HELLO EVERYONE! What’s happening? Does anyone have any idea? No? GREAT!

For once, though, I genuinely don’t care. I am about to embark upon a disgustingly lavish weekend of eating and drinking with my girlfriend, and, frankly, everything other than food, booze and the happy functioning of my gastrointestinal tract can get royally fcuked until Monday (apart from you, dear reader). There’s a reasonable chance that I might contract gout between now and next Friday, so apologies in advance if next week’s Curios gets delayed by painful crystalline deposits of uric acid around my finger joints – until then, though, let ME feed YOU like some sort of shabbily-plumed miserybird (a glum-beaked stork, perhaps, or a slightly sh1t heron). Open wide and let the anticipation build – WHICH of this week’s multitude of partially-digested, meaty little nuggets of webspaff will I deposit down your pinkly-throbbing epiglottis first? LET’S SEE SHALL WE???

I, as ever, am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios; everything, as ever, is a mess and broken beyond all probable repair. ENJOY! 

By Craig Keenan

LET’S KICK OFF THIS SECTION WITH THE NEW FOUR-TRACK EP FROM PIXEL AND JACK NIMBLE WHICH IS A CRACKING LITTLE SLICE OF UNDERGROUND UK HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS, IF YOU’RE A CLIENT AND FEELING SADISTIC, THAT YOU EMAIL YOUR AGENCY ASKING FOR A WHITE PAPER OUTLINING IN DETAIL WHAT THEY THINK YOUR ‘THREADS’ STRATEGY SHOULD BE:

• Instagram Launches Threads: A NEW SOCIAL MEDIA! A NEW SOCIAL MEDIA! Remember the good old days, before everyone just threw up their hands in resignation at the realisation that Facebook had won, when a new social platform sprang up seemingly every couple of months? Peach? Ello? Yo? Well HUZZAH, then, for Threads, Insta’s new spinoff app (trailed a few months ago and mentioned in here on 30 August, when I said that it ‘couldn’t be less important’, an opinion I’m struggling to revise at 652am this morning)! Threads is effectively to Instagram what Messenger is to Facebook; it’s a messaging app, pure and simple, with the sole gimmick that it’s limited to using with whoever you’ve designated as your ‘close friends’ on Insta; the idea being to streamline the experience for those users who conduct their entire lives through the app. It also includes the to-me-baffling autostatus thing, to whit: “We’ve heard that you want an easier way to keep up with your friends throughout the day – especially when you don’t have the time to send a photo or have a conversation. That’s why we created status. You can choose from a suggested status (? Studying), create your own (? Procrastinating) or turn on Auto Status (? On the move), which automatically shares little bits of context on where you are without giving away your coordinates. Only your close friends will see your status, and it’s completely opt-in” (those are Instagram’s own emoji, btw, in case you thought my long-standing aversion to the sodding things had passed; it really hasn’t). WHO? WHO WAS ASKING FOR THE ABILITY FOR THEIR PHONE TO SEND AUTOMATIC MESSAGES ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE? No fcuker, that’s who. Anyway, this is rather a lot of words for something with little-to-no immediate brand implications, though there is definitely some sort of ‘surprise and delight’ (sorry) mechanic certain popular brands could maybe do with granting fans the ‘joy’ of being one of their close friends for a week, offering them exclusive content and offers and a bit of BIG BRAND LOVE (before then cruelly withdrawing the attention and moving on to the next idiot in the queue). I don’t know, you’re the social media people, you come up with something (and if you’re not the social media people, why the fcuk are you reading this section? It’s awful! Skip to the good bits!).
• Insta Tests Reminders For Product Launches: Yep, if you’re the sort of brand whose fans (brand fans – a concept so alien and hideous that it makes me feel a tiny bit less human each and every time I type it) eagerly await your new products with fevered anticipation then this potentially-forthcoming new feature from Insta might be of use; “The product launch sticker in Instagram Stories and product launch tag in feed lets people set reminders for the launch date, preview product details and buy as soon as a product is available without leaving Instagram.” Being tested with a limited number of large brands in the US, but I feel reasonably confident in predicting that this will become available to all in due course.
• AR Shopping Launches On Insta: For a small range of partners (in the US), at least – still, this is another feature that will be available more widely within 6m or so – it’s a standard (ha! ‘standard’! How quickly the magic fades!) feature that will let brands with wearable products allow users to ‘wear’ them in AR, before swiping to buy directly through the app if users like what they see. Why not start pestering your Facebook rep about this each and every day til it finally rolls out in the UK? They live for those sorts of interactions, I promise you.
• Instagram Creators: A slightly-baffling Insta account, from Instagram itself, which is seemingly designed to offer tips and inspiration to ‘Creators’ (fine, I’m not going to wang on again about how much I hate that term; know, though, that I really, really do) for making better, more engaging stuff on the platform. It’s fair to say that, 12 posts in, it’s not really offering much in the way of value, but maybe it will improve and say or do something useful one day. Beautifully, the comments to most of its posts are along the lines of “want to help creators, Insta? Well stop throttling our fcuking content, then, we don’t want to buy any fcuking ads”, though if any of those people think that particular genie’s going back in the bottle they may well be disappointed.
• Twitter Launches Anti-Hate DM Filters: Or at least it’s testing them, and I can’t see this not becoming a universal part of the product. Don’t want to click the link? Here, look, this is the ‘interesting’ bit: “Instead of lumping all your messages into a single view, the Message Requests section will include the messages from people you don’t follow, and below that, you’ll find a way to access these newly filtered messages.Users would have to click on the “Show” button to even read these, which protects them from having to face the stream of unwanted content that can pour in at times when the inbox is left open. And even upon viewing this list of filtered messages, all the content itself isn’t immediately visible. In the case that Twitter identifies content that’s potentially offensive, the message preview will say the message is hidden because it may contain offensive content. That way, users can decide if they want to open the message itself or just click the delete button to trash it.” A Good Thing.
• Smarter YouTube Ads: Turns out I’m really not in the market for paraphrasing a bunch of relatively-tedious social media platform updates this week. Fancy another load of C&P from the link? Tough! “Rather than managing separate campaigns for 6-second bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads, now you can upload multiple video creatives into a single campaign. From there, Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of these formats to help you reach your audience at scale.” It’s a glorious time to be alive.
• Snapchat Enables Three-Minute Ads: It’s uncertain whether anyone ever actually needs to see a three-minute advert for anything, but, more interestingly, you can now promote (short) music videos on the platform, longer film trailers and the like; in terms of advertising media to children, this is probably quite useful. Additionally, Snapchat “is also giving advertisers the ability to add swipe actions to their commercial campaigns, just like users can do with non-commercial content. In the new format, any commercial campaign can now enable users to swipe to a web view, long-form video or camera attachment.” Genuinely potentially useful, this, though the obvious caveats around ‘is Snap really a good use of our ad budget though? Is it really?’ apply.
• Reddit Offers More Video Ad Size Options: There are a couple of other small updates here as well, including mobile landing pages and referral URLs; I’m personally of the opinion that Reddit (or at least certain bits of it) is just about normie enough that advertising on it shouldn’t be quite as scary as it used to be, though don’t quote me on that (the idea that anyone goes around quoting some webmong’s opinion on Reddit advertising!).
• Better Privacy Controls for Google Products: There is literally NO brand implication for this at all, but it’s good to know about and the sort of thing you might want to read and inform your friends and family about, should any of them be the sort of odd throwback who cares about privacy and not having their every move tracked by a somewhat-sinister advertising behemoth. This includes an incognito mode for Maps, letting you use the app without automatically flagging each and every step you take to Google, along with improved password security and a couple of other bits and pieces. Not fun, but worth knowing.
• Google Launches Action Blocks: Sinister Google may be, but it does also make some very, very smart things. Action Blocks is a great idea to improve smartphone accessibility; “Action Blocks are essentially a sequence of commands for the Google Assistant, so everything the Assistant can do can be scripted using this new tool, no matter whether that’s starting a call or playing a TV show. Once the Action Block is set up, you can create a shortcut with a custom image on your phone’s home screen.” So, for example, a user could set up an automated chain of actions which would allow them to order an Uber back to their house with a single tap of an easily-recognisable icon from the homescreen; for users with learning difficulties, or dementia sufferers, touches like this can radically increase the usability of a smartphone. SUCH a good idea – currently only in beta, but worth keeping an eye out for this if you know people who might benefit.
• Google Shopping Gets Revamped: The really interesting bit of this update is the tweak to Google Lens, which (as the piece points out) brings it much closer to Pinterest in terms of the ability to take photos of stuff and then buy things that look like whatever’s in that photo. There are a few other updates here too, but at present it’s US-only and, well, I’m bored of this stuff now so am going to leave you to click the link and find out what the fcuk they might be.
• BoostApps: Whilst I appreciate many of you are snugly-ensconced in the ivory towers of BigAgencyLand and as such have access to ready, willing teams of CRACK DESIGNERS and CUTTING-EDGE VISUAL CREATIVES (lol jk I bet it’s a constant battle to get anyone to even crop an image for you, right? And they never answer their emails? FCUKING ART DIRECTORS, EH???), I know that others of you don’t always have the resource and have to cobble together your content in other ways. BoostApps is a set of three apps which are designed to let you make quick, fancy-looking content for the socials, with one designed for Story creation, another for better video editing and the last for the creation of animated ‘posters’. As with all these things, the outputs won’t look quite like the stuff Nike does – still, better than messing around in Paint like I tend to.
• Feast of Legends: In a week in which I saw that the FT has launched a financial literacy boardgame to sell to schools, Wendy’s (the US burger chain whose inexplicable USP is…er…square patties) has done what might be my favourite pointless advermarketingprthing of the year and created a whole Dungeons & Dragon’s-style tabletop roleplaying game which you can download as a PDF and play RIGHT NOW! I just took a look at the game manual and, fair play, it’s nearly 100-pages and is seemingly a pretty well-fleshed-out standalone campaign, although I imagine the near-ceaseless shilling of assorted fast-food products throughout might get a bit wearing after a while. Still, I am officially declaring the creation of branded tabletop gaming products a PROPER TREND FOR 2020 (is this the first trend prediction of the year? Am I a PIONEER?!?!) – you read it hear first, kids!

By Ian Francis

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS GREAT PLAYLIST OF SONGS INSPIRED BY SCIFI, COMPILED BY FRED DEAKIN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS THIS WEEKEND MORE THAN MOST IS VERY MUCH AWARE OF ITS OWN MORTALITY, PT.1:

• The UK Deprivation Map: Taking publicly available data about relative deprivation across the UK, by postcode, this is an excellent piece of dataviz which quickly and easily allows you to see how different areas of the UK rate on a scale of more-deprived to less-deprived. This is new data, published with relatively little fanfare last week, and it doesn’t paint a great picture of equality and wealth distribution around the country. What’s most striking, to me at least, about this is how it neatly and starkly points out quite how much wealth and privilege is concentrated in certain areas of London; not, I’m sure, news to any of you who aren’t members of the Capital’s liberal elite, fine, but it’s particularly evident here, as is the (again, unsurprising) rise in deprivation in urban areas as soon as you go North of Cambridge.
• Civility in Politics: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is a project by my friend Alison Goldsworthy, but it’s a good project and I would be including it anyway, and it’s my newsletterblogthing so, well, there. Civility in Politics is an award seeking to celebrate the seemingly-lost art of, well, politicians not being complete cnuts to each other; nominations are open in a selection of categories including politician of the year and campaigner of the year, and winners will get a £3k donation to the charity of their choice. Should you know of someone in politics at a local or national level (in the UK) who deserves recognition, nominate them – apparently they’ve had a surprisingly high number of suggestions already, which is pleasing-if-a-touch-surprising given, well, 2019.
• The Depression and WWII In Colour: A fabulous archive of colourised photos of the 30s and 40s in the US from the US Library of Congress on Flickr; there are hundreds of pictures here (1600, to be precise), and if you listen to a combined soundtrack of Count Basie and South Pacific while browsing them you’ll basically be transported back in time.
• The Mr Global 2019 Photos: These have done the rounds a bit this week, but if you’ve not seen them then OH BOY are you in for a massive, beefcake-based treat. Mr Global, I learned this week, is the male equivalent of Miss Universe; much like in that particular bastion of good taste, Mr Global contestants are also required to model costumes based on their traditional national garb, and this photo set presents the JOYFUL press shots for each of the several-dozen square-jawed, brooding-browed hunks dressed up in all their local finery. It’s almost impossible to pick a favourite, but a few observations: 1) WHY DOES THE UK NOT SUBMIT AN ENTRY? Also, what would our national dress look like?; 2) I think I just got pregnant as a result of Mr Nigeria’s lusty gaze; 3) Mr Taiwan is corpsing very hard in his second shot; 4) Absolute respect to Mr Cuba not only for absolutely owning his (very, very silly) outfit, but also for having what appears to be a truly gigantic penis, albeit one which exists at a fixed 90-degree angle to the rest of his body at all times; and 5), WHAT THE FCUK USA THAT IS NOT YOUR NATIONAL COSTUME ALSO PUT SOME EFFORT IN. Honestly, I could stare at these for HOURS.
• Mammalz: Actually, having complained *up there* about the fact that noone launches new social networks anymore, here’s another new one – Mammalz is ‘A new way to experience nature’ – that is, seemingly by tapping away on your phone. The idea is that Mammalz is a (standard-seeming) social platform, designed specifically for people working in, or interested in, nature and conservation, for sharing photos and information and news about, I don’t know, Gnu mating season. This is obviously never going to become anything other than, at best, a niche product (fast forward to 2050 when Mammalz buys out TikTok for $73bn), but it’s entirely possible that the nature community is CRYING OUT for a Facebook analogue; can someone check back in on it in a year and let me know how it’s going? Thanks.
• Flags Mashup Bot: I’m late with this one, mainly as I was convinced I’d featured it MONTHS ago (but I hadn’t. God, it must be thrilling to read about the day-to-day mechanics of running a long-running-but-still-very-much-not-very-popular-newsletterblogtypething!); Flags Mashup Bot is a Twitter bot (SHURELY NOT!) which, er, combines different flags to make new ones. That’s it – except as a result ofthe fact it’s entirely random, it quite regularly throws up…problematic examples which occasionally seem like exhortations to all-out war between certain nations. Can’t imagine too many people on either side being happy with its Sino-Japanese combination, for example, not to mention the Yorkshire/Lancashire abomination. Follow not only for the flags but for the surprisingly-excellent vexillological chat that you get in the replies.
• Peter Lindbergh: I didn’t know this, but Peter Lindbergh was a renowned fashion photographer who died this year after decades of work at the very top of the industry; this site is an online obituary to him and a celebration of his life and work, featuring his biography and portfolio, presented in lovely sober, beautifully-designed fashion. This is in part just a really nice piece of memorial webwork, as well as being a wonderful record of trends in fashion (and fashion photography) since the 60s; it also made me briefly contemplate the sort of esteem one must be held in to get a tribute website in death. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, can someone please create a CurioBot which will churn out GPT2-Generated Curios for the rest of time? Hubris? ME????
• Mylee: I went to dinner at the house of some friends last night who’ve recently had a baby, and we were talking about breastfeeding (it’s a highbrow laugh riot being in middle-age, kids, you just wait!) and what a weirdly political and fraught topic it is. Well, if you want to make it more fraught and give yourself an additional level of worry and anxiety as a parent, Mylee could be the product for YOU! Yes, that’s right ladies, QUANTIFIED TITS!!! You can use Mylee to undertake CHEMICAL ANALYSIS of your breast milk, getting near-instantaneous judgement as to the perceived quality of your body’s output, as well as using it to measure the quantity of your lactation to (and this is the good bit) ‘motivate you to reach your breastfeeding goals!’. Now as a cishet man my experience of either having breasts or lactation is…minimal, but I don’t think this sounds like a particularly good idea, especially not at a time which can often be fraught and nervous and stressful anyway. Would YOU like an app cajoling you about your fluctuating milk protein levels? Do YOU want another reason to be terrified you’re somehow failing the precious, fragile output of your union? I can’t imagine you do, but, well, here it is anyway! Also, and this is a beautiful closing kicker, it costs $250! AND THAT’S A DISCOUNTED PRICE! Madness.
• Natalist: Not content with exploiting nervous parents immediately post-partum, the mad world of startups is also attempting to exploit people’s fear of sterility for profit! Natalist is one of the most shameless grifts I have seen in years – it’s fertility as a service! The site offers visitors the opportunity to buy either one-off ‘Get Pregnant’ bundles, containing a few pregnancy tests, some ovulation tests, some vitamins and a book called ‘Conception 101’, or (and this is the REALLY horrid bit) subscribe to a monthly delivery of this tat for the princely sum of $75 a month. WHAT?!?!? I checked this out yesterday when I found this and the retail price of the goods included isn’t more than £40-odd quid, max, making this a quite staggering amount to pay for a bunch of stuff which, with the best will in the world, are unlikely to make a significant material difference to one’s likelihood of getting knocked up; not only that, but WHO NEEDS THREE PREGNANCY TESTS A MONTH?!?! This is madness, and quite unpleasantly exploitative madness at that.
• What’s Your Grief: A website offering resources for people coping with loss, this contains a wide range of resources, articles, links and advice on how to try to cope with the death of a loved one. It’s not hugely cheery as a casual browse, as you might expect, but it’s the sort of thing I would have found hugely helpful at various points over the past 10 years and which might be worth bookmarking or keeping somewhere because, well, it’s a universal problem.
• Oollee: Preposterous subscription service of the week part two! Oollee does, I will concede, have an oddly-compelling and pleasingly over-engineered website, featuring a strangely-threatening humanoid figure made out of water and a persistent (and, as I am finding as I type this with the tab open, bladder-troubling) watery soundtrack. That’s my goodwill runs out, though – Oollee is selling a subscription to a water filtration system, and specifically to the filters, which you need to replace at the cost of $29 a month. Now there are a few things wrong with this – for a start, US tap water is entirely potable, making this pointless from the outset, not to mention the fact that most commercially-available domestic filtration systems require you to spend around £40 a year on replacement filters rather than the £360 you’d be spending to enjoy the ‘convenience’ of a new one being mailed to you each month. The WORST thing about it, though, is the ability to ‘check the quality of your water whenever you like through the app’ – WHY? WHO THE EVERLIVING FCUK IS GOING TO THINK “OOH, YOU KNOW WHAT, LET ME CHECK THE MAGNESIUM LEVELS IN MY FILTERED WATER TANK WHILE I’M AT WORK, I DON’T WANT THEM DROPPING BELOW OPTIMAL LEVELS!” Literally NO FCUKER, that’s who. The cherry on the cake of this godawful company is that it’s based out of Menlo Park. Of course it is.
• Plotify: I love this – such a clever idea, and I’m slightly annoyed I didn’t think of it. Plotify lets you plug in any film title you like, and will generate you a Spotify playlist based on its plot; the song selection is a touch loose, fine, but the technique is quite smart; as far as I can tell, it pulls a plot summary of whatever you type in from…somewhere, and then using that copy as a series of keyword searches to populate the playlist. If you want an excellent way of throwing together some VERY random (but loosely thematic) playlists this is almost unparalleled.
• Surveillance Cinema: This is a really clever art project; artist Rachel Fleit reimagines iconic scenes from cinema, stitching them together from surveillance camera footage. The resulting short films are sinister and alien despite being very, very familiar – I would love to see a short horror film shot entirely using Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras, maybe one set in a suburban cul-de-sac; sadly Ring’s current privacy travails mean that the likelihood of them commissioning one is pretty low.
• Pret Etranger: The existential musings of Albert Camus, applied to Pret A Manger. You may not think that this sounds funny, but you are wrong.
• Impeachment FYI: Your one-stop-shop for the latest impeachment news and updates. Sadly this pertains to the impeachment happening on the other side of the Atlantic rather than a newly-announced attempt to dethrone That Fcuking Man, but US readers might find it useful and those of us in the UK can just sort of wistfully hope.
• Canoo: This is interesting – a much-predicted business model in the wild for the first time (for me at least). One of the things futurists have been predicting for a few years now is the advent of ‘vehicle as a service’ provision; Canoo does exactly that, offering residents of…some cities in the US (it’s not launched yet, you see) the ability to pay a monthly fee to gain use of one of their specially-designed electric vehicles, which look rather nice and are all spacious and city friendly and stuff. It will be interesting to see what takeup of this is – if they can make it work in the States where people are big into car ownership they can potentially make it work anywhere.
• Drama Online: No, sadly not that sort of drama – instead it’s a wonderful trove of theatrical resources, including playtexts and analysis and theory and all sorts of other gubbins; if you or anyone you know is a bit thespy then this is a glorious resource (although you need to me associated with an academic institution to get access).
• Real Fantasy: I don’t mean to make too many assumptions about my readership, but I feel quite strongly that there may be more than a few of you who might be interested in this. Let’s see: “Real Fantasy is a magazine about interpersonal connections formed in virtual worlds. We are asking for story submissions from people who have played, or currently play, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. The only requirement is that the story is about a strong memory you made in-game and carry with you today.” Did you fall in love in Azeroth? Have you developed a secret and burning hatred for someone on your Minecraft server? TELL THE STORY.
• A Kids’ Book About…: On the one hand, this is probably a really good idea – this site presents a selection of books designed to help adults have conversations with children about difficult topics, like sexism or depression or death (and more positive things, like creativity or belonging), all with friendly-looking designs and written by proper kids’ authors, and I can imagine that these aren’t a bad way of beginning to have Serious Chats about stuff. On the other hand, I did laugh a LOT at the sheer miserable horror of the ‘buy’ page, where you’re presented with a litany of titles like ‘A kids’ book about racism’ and, most perfectly of all, ‘A Kids’ Book About Failure’, which at least one of my godchildren is now getting for Christmas and which their parents had better find funny.
• Fat Bear Week: IT’S FAT BEAR WEEK! Thanks to Curios reader Hannah for reminding me of this, and of the fact that you can (as soon as the sun comes up over there, at least) watch a livestream of some VERY CHONKY BEARS catching salmon in the Katmai National Park; there’s currently voting going on to determine which of the bears so-far captured on camera is in fact the thiccest boi, so you may want to get involved.
• Whatsappr: An easy way of adding a ‘share this on WhatsApp’ link / button to anything you want. Which is useful. LOOK, NOT EVERYTHING IN CURIOS HAS TO BE FUNNY OR WEIRD OK, SOME THINGS ARE JUST USEFUL AND THAT IS FINE. Jesus.
• Echo Chamber Club: “The Echo Chamber Club is a philosophical research institute dedicated to understanding how information environments can be healthy and democratic in a digital age.” Part of Ed Saperia’s Newspeak House project, exploring digital democracy and its development, this is worth keeping an eye on if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
• This To That: A website celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and an absolute CLASSIC of the genre, serving one very specific purpose – that purpose is to help you work out how best to stick one sort of physical material to another. You ever wanted to know exactly the best means of sticking rubber to wood? YES MATE IT’S CHRISTMAS COME EARLY.
• Studio Binder: Even in weeks when the internet is an absolute horrorshow of bad, there will be occasional nuggets like this that momentarily convince me that it wasn’t a terrible invention after all; this is a YouTube channel which offers an incredible selection of video production tutorial and theory content, covering everything from scriptwriting to captioning to direction masterclasses…fine, it’s produced by a software company as marketing for its editing tools, but who cares – this is genuinely useful if you’re a budding filmmaker.
• Tilt Five: This is a really interesting Kickstarter, looking like it’s going to do over a million by the time it’s through and offering you the opportunity to get hold of an AR boardgames kit; it will ship with a board, sets of glasses and a variety of different games you can play with the kit. The idea is that the AR will basically turn everything into some sort of amazing Battlechess-style experience, with animations and SFX and all sorts of other digital gubbins which will make your tabletop gaming more immersive than ever before. Which is great in theory, though obviously the value of this will be determined by how good the games are and how many more get made for this specific platform; it does rather feel like it’ll end up being a bit Betamax-ish once Oculus and the rest become mainstream, but til then it could be worth a look if you fancy an augmented boardgame fix (and, er, if you’re ok with Kickstarter’s increasingly unpleasant labour practices).
• The Highway Wiki: You want a Wiki all about traffic signals and associated information? You want to get lost in an exhaustive list of every single manufacturer of traffic signals in the world? No, I can’t imagine you do for a second, and yet I know that at least one of you will click this link and THIS IS THE POWER I WIELD!!!
• Parliament Buildings of the World: A sublime Twitter thread offering photos and, even better, short critical appraisals of the Parliaments of the world. It’s amazing quite how many of them look quite a lot like not-very-good-motels.

