reminiscent of Coldwar Steve, but with less McFadden and more kittens.
• Robn: This looks QUITE ridiculous, but if you’re a runner then perhaps it’s a hugely useful idea that you’ve been clamouring for for years. Robn is a…harness, I suppose you’d call it, designed to be worn like a packless backpack and which basically lets runners (or indeed anyone) carry their phone, keys, etc, in a non-pocketed way whilst at the same time doing away with the need for headphones thanks to inbuilt speakers. It’s quite hard to describe, but click the link and take a look – it looks a bit like the sort of thing that might be bought by the type of man who likes to share details of their ‘carry’ on Reddit and who never leaves the house without a Leatherman and at least one concealed blade, but if you’re the sort of runner who finds headphones unaccountably infuriating and who wants to keep their keys somewhere that isn’t a bumbag then perhaps you’ll be into this.
• Ologies: Tedious caveat about me not listening to podcasts aside, this looks like it could be really interesting – Ologies is a simple premise for a podcast, with its host Alie Ward exploring a different science each week (the titular ‘Ologies’). Recent episodes have covered the science of spider webs (spidroinology) and bleach (disinfectiology, apparently, though I think that’s not a real word) – I think this sounds fascinating and quite a lot of gentle, comic, Robin Ince-ish fun.
• Wheel Decide: Can’t decide? SPIN A WHEEL AND LET IT DECIDE FOR YOU! This was quite a weird discovery; I thought it was a slightly thin single-gag website, but digging around links it to a weird little subReddit dedicated to people making seemingly infinite variations on the decision wheel. Want a wheel to help you decide which blocks to lay in Minecraft? How to propose to your girlfriend? NO PROBLEM! Very strange.
• Singsong Dingdong: A lovely little 8-bit-style platform game – small, simple and perfectly-formed, this is a great way to waste half an hour while you’re meant to be working.
• Lewdlist: Two important caveats here: 1) THIS LINK IS QUITE NSFW; 2) I promise you, as ever, that I don’t look for this stuff, IT FINDS ME. With those caveats out of the way, let me present to you the Lewdlist, a website collating every single ‘sexy’ videogame concept you could possibly imagine, and then about 3million more which you couldn’t imagine at the outset but which now, by Christ, you certainly can (even if you wish you couldn’t). Let me state quite clearly I AM NOT INTO THIS STUFF AND HAVE NOT PLAYED ANY OF THESE GAMES; that said, I confess with only minimal shame to having spent an increasingly-boggle-eyed (anyone who knows me will be aware of quite what a statement that is) twenty minutes clicking around and reading about some of these. You ever wanted proof that rule34 is very much a thing? Here it is! Be aware that there is quite a lot of very odd sex stuff in here, so bear that in mind before you go gambolling through the sticky pages with abandon. There’s still nothing that’s stayed with me quite so much as the image on the landing page for ‘Breeders of the Nephelyn’, mind.
• JS13K2019: This year’s collection of games made as part of the JS13K project, where programmers vie to make the best game they can, playable in-browser, with a total filesize of no more than 13kb. As ever, the inventiveness on display here is wonderful, and there are several legitimately good games in here – the winning title, a puzzler involving shadow selves and buttons and door unlocking, is a VERY clever little headscratcher, and it’s only one of several here which are worth your time.
• The MS-DOS Game Archive (Redux): Last up in this week’s miscellaneous links, the Internet Archive this week uploaded another 2500 old PC games, all playable in-browser. You want the Monkey Island games? You want Cannon Fodder? You want Sensible World of Soccer? You want OLD VERSIONS OF CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER?!?!?!? This is SUCH an incredible resource and SUCH a good way to get sacked – who the fcuk cares, though? Your job’s sh1t and largely pointless and capitalism’s dragging us all to hell in a handcart; let’s all give up and play Ivan Ironman Stuart’s Offroad Racer until death comes to claim us!