By Serge Gay Jr.

NEXT, HAVE A RATHER GOOD TECH-HOUSE MIX BY FRANCESCO MONTI!

THE SECTION WHICH IS THIS WEEKEND MORE THAN MOST IS VERY MUCH AWARE OF ITS OWN MORTALITY, PT.2:

• Leo Aerospace: I can’t imagine there are many of you who are likely to find this particularly useful, but I wanted to include it purely to share my amazement at the fact that you can apparently fire rockets into space FROM A BALLOON, but also because the little illustration of the balloon with said rocket attached to it is SO incredibly shonky that I’m not totally convinced this whole thing isn’t a joke (it isn’t a joke, it’s real, let’s shoot something into space from a balloon!).
• Can You Microwave?: There are certain categories of question that are so important that they need a standalone website (see also: that one up there about how to stick things to each other). This is onesuch site, offering all the information anyone could possibly need or want on the likely outcome of microwaving a bunch of different objects and materials. Even if you don’t click, I feel it’s important to share this particular entry from the homepage: “Can you microwave lube? No.” I’m basically a public servant.
• Knowable: “Knowable is a first-of-its-kind audio learning platform and library of original, expert-led audio courses. We create immersive, screen-free learning experiences that help people get inspired, learn new things, and accomplish their personal and professional goals.” It’s a paid-for service, obviously, but they have some pretty big names involved, including the likes of Alexis Ohanian on their ‘how to be an entrepreneur’ course (I personally think that the likelihood of any of you learning anything from Alexis Ohanian burbling into your ear about entrepreneurship is approximately zero, but feel free to come and laugh at me when you’re riding around on a platinum BMX or whatever it is you choose to buy with the millions). Could be worth a look, maybe, but equally caveat emptor and all that.
• The Brimley Line: A joyous piece of internet silliness, the Brimley Line is…oh, look, here: “When ‘Cocoon’ reached theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley was 18,530 days old. This account makes note of people who have reached that age.” Yes, that’s right, a Twitter account that arbitrarily celebrates celebrities’ 18,530th day of life, sporadically Tweeting out things like “Born Jan. 2, 1969, supermodel and maternal health activist Christy Turlington is 18,530 days old today, making her the same age as Wilford Brimley on the day ‘Cocoon’ was released. Congrats @CTurlington — you’ve reached the Brimley/Cocoon Line.” You may not think it will make you happy, but I promise you it really does.
• The SWPA Award Entries: A selection of photos submitted to this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, collected by the Atlantic and featuring some absolute gems; the last one on the page is a particular favourite of mine.
• Cheatman: Would you like to play a game of hangman against the computer? One in which the computer cheats incessantly? One which is impossible to win? You wouldn’t automatically think that this would be anything other than a deeply frustrating and futile experience, and in the main you’d be absolutely right, but there’s something sort-of bitterly amusing about the machine opponent’s ceaseless cnutery which means I enjoyed it quite a lot more than I expected to. Still, you really CANNOT win.
• Haywire: Photographs of the incredibly tangled telephone wires of Nepal, which, again, shouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting as pleasing as they in fact turn out to be.
• Smartcan: I can’t work out if this is the best product innovation I’ve seen all year or absolutely the worst. You decide. There are certain parts of the world in which residents are expected to move their bins to a specific collection point to facilitate the binmen’s job; I can only imagine the intense pain and discomfort these people feel each week when they have to move a wheeled plastic container a dozen or so feet and then back again. Well THANK GOD for Smartcan, then, which eliminates that onerous chore by, er, fitting the bins with wheels and a motor and letting you programme them so they’ll wheel themselves out each week. YOU CAN TRACK THE BIN USING AN APP! “What are you doing, Brad?” “Oh, nothing Steve – just checking my motorised Smart Bin is manoeuvring itself into place with sufficient accurac-oh for fcuksake, it’s gotten stuck on the SUV”. No, I have decided, this is a terrible, terrible idea.
• SeatyGo: An appalling name – honestly, can we ban tweeness for a few years? I thought we’d got all that ‘boaty mcboatface’ and twee nonswears out of our systems a few years ago, but I worry it’s creeping back – for what otherwise looks like quite a sensible thing, a detachable bike seat currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. It’s about halfway there with three weeks to go, so there’s a reasonable chance it’ll make its target – cyclists bored of having their seats nicked could do worse than check this out (previous comments about Kickstarter’s anti-union fcukery notwithstanding).
• The Trade Journal Cooperative: I am MISERABLE that this doesn’t deliver to the UK, but am including it in case anyone fancies setting up something parallel (if it already exists over here, please do let me know) – this is a subscription service which, for an annual fee, will send you a different obscure trade publication each month. It may not sound great, fine, but how much would YOU like to wake up one morning to find an unexpected copy of ‘Pizzaiolo Monthly’ or ‘Sprocket World’ on your mat? LOTS is the obvious answer. Quite annoyed I can’t subscribe.
• Tonic: Sorry, I’ve just realised there’s rather more US-only stuff in here than usual; I’ll be more careful in future. Still, Tonic is a really interesting idea – an app to surface new and interesting content from the web, which uses a combination of automated scraping of sources allied with a human editorial team to triage and maintain quality control. It’s focused on reading rather than audio or video, and is currently US-only for the entirely reasonable reason that most of the content that they are currently surfacing is from / about the US and they want to expand their range before going international. I’ll be watching this with interest – in a sense it could work like a less-overwhelming Curios, which sounds, to my mind, POINTLESS, but then again I would say that.
• AngelFace: A facial recognition app for VCs, cobbled together as a sort-of joke but actually functioning as a reasonably sobering warning about how easy it is to make this stuff now from off-the-shelf bits of code and whatever database of photos you happen to have lying around. It’s not awfully difficult to imagine this sort of thing being used for less-than-lovely purposes – although maybe that’s only if you’re a relentless Cassandra-type miserabilist like I am.
• Fitzframes: Now this seems like a smart business idea – bespoke, to measure, 3d-printed glasses, designed for kids, which come in a range of colours, are claimed to fit perfectly, and which as a result of the manufacturing process are cheap, apparently sturdy and easy to replace. Obviously I can’t speak to the quality as – again – this is a US-only product, but this feels very much like the sort of thing you could probably absolutely rip off and do in another territory if you work fast enough (but, er, don’t! Sorry, people behind this website, I don’t mean to suggest that people just steal your ideas (although that is in fact exactly what I just did)).
• UX Frameworks: A whole host of resources and frameworks for designing UX. Not hugely interesting if this isn’t your field but potentially hugely valuable on the offchance that it is.
• 50 Digital Wood Joints: No, I have literally no clue whatsoever as to why you might want to download a PDF of 50 different ways of making joints in wood, but I’m sure you can come up with a reason.
• Epidermis: A really powerful photo project presenting a range of women, posing in ways familiar from beauty advertising, each of whom have a skin condition which they’re not attempting to conceal with makeup. Sophie Harris-Taylor’s images are rather beautiful; here’s the artist’s statement on the project, which is even nicer due to not having been coopted by fcuking Dove. “Normality is defined by the images we see all around us, we are led to believe all women have idealised, flawless skin – they don’t. Whether unshown or simply disguised, many women have conditions such as acne, rosacea and eczema and many of these women feel a pressure to hide behind a mask of makeup, covering up what actually makes them unique. Here these beautiful women stand unashamed of baring their skin.”
• K-Stans: More photos, this time a gorgeous selection taken in the ‘Stans (Kazakh, Kyrgi, and possibly one or two others) and which are full of impossibly blue skies and yurts and people who grew up on a diet of yak milk. Included in part for my friend Jay, should they be reading this (HI JAY!).
• Troll Factory: A small game by Finnish public service media company Yle (which I think is a bit like their equivalent of the BBC) which is designed to help kids understand issues around disinformation, fake news and social media. It’s short and simple and not aimed at the likes of YOU, but your kids might find it interesting or educative.
• Name The US Cities: This is SO HARD but at the same time SO COMPELLING and I am SO BAD AT IT.
• The Interactive Fiction Contest 2019: Last up in this week’s selection of webephemera, this year’s entries into the annual Interactive Fiction competition features a wonderful, diverse selection of different types of IF, spanning an incredible range of plots, themes, mechanics and styles, from genre fiction to serious, emotionally hefty explorations of some pretty adult themes. My personal favourite from this year’s lineup is this, a (very dark) little story called “The Mysterious Stories of Caroline”, but do take some time to read through see if there’s something that piques your fancy; there are honestly some truly wonderful pieces of writing here, and I think IF is very much slept on as a mainstream content mechanic.

By Naudline Pierre

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS IS A TRULY SUPERB AND ECLECTIC MIX OF ROCK AND SOUL AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER THINGS THAT I GUARANTEE YOU WILL LOVE OR YOUR MONEY BACK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Fcuk Yeah Jaques Chirac: So long, Jacques. Enjoy a bunch of photos of him looking incredibly fcuking gallic.
• Horny Jar Jar Binks: I make no apologies. IT FINDS ME, OK?? This is broadly SFW insofar as I haven’t seen any obviously deviant images, but the text of the site is very much not the sort of thing you want to be caught reading in the office; the obsession with fellating Metallica is very, very odd.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Vanessa McKeown: McKeown is a (UK-based?) photographer and designer, whose Insta feed presents her gently surreal manipulated images. The style’s familiar, but there are a lot of very good little visual gags in here.
• Samuele Recchia: An Italian artist with a pleasingly scratchy and slightly sinister style – I came across this via an excellent newsletter by someone called Pietro Minto, which comes out every Saturday and always contains at least five links I’ve never seen before. It’s all in Italian, but that will make it all the more exciting to find out what the fcuk it is you’ve clicked on; worth a sub imho.
• Dirk Koy: Short examples of creative videography, with a very distinct style.
• Domenic’s Can Collection: There’s an article down there about the weird hobby of collecting cans of Monster Energy Drink, through which I discovered this EXCELLENT feed in which Dom shows off the many, many different flavours of Monster they’ve managed to accumulate. What’s particularly nice about this feed – there are MANY others like it, turns out – is that Dom takes the trouble to try and compose the shots in gently pleasing ways; I particularly like the use of flowers and fresh fruits as a contrast to the luridly artificial energypiss.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How Does Trump Win: A Twitter thread by Rob Blackie analysing how and why Trump – and similar politics elsewhere – is so successful; you may think that you’ve read all this stuff before, but I promise you Blackie’s analysis is cogent and he pulls together lots of different elements to make his case. Contains lots of pointers for all your PR people too, should you wish to take lessons from the Bad People.
• Inside Aspen: The Aspen Institute is, if you take it at face value, basically like a paid-for Davos for liberals; a $10,000+ retreat where rich ‘leaders’ (occasionally real, occasionally self-defined) convene to explore ideas of liberalism, statecraft, democracy and the like, whilst communing with like-minded individuals as they learn how to become the best version of their incredibly successful and undeniably-hubristic selves. This is a very, very good read in the Economist’s 1843 magazine, and, especially if you’re a left-leaning person like me, will make you feel a bit uncomfortable (though not as much as it will make you fcuking despise the concept of the Aspen Institute).
• Among Arms Dealers: One of two superb LRB pieces in this week’s longreads, this first is a relatively brief series of vignettes and observations gleaned from the recent DSEI arms fair which took place in London. So, so much to love (read: hate) about this, from the wonderful details (the Italian booth babe in a camo cocktail dress), to the discomfort of the interviewees when they realise they’re talking to a reporter – absolute special shout out, though, to whichever agency it was which came up with ‘Strike With Creativity’ as a brand position / strapline for death-merchants Raytheon; I hope you feel incredibly proud of yourselves, you dreadful cnuts.
• The Surveillance of the Suburbs: A very good article on the growing ubiquity of Amazon’s Ring doorbells, which as I’m sure you’ll recall have come under a bit of scrutiny this year as a result of some rather interesting marketing tactics whereby the company cosies up to police forces to get them to act as de facto salespeople for the tech. The piece shows quite how attitudes in tech reporting have changed over the past few years, and not before time – a few years back, the potential social consequences of surveilled neighbourhoods are unlikely to have been subjected to quite the degree of scrutiny we’re seeing here.
• I Worked At Capital One: An honest account of what it’s like working for a company whose entire business model was predicated on selling people debt that that they were going to have to keep paying off for decades; the interesting bits in this piece are less about the day-to-day mechanics of working for an awful business, so much as the questions that exist in the margins about whether said awful business absolutely had to be as awful as it was to make money; turns out, it probably didn’t! “An ethical corporation could be tempted by compelling evidence about the suffering it caused to relinquish some of its massive revenue. But over the long run, a publicly traded company wasn’t going to sacrifice a meaningful amount of income to avoid destroying lives—unless the law required it.” Well, quite.
• Entertainment is Getting Shorter (And Longer): Hugely interesting essay, particularly if you’re in the content business (AND WHO ISN’T???), about the growing polarisation of content types across different media – on the one hand, ‘snackable’ content designed to be consumed constantly, voraciously, without even thinking; this is your 3-10s bucket, the majority of the stuff we scroll through on the feed and enjoy on the TL; on the other, looooong content, from the hour-long visual albums dropped by Beyonce and others to the proliferation of longform writing all over the web. The piece asks what this means for the more traditional 20-30m content format, the 1500 word essay and the other formats stuck in what the author terms the purgatorial middle-ground; I find the theorising about the relationship between the two forms genuinely interesting, though I appreciate I might be a niche case here.
• Being Famous on TikTok: Another week, another essay about TikTok to try and explain it to the old; this time Vox looks at what it’s like to achieve a modicum of fame on the platform, but frankly it’s less about TikTok as a platform than it is about the increasingly common dream amongst global youth (to quote this excellent line from the article) “wherein performing your life online becomes a paying job.” Performing for who, though? And for what?
• Facebook Dating: The first proper writeup I’ve seen of what Facebook Dating is actually like as a product – the author, an obviously media-literate Manhattanite, is obviously not target audience for it, but her observations ring true nonetheless; that Facebook dating will work most successfully for heavy FB users, which means in turn that it’s likely going to be most popular amongst older demographics and in the developing world. I share the author’s skepticism as to whether it’s going to be enough to entice people back to the platform and make them start using it regularly again, though admittedly one oughtn’t underestimate the powerful motivator of ‘I might get laid’, especially among men.
• Trepanation: I remember always having a weird fascination with trepanation, ever since I was a kid (I remember slightly freaking out my English teacher when I was 15/16 by knowing that word; she was also incredibly disturbed by the fact I was reading American Psycho, suggesting, on reflection, that she was possibly drawing some unfortunate inferences). Anyway, this is an honestly fascinating history of the practice, from its use in Neolithic times to the weird, niche communities who do it to themselves in 2019. Imagine for a second drilling a small hole into your own skull. JUST IMAGINE IT. Maybe it would let the voices out, though.
• Remember Balloon Boy?: Oh wow, those were great and innocent times! Nearly 10 whole years on from that glorious Summer in which a small kid was flown away by a balloon and his terrified parents were briefly famous until it turned out that it may in fact have all been staged as a means of getting famous! HALCYON DAYS! This is a wonderful story – the reporter treats it with admirable respect and restraint, even when portraying a family best described as eccentric, and even when it all gets very odd towards the end. Even if you don’t recall the original incident this is worth a read.
• JD Salinger’s Spiderman: It’s a single joke, fine, but it’s executed perfectly. What if Holden Caulfield was Peter Parker?
• On Escapism, Twitchcon and the Fortnite Habit: I enjoyed this lots more than I expected to based on the writing style (a touch on the overblown style) – I suppose it’s the honesty of the author’s account of his own obsession with the game, and how he felt about it after having seen thousands of obsessive kids hopped-up on primary coloured fizzy drinks and Fortnite fever at this year’s TwitchCon. It sounds awful.
• The Red Bull Experiment: I had totally forgotten that Red Bull tried to find an American F1 driver a few years back; this absolutely fascinating piece tells the story of that process, and what happened to all the people who didn’t make it (as well as the ones who did). The central question here is an interesting one which applies to a range of disciplines, not just sporting; is the search for an exemplary talent ever worth fcuking up the lives of a selection of less-exemplary talents for? Randian theorists need not respond to that rhetorical question.
• Building the Starbucks of Weed: On the race to work out what the perfect environment for people to consume all this newly-legal weed is. The author speaks to a variety of people trying to find the perfect formula for smoking venues; upsettingly, all of them seem pretty much wedded to the idea of some sort of ‘Museum of Icecream’-type Insta-friendly photo playground, which strikes me as HORRIBLE; look mate, when I am very stoned I very much do NOT want to be surrounded by people taking photos of stuff, posing and being all performative. I want, in the main, to be in my house, suggesting on reflection that I am probably not the target market for these places. Still, if you’re interested in the future of weed or indeed retail in general, this is worth reading.
• How Kerrygold Conquered America: If you’re me, Kerrygold is what you buy from the corner shop when you realise that the butter in your fridge has been there approximately seven months and it’s probably not supposed to taste like that. If you’re American, though, it’s apparently THE chic dairy product of choice, endorsed by famouses and redolent of the thick, verdant grass of DE AUOLD CONNTRY (that’s my phonetic Irish – good, isn’t it?); find out why in this article (it doesn’t actually tell you why, but it’s a nice read on the business of food which I am always fascinated by).
• It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfcukers!: YES IT FCUKING IS.
• Cut From The Same Cloth: I absolutely love this essay, in which Myfanwy Tristram writes about her attitudes to her teenage daughter’s fashion choices, and draws links between her past as a goth and the evolution of teen style into the 21 Century. I imagine that if you’re the parent of t(w)een girls this is wonderful – even if you’re not, though, it’s a genuinely beautiful piece about memory and growing up and letting go, and with a healthy dollop of late-20thC fashion history and cultural tribalism. So good.
• Darkness on the Edge of Cougartown: Some of the downsides of dating a younger man, by the older woman in the relationship. Genuinely very funny indeed.
• Consider The Butt: In which the author, Heather Radke, writes for the Paris Review about visiting Butt-Con, an event designed to promote “Tushy, a hefty plastic gizmo that attaches to a toilet in order to turn it into a bidet. The founder of Tushy, Miki Agrawal, says that she likes to work in the “taboo space.” Before getting into butts, Agrawal was busy rebranding menstruation as the CEO of Thinx, a company that makes underwear for people on their periods. Butt-Con was a showcase for her new product, as well as for her own personal brand of transgression: Agrawal doesn’t just want to talk about the body parts we keep hidden, but about what those body parts do. She makes products for periods and pooping, and then she works to make those products seem hip.” This is BRILLIANT; funny and smart and far better than an essay about visiting the launch of a bidet product ought to be.
• Was It Worth It?: A selection of essays by women who in one way or another participate din the Me Too movement, whether by outing an abuser or blowing the whistle on unacceptable behaviour in their industry; each one looks at what happened afterwards, and how their lives have changed. It’s fair to say that it’s not exactly a hugely uplifting series of accounts, but it’s an important one; not only is there some powerful writing in here, but it’s also a useful reminder of the sort of structural power imbalances that still exist to perpetuate the problems that the movement hoped to address.
• Topping From The Bottom: Sex and pain and ageing and illness and drugs and self-hatred and look, I know this doesn’t sound like fun but I promise that it is a beautiful piece of writing by Susannah Breslin.
• Reviewing Updike: Last up in this week’s longreads, possibly the best thing I have read all year, let alone all week. Patricia Lockwood reviews early-period John Updike – you don’t have to have read his work to enjoy this, and please don’t ignore it just because you know nothing about the author whose work it analyses. The piece gives you all the information you need to enjoy it, and the writing is…actually, it’s not even worth trying to describe it, it’s just perfect, to the point where I again got that slightly saddening feeling whereby you read something and you realise that, yes, this is what being really good reads like. Honestly, I kept stopping to enjoy particular sentences or turns of phrase – if you only read one thing from this section, please make it this one.

By Hiroshi Watanabe

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a superb mashup of 50 songs from the year of my birth by the ever-excellent The Hood Internet:

2) Next up, this is a BEAUTIFUL piece of animation and on a cold autumnal afternoon it’s just the bleak little tonic I’m sure you all need. It’s called ‘The Full Story’:

3) This is a few months old, but it’s gorgeous – Girl Ray with ‘Tell Me More’:

4) HIPHOP CORNER! This is the latest from Curios favourites Clipping, and it’s as fuzzily, brilliantly anxious as ever. This is ‘Blood of the Fang’:

5) Finally this week in the musical selections, the aptly-titled “Soon There Will Be No Summer” by Fauness – this is gorgeous and cold and crisp and reminds me of frosty mornings, and OH LOOK THAT’S THE LAST VIDEO OF THE WEEK AND I REALLY NEED TO GET MOVING AS I HAVE SOME SERIOUSLY LAVISH EATING TO START PREPARING FOR I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU I HOPE YOU GET TO EAT NICE THINGS TOO THIS WEEKEND AND THAT YOU DO SO WITH MODERATION AND DON’T GET FOOD POISONING AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I CARE ABOUT YOU VERY MUCH AND REALLY HOPE THAT I CAN BE HERE AGAIN NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE BYE TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HELLO I AM BACK MY GOD I HAVE MISSED YOU! I went to Spain! I saw some sun! I met an Australian millionaire who was responsible for coating one of Perth’s major roads with 1000 litres of concentrated sulphuric acid a few years back! I saw young women who’d had such aggressive lip-fillers that they literally had to move their mouths with their fingers to be able to drink from a bottle! I had a time. 

In my absence, it appears that noone’s seen fit to sort the world out at all – what the fcuk have you been doing with yourselves? Anyway, with little further ado, let’s crack right on with the links and the words and stuff – I imagine that your past two Fridays have been miserable and work-filled and without the usual slightly queasy LOLs afforded you by my sparkling prose – strip down, grease up, and prepare to squeeze yourself into the tight-fitting cloaca that is this week’s infodump. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you have no idea how good it is to be back.

By Mark Tansey

FIRST UP, A LOVELY NEO-SOUL-ISH END-OF-SUMMER EP BY HALIA JACK!

THE SECTION WHICH, BASED ON THE PAST WEEK’S NEWS, FEELS BROADLY POSITIVE ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF ESCAPING INTO ZUCKERBERG’S VIRTUAL BIG BLUE MISERY FACTORY:

• Facebook’s VR Future: This stuff is all hugely speculative, fine, but it’s fascinating to read; whether or not any of the tech outlined in here becomes mainstream or whether it’s all superseded before it comes to market is unknowable, but (if you’re me, at least) it’s impossible not to feel a small frisson of futureexcitement at the developments listed in this FB announcement on its VR tech. Photorealistic 3d avatars! Holopresence! The creation of a 3d map of the entire world, enabling the lightning-fast 3d experiences in a digital analogue of meatspace! Fine, the last one is perhaps a touch on the sinister side – I’m not 100% certain that I want any single commercial entity ‘owning’ a digital representation of the physical world, though I can’t fully articulate why – but overall the work listed in this piece is genuinely thrilling from a tech point of view, and offers a momentary peek into a scifi future that I will doubtless be too scared, confused, old or dead to enjoy properly.
• Facebook Horizon: About 10 years ago, I remember getting very excited indeed about the prospect of Playstation Home – anyone remember that? No? It was Sony’s attempt at a mass-market virtual world, where anyone with a PS account could have an avatar and use it to navigate a persistent, multiplayer virtual space in which they could talk to people, watch films, play games and generally amuse themselves in manners befitting tiny digital humans. Obviously it didn’t catch on at all – turns out noone in the mid-00s had either the bandwidth or the general desire to hang out in a digital apartment playing Frogger – but I can’t help but be reminded of the ambition when I read this announcement about Facebook’s forthcoming (in 2020) VR world ‘Horizon’, which basically sounds like the same sort of thing (except first-person and VR-enabled). This is all very much theoretical at present, but the idea is that anyone will be able to create their own spaces, experiences, etc, and share them with other users to enjoy collaboratively, with the ability to watch multimedia, play games and generally hang out with whoever you like in digispace. The likelihood is that this will, at first at least, be a shonky, uninhabited mess, but it’s equally likely that this is the first step towards a proper, mass-market VR world and as such it’s worth keeping an eye on. Oh, and if you think that FB isn’t going to be tracking everyone’s movements and actions in VR and using that data to sell more ads to the world then, well, you’re a naive idiot.
• FB Expands ‘Playable’ Ads: Facebook’s interactive ad units – which let you create games as an ad format, or AR face filters as promos – are now being rolled out to everyone! That’s right! I’m excited too! My pathetic ennui aside, these are quite interesting opportunities (if expensive ones).
• FB Announces New Features for Public Figures: If you’re a famous, then Facebook has a whole new suite of toys just for YOU! The ability to contribute collaboratively to Stories, better discovery for famouses on the platform, a ‘fan reply’ sticker option to encourage photo or video responses from your audience, additional ways of screwing your idiot fans for cash through the ‘Facebook Stars’ tipping mechanic, and a few other things too. SO EXCITING (not exciting at all).
• Facebook Adds New Video Publishing Tools: This is mostly stuff about Lives – you will now be able to ‘rehearse’ a live on Facebook (why is this necessary?), trim the footage to eliminate the top and bottom of the broadcast for post-Live replay, and – and this is the really exciting bit – broadcast for a full 8 hours rather than the limiting, inadequate 4 hours that you were previously allowed. I am thrilled to discover the exciting, innovative content formats that ‘creators’ are going to invent with this newfound freedom – 8 hours of slow, miserable edging? A webcam feed of your office hours? Truly, the possibilities are almost endless and we should all be thankful that we live in what can only be described as the golden age of creativity.
• Twitter Launches ‘Hide Replies’ Feature in US & Japan: If you’re in either of these countries, you can now opt to hide replies to your Tweets – so you can now say whatever awful crap you want without having to see the reactions! Obviously this is designed to minimise the impact of trolling, but it will also act as a convenient way of muting dissent and reinforcing one’s own opinionbubble – Twitter here, as ever, taking a broadly sensible idea and fcuking it right up through poor implementation. Anyone would think its leaders don’t really have the first clue as to how to manage their platform and its impact on the world!
• Twitter Launches List Update: This isn’t very new news – the feature’s been tested for a few months now – but you can now swipe left within the Twitter app to navigate to your Lists, making them significantly more useful as a tool for normie users. For certain brands, this might make creating and pimping lists for your followers becomes worthwhile – maybe, a bit. It’s only iOS at present, but is coming to Android ‘soon’ – if you were yearning for something to look forward to for the remainder of the year, this is surely it.
• Snapchat Launches 3d Selfies: I…I don’t care. Sorry. Look, if you’ve got a recent-model iPhone you will now be able to make vaguely 3dish images using Snap, much like you’ve been able to do on Facebook for a while. Is that exciting? Should I be interested? Do you feel better for knowing this information? Shall we move on? Let’s.
• TikTok Introduces Video Search: Or at least it does in China. Leaving aside this week’s news about TikTok’s censorship of stuff the Chinese government’s not keen on, this is legitimately amazing (let’s not think too hard about how this video search might be used by the in-no-way-terrifying Chinese state apparatus); TikTok’s rolling out the ability to search within the app by face – so you can easily find videos featuring the same people – or products and clothing, to facilitate in-app shopping. This is SO FUTURE, and basically how all video is going to work within a decade.
• All The TikTok Ad Formats: Thanks to Contagious for this genuinely useful guide to the different ad options that you can buy on the platform; it’s accurate as of today, but will almost certainly be hideously out-of-date by the middle of next week, by which point TikTok will doubtless have launched the ability to target people based on sperm count of follicle count or something equally invasive. Still, ‘til then this is worth bookmarking should you or your clients be in the business of flogging stuff to children.
• Pinterest Updates Its Lens Visual Search Tool: Oh, look, here, I can’t be fcuked to paraphrase this very tedious news: “Pinterest made some changes to its Lens visual search tool to aid Pinners in their searches for ideas and inspirations. Pinners can now take photos or upload images from their camera rolls and use them to search via Lens.” Isn’t ‘Pinners’ a horrible term? Isn’t that an appallingly-written article? Don’t you wish you had skipped this section and gone straight to the links? ME TOO.
• All Of The Amazon Announcements: I know that this is hardware rather than software (in the main), but it’s advermarketingpr-adjacent and so I feel justified in including it. Amazon this week announced a bunch of new things – mainly Alexa-enabled products, with new devices and the exciting development of ALEXA WEARABLES, so you can order toilet paper on the move via your magical surveillance ring (no pun intended). Glasses with Alexa! A ring with Alexa! An oven with Alexa! All ‘coming soon’ (the wearables will be released in limited numbers as a beta test in 2020, apparently), and prepping us for the inevitable future in which Amazon has basically won the voice assistant game and knows everything about our wants and desires, thereby achieving an unassailable commercial advantage and basically becoming the overall winner of the great game of ‘Capitalism’ come 2100 or so. I jest, but only slightly – also, I am now totally convinced that MechaBezos is secretly planning to live forever via the medium of uploading his consciousness into the Alexa ecosystem on death (I am going to start referring to this as the Jeffularity, and you can too if you like).
• 24 Hour Ace: I make no apology whatsoever for including yet ANOTHER Gucci website in Curios; this is a site promoting the brand’s 24 Hour Ace project, where a bunch of designers mess with their Ace trainer to create bespoke, limited edition designs. This is WONDERFUL – all retro aesthetic, but simultaneously packed with lovely content – and, much as it pains me to say so, I quite like the shoes (but not enough to shell out the fat end of 500 quid on them, to be clear).
• The Trino Quest for Comfort: This is a promo for socks, but that really doesn’t matter – ignore the slightly baffling brand association, and instead glory in this wonderfully-playable little browser game, which plays a bit like a more forgiving version of Flappy Bird in which you play as a hanggliding sheep. Honestly, this is really, really fun – works best on mobile, but playable in-browser as well, and I just lost 10 minutes playing it which either suggests that I am right and it’s an excellent game, or that I’m not really in the mood for writing another 6,000-odd words about stuff on the internet this morning and would rather get back into bed for a few hours (guess which!).