By Jason Brueck

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘CHILL DREAM HOUSE’ AND WHO AM I TO ARGUE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• 9-Eyes: Only one Tumblr this week and it’s an old one whichcame back to life last week – 9-Eyes launched around the advent of Google Maps and was dedicated to collecting some of the more WFTish elements captured by the panopticoncars; it had been offline for 5 years now, so it’s lovely to see it return. Again, this is ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Long Furby Fam: An Insta account dedicated to posting images of modified, often deeply disturbing, Furbies.
• They Didn’t Die: Obituary euphemisms for ‘died’ – passed away, departed, or, beautifully, ‘crossed the rainbow bridge’.
• The Lynx Project: The Insta feed of a project studying the Lynx in Canada, which presents a pleasing selection of photos of these large, pointy-eared bois. O MAOW!
• Our Type: “Our Type documents the disappearing shopfronts, signage and typography of Ireland’s towns and villages.” Pleasing.
• Felipe Nunes: Felipe Nunes is a skateboarder; he also happens to not have the full complement of limbs. Watching Nunes skate is quite, quite incredible, and will make you rethink (again) what people with disabilities are capable of.
• Annette Labedzki: According to her bio, Ms Labedzki ‘loves paint and colours’. She also loves making a delightful, beautiful, VERY SATISFYING (in a vaguely kinetic sand-adjacent way) mess. If you’re a bit ASMRish then you will enjoy this a LOT imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 100 Days of Hong Kong: Or, more accurately, 100 days of the Hong Kong protests. This is an excellent interactive put together by the South China Morning Post and presenting a chronology of the protest movement over the past three months, its evolution, the shifting tactics of the state in response and how the demonstrations have ebbed and flowed across the territory as the protest has evolved. A briliamt piece of digital journalism, presenting an awful lot of information clearly and with a strong sense of narrative, this is really very good indeed.
• Is Amazon Unstoppable?: The first of two MASSIVE pieces on Amazong this week, this from the New Yorker and is an excellent overview of the company, its business its culture and its almost-unique place in the pantheon of American capitalism. It won’t, if you’re a keen student of Bezos and his works, tell you anything you don’t probably already know, but as is common with these pieces it ends up being more than the sum of its parts by dint of the cumulative effect of all the parts giving quite a complex, slightly terrifying, vision of the whole.
• What Bezos Wants: The second MASSIVE piece on Amazon is, to my mind, the better of the two; by Franklin Foer in the Atlantic; this is better on Bezos (and thus Amazon’s) overriding ambitions – to whit, total global domination – and the uneasy fact that every single company currently selling anything to anyone is simultaneously dependent on, and competing with, Amazon; which, whichever way you look at it, is a pretty sweet position for MechaBezos to be in.
• Weather Reports from Xinjiang: “In 2018, I began to travel to Kazakhstan to interview the family members of Xinjiang’s imprisoned and disappeared. I also interviewed former detainees who described their own experiences. Most had crossed from China into Kazakhstan in the weeks, months, and years before our meeting, either by applying for residency and citizenship or by escaping across the border. The result is an oral history of life in contemporary Xinjiang. To my knowledge, it is the first document of its kind.” There is a LOT in here, but my word are there some incredible stories. This is worth bookmarking and returning to, as it’s an absolute trove of wonderful (and not-infrequently-harrowing) writing.
• India’s Facial Recogniton System: Which of our favourite in-no-way-iffy global superpower regimes is experimenting with the terrifying potential of facial recognition tech to augment its existing social control mechanisms? Why that’s right, it’s ‘cuddly’ Narendra Modi’s India! This article is about as uplifting as you’d expect it to be, and while it acknowledges that there’s no explicit link between this mooted facial recognition system and the already-controversial universal ID system Aahhaar, it’s also not hard to imagine exactly how an already-authoritarian regime might go about making that exact link.
• Goodbye To The Millennial Lifestyle: A smart piece of reporting which is the first to suggest that the less-than-stellar IPO performances of Peloton, Blue Apron and a host of other millennial(sorry)-friendly businesses is a precursor to a shift in economics which will see a lot of the ‘as a service’ offerings seen as so compelling to younger consumers and as such heavily-backed by VCs start to have to hike their prices to survive. Which, in turn, means that consumers might start looking back at this period of relatively cheap cabs, delivery food, exercise and mattresses as a brief blip in the matrix; turns out that keeping this stuff cheap to consumers causes the businesses to haemmorgage money! WHO KNEW???
• Mariana Mazzucato: A slightly-dizzying profile of one of the few current top-of-their-game economists to have anything like a public profile, this is a quite incredible article. Do you ever read things about successful or brilliant people and feel very real sense of your own inadequacy and insignificance? Well with this you DEFINITELY will; honestly SO interesting, regardless of your practical understanding of economics. The sheer number of world-changing projects that she is involved with is astonishing, as is the breadth of topics to which she’s seemingly able to turn her mind; if you ever have some tedious w4nker in a cravat and those square-legged artist’s trousers attempt to tell you what creativity is, show them this and point out that there is literally nothing more creative than using numbers to solve the world’s problems.
• Nowthis News and Social Video: Interesting look at Nowthis Video, a company which has cornered the market (this week at least) in political video content in the US, creating content which reaches hundreds of millions across the political spectrum each week. Regardless of how much you care about content around US politics, the business model here is interesting to read about and, again, a stark reminder of how much of this is a numbers game; the quantity of stuff they produce each week is INSANE, as is the size of the production team. Next time your clients whinge at you about your numbers, ask them when they’ll be willing to shell out for a team of 100+ writers, editors, camerapeople, producers…
• Celebrity Phone Numbers: On the very recent phenomenon of famouses in the US asking you to text them; this is a company which is offering the opportunity for mass SMS-based star-to-fan interactions, effectively a mailing list reduced to the most oldschool means possible. Will be interesting to see if this takes off – what I am always most interested in, though, with stuff like this, is how these apps manage to persuade all the famouses to use them – do they use some of the VC cash to literally pay them to play? Do all these people share the same agent and does said agent have a stake in this app? It’s CONFUSING.
• Did dril Sell Out?: You may or may not be aware that KING OF WEIRD Twitter dril this week announced he was going to make an actual TV show with Adult Swim, attempting to translate his particular brand of despair-surrealism from 280 characters to 20m of video. Whether or not the show will work or not is moot; the story here is the fairly-typical way in which a host of people on the internet got very upset that the person who had kept them entertained for free for a decade with pithy witticisms has decided to get paid for a change. The answer to the question is ‘no, of course not ffs’, but the interesting part of the piece is the discussion around the extent to which being on Twitter can or should be considered ‘work’ or whether it’s what you do to get work, and how those boundaries blur. I tend to find, fwiw, that I very much get jobs despite my Twitter presence.
• The Pinterest Algo: You have to be quite into s*c**l m*d** to get the most out of this, fine, but for those of you who work in or around algoland this is a really interesting read, on the unique way in which Pinterest has given users the opportunity to tweak its algorithm and what that’s meant for the way in which the platform has evolved.
• Hyperpersonalised Medicines: It is entirely possible to create medical treatments for illnesses designed to treat a very specific genetic profile – so specific that they might work for one intended recipient alone. Should we, though? This is a fascinating essay looking at the very, very specific branch of medicine investigating ultraspecific treatments; the questions as to the rights and wrongs are largely left to the reader, but it’s not hard to imagine a situation whereby the ultra-rich are able to create and make use of highly-tailored treatments which the less-plutocratic couldn’t even dream of. Nice thought, eh? What? Oh.
• Time on TikTok: The seemingly-neverending cavalcade of thinkpieces explaining TikTok to a confused adult world continues, though this, in the NYT, is really rather good. A selection of the paper’s critics spent a week with the platform and shared their impressions of it; there are some lovely observations here, and each of them comes away from it feeling, broadly, like it’s not A Bad Thing. There’s a line in here that stuck with me, though, about how it very specifically feeds young people’s ‘desire to be seen’ – it made me think, as a teenager (and, frankly, even now) I honestly had no desire to be seen AT ALL; is this even a thing anymore? Can young people conceive of not wanting to be seen – not just irl, but even online? Is there anyone currently alive and smartphone-enabled between the ages of 10-16 who wouldn’t give their left kidney and a few significant layers of epidermis in exchange for a stint on the ‘trending’ page? Genuine question, I am curious. BONUS TIKTOK! This piece about the weird way in which serial killers are fetishised on the platform is…odd.
• Closet Accounts: The latest Instatrend is teens obsessively researching their idols’ outfits and racing to post links to Insta ‘Closet Accounts’ detailing where other similar stans can purchase the clothes the famous is wearing (or close approximations thereof). There’s DEFINITELY some sort of bullsh1t insight you can squeeze out of this to justify some sort of awful hashtag campaign, in case you’re unfortunate enough to have to use words like that in cold blood.
• On Fortnite’s Black Hole: Typically great writing on Fortnite by Keth Stuart at the Guardian, who as ever does a great job of explaining what happened this week (the black hole! Chapter 2! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN FFS????) to a normie audience whilst also gently outlining how incredibly smart Epic has been at turning what is effectively a software update into a global news story. BONUS FORTNITE FEATURE! This piece looks at how the game map has evolved over each of its various changes in the past Chapter, and how that’s slowly created narrative and UX tweaks simply by changing the playfield. SO much interesting design here.
• Meet Fox E: Fox E reviews restaurants on Yelp. He often includes photos oh himself in those reviews, which are also occasionally left as poems or raps. His girlfrie…oh, look, you just have to read this. What a remarkable man, and what an odd story this is.
• Living In Cursed Times: The proliferation of the term ‘cursed’ has been a feature of the past three or so years online; what does it mean though? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? If you’re in the market for a slightly-overserious explainer about the deeply layered significance of the word in its EXTREMELY ONLINE context, or an attempt at a precise definition of what exactly constitutes ‘cursed energy’, then you will very much enjoy this (also, please, can we move on from the use of the term ‘energy’ please? It makes everyone sound like the sort of person who’s really into crystals, which perhaps on reflection is in fact what everyone is in 2019).
• The Cheetos Market: You know those stories that occasionally do the rounds online, in which someone in the midwest finds an X shaped like a Y (a cheeseburger shaped like Jesus; a rifle shaped like regret; that sort of thing) and then puts it on eBay and it attracts a bid of $100,000 within minutes and the world shakes its collective head and moves on? Well, have you ever actually seen proof that any of these things ever sold for those sums? And have you ever wondered if anyone really DOES collect funny-shaped crisps? And have you ever thought “hm, I’d really like to learn more about the types of people who attempt to extort 6-figures from gullible strangers for a corn snack shaped a little bit like a person, if you squint”? EXCELLENT, in which case read this article.
• Models of Models: This is about mathematical models – what they are, what they are used for, and how to think about them – it is also one of the best, clearest pieces of writing about information categorisation and taxonomy (at a theoretical level) I’ve read in a while, and I promise you is REALLY REALLY INTERESTING, whether or not you are a maths moron (I am a maths moron; there is no need to be ashamed (not true, there are a lot of reasons, but let’s gloss over them for now).
• The Manhood of Achewood: This is part of a long series of essays analysing seminal (in the ‘it was the start of something’ sense rather than in the ‘a load of w4nk’ sense) comic Achewood (if you don’t know what that is then, well, READ THIS PIECE AND EDUCATE YOURSELF FFS) through a variety of different lenses/prisms; this one looks specifically at its treatments of masculinity, and it’s a smart reading of a comic I feel I probably haven’t read enough criticism of.
• Maradona: A quite wonderful portrait of the second-greatest footballer I have ever seen (sorry Diego, but Leo is better), written by an American and all the better for not quite having the same familiarity with the subject matter presumed when a European or South American writes about Maradona.
• In Defence of Fiction: Zadie Smith on typically fantastic form, on writing fiction, what one has the ‘right’ to write about, the role of the imagined in exploring the self and the other, and all sorts besides. She’s so DISGUSTINGLY clever it makes me quite upset.
• The End of Oz: Finally in the longreads this week, on the ‘Oz’ series of books, except it’s not really about that at all – it’s a truly superb essay on childhood and family and memory and the past as a concept and a foreign country and change and, honestly, it’s really quite brilliant and deserves the cup of tea and biscuit you’ll need to accompany it.