By Guim Tio Zarraluki

NEXT UP, MORE MODERN SOUL FROM OLIVIA LOUISE AND HER NEW EP ‘NO PHUX’!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER HOPES THIS TREND FOR IMPEACHMENT CATCHES ON OVER HERE, PT.1:

• Imagenet Roulette: You’ve almost certainly all seen this and played with it already, what with it having come out in my absence, but I’m including it anyway because a) THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE FFS; b) I like it a lot; c) it’s being taken down at some point today, and so I feel honour-bound to pimp it while it’s still available. Imagenet Roulette is a site which lets you upload any photo you like, from the web, your camera roll or your webcam, and which then uses the Imagenet library held by Stanford university to ‘classify’ whatever you upload; effectively the software matches the image you upload to ones in the extant library, and applies category classifications to it based on what it ‘sees’ – the idea being to highlight the problematic nature of many of these classifications, and draw attention to the inherent bias which exists within these sorts of AI systems. I just webcammed myself and got “convict, con, inmate, yard bird, yardbird” which, well, is indicative of the sort of rock-hard, threatening man I am. Anyway, this will disappear from the web imminently, but if you’d like to check it out it’s installed at the Barbican and at the Fondazione Prada in Milan – it’s ART, guys.
• Generated Photos: 100,000 made-up faces! You want a huge repository of faces of people that have never existed and which have in fact been ‘imagined’ by an AI? GREAT! “We have built an original machine learning dataset, and used StyleGAN (an amazing resource by NVIDIA) to construct a realistic set of 100,000 faces. Our dataset has been built by taking 29,000+ photos of 69 different models over the last 2 years in our studio. We took these photos in a controlled environment (similar lighting and post-processing) to make sure that each face had consistent high output quality.” Honestly, these are amazing – not only because of how convincing they are at first glance, but also because of all the instances where the faces are slightly wrong – honestly, do take the time to take a look at the GDrive of the images and have a browse, as there are some genuinely unsettling little anomalies in there, from the odd overly-crinkled ear to people who seemingly have nostrils in their foreheads (I kid you not). There’s something interesting about the fact that all the generated faces are so generally-pleasing; I would love to see a similar project undertaken using a training set of normal (oh, ok, ugly) people rather than models; in fact, there’s a really interesting project in the idea of using sets of people divided by nationality and seeing what emerges. Fascinating.
• Who Posted What?: “whopostedwhat.com is a non public Facebook keyword search for people who work in the public interest. It allows you to search keywords on specific dates. When you want to search on a specific date, you can search only for the year, only the month from a specific year or for a specific date. It is also possible to use two or more keywords like terror attack paris. You can also search in posts who got posted in between two specific dates. It is possible to search in between two years, in between months of different years and in between two specific dates.” Not hugely interesting, fine, but REALLY useful as a means of surfacing legacy content from Pages or Groups – journalists and general muckrakers could get a lot of use out of this imho.
• Am I Cancelled?: I’m genuinely annoyed about this – way back in November last year, as you will doubtless-recall, I told you all about an idea my friends and I had called Milkshakeduck.me which would tell you how likely you were to be cancelled; now someone’s gone and made a tool which basically does that, except in a really crap way; plug in your (or anyone else’s) username and it will tell you whether or not you’ve been cancelled based on your past Twitter output. It doesn’t even tell you why, FFS! Everyone apart from me (and you, dear reader, and you) is a useless, know-nothing bozo.
• Witches: The University of Edinburgh presents a map of all the places in Scotland where women accused of being witches lived – over 3,000 of them, which is a quite astonishing number and one worth bearing in mind when you hear Trump describing his impeachment proceedings as ‘the greatest witchhunt in history’. You can click on the individual entries to find additional details about the person in question, which occasionally throw up some wonderful little story fragments – “She was a servant to the father of Margaret Murdoch, the tormented girl who denounced a lot of the 1699 accused witches”. WHO WAS MARGARET MURDOCH? WHY WAS SHE TORMENTED? So many writing prompts in here if you’re in the market for them.
• The Syllabus: I always feel a bit wrong recommending other newsletters in here, like I’m asking you to cheat on me or something (I know, obviously, that you all know no other newsletter Gods but me); this one’s a relatively new offering from anti-tech-solutionist and general genius pessimist Evgeny Morozov; the idea behind The Syllabus is that it’s a weekly digest of interesting writings and thinking and podcasts and videos and stuff, which you the reader can customise to a reasonable extent; there are a variety of off-the-shelf selections you can subscribe to, covering media, tech, etc, but the really interesting feature is the ability for individual users to select the areas they’re most interested in, and receive a lightly-personalised selection of curated content each week based on their choices. I got my first one this week – it’s VERY academic, and if I’m honest I’d prefer a little more in terms of commentary and colour on the selected bits, but I can definitely see the potential. Were I a better, more organised and frankly more altruistic newslettermong I might try and implement something similar for Curios but, well, life’s too short.
• Butter Churn: You want a fun, Flash-esque music visualiser? YOU GOT IT! This is really nicely done, and the various options are visually excellent – another thing which it would be sort-of cool to throw up on a big screen and just let it react to whatever soundtrack you choose to play. Pleasingly you can sync it with either music from your device or from any track/playlist from Soundcloud, so try it out with whatever sounds you’re feeling RIGHT NOW (NB it produces some very odd stuff when you plug in Cannibal Corpse).
• Spot: It seems that we’ve been gawping at Boston Dynamics’ terrifying robot creations for years, making it all the weirder that this is the first time that they’ve been commercially available. Still, welcome to the FUTURE, in which anyone who fancies it can get their hands on a creepy, quadrupedal dogrobotthing, to, I don’t know, test the safety features in an industrial environment, or dance gamely through a minefield, or race through the desert, or whatever you want (actually that last one’s a GREAT idea – I would watch robot dog desert racing in a heartbeat, although my enthusiasm may be as a direct result of having been back at work for a week and as a result being almost catatonic with boredom). The video here is a pretty standard promo, featuring very little you haven’t seen before, but it’s still astonishing to see actual, proper robotics on practically-mass-market-sale; I think there will be a smol domestic version of this tech available within the decade. Oh, and if you want to see the REALLY mental robot stuff, here’s a different video showing one of their humanoid robots doing gymnastics which, well, CRIKEY.
• Megabot: The other mental robot-related link in this week’s Curios, this is a live eBay sale which, if you have a spare 100k (at the time of writing) will let you purchase Eagle Prime, the “15-Ton 2-Story Tall Gasoline Powered Car-Smashing Piloted Giant Battle Robot From the world famous USA vs Japan Giant Robot Duel” – if you don’t remember that event with forensic clarity you can see it again here. What would YOU do with a two-story tall mechanical fighting robot? Depressingly, I imagine the answer for lots of the sort of people who would be willing to bid on this would be something along the lines of ‘take it to Parliament Square and TAKE BACK CONTROL’, but perhaps I’m being unfair. Regardless, if you’re a very rich person, why not take a punt on this? Even better, if you’re a business owner with a few hundred k burning a hole in your balance sheet then why not buy this as an interesting landmark/talking point to erect outside the office? COME ON, LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
• SD Notes: Another ephemeral website creator – log on, add whatever characters you like after the / at the end of the url, and HEY PRESTO, your very own site! You can only add text to it, but it’s permanent (as long as you update it every The Geocities Archive: I have definitely featured Geocities lookup repositories on here before, but this is the most comprehensive I’ve yet come across; if you want the ability to search through the internet back in those innocent, halcyon days before we realised everyone was basically a Nazi with a keyboard then this is for YOU. This is a complete goldmine of odd – a couple of cursory clicks just now landed me on this archived scan of a comic strip from Beezer magazine called ‘True Brit’, which features a Roger The Dodger lookalike called Tommy who, when he gets angry, turns into a TRUE BRIT (I am, I promise, not making this up) and acquires superpowers. Honestly, you could lose yourself in this stuff for years – SO MUCH WHIMSICAL ODDITY!
• Adblock Radio: A tool to block ads from podcasts and livestreamed audio. I’ve not tried it, so no idea if it actually works, but the idea’s potentially useful – Web Curios accepts no liability whatsoever if this ends up being some sort of appalling malware.
• The Cool Worlds Lab: If everything’s just a bit bleakly terrifying right now, perhaps this YouTube channel will help. This is produced by the Columbia University Astronomy Department, and is “a team of astronomers seeking to discover and understand alien worlds, particularly those where temperatures are cool enough for life, led by Professor David Kipping.” You want to learn about exoplanets and artificial gravity and whether or not we are likely to be alone and unloved in a godless and uncaring universe (we are, get over it)? You will LOVE this, in that case.
• Fix Radio: This is AMAZING! Fix Radio is an online radio station aimed at tradespeople – it’s literally created especially for people with paint-spattered radios who hang out in your kitchen drinking endless cups of oversugared tea and telling you that ‘no, mate, it’s going to take another 6 days and I need to order the parts and we’re looking at the fat end of a grand to be honest and do you have any digestives?’. I can’t tell whether this is a branded endeavour, but, honestly, I now want to create bespoke radio stations for ALL professions – I am totally pitching this to someone next week as the vanguard of new content solutions, practicality be damned.

By Mark Tennant

NEXT, TRY THE RATHER EXCELLENT CHIPTUNE-Y SOUNDTRACK TO THE VIDEOGAME ‘SAYONARA WILD HEARTS’!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER HOPES THIS TREND FOR IMPEACHMENT CATCHES ON OVER HERE, PT.2:

• Plastic: A very powerful graphical visualisation by Reuters, which shows you the amount of plastic bottles which have been sold since you open the page (I’ve had it open for the time it’s taken me to write this sentence, and we’re at *checks* 120,000, which is frankly insane. As an aside, I think this week was the first when I felt the proper ‘wow, we really are totally fcuked, aren’t we?’ species-level horror about the environment; whilst I obviously applaud all efforts to be better at renewable energy and recycling and lessening plastic use, it’s becoming eminently clear to me that the problem isn’t necessarily one of specific materials or actions so much as one of a species-wide addiction to consumption, which is so desperately, deeply ingrained that we’ll still be buying cheap sunglasses and assorted crap off Wish when the seas are boiling around us. If you’re worried about single-use plastics and coffee cups whilst still buying stuff on Amazon Prime and shopping in Primark you’re still part of the fcuking problem, sweetheart.
• WeWalk: This is SUCH a good idea – WeWalk is a ‘smart’ cane, designed to offer additional information about one’s surroundings and ambient environment to the visually-impaired. I remember watching my brother using his cane when he was alive, and thinking that it was a massively inefficient tool – this is exactly the sort of thing which would have made his life easier (although it’s probably a bit fragile for smacking bullies with, which was very much his favourite use for it).
• Kapwing: This is a really interesting tool – if you are in the invidious position of having to make CONTENT for a living (I know, I know, we are ALL creators in 2019, we are ALL visionaries, we are ALL geniuses whose output needs to be seen and heard and worshipped) then this might be useful; Kapwing is ‘a collaborative platform for creating images, videos and gifs’, which presents a really simple UI to pull together text, image and video collages collaboratively, which you can then export on the social platform of your choosing. There are free and paid-for tiers, but the difference seems minimal outside of the ability to watermark stuff, so if you need a slightly less-awful way of creating flashy texty gif-type-things then you could do worse than check this out.
• Cancelled Bot: The first of two bots by Rob Manuel to be featured in Curios this week (he doesn’t even PAY me for these plugs, the fcuker), Cancelled Bot does exactly what you’d imagine and CANCELS anything that’s currently trending on Twitter. You can follow it and @message it if you want to be cancelled too – it’s oddly cathartic.
• Tone Detector:Grammarly’s been around for an age, letting you get a digital eye cast over your prose to tell you exactly how badly you’re mangling the language and syntax; it’s just launched another tool which analyses your copy and lets you know if you’re coming across as, well, a bit of a cnut (I’m paraphrasing; sadly the assessments don’t have quite that degree of clear-eyed honesty). On the one hand, this is sort-of useful; on the other, if you really can’t tell if your emails are rude or enervating or downright aggressive without the help of a digital assistant then you’ve probably got problems beyond the reach of software. Interestingly, it ranked the edition of Curios I tried it out on as ‘disheartening’, which is probably about right tbh.
• Guard: This is a really interesting service, which seeks to use machine learning to assess the privacy policies of websites, and offer users an at-a-glance overview of exactly how appalling the terms of service of many major web services are. It’s a work in progress, and at the time of writing it’s only got 20-odd sites on it, but over time, and with enough training, you can imagine this being a genuinely useful service – anyone can assist in training the software, so if you’re feeling bored and like you might want to contribute to the effort, you can spend 10 minutes assessing the privacy-friendliness of a bunch of legalese (it’s not, it’s fair to say, hugely exciting as a pastime, but then again neither is your actual job).
• Fesshole: Rob Manuel’s other new bot, Fesshole has gotten quite a bit of attention over the past week or so – the idea is that anyone can contribute an anonymous confession via a GDoc which will eventually be tweeted out by the bot; there are some genuinely GREAT (and appalling) ones in here, and you can see the full list of confessions to date by clicking here should you so desire. I have submitted one myself – I hereby offer an actual, proper readers’ PRIZE to whoever can accurately guess which is mine (seriously, email Imperica with your guesses and I will send someone an actual gift if they guess right) of the current 1100 entries. Special shout out to the deviant who confessed this gem (please never share the output): “I’m creating a deepfake of Nigella Lawson and Lucy Worsley going at it with each other, purely for my own amusement.”
• Old Wood Toys: Do you want a pleasingly-retro website collecting all the information you or anyone else could ever desire about the manufacture and maintenance of old wooden toys? No, of course you don’t, it’s 2019 ffs, and yet I present it to you nonetheless. If nothing else, this is worth checking out to learn about the genuinely terrifying Scary Anne dolls of the 1920s, which will be haunting my nightmares tonight (and probably yours too).
• Satellites: A website which uses your location to tell you when you might be able to next see a satellite passing above you. Largely pointless, unless you’ve a real burning desire to know exactly what that fast-moving dot of light hurtling across the sky is, but a really nice example of how you can stitch together a bunch of different open data sources to interesting effect.
• Heart of Neon: I’m making quite a big assumption here, but I’d imagine that quite a few of you know who Jeff Minter is. In case you don’t, though, let me briefly explain – Minter is one of the great eccentrics of the UK videogames industry, a man who created some of the greatest, oddest little digital toys of the 80s and 90s and whose baffling obsession with camelids led to him naming his studio Llamasoft and one of his games Llamatron (Llamatron is, honestly, AMAZING – watch this video of it and then go and download a copy). This is a Kickstarter project seeking funds to make a documentary about his career, which if you’re in any way interested in the history of indie games is a worthwhile cause to punt a fiver at. The target is…ambitious, and it doesn’t look like they’ll make it with a fortnight to go, but it’s something I’d love to see made so, you know, PAY UP.
• Zero Degrees: A photo project which photographs flowers encased in blocks of ice. Weirdly lovely, and the sort of thing which feels like it could be an ad campaign for…something, though I have no idea what. Maybe one of you creative geniuses can come up with something.
• The ESPN Body Issue: It’s that time of year again, when ESPN presents a selection of photos of elite athletes in the buff so that we can all feel moderately inadequate when we compare our pasty, lumpy-in-the-wrong-places reflections to the visions of muscular perfection here arrayed. Every time I see this stuff I am left slightly in awe at the insane examples of humanity displayed, and genuinely amazed at the buttocks in particular – I mean, just look at the callipygian nature of the subjects! You could bounce pound coins off them! They’re like bowling balls in tights! My personal favourite in this year’s edition is Katrin Davidsdottir, but they are all quite disgustingly wonderful-looking examples of humanity.
• Knolling: Knolling is apparently the practice of arranging objects in pleasingly regular grids and then taking photos of them; this is all the photos with that tag on Flickr, and I promise you it’s a LOT more satisfying that you might initially imagine.
• Malmal: Malmal is a collaborative infinite canvas, on which anyone can draw anything they like – wonderfully, there doesn’t appear to be ANY hate or Nazis or racism or anything on here, meaning you can instead just scroll around and enjoy the wonderful selection of surprisingly really good art on display, ranging from cartoon-style, anime-ish figures to more serious-looking character sketches. Genuinely wholesome and lovely (at least at the time of writing – apologies if by the time you get to it it’s been overtaken by channers).
• Seasons: A beautiful short ‘game’ in which you listen to a piece of music and pick lyrics to fit it, creating your very own song as you go. This is absolutely gorgeous, and I would play the fcuk out of something that took this concept and built on it.
• American Election: Finally this week, a game which takes you through modern American politics in a series of creepingly-awful chapters which slowly and meticulously explore and unpack the vile, violent and angry nature of modern political discourse in the US. This is, honestly, masterful – a wonderful use of a lightly-interactive medium to tell all sorts of stories about the world we live in. It describes itself as “A dark political nightmare game about Abigail Thoreau, a campaign assistant working to elect her candidate”, but, honestly, that doesn’t give you any idea of quite how dark and brilliantly written this is. Play it – it’s vastly more interesting than anything else you’re likely to do in the office today.

By Camille Soulat

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE AN HOUR-LONG CUT OF THE MYSTERIOUSLY-NAMED BUT RATHER LOVELY ‘SOVIETWAVE’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Nice Sausages: Beautiful, cut-out-style animations by Kajetan Obarksi. These are WONDERFUL, often taking old illustrations and paintings and creating humorous moving vignettes from them – Obarski’s got a wonderful eye.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Pixeldanc3r: Pixelart by David from Argentina. David is brilliant, whoever they are.
• Brutalist Empire: I know that in internet terms a fascination with brutalism basically marks you down as an aesthetic VSCO girl, but I don’t care. This feed collects loads of good brutalist design and architecture – glorious photos.
• Foka Wolf: Street artist from (I think) Birmingham, with a nice line in urban subversion and reworked signage.
• Dr Leon Advogato: Possibly my favourite story of the week, this – “Leon was just like any other stray cat – roaming the streets, looking for scraps. One day, he walked into the Order of Attorneys of Brazil building, and his life changed. After people started to complain about the cat hanging around the reception area, the OAB took action to curb the moaning: they hired Leon as a lawyer.” IT IS ADVOGATO, THE LAWYER CAT! O MAOW!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Carol Cadwalladr: The headline of this Atlantic profile is ‘Britain’s most polarising journalist’ – what really got Carol’s back up this week was the assertion contained within the piece that she’s as much an activist as a journalist. I can see her point – whatever you might think of her investigations in Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the like, you can’t argue with the quality of her hackery. Still, the article’s interesting insofar as it details the slightly obsessive nature of her quest, and the slightly blurred lines that occur when one starts to crowdfund one’s investigations in the manner in which Cadwalladr has done – not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with her seeking funds for her work, more that as soon as you start to take money from people with a vested interest in a certain outcome, you could be argued to be compromising your reporting to an extent. Regardless, this is a really interesting read (even if it did make me think of Louise Mensch, oddly enough).
• The Cameron Book: We’re all sick of hearing Dave wax unrepentant, aren’t we? FCUK OFF DAVE THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT A REFERENDUM WAS INEVITABLE YOU APPALLING CNUT. Still, regardless, this review of his memoirs by Stephen Bush in the New Statesman is more interesting than most of the comment I’ve read on the subject; I had completely forgotten Dave’s steadfast efforts to de-posh himself in the late-00s, but it’s fascinating to look back at his early reign and his brief, ill-fated attempt to de-toxify the Tory party before the Euromadness took hold.
• Inside the Pee Tape: Do you remember those innocent times three years ago when we all thought that Trump might be brought down by a videotape of him involved in some light urolagnia with some hookers? GREAT DAYS! This is a very odd, very detailed article which looks into the possible veracity of a video which has been doing the rounds for a year or so, seemingly THAT video, which shows Donald sitting in what looks very much like the hotel room in question while two women apparently engage in a little gentle pissplay – it’s almost certainly not real but, well, who made it? Why? This is honestly really interesting – my money’s on Alison Jackson having done this as a laugh, but I’d welcome your theories. Oh, and you can see the video in question here if you really want to.
• One Summer In America: If you want to get a sense of the battering, cumulative effect of all of this news, all of this horror, all of this STUFF, then this piece in the LRB is essential reading. It’s a simple (if beautifully-written) list of all the things that have happened over the course of the past three months in the US, drawn from news reports – everything in this article has happened or at least been alleged, on record. THREE MONTHS. Honestly, reading this is a little like being beaten repeatedly over the head with something blunt (but, er, it’s very good!).
• The Cancel Culture Con: The best thing I’ve yet read on the pernicious idiocy of people complaining about ‘cancel culture’. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but the conclusion neatly summarises the thrusty of the author’s argument: “The power to cancel is nothing compared to the power to establish what is and is not a cultural crisis. And that power remains with opinion leaders who are, at this point, skilled hands at distending their own cultural anxieties into panics that—time and time and time again—smother history, fact, and common sense into irrelevance. Cancel culture is only their latest phantom. And it’s a joke.”
• How TikTok Holds Our Attention: ANOTHER explainer on what TikTok is and how it works, this time from the New Yorker, but worth reading to get a bit more of a handle on how the company operates (chaotically) and the platform’s appeal. There’s something interesting (to me at least) about the rise of a service so dedicated to frivolity in an era characterised by everything being VERY SERIOUS all the time.
• Tinder Swipe Night: You may or may not have seen that Tinder’s moving into the content game, producing an interactive CYOA-style experience called Swipe Night, which will not only present users with a narrative experience but which will also use the choices they make through the game to inform a suite of matches they’ll receive on completion. Whether or not the narrative is any good remains to be seen, but the idea of using these sorts of signals as a means of pairing people is an interesting one – would you want to date someone based on their choices in a game?
• High School Roleplay on Facebook: The phenomenon of Facebook as a space for roleplaying is fascinating to me – from the people pretending to be Boomers, to this phenomenon, where millennials invest and effort in Facebook groups in which they roleplay being at school. WHY?!? I imagine this is a generational thing; this makes no sense to me, being of an age where the internet didn’t exist til I was in my mid teens, but if you grew up with afterschool MSN chats and the like then perhaps it’s more comprehensible. Regardless, I think there’s a genuinely interesting cultural thing here which is ripe for some sort of gentle exploitation – fast forward three months and watch as every fast food Twitter feed pivots to 90s roleplay and ruins EVERYTHING for EVERYONE.
• Photos of Blackboards: Jessica Wynne is a photographer and professor who for the past year or so has been taking photographs of the blackboards of maths teachers; this article describes the work, and, more interestingly, presents a selection of images from the collection. I know it doesn’t sound interesting, but, if you’re a mathematical incompetent like me then the scrawls and equations basically look like magical runes. Also, there will be LOADS of inspiration here if, like me, you like playing the ‘let’s leave a lot of random scrawls on the whiteboard to confuse the next person to use this meeting room’ game.
• Storming Area 51: I’ve mentioned the planned party at Area 51 several times in Curios this year, and on each occasion have made some sort of snarky prediction about how it was all going to go horribly wrong and be a terrible disaster – well IN YOUR FACE MATT MUIR FROM THE PAST, because, once again, I have been proven totally wrong, as this rather lovely writeup of the whole thing suggests. Instead of being a clusterfcuk of horror it appears to have been a genuinely nice, pleasant (if surreal) gathering, and the spin-off party in Vegas also sounds like a generally good time. The only downside, to my mind, is the non-appearance of former Blink-182 frontman and alien botherer Mark Hoppis, who would have been the cherry on the extraterrestrial cake. Oh, in case you were wondering, noone found any aliens.
• The Slime Bash: Memes move with such speed that it’s often hard to remember them once they’ve passed – so it is with the slime craze of a few years back, which I’d totally forgotten about until I read this piece, about this year’s massive slime fan convention in Illinois. Fans? Of slime? How can you be a fan of a substance? HOW DOES CULTURE EVEN WORK ANY MORE? This is less about the convention and slime than it is about the unique ability of online subcultures to create community around shared passions; when reading stuff like this, it’s hard not to think back to being a child and wondering how my personal obsessions would have translated into an online world.
• Japanese Pizza: As a half-Italian I am typically, tediously absolutist about Italian food. Pineapple on pizza is an aberration, if you put cream in carbonara you’re basically a nonce, that sort of thing. Still, I adored this article about the search for pizza perfection by artisan pizzaiolos in Japan; there’s something about the peculiarly Japanese pursuit of excellence in a single discipline which lends itself perfectly to the very prescribed basic idea of Neapolitan pizza, and something oddly romantic about the image of these lonely obsessives making pizza after pizza in search of the ultimate crust. This will make you very, very hungry, fyi.
• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet: An excellent online mystery, which part of me hopes will never be solved. “Twelve years ago, a catchy New Wave anthem appeared on the internet with no information about who wrote or recorded it. Amateur detectives have spent thousands of hours since trying to figure out where it came from — with little luck.” What is the song? Who recorded it? WHERE DID IT COME FROM? We will, hopefully, never find out, but it’s a lovely curiosity to read about.
• Alec Guinness Hated Star Wars: This is a BEAUTIFUL story – the author once met Alec Guinness, who then mentioned their meeting in his memoirs; this is the author’s own story of that meeting, his recollection of Guinness, and how and why the actor manipulated the anecdote slightly to fit a particular narrative. Honestly, this is so, so lovely.
• Who Would I Be Without Instagram?: One of the best pieces of writing about growing up with, and through, Instagram, written by Tavi Gevinson. Gevinson’s perspective is naturally singular – after all, most of us are not catapulted to international fame in our early teens, and most of us don’t launch publishing imprints before they’re 20 – but her reflections on the manner in which her internal and external identities were shaped, nurtured, stunted and stultified by online existence feel immensely universal. She’s a wonderful writer, and this article is full of beautiful observations about the feeling of being ‘seen’ but not seen online, and the peculiarly, incessantly performative nature of modern – but also, simply human – existence.
• Where Am I?: What must it be like to live with a condition whereby you have no sense of place or direction, where you can’t quite place yourself within the world or necessarily recognise or see the elements that make it up? Genuinely terrifying, I’d say, though this essay by Heather Sellers, who suffers from face blindness and a general lack of ability to ‘do’ space and geography and directions and stuff, is pleasingly uncomplainy – it made me think quite hard about the extent to which I take certain things for granted.
• Football in Greenland: Greenland’s football championship takes place over the course of one week, featuring evocatively-named teams such as the legendary B-67 and very much at the mercy of weather conditions that can include blanket fog and freezing rain; this is a wonderful piece of journalism, sharing snapshots and stories from the week-long tournament and giving a sense of just how small a place Greenland is. I would ABSOLUTELY go to this next year if anyone fancies it btw.
• Kings of Croquet: “On a sunny September Sunday in 1982, Mark Burchfield, a 20-year-old tobacco farmer from rural Kentucky, stood in Manhattan’s Central Park, getting ready to take the most important croquet shot of his life.Mark and his father Archie were one of 32 teams competing in the doubles tournament at the sixth annual U.S. Croquet Association National Championship. Archie already had seven state croquet titles under his belt, but this was Mark’s first tournament. He hadn’t even seen croquet played on grass until the month before; his father’s first time was in March.” You may not think that a story about croquet would be an exciting tale of underdogs and prejudice and class and overcoming the odds but, well, you’d be wrong. This is great.
• Stories About My Brother: Prachi Gupta’s brother was a brilliant engineer with a potentially glittering career ahead of him; he had made money on Bitcoin; he was also someone who’d been turned onto the MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) lifestyle towards the end of his life, and who died after complications ensuing from surgery he’d had to lengthen his legs in an attempt to correct what he saw as the height deficiency that was stopping him having romantic success. This is very sad, but beautifully-written – the gentle radicalisation of young men online is, honestly, slightly terrifying to me.
• The Bread Thread: Superb piece of writing, about female sexuality and shame and gender and bullying, and how women are judged, and how owning one’s past isn’t always enough to make one safe. Really, really good, this.
• Going To The Restaurant: Finally this week, a short-but-perfectly-formed essay, describing going to a restaurant. This is SUPERB, with not one word wasted, and it’s an excellent way to spend two minutes of your day.

By Shohei Otomo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Let’s kick off with this wonderful song by Vagabon – the vocal is wonderful, I love the slightly shiny minimalist vibe of the track overall, and the dancing in the vid is mesmerising; the song’s called ‘Water Me Down’:

2. Awesome video, this, and the song’s not bad either. This is Anyway Gang, with ‘Big Night’; the song’s an excellent indie disco banger, but the 16-bit game in the video’s the real star here:

3. Belle & Sebastian’s latest. I fcuking love Belle & Sebastian. This is called ‘This Letter’:

4. This is called ‘Tape’, by a band called Canigou. I could watch this video forever – honestly, it’s like animation done by a neural net or something, it’s mesmerising:

5. UK HIPHOP CORNER! I got goosebumps listening to this – SBTV Warm Up Session by Deyah – there’s something really pleasingly understated about her delivery here, but the words are fire, as I believe the kids say, and her flow is amazing when she ramps it after the first 90s:

6. MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the latest track from Tyler and it is SUPERB. This is A Boy Is A Gun:

7. Last up, an excellent video which seems apt given this week’s news. This is called Natural Born Killers, and it’s by James Massiah AND THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK IT’S SO GOOD TO BE BACK I’VE MISSED YOU AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND AND THAT YOU GET TO RELAX AND MAYBE FORGET ABOUT ALL THE SCARY THINGS FOR A BIT AND INSTEAD JUST DO STUFF THAT YOU LIKE AND ENJOY AND MAYBE HANG OUT WITH FRIENDS AND JUST GENERALLY ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE I ONLY WANT THE BEST FOR YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I wasn’t expecting this, I have to say, but as I prepare to take two weeks off (yes, that’s right, I’m AWAY! You don’t have to feel guilty about deleting this email without even taking a cursory looking at its contents for a whole FORTNIGHT!) I am in a weirdly cheery mood. He’s fcuking it all up! Maybe it’s all going to be ok! Between this and Italian politics’ surprise decision not to let the fascists win (yet), it’s been a far less bad week than I was anticipating, and in a few short hours I get to go somewhere (hopefully) sunny and (hopefully) pleasant (this is a somewhat underresearched trip, it’s fair to say).

I need to pack, I need to shop, I need to MOVE. So, with no further ado, I bequeath you this latest edition of Web Curios, freshly-birthed and still covered in that lovely mucal sheen; hold on a second while I whizz up the infoplacenta and then huff it ALL down in one go – TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU AND DRINK IT, FOR THESE ARE MY LINKS (they’re not mine, they’re all other people’s hard work, I just hoover them up and to be honest they deserve the credit, not me), FORAGED JUST FOR YOU!

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and what are you going to do with yourselves on a Friday afternoon for the next few weeks? Work?

By Quentin Shih

FIRST UP, THE NEW ALBUM BY HIPSTERHIPHOP GREATS ‘WHY?’!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS GETTING RID OF ‘LIKES’ IS A START BUT WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THIS TO NOW EXPAND AND INCLUDE POSTS, THE FEED, THE CONCEPT OF ‘FRIENDS’ AND, WELL, THE WHOLE FCUKING THING TBH:

• FB To Test ‘Like’-Count Removal: Muchlike Insta did earlier this year, so Facebook is apparently considering removing the oh-so-meaningful metric of appreciation from public view. Whether as a sop to the ‘s*c**l m*d** is bad for you’ crowd, or as a way of making people feel less self-conscious when noone gives a fcuk about the minutiae of their lives and by so doing encouraging people to post more freely, this is unlikely to become A Universal Thing anytime soon and, beyond that, won’t make any practical difference to anything. So, er, NEWS!
• Facebook Launches Business Tools for Messenger: These look interesting, particularly the lead generation and CRM-integration stuff (as ever in this initial section, the word ‘interesting’ is doing quite a lot of work here); there are also updates relating to appointment booking and conversion tracking through the platform. On the flipside, though, Messenger stuff will no longer appear in Facebook’s ‘discover’ tab – Mark giveth, and, more often than not, he taketh away.
• The Facebook Data Portability & Privacy White Paper: Be aware that, unless you have a specific and detailed interest in the future of the ad tech industry and data brokerage in general, this is likely to mean very, very little to you (another way of explaining this is that it meant very, very little to me and therefore I’m sort of hoping that that means it’s a bit niche and obscure rather than something to do with me being thick). This is Facebook’s White Paper setting out its position on data portability and privacy, and all the thorny questions over rights to data and what controls and regulation should be enacted to attempt to de-Wild-West the whole online advertising business – it’s light on actual concrete positions, but from what I’ve read it’s very heavy on thinly-veiled and somewhat-repetitious criticisms of ‘regulators’ from ‘stakeholders’ for not deciding what the laws on all this sort of stuff should be and thereby traducing not only the poor consumers but also the POOR POOR PLATFORMS alike. DEFINITELY nothing to do with the platforms not having given anything resembling a fcuk about any of this ‘til about 18m ago, oh no no.
• Facebook Dating Launches in the US: Readers in the US, you can now entrust your future romantic journey to the Big Blue Misery Factory! Imagine a cherub with Zuckerberg’s face, flying around, pinging amorous shafts (ahem) off left, right and centre whilst simultaneously attempting to hamfistedly shoehorn product placements into every new couple’s first set of romantic photos – yes, THAT is what Facebook Dating will be like. In my head, at least – for a more realistic description of the platform, click the link and read the blurb. There’s obviously LOADS of ad potential here – at the very least, the ability to advertise at people who’ve just matched with someone on FB dating seems like an obvious one – but what really interests me about this is whether Facebook ends up actually being quite good at the matchmaking thing; after all, it has such an incredible wealth of datapoints about so many of us. Or maybe data is a fcuking terrible way of looking at such an amorphous concept as romantic attraction. Maybe.
• You Can Now Share Tracks From Spotify on Facebook Stories: If you happen to work in one of the territories where people actually use Stories on FB, congratulations! You can now add music from Spotify to them! I probably didn’t need to write any explanation here, on reflection!
• Twitter Launches Audience Expansion Options: When you buy ads on Twitter you’ll now also get the opportunity to allow Twitter to automatically expand the audience into lookalike categories. Which is nice. I particularly like the idea that there’s a sliding scale to determine the ‘fuzziness’ of your targeting, from ‘pretty much as specified’ to ‘we’ll decide to show your ads to, thankyou very much’. No clue as to when this will arrive with everyone, but expect it to be reasonably soon.
• LinkedIn Introduces Insights & Research Hub: It’s writing sentences like that that have caused my soul to with and atrophy to the extent that I can actually hear it rattling around in my thoracic cavity as I drag myself around the city (jk! I sold my soul to the devil when I was 16 in exchange for good exam results!). Anyway, if you’re the sort of person who’d like a quick and easy way to get research and data from LinkedIn about how best to reach specific industries, divided by vertical, or different people within an organisation, then this might be useful – be warned, though, that this seems puddle-deep in terms of what you can get out of it, so I wouldn’t expect it to suddenly solve your ‘insights for the C-Suite’ crisis (another absolutely rock-bottom sentence to close with, there).
• Insights and Comedy: The top section of Curios doesn’t, as a rule, link out to 200+page academic dissertations, but I will make an exception for this one. Justin Lines is a researcher and strategist who is also doing research with Edinburgh University into the relationship between the insights that comedians bring to bear when constructing jokes and routines, and those that us advermarketingpr scum use when attempting to persuade a client that our idea’s really clever and makes loads of sense, honest, LOOK I’VE TOLD YOU A FCUKING STORY CAN YOU PLEASE JUST BUY THE CAMPAIGN SO I CAN HIT MY NUMBERS THIS YEAR WE ALL KNOW THAT IT’S ALL BULLSH1T ANYWAY SO CAN WE DROP THE PRETENCE AND CAN I STOP PERFORMING NOW PLEASE? Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, as I alluded to, this is VERY LONG, but also contains some really clear, smart and useful thinking around the whole horrible ‘what is an insight and how do I find one and what are they for?’ stuff which, in the main, I am very bored of, but which equally I am mostly very bad at. Readable, interesting and unexpected (at least what I have read of it so far), this is very much worth your time. Anyone who’s ever seen me present anything, ever, can attest to the fact my style veers somewhat towards ‘angry, frustrated, borderline-aggressive bottom-of-the-bill drunk on an open mic night’, so perhaps that’s influencing my opinion here, but still.
• Create and Strike: The next global climate strike is happening between 20-27 September. A few creative agencies have launched this initiative, encouraging people in advermarketingpr to join the movement on 20 September; this is the accompanying site, explaining what it’s all about, offering information as to where your nearest strike action will be happening, and naming the agencies that have signed-up in support. There are loads of pretty big names on there, and whilst I’m basically of the belief that taking a day off to protest climate change whilst working for an industry whose primary ethos is to get people to consume more is pretty fcuking risible, it’s also better than nothing – so why not send this to your CEO and ask if they’ll join you in standing around doing nitrous all day in the middle of Piccadilly in a fortnight’s time?

By Giulia Andreani

NEXT, HOW ABOUT THIS PLAYLIST OF OBSCURE INDIE ELECTRONICA WHICH IS ALL REALLY RATHER GOOD?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS PRE-HIATUS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU ALL, AS EVER, FOR READING THIS BASTARD THING, PT.1:

• The Enigma Machine: Absolutely sublime little webtoy which lets you play around with an interactive version of the Enigma machine, specifically one which is laid out so as to show you the insane complexity of the codes it generates and how it goes about generating them based on any given input you choose. Type in whatever phrase you like, and watch as you’re shown the encryption process in beautiful, soothing animation; this does a superb job of demonstrating the basic principles behind this sort of system, and the way in which it works to encode information. So, so lovely.
• Datehackr: ‘The apps’, as I believe people on the dating scene call them, aren’t really working for anyone, are they? Does anyone seem to actually enjoy dating any more, or is it just a chore that people go through inbetween sitting nervously at home biting their fingernails, taking CBD medication and watching infinite repeats of soothing television they recall from Better, Simpler Times? Perhaps one of the reasons why they’re not working any more (other than the aforementioned possibility that treating people as swappable, tradable commodities is perhaps not a fantastic route towards self-actualisation) is because of stuff like this. Listen to the blurb: “If you’re not getting matches on dating apps, it’s because your profile isn’t being displayed. We create multiple dating profiles with your images to increase your match rate instantly. By creating multiple profiles, you will be displayed more often and get many more matches!” First off, lads, THAT IS NOT THE REASON YOU ARE NOT GETTING MATCHES. Second, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE YOU MATCH WITH? I am not 100% convinced that the likely users of this service are going to have the immediate rapport and sparkling repartee to necessarily forge any sort of personal connection here. The most-depressing thing about this, though, is that part of me has a sneaking suspicion that there’s no tech behind this at all, and in fact all of the ‘automatic swiping’ here is being done in one of those now-legendary engagement farms somewhere in the far East – or, even worse, is just being Fiverr-ed out by some poor kid in the Philippines for 10p an hour, creating yet another layer of invisible servitute sitting just below the taut, shiny skin of the beautiful future we all inhabit.
• Hong Kong Protest Livestreams: A collection of streams from whatever is going on in Hong Kong right now, this page automatically updates with new feeds whenever any of the currently-streaming ones gets shut down by the Government, and is another example of the incredible, odd, oh-so-future nature of the HK protests.
• Leon Sans: This is ‘just’ a font, fine, but it’s one of the most beautiful web experiences I’ve seen all year; the site cycles through a variety of different styles and applications of the Leon Sans font (so named after its designer, Leon Kim), all presented through a series of beautifully-designed, beautifully-animated transitions. Seriously, this is mesmerising and I quite want to commission Kim to make a 3m film of this sort of thing using words and phrases of my choosing that I can have as a looping artwork at home (to note here: I neither have the sort of home where this would look anything other than ridiculous, or anything to display it on other than a crap 20-odd inch non-smart TV, lest you think I’m getting too fat off all the sweet, sweet Curios dollar).
• Zao: I couldn’t not include a link to this week’s momentarily-viral-and-then-REALLY-SCARY Chinese face-fiddling app Zao – so here it is! You all, I’m sure, heard about this this week; huge spike in popularity based on the (genuinely impressive) faceswapping tech, which enables anyone to plant their fizzog into scenes from popular films, animes, etc, with a hugely-impressive degree of seamlessness, subsequently-followed by MASSIVE PRIVACY PANIC when everyone a) remembered it was a Chinese app and we are all convinced that China wants to capture ALL OUR FACES and b) read the Ts&Cs. Did we all forget the Faceapp thing from a few months ago already? We did? Oh, right, ok. Couple of things to note about this, from my point of view; firstly, that the app’s a very clever toy but not much more – the impressive nature of the results is down to good tech, true, but also due to the fact that it only does a relatively limited set of things (you can only insert yourself into stuff that the app has pre-loaded, meaning that a lot of the heavy-lifting is done in advance when it comes to the graphics, computation and stuff); and secondly, that the person who properly wrote up this up first in a Twitter thread (Allan Xia) had much of what they wrote lifted wholesale by many of the publications writing it up, which seemed a bit sh1tty to me. Anyway, put your face in an anime and train the Chinese AI army! Or something like that, maybe.
• Faceswap: Seeing as we’re doing face stuff, Faceswap purports to be ‘the leading free and multipurpose open source Deepfakes platform’. If you’re seriously interested in messing around with this stuff, I’d start here – though be warned, you need some pretty decent processing power at your disposal and a rudimentary (at least) understanding of coding and, probably, a bit of maths. Don’t expect to be churning out anything Will Smith/Matrix-like, basically.
• Commerce Cream: A really horrible name for a website, but the idea’s nice – Commerce Cream collects examples of really pretty sites built on Shopify, along with occasional interviews with the designers who made them. If you’re after a repository of design inspiration – albeit design inspiration with a VERY particular sort of aesthetic, because Shopify really does cleave quite closely to a very particular sort of interiors magazine aesthetic.
• Commute: We all know about the pollution we experience on the average London commute – the clogged breathing, dulled-grey skin and particulate-encumbered hair we find ourselves with upon arriving at the workprison each morning testifies to this. We don’t, perhaps, consider the question of the aural pollution we’re subjected to – helpfully, this site exists to remind you that that’s a problem too. This is a ‘visualisation and sonification of the noise pollution in our daily commutes’, taking data from routes along the Paris Metro and letting you visualise and listen to an aural representation of it through a couple of separate views, wave and spiral. For something which is meant to represent the grinding, noisy horror of traipsing from your sock of an apartment in the unfashionable end of the 19th to your office across town in the 7th, this is surprisingly easy on the eye and ear; I would LOVE to see (hear) this done for London, with different audio styles for each line; I think the Northern would be grindcore and the District some sort of distressing Gilbert & Sullivan-style medley.
• This Erotica Does Not Exist: The rather sparse, sober description on the ‘About’ Page reads, simply, “This website contains samples of text generated from GPT-2, fine-tuned on text from Literotica.” It doesn’t quite do justice to the beautiful, mad filth that’s contained within it, though – this is technically NSFW, but it’s also all-text, so unless someone’s actually bothering to read over your shoulder then you should be fine (also, HELLO OVER-THE-SHOULDER-READER YOU SHOULD GET YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION TO CURIOS YOU FREELOADING FCUK!). You can pick from either randomly generated filth, or stuff that’s been prompted with seed text from classic works, like Hobbes’ Leviathan (surprisingly sexy), Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (so much thirstier than I would have expected), or Agatha Christie (I do NOT remember Poirot doing that). Genuinely funny, though does also quickly lead one to conclude that erotica writing must be a deeply tedious pursuit; how many new euphemisms for genitals can one come up with? And how do you remember where everyone’s got their hands?
• The Bartender’s Library: Oh wow – if you’re into booze (but in a socially-acceptable, ‘interested-in-mixology’ sense rather than my rather more specific ‘has a problem with the Casillero’ sense) and cocktails and stuff, this is a treasure trove. This site collects old texts on cocktails and bartending, digitised and held in the Internet Archive, in one place – you want to find actual, proper old recipes from the 20s and 30s? You want to know how to mix a gimlet in the manner in which Bertie Wooster would definitely have approved? GREAT. Definitely worth keeping in mind next time you’re having a party and want to appear sophisticated for at least 10 minutes before someone breaks out the ket and it all goes downhill and then the crying starts.
• The Future: I don’t EVER feature single memey-type stuff on here, but I’ll make an exception for this – seen on Insta, it’s a wonderful grid of potential options for the future of humanity, based on where on the ‘hyperhuman/unhuman’ and ‘deceleration/acceleration’ axes we end up heading. Click and pick which one YOU like the look of most; personally-speaking, I’m pinning my hopes on ‘Fully-Automated Space Gay Luxury Communism’, but, as they say, TAG YOURSELF!
• Reigns: Reigns, if you’ve not played it, is an excellent mobile game in which the premise is that you’re the ruler of a fictional kingdom and need to stay alive as long as possible through making a series of binary decisions, through which you swipe, Tinder-like, til you’re inevitably skewered by a resentful courtier or eat a bad goat or something. This is a Kickstarter seeking funds to make a physical, card-based version, which I imagine would work wonderfully and which is worth a look if you’re a player of games.
• GPX Jewellery: I’ve featured people on here before who make slightly-abstract map-based jewellery, but I think this is the first place I’ve found that takes data from things like Strava and uses that as the basis for a design. Upload the GPX data from the route-tracking device of your choice and turn it into rather beautiful, geometric-ish pendants. Currently they only ship to the US, but the site indicates that they will consider international shipping if you ask nicely; if you have a friend or partner who’s unaccountably attached to a particular cycle route, say, this might make a lovely and unique present.

By Chelsea Gustafsson

NEXT, HOW ABOUT A PLAYLIST OF ALL THE MUSIC FROM THE TONY HAWKS GAMES?!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS PRE-HIATUS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU ALL, AS EVER, FOR READING THIS BASTARD THING, PT.2:

• The Institute of Urban Arts: “The IOUA is a social enterprise that was founded in 2019 to document and expose pioneering work from the urban avant-garde through projects, publications, film, and exhibitions.” It doesn’t yet have a physical location, and details are sketchy (you can read a little more elsewhere on Imperica), but it’s worth keeping an eye on and signing up to if you’re interested in the idea of attempting to preserve, support and showcase urban art.
• Email Love: Who doesn’t love email? Well, most people, it seems, seeing as we’re always talking about how we want to KILL IT and replace it with stuff like Trello or Slack or Messenger or Workplace. Well fcuk that noise, I like email; I like receiving them (although, fine, not at work) and I like reading them and I like writing them, so THERE. Anyway, for any others amongst you who feel the same way, Email Love might be a useful site to browse through; it’s a collection of resources and information for people who work in or around email including examples of great templates, good newsletters (the omission of Curios can only be a temporary oversight), interesting email design, a blog… It’s a one-person labour-of-(email)-love, and its creator, Rob Hope, plans to add more tutorial and how-to content over time; if you’re a newslettermong like me, it’s an interest place to have a dig around.
• Himalaya: Have we solved the podcast discovery conundrum yet? I know they’re now googleable, but that doesn’t necessarily help with the ‘I like podcasts like x, where can I find more?’ issue which I presume plagues those of you who listen to the bastard things. Himalaya attempts to solve this issue by sorting them across 29 categories, each with their own subcategories for you to browse. There’s limited information beyond the title of each show, which is potentially a pain, and someone really ought to come up with a specific category for ‘people talking far too self-indulgently about stuff that not even their mates would bother listening to for 45 minutes and dear fcuking christ did you have to record this on your fcuking headphone mic?’, but I can imagine this being at least a bit useful to a few of you.
• Free To Use Sounds: Well this is quite something. The ‘free’ bit here doesn’t feel entirely accurate – the site attempts to get you to part with cash suspicously-regularly for something that touts itself as free, but given that it appears to be entirely created and maintained by a (very enthusiastic) German bloke named Marcus and his partner Libby you can’t really begrudge them wanting to make a few quid. They’re seemingly travelling the world, recording sounds and adding them to their burgeoning online library of ambient noises and FX; you want Vietnames pigs? You got it! You want nearly 100 different toilet flush sounds? LUCKY YOU! Charmingly, lots of the sound libraries have little blogs attached talking about how they recorded the audio, what equipment they used, and the occasional whimsical anecdote; leaving aside the slightly-aggressively-grifty UX, this is kind-of charming.
• Medieval Lions: I have, for many years, had something of a thing about poorly-drawn or poorly-sculpted animals in classical art – this Twitter thread basically had me in tears for a good few minutes when I found it earlier this week. LOOK AT THEIR FACES!
• The Phonetic Reverser: Or, more prosaically, a website that lets you type in anything you want in English and which will in return spit out a phonetic pronunciation guide so you can say the phrase backwards, phonetically. Try it out, it will make marginally more sense once you’ve seen how it works; now, keep it loaded on your screen and refuse to speak to the person across the computer from you unless it’s via the medium of backwardstalk. They will, I guarantee, find it HILARIOUS. This is also useful in case you want to do one of those ‘record it backwards so that when you play it in reverse it looks like it’s going forward’ music videos and need to learn what shapes to make as you lipsync, which I am sure is how at least three of you were planning to spend your weekends.
• Find Lectures: I don’t know about you, but every September I’m filled with a very real sense of regret that I’m not embarking on an exciting new journey of academic discovery and will instead continue to sit slumped in front of a computer, willing the minutes to pass so I can go home and drink myself into a state of calmness whereby I can finally sleep. If YOU feel a bit like that too, why don’t you spend this month IMPROVING YOURSELF by watching one or more of this incredible collection on English-language lectures from around the world? “FindLectures.com allows you to discover interesting topics that you might not think to look for, including collections of approachable academic lectures, conference talks, interviews, documentaries, and historically significant speeches. Generally, transcript talks and the speaker’s bio are searchable, so that you can find presenters who have a unique angle on their content. Video and audio content is scored for a variety of quality measures, including length, audio quality, presentation style, speaker authority, and more.” HUGE collection of stuff, with a bias towards North America but loads of stuff from the UK too, this is a combination of video and audio and has content on almost every topic you can imagine if you feel like indulging your back to school memories for a while.
• Online Courses: I think I featured this a few years ago, but it’s updated for 2019 – this is Open Culture’s motherlode list of open, free online courses which are open for registration in September – there are nearly 4000 of the things, from academic institutions across the world. Want to enroll in a Harvard course on Shakespeare’s life and work? Fancy exploring the History of Rock & Roll through the University of Florida? GREAT! I know I always say how everything is awful and it’s all the web’s fault, but things like this make me momentarily think that perhaps it’s not all terrible (even though deep down I know it mostly is).
• Visualising Bon Iver: A beautiful promo site for Bon Iver’s latest, made in conjunction with Spotify, which pulls data on the number of streams the album’s received and lets you scan back through how that’s changed since early-August; all the while, the site plays tracks from the record, and a mesmerising series of ASCII-type animations, all made of the character ‘i’ (because the album’s called ‘i, i’, DO YOU SEE?). Very nicely done.
• Touchy-Feely Tech: Have you ever thought “I quite like DIY and tinkering with things, and I also quite like sex toys; why don’t I combine those two passions into a single hobby?!”? No? Shame, because if you had then this site would basically be perfect for you. “Touchy-Feely Tech is a creative technology studio working at the intersection of electronic hardware, art and education”, and they are currently working on developing their first project, a build-it-yourself vibe kit designed to teach the rudiments of making, electronics, programming and sex positivity, all-in-one! The idea is that eventually it will develop into workshops and talks and a movement of sex-makers, but at the moment it’s just a website and pre-order list; still, this sounds like a great project; certainly as good a way as any to get a horny teen to get busy with a soldering iron.
• Drilldo: Of course, you might not want to bother with all the faff of crafting your own sex toy; you might, instead, just want to jam a dildo onto the end of a power tool and be done with it. BUT DON’T DO THAT IT IS ALMOST CERTAINLY VERY DANGEROUS! Instead, get Drilldo – the safe attachment that lets you attach your rubber dong to the end of an actual, proper Black & Decker. I am honestly incapable of imagining what this might be like as an experience – and god knows, whether I like it or not, my brain has been trying to make me ever since I found this link – but if anyone wants to do a product review I am ALL EARS (I am not all ears, please never, ever contact me with this information). This is a BIT NSFW, but it’s worth the risk to see the frankly terrifying product range on display (there’s no nudity, but an awful lot of massive latex wang).
• 15 Wishes: Last up this week, and VERY different from the last link, is a lovely, gentle little block-breaking game (think Breakout, for the older people among you), all about the feeling of missing someone. Gorgeous piano soundtrack and some genuinely heartstring-tugging copy means you might shed a smol tear as you play.

By Tony Toscani

FINALLY THIS WEEK, LET’S CLOSE THE MIXES WITH TYCHO’S SUNRISE SET AT THIS YEAR’S BURNING MAN!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• GifMK7: Satisfyingly-chunky and oddly-squeezable 3d animated CG gifs. Occasionally featuring statuary, for no discernible reason.
• Stationery Compositions: Satisfyingly-composed images consisting of artfully-arranged stationery, and the second week in a row I get to call out design & office supplies emporium Present & Correct for being great (and as an aside, if you want an example of an excellent retail Twitter feed, this is it – SO good, perfectly on-brand, fulfils a great function (interest/design utility), consistent and well-curated…honestly, you can learn a lot from it if you’re the sort of poor bastard who has to do things like write Twitter ‘strategies’ for a living).
• Earthglance: Aerial shots of the earth. Actually I think I nicked this from Present & Correct too. FFS.
• Lvl374: An odd-but-wonderful Tumblr, collection a series of short animations, all evidently set in the same imagined world, each looking as though they are taken from the cut-scenes of a long-forgotten 90s Japanese shooter. The aesthetic is PERFECT, though I would love to know if there’s some sort of hidden narrative behind it all. Regardless, beautiful work.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Richard Parry: Richard Parry’s feed (at least of late) presents a series of beautiful images showing exploded electronics – you know, those views of stuff where it’s all pulled apart so you can see all the internal components? YES YOU DO FFS CLICK THE LINK – he sells prints too, should you like the designs.
• Donald Topp: A very Supreme-y vibe to these drawings by Donald Topp, where pop culture figures meet tattoo culture. Not violently original, fine, but really nicely done.
• Dan Kitchener: The Insta feed of street artist Dan Kitchener, whose work is in a variety of places around London and which was drawn to my attention by Josh (THANKS JOSH) because there’s a piece opposite his office. The ‘city-by-night’ effect on a lot of this stuff is magnificent.
• Precious Mutator: “Canadian upcycling art”, reads the description. YOU HAVE NO IDEA. There are some very creepy things on here (NB – I see that since I found this it’s been picked up by MailOnline – I know I never talk about where I get stuff from, but it WASN’T THERE).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Angus The Troll: Apologies for linking to a Twitter thread – but, well, you can unroll it if you need to – but this is EXCELLENT; Marc Owen Jones tells the story of befriending a Twitter troll called Angus…and then watching as Angus cycled through a variety of different identities and political positions over the course of their relationship, seemingly unaware of the fact that Jones could see behind the curtain. This is, aside from being very funny in parts, a really interesting look at the practical realities of how these sorts of sockpuppet/bot accounts work.
• The Cost of Next Day Delivery: This is an excellent-if-very-long piece, looking at exactly how Amazon is meeting its next-day-delivery commitments in the US, and the costs that these commitments are exerting on the workforce undertaking said deliveries. What’s especially interesting about this is the stuff about how Amazon’s effectively established an entirely new delivery industry around itself, created from the bottom up and designed specifically and explicitly both to fulfil its next-day promise and to circumnavigate the sort of legislation that would have made that fulfilment utterly impossible to do. It’s quite incredible – honestly, the detail about the smaller trucks being used as it brought them below some health-and-safety thresholds is, if you leave the ethics aside, sort-of brilliant – and yet another example of how Amazon is literally reshaping the world around it to attain and cement market position.
• Musk & Solar City: Solar City is the forgotten bit of the Tesla empire – the solar panels business which was meant to revolutionise energy collection and storage through its invention of solar energy collecting roof tiles and similarly scifi creations. Except it doesn’t seem to be quite working out like that. This is a bit businesswonky, fine, and it helps if you’ve a vague interest in the ‘is Tesla a fcuked company or not?’ question, but even if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s enough in here about Musk and his…idiosyncratic approach to fiduciary duty and, you know, truth to make it worth a read.
• Call The Robot ‘It’: On the importance of creating emotional distance between children and the current generation of ‘robots’ – voice assistants or programmable toys or whatever. I hadn’t heard of Generation Alpha as a concept before reading this – apparently that’s the first generation to grown up with robots and voice assistants and the like as a standard part of their surroundings – but the article suggests that maintaining a degree of ‘us’ and ‘them’ distance between the machine and the kid is important for ensuring a healthy understanding of the ‘programmer’ vs ‘programmed’ nature of the human/machine dynamic. At least until that dynamic flips, obvs.
• Killer Robots: A really quite unsettling look at the current state of robot warfare and autonomous systems of mass death delivery – smart missiles, bombs, tanks, drones, all of which can go, identify a target it, reduce it to pate and come home with nary a human command. Except that’s not the case yet, and the article’s at pains to point out that the idea of giving full autonomy to robot killing machines isn’t anyone’s idea of sensible right now. I don’t know about you, but the ‘right now’ there isn’t filling me with loads of confidence. This is yet another piece about scary future tech in which I kept to see, I don’t know, a military or technological ethicist crop up as being involved in the development of all this stuff but, well, NOPE!
• The Instagram Papers: I love stuff like this – platforms being bent into the shape the users want, regardless of their intended use. This is a great and oddly-heartening piece about how growing numbers of young people are setting up their own newsfeeds on Instagram, curating and packaging the day’s events for their peers in a manner that works for them. Details like this are great: “Within Instagram, there are different ways of reaching audiences and starting conversations. Kanda engages followers via polls on Instagram stories and records videos, like the one she recently posted explaining the scandal surrounding financier and accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “People also tend to reply back to stories with questions or actually wanting to start an open discussion,” she says. “I’ve gotten some really thoughtful insights from people replying to stories.” I know the idea of an ‘insta newspaper’ isn’t new, but let’s forget about that woman from the Standard’s preposterous vanity project and look at the genuinely interesting stuff instead.
• Five Millennials Changing The World: I know that making fun of millennials is a) not funny; and b) a joke from about 5 years ago, but this piece made me laugh a LOT. Profiling the 5 millennials around the world who really can be said to be making a difference, this is glorious (for about 5 minutes, and then maybe just a bit sadmaking).
• The Post-Truth World of Influencer Romances: I’m including this in part because it’s interesting to look at the odd world of manufactured romances in general – nothing has changed since Hollywood in the 20s, honestly – but also because it’s yet another footnote for my ‘twenty years of kayfabe’ theory that I am going to keep on wanging on about til Alex gets round to writing that piece.
• Using AI to Write a Novel: In which the author, Sigal Samuel, explores how working with the GPT-2 AI is helping him write his next novel, and how by using a combination of his own work as a prompt, what that causes the AI to generate, and his own edits of that eventual output, he can find himself creating more creative, vivid and imaginative scenes where he might previously have struggled. This is truly fascinating stuff – less so, to my mind, in terms of the output, but more in terms of this as an emergent discipline; I’ve written here before, loads, about the idea of human/machine ‘centaurs’ being the likely optimal application of AI til it gets REALLY good, and it’s something I know Shardcore is interested in exploring with his art. The really, really interesting things with AI at the moment happen when you start to see how it can work alongside human thinking as the mental / creative equivalent of the motor on an electric bike.
• Hipster Cereals: On the growing trend for super-healthy, subscription-service, keto-diet-suitable breakfast cereals in the US. This sounds ridiculous – especially that people might pay something like £2 a bowl for stuff that tastes like Cap’n Crunch but which is less likely to give you type-2 diabetes – but, well, here we are. This feels like the sort of thing there might be a market for in the UK (and tbh I reckon if you could make Crunchy Nut Cornflakes with extra protein and less sugar you could probably retire within 12 months).
• The Counterfeit Airpod Market: Ostensibly a sort-of review of a bunch of ripoff Apple airpods ordered off the internet, this is a far more interesting article which asks some interesting questions about the knock-on effects on the planet of wildly-successful consumer products, particularly something as famously environmentally-problematic as the Airpod. “These fake AirPods will probably work for a couple of months with regular use. Then, they’ll probably start holding less of a charge, and eventually stop working entirely. Just like regular AirPods, they’ll make pretty, symmetric fossils. Fake AirPods will never biodegrade, and they’ll never decompose. These knock-off AirPods are the unavoidable outcome of Apple making culturally important products that are out of most people’s price range. The same capitalist forces that make AirPods possible also make fake AirPods possible.” Feel good?
• How Waze has Ruined LA: Another week, another ‘hey, look what happens when you build ‘disruptive’ technology but don’t spend enough time thinking about what the consequences of ‘disruption’ might in fact be!’-type article, this time looking at how Waze, the driving / shortcuts app, has basically turned LA into an (even more) undrivable sh1thole. This is an object-lesson in how less-than-thoughtful product development and design, when layered onto the real world, can have pretty remarkable and not exactly unpredictable consequences. You know that whole ‘we live inside a simulation’ idea that gets a new wave of attention every now and again? Well maybe we’re inside the simulation that a bunch of super-intelligent beings are using to test out all their exciting, disruptive new ideas before deploying them in real life. Would explain quite a lot tbh.
• Mapping the Artists of the Whitney: A lovely interactive project, mapping where the artists featured in every single Whitney Biennale since 1932. Mainly of interest to art fans, but it offers a really interesting journey through trends in North American contemporary art.
• The Art Gallery in Fallout76: If you ‘do’ videogames, you may know that the latest game in the post-apocalyptic Fallout series was less-than well-received. Still, it hasn’t stopped players doing some fun things in the gameworld, and this account of one player’s creation of an in-game art gallery, in which people can have their own area in which to create an exhibit from the games objects and props, based on whatever themes they choose, is a wonderful example of users stretching systems to the limit of their intended use. Also, the ‘exhibits’ are occasionally GREAT.
• Weezer’s Blue Album: God I loved Weezer’s Blue Album. It, along with Ash’s first EP (when they were still literally 15 and living in Ireland and before they got famous with Kung Fu), marked me down as having DANGEROUSLY ALTERNATIVE tastes amongst my classmates (Swindon, man, Swindon), and meant I spent an awful lot of time listening to it on a Walkman and dreaming of escaping to a place where SOMEONE would UNDERSTAND me (so, so emo). Anyway, this is a great piece looking at the band’s genesis and painting a not-hugely-flattering picture of any of the people involved, but in a believable rather than monstrous way (though Cuomo does sound like a bit of a prick).
• The History of the Fleshlight: You all know what a Fleshlight is, don’t you? Yes? Good, well we can continue then. VICE looks back at the device’s history – its genesis as an aid for a man whose wife had been told she couldn’t safely have sex during her pregnancy and so who decided to design himself a solution (we all have a practical friend, don’t we?), its subsequent status as a piece of internet legend and a pop-culture phenomenon (noone knows anyone who owns one, everyone knows what one is), and, latterly, its status as something of a precursor to the world of more gender-fluid and less anatomically-focused sextoys we’re moving towards. Totally SWF, though, well, there are some pictures of the devices in question. Still, could be anything, right?
• Courtney Love at 55: An article celebrating the Hole singer at 55, and looking back at her (the piece contends) somewhat overlooked status in the pantheon of rock. Reading this, it’s startling to remember quite how much outright hatred and misogyny Love has faced throughout her career; I remember reading music magazines in the mid-90s which even then effectively painted her as a serial groupie and hanger-on rather than an artist and performer in her own right. That said, Love’s never made any secret of her desire for fame and status, which comes through loud and clear here – what also comes through, though, is the extent to which she was a pioneer of strong female voices in modern rock music. Really interesting, and made me want to listen to Live Through This for the first time in YEARS.
• Eton and Power: I know Sam Leith, the author of this piece, a little bit – he’s lovely, and joins the collection of people I know who went to Eton who I want to hate but can’t. Sam looks back at the very peculiar nature of the Eton experience for this article, and tries to examine what it is about it that produces people with such an odd relationship to power; this is fascinating, and quite horrible at the same time.
• The Book of Prince: Imagine being asked to write Prince’s book with him. JUST IMAGINE. No, don’t imagine, read this piece instead. This is a lovely, intimate piece of writing – Dan Piepenbring is obviously a huge fan, and it comes across in every sentence; as does the fact that Prince was evidently a very intelligent, very interesting, very singular man who would have been an absolute intimidating terror to work with – go on, read this and then try and imagine bringing notes to Prince: “Yes, er, I mean, I’m just not sure that that metaphor wor…”. No, it’s too awful to contemplate. This is a SUPERB essay.
• Two Days in the Spa: Do we have 24h Korean spas in London? It feels like a very US thing, somehow. Anyway, in this article the author attempts to spend two days and nights consecutively in LA’s Wi Spa, in which you can pamper yourself, sweat, eat, sleep and just generally hang out. Will our hero attain a state of Nirvana? Will he transcend? Will he get found and kicked out before the 48h time has been reached? This is genuinely funny, a touch like a slightly-less-neurotic early-period David Sedaris, and you will feel ever-so-slightly-cleansed after reading it.
• Magic Eraser Juice: Beautifully-written account of what it’s like going round saving opioid addicts from overdose in an unnamed part of America. Really, really superb prose, but about as uplifting as you’d expect.
• Lemons In Winter: Finally this week in the longreads, Mika Taylor writes about her divorce and its aftermath, and going to visit some seals. Gorgeous and sad: “It’s January and I am visiting California’s Central Coast because my husband is leaving me. Has left me. I have never been this sad before. I am forty years old and my marriage is, was, the center of my life. My husband and I have been together almost twelve years, married eight, and separated less than six months. I am not over it. I am not OK. And I do not really see a path through, though therapists and friends assure me that time will help. I know this type of loss is common enough, but I am in no way prepared. At least in California there will be sun, I’d thought. But right now, it’s raining.”

By Sandro Giordano

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, this is a lovely, spare and sad song, about the end of a relationship or friendship and that feeling of not knowing quite what you’ve done wrong. It’s called ‘What Have I Done?’, it’s by Zoe Boekbinder and it’s for each and every one of you who’ve ever considered unsubscribing:

2. I really, really like this, and it reminds me very strongly of something from around 2009/10, but I am fcuked if I know what. Anyway, it’s by Melt Yourself Down and it’s called ‘Boot and Spleen’, and it’s sort of shouty, spiky, art-rocky, with horns!   

3.  

4. This is called ‘Bones’, it’s by Free Love, and it’s got a wonderful buildup and sort ofg gently old school rave-ish sensibility which I very much enjo

6. Next, a lovely, slight, skeletal, skittery, insectile piece piece of electronice by Floating Points, called ‘Last Boom’

8. I love the vocal on this so, so much (anyone else find it a bit Bjorkish in parts?). It’s called ‘Trying’ and it’s by Aunty Social:

10. Last up, this is ‘Thrasher’ by Sassy009 and it’s EXCELLENT, not least the way it sort-of switches halfwaythrough – AND THAT’S IT I AM ON HOLIDAY OH MY DAYS A BREAK AT LAST BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME I WILL BE BACK THANKS FOR READING EVEN IF IT’S ONLY EVERY NOW AND AGAIN EVERY LITTLE HELPS AND I APPRECIATE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE SEE YOU IN THREE WEEKS BYE BYE BYE!!!!

Amidst all the triumphalism in the Tory press this morning, did anyone happen to notice Macron’s body language during their joint presser yesterday? There was a point when our glorious leader was lying through his teeth about the meaning of Merkel’s ’30 days’ line and Manu’s index finger was spasming so hard against the lectern that it looked like his digit was ineffectually cosplaying Woody Woodpecker. 

I was doing quite a lot of professional spasming this week too, not least because of the realisation that next Thursday I have to deliver a two-hour presentation to 100-odd people at one of the agencies I work at. I am therefore obviously going to spend the majority of the weekend catatonic with poisons so as to engender the MAXIMUM degree of slightly wonky fear which will hopefully propel me over the finish line as I start writing the bloody thing on Tuesday – WISH ME LUCK, WEBMONGS!

Anyway, enough talk of WORK – it’s a three-day weekend! It’s carnival! It’s going to be nice weather! DON’T THINK ABOUT THE BURNING RAINFORESTS AND BOLSONARO AND TRUMP AND JOHNSON AND FARAGE AND ORBAN AND BEZOS AND ZUCKERBERG AND DORSEY OR ANY OF THE OTHER BAD THINGS! Instead, take a deep breath, bend over and place your head into the hole I’ve helpfully dug for you, and then enjoy the gentle, tickling sensation as I fill it up around your ears with infosand – see, it’s better this way. It’s safe inside the web (it’s not safe). I am Matt, today is Friday, this, as ever, is Web Curios, and YOU deserve every inch of it. 

By Daehyuk Im

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST AND GREATEST SUPERMIX BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE WHICH IS, AS EVER, TRULY SUPERB!

THE SECTION WHICH IS ONCE AGAIN SADLY SCEPTICAL ABOUT THE MASSIVE ADVERTISING COMPANIES’ CLAIMS THAT THEY’RE GOING TO MAKE THE AD TRACKING LESS CREEPY AND INTRUSIVE:

• Off-Facebook Activity: It is, it’s fair to say, becoming quite hard to keep up with the various initiatives being announced by Facebook et al to reassure us that no, honestly, we’re the ones in control of our data and who can advertise at us – you’d obviously have to be a terrible cynic and possibly a communist of some sort to believe that this was in any way an intentional side effect of the massively obfuscatory language continually used to talk about all this, and the continued lack of any sort of easily-accessible/digestible guide to what all these different tweaks are and how they interrelate to each other. This latest news is about how Facebook is slowly beginning to roll out its long-promised ‘clear history’ function, promised by Zuckerberg over a year ago – users in Ireland, South Korea and Spain will now be able to get more detailed information about the information other apps and websites have sent Facebook about them, de-link that information from their profile, and prevent this sort of data-sharing happening in future. Note, by the way, that the word ‘delete’ is at no point mentioned; the data is in fact not deleted, it continues to sit on Facebook’s server farms, which is slightly different to what was promised. Note also this news from the other week, about how Facebook has developed systems which will allow ad targeting of users without the use of their personal data and instead based on learned personas, etc, which does rather suggest that the creepy ad stuff isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
• Twitter Bans Ads From State-Controlled Media: A response to the past few weeks’ apparent propagandist ad buys by Chinese media, in which promoted Tweets spread across Twitter decrying Hong Kong protestors’ violent ways in a in-no-way-state-orchestrated campaign. It feels like a superficially Good Thing, though there are some obvious grey areas – Twitter’s definition of ‘state controlled media’ is “news media entities that are either financially or editorially controlled by the state”, which leaves a few interesting questions about organisations such as RAI in Italy, where channel controllers and senior editorial staff are political appointees and very much get their direction from whichever hopeless criminal is in charge that week.
• YouTube Killing Messages: You used to be able to use YouTube as a messaging app – WHO KNEW? Anyway, you can’t any more. This feels very much like an opportunity to build some sort of a plugin replacing this functionality, though when I say ‘opportunity’ I can’t in fact imagine what benefit you’d get from doing it other than a warm sense of slightly-futile satisfaction.
• Some Google Chrome Privacy Thing: On the one hand, even by my low standards for this section that is a terrible, lazy ‘headline’. On the other, I challenge you to work out exactly what this announcement is saying – “we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox.” Ok, so they’re announcing an initiative! About privacy on the web! Except, marvellously, the blog makes references to the fact that ‘today’ they will release more details about what this might entail…but doesn’t reveal them! You have to click through to another blog to learn that…well, actually nothing at all, just that Google’s thinking about some stuff around limiting fingerprinting (that is, the ability for developers to match users across websites and therefore track their behaviour and target them with specificity). I wonder why it is that we find it so hard to trust these companies?
• Livestreaming Comes to Reddit: Or at least they’re testing it, with users across the world having the chance this week to launch livestreams which can be voted up and down in classic Reddit fashion; the trial ran from Monday and closes today, and there’s no guarantee that it will be rolled out permanently, but, well, if LinkedIn can do livestreaming, why not Reddit? The announcement is VERY CLEAR about the ‘no bongo’ rule, but, well, I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to find.
• Shelter on TikTok: The first UK charity I’ve seen to start using the platform; it’ll be interesting to see whether or not this sticks, and whether they find the effort involved in making TikToks (is that what we have to call them? Dear God) is worth it; honestly, decent vertical video is SO HARD imho.
• The Bacardi Beat Machine: An absolute classic of the ‘the agency will have creamed themselves over this but I would bet actual cashmoney that noone who doesn’t work in advermarketingpr will ever see this, ever’ genre, this. Bacardi have made a MIXING DESK out of YouTube – except it’s not a mixing desk, it’s a single YT video which is designed so that, by skipping back and forth through the track using the number keys on your laptop, you can ‘mix’ ‘songs’. It’s admittedly a clever use of inbuilt functionality, but, well the track sounds crap, the ‘mixing’ is shonky as you like, and you can’t record or export your output, meaning there’s limited shareability. Still, doubtless this’ll be on an awful lot of self-satisfied awards lists, so THAT’S WHAT MATTERS!
• 60 Years of the Clios: 60 years of the advertising awards that aren’t Lions! This is a rather nice website if you’re in the market for some adland nostalgia; the site presents a painting in which are hidden (not really hidden’ a bunch of classic US/UK ads from THE PAST; click on the figures, read a little bit of blurb, watch the clip. It feels like this all skews a bit recent, but it’s nice to see the SMASH robots lurking about in there (the fcuking Budweiser knight can fcuk off, though).
• Deepfakes on Demand: You want a deepfake making for your ad, your SOCIAL CONTENT or just to fcuk with someone? FRIEND OF WEB CURIOS SHARDCORE IS NOW AT YOUR SERVICE. He’s launched a commercial service, offering quotes and production on whatever deepfake you want making (except bongo. He’s not doing bongo). There’s a good 6-12m window when you can get quite a lot of attention doing this stuff as a brand, I reckon, so if you have an idea drop him a line.

By Gherdai Hassell

NEXT, ENJOY THIS 8-BIT REWORKING OF MILES DAVIS’ ‘A KIND OF BLUE’ BY FRIEND OF CURIOS ANDY BAIO!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE EXCELLENT ANNUAL FOOTAGE OF UNIFORMED POLICEMEN DAGGERING, PT.1:

• Streaming Consciousness: I wanted to include this last week, but the site was temporarily banjaxed (and WHY DO I THINK YOU CARE?! This sort of pointless digression is why Curios is so appallingly lo-Christ, I’m doing it again, sorry); it’s working again now, though, so ENJOY! This is a lovely project (thanks Kev for sending it to me), stemming from 47 young people sharing their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, dreams, etc, in an anonymous private Slack group; those thoughts (etc etc) are now collated on this website, grouped by theme, in a sort of semi-infinite mess of emotion; there’s something very personal about the way in which these are presented, and it feels not unlike being inside a collective teenage consciousness which I guess is sort of the point. The gently undulating colourcycle in the background is a touch distracting, fine, but in general this is a beautiful, meditative piece of webart which is oddly reminiscent of perennial Web Curios favourite The Listening Post.
• Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: This is a throwback – I remember the old version of this site from a decade or so ago, and now here it is all de-flashed and HTML-happy. Ishkur’s is a sort of taxonomic guide to electronic dance musical genres, offering a navigable encyclopedia of styles which shows how they interrelate with each other. You can hear short clips of each genre to help make sense of the slightly overwhelming range of stuff in here, and read (often funny) descriptions of each – fair play to Ishkur for bothering to write about the minute differences in style between fidget house and microhouse because, really, HOW DO YOU TELL? Dance music enthusiasts will get lost in this for days, but for the more casual webmong it’s still a fun way to pass 10 minutes; see what the most terrifying style you can find is (clue: it is ALWAYS Gabba)!
• Colournames: Yes I’ve anglicised the spelling, WHAT OF IT? Anyway, this is ACE and the sort of thing that if you’re in the right mood could potentially take over your afternoon rather. This is a madly-optimistic project to create “an open, free and consistent source of color names”; go to the site, click ‘random’ and it will spit out an-as-yet-unnamed shade for you to ascribe an identity to. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that there are restrictions on the words you can use, but naming a particularly virulent shade of yellow ‘fcuk mustard’ wouldn’t be particularly big or clever anyway; this feels like the sort of thing that an entire design team could happily while away the rest of the day messing around with.
• Headbanger: I can’t say I particularly miss the brief trend from a few years back of websites that were controlled by motion-tracking your movements via webcam; still, this is a nice throwback and surprisingly fun (if you don’t mind looking a bit silly). This is a site to accompany a new album by NY metal band Dracaris, whose latest record apparently “is connected thematically by a series of schizophrenic episodes. A tangled web of thoughts, ideas, hallucinations, all from a distorted mind” (course it is lads), and which is obviously best represented through a game of Breakout which you control by moving your head from side-to-side, opening your mouth and headbanging. Try it, it’s oddly fun and there are 13 separate levels to play through – or, even better, get the person opposite you to play it and then try and throw stuff into their gob while they’re open-mouthed and nodding.
• Liminal Earth: SO SO GOOD! This is an evolution of a project I featured on here last year called Liminal Seattle, which I described thusly: “Liminal Seattle is a crowdsourced map, collecting the supernatural stories of the city’s residents mapped to where they took place. If you want to browse around people’s sightings and reports of the supernatural, and enjoy obviously totally sane entries such as “There’s a man in a house who’s trapped in the 3rd dimension. he died in the home and now he sits on the porch. he protects and cares for the folx who live there now, but we think he wants to officially cross over.” (of course there is mate) then this is an EXCELLENT browse.” Except now it’s been expanded to cover THE WHOLE WORLD – anyone can submit the strange stuff they see or experience, tagged to a specific location, so we can get an overall picture of where all the weird is worldwide. Sadly there are currently only two entries for the UK at present; one for a ‘train time slip’, where an otherwise-ordinary regional train in the midlands stopped at the same station twice(!), and another in Wales which I need to reproduce in full: “A door in a tree, didn’t try and open it or knock, the resident probably gets enough humans bothering them. It could also be a portal.” Reader, I scoffed, but then I noticed that there was a photo and OH MY GOD. Honestly, this site is just superb and I can’t encourage you to explore it enough.
• The Custom Movement: I imagine at least a few of you will be into trainers (sneakers? Kicks? Creps? Honestly, no idea), in which case this site may well be something of a goldmine (or route into rapid bankruptcy). The Custom Movement sells custom trainers, redesigned and ‘remixed’ by various artists and designers; some of these are wonderful, some are hideous, and all are guaranteed to make people think ‘man, that person really wants people to look at their shoes’. Wallflowers and the fashion-backward need not apply, but if you’re the sort of person who goes to Selfridges and buys those trainers with the massive velour wings attached to them (you know the ones I mean) then this could be your heaven.
• The Symphony Project: Do we all know what the Blockchain is now? Yes? No? Does it matter? For the purposes of this website, not at all! All you need to know that the Blockchain here is presented as an excitingly-navigable 3d landscape, which lets you not only visualise but also hear the Blockchain in your browser. The developers “used a technique called additive synthesis to generate sound on the fly, and utilized the parallel nature of graphics cards to synthesize a sound for each of the thousands of transactions that can make up a block. The unique sound signature that plays when you visit a block consists of each transaction producing eight sine waves (a fundamental pitch and seven harmonics). The fundamental pitch is determined by the transaction value, and the amount of randomness added to the harmonics partials is controlled by the fee-to-value ratio of the transaction…The volume of the harmonic partials, meanwhile, is determined by the spent-to-unspent output ratio. This creates a range of sound that communicates the health of the block: a virtual heartbeat that codifies the volume of transactions and the number of transactions unspent.” Look, I’ll be honest, I don’t understand much of what I just typed, but as a fancy bit of dataviz and exploration it’s rather wonderful. Sounds awful, though.
• Pago: This is a really interesting piece of design, collaboratively conceived of by Google and Panasonic; Pago is a sort-of combined torch and Google-machine and machine-vision device (yes, I know, but trust me, this is harder than you’d expect), designed to help kids access the power of the web for learning purposes without being tethered to a screen. The appealingly chunky Pago looks like a sort of trumpet; the idea is that kids can point it at whatever they are interested in, press a button, and the device will recognise the object, tell the kid what it is, allow them to learn more about it, and store it in the device’s memory for later transfer to other devices for online scrapbooking, etc. It’s only a proof-of-concept, I think, but it’s a really nice combination of digital and physical.
• Weather: Electronic musician Tycho’s got previous for making interesting little webtoys to accompany their releases; their latest, Weather, is no exception, and the accompanying site is a delight. The gimmick is very simple – allow the site access to your location and it will pull weather data from…some data source; it’ll then use that to craft a 25-song playlist for you, drawn from Tycho’s back catalogue but also including a host of other artists too. Track selection will be determined by factors such as temperature, wind speed, etc, and having tried it a couple of times there appear to be enough tracks linked to it to make it reasonably reusable. Special mention to the site design, which is really very nice indeed – super-simple and all the better for it.
• Moodfeed: A little Buzzfeed archive experiment, where you select what mood you’re in from a list of 6 options (hungry, joyful, nostalgic, bored, curious and stressed, since you ask) and the site will spit out a selection of supposedly emotion-appropriate articles from the Buzzfeed back catalogue. It’s an interesting way of getting people to engage with historical material, though I’m not sure exactly how much of Buzzfeed’s intensely zeitgeisty stuff is really worth going back through at a distance of 12+months. I just tried telling it I was stressed (I am not – I am a Buddha floating on a lilypad, as per) and it suggested I look at a post entitled ‘55 Memes About Anxiety That Will Make You Say ‘Me’!’ which I’m not sure would have the intended de-stressing effect tbqhwy.
• The San Francisco Disco Preservation Society: Like Disco? Well OH MY DAYS is this the motherlode you have been searching for! “The mission of the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society is to collect, restore, digitize, preserve, and present historic audio and video recordings pertaining to DJ and nightclub history in San Francisco and internationally, as well as educate, inform, and entertain the public and future generations through its archives, public events, screenings, and online access to its resources.” There are classic disco mixtapes, and then selections from the 80s, 90s and 00s; honestly, the Summer 1975 one in particular is a DELIGHT.
• Book Covers: I missed this last month – shame on me – but this is a typically nicely-done piece of infowrangling by The Pudding, looking at the visual similarity between book covers; not a topic you’d ordinarily think worthy of poring over, but this visualisation, created by machine learning, shows in beautiful fashion the less-than-original choices made by publishers. Once you start exploring, it’s quite addictive to see exactly how often books quite shamelessly cleave to genre tropes when it comes to covers – and quite how bad so much of US book design is.
• Input Delay: You know that incredibly annoying keyboard lag that you occasionally get when your computer’s struggling under the weight of 100 open tabs (or is that just me?)? This site lets you simulate that exact experience to differing degrees of severity, which is perfect if you wanted to send yourself spiralling into a throb-veined funk just for the hell of it.
• Critics Company: These kids got a load of media attention this week, and rightly so – Critics Company is a collective of young filmmakers working out of Nigeria, who are making some madly inventive scifi/horror-type shorts on their phone; obviously this isn’t quite Hollywood, but the passion they have for it is infectious and I hope that their recent semi-fame gets them access to some better kit.
• Stoic: I think I’ve spoken on here before about the weird adoption of the stoics as the alt-right-adjacent’s philosophers of choice – stoicism is trendy in 2019, or at least the particular variant of it currently being espoused by Jordan Petersen and other such horrorshows of the modern age. Anyway, that probably explains in part the name choice for this new app, a MINDFUL JOURNALING EXPERIENCE (dear God save me), which each day will ask you how you’re feeling and track your moods and ask you to record your musings and serve you content to address your emotional deficiencies and OH GOD CAN WE STOP EXAMINING OURSELVES FOR ONE FCUKING SECOND PLEASE? No? Ok then.
• Fail Online: Via last week’s B3ta newsletter (THANKS ROB!), this is a simple Daily Mail headline/article generator, which churns out frighteningly-plausible pieces at the press of a button. I just got “Huntswoman, 54, who was at centre of storm for whipping bleeding heart liberals and calling them ‘uneducated peasants’ was crushed to death by young muslim men at hunt”, which is uncanny.
• 3d Cholera: I’ve featured John Snow’s infamous map of cholera outbreaks in London before on here, but this new, whizzy version allows you to explore it in 3d, which is a really nice example of clever digitisation of old materials and a lovely piece of dataviz to boot. Click ‘Switch to 3d’ in the left-hand nav to enjoy looking a disease-related deaths across the city in the 1850s! So cheery!
• The Map of Video Walks: This is quite wonderful – a Google Map which collects links to YouTube videos of walks, with each pin taking you to a first-person stroll around…somewhere. Fcuk that Buzzfeed thing up there – if you’re feeling stressed, I very much recommend that you have a stroll around Sorrento instead (virtually).
• Trails of Wind: I’m not particularly proud of this, but I confess to sniggering like a child every time I see this site name. Still, if you can get beyond the schoolboy humour (mine, to be clear, not the developers) then there’s something weirdly interesting about this map of all of the world’s airport runways, showing which direction they run in. You can explore the map yourself, or let you take it on a tour of the world’s runways which, I promise, is significantly more interesting than I just made it sound; the project’s more art than engineering in some senses, given its attempts to visualise the constraints placed on man-made construction by elemental factors outwith our control.
• Typeloop: An app that lets you apply a range of rather cool animated text effects over your photos and videos, and, as is now de rigeur, then export those to use in your Stories in an attempt to leverage the novelty of a NEW TRICK to snare a few more views of the uninteresting, poorly-shot-and-narrated soap opera you are trying to make of your life.

By Frank Moth

NEXT, TRY THE GLITCHY, WONKPOP STYLINGS OF DAVID SHANE SMITH!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE EXCELLENT ANNUAL FOOTAGE OF UNIFORMED POLICEMEN DAGGERING, PT.2:

• The UK Government Website Archive: This is wonderful, but also a reminder of how little decent preservation of the old web exists and how much is being lost via attrition. Jonty Wareing has pulled the earliest entries from the Internet Archive for each of the official list of .gov.uk domains, meaning here collected on this page is a collection of what each site looked like when it was first created. It’s astonishing quite how early some of these were – who was accessing Bradford Council Services online in 1996?! Who were these built for? So much excellent retrodesign goodness, should you be in the market for such a thing.
• The Travelling Youth Circus: The Boston Globe’s Big Picture series presents a wonderful set of photos of the only travelling youth circus in the US; these are all wonderful, but particularly the shot of the kid looking intensely, perfectly, teenagedly bored and p1ssed off whilst in full slap and costume which will be a familiar expression to anyone who’s ever interacted with a teenager ever.
• The Digital Ludeme Project: This is slightly academic, but very interesting nonetheless. “The Digital Ludeme Project is a five year ERC-funded research project hosted by Maastricht University. This project is a computational study of the world’s traditional strategy games throughout recorded human history. It aims to improve our understanding of traditional games using modern AI techniques, to chart their historical development and explore their role in the development of human culture and the spread of mathematical ideas”. There’s no playable output as yet, but the idea of training an AI on the rulesets of all the ancient games ever and then seeing what it comes up with is a fascinating one, and I think this is a really interesting avenue of enquiry when it comes to the automation of systems design and the like (which, I know, sounds incredibly dull when