By Simone Hutsch

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. There are nearly 400million guns in the US. This video shows you 2,328 of them. This is creepy as you like, but also quite a brilliant piece of film:

1. This is the new one from Slaves. It’s called ‘One More Day Won’t Hurt’, but I’m not convinced that they really mean that:

1. Would you like some unpleasantly-abrasive NOISE from Bridgitte Bardon’t? YES YOU WOULD! I will give anyone who puts this on the office stereo and sends me proof an actual prize; it’s called “I Wonder”:

1. Next, this is a rather beautiful antidote to that last horror – this is Konradsen, with the gentle, beautiful, pleasingly-Feist-adjacent ‘Baby Hallelujah’:

1. Last up this week, this is Lady Shocker’s recent SBTV Wake Up session – love the flow and the way she emotes the fcuk out this; you can tell she’s also an actress. Anyway, regardless, this is ace and you should check it out and OH LOOK THAT’S ALL WE HAVE TIME FOR AND FRANKLY I’M ALREADY A BIT LATE SO I’M GOING TO HAVE TO KEEP THE GOODBYES SHORT THIS WEEK BUT PLEASE REMEMBER I LOVE YOU AND I CARE ABOUT YOU AND ALL THESE LINKS ARE BASICALLY JUST MY WAY OF SHOWING YOU I CARE SO PLEASE TRY AND HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND DON’T LET THE BASTARDS, WHOEVER THEY MAY BE IN YOUR PARTICULAR CASE, GRIND YOU DOWN, TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND BYE!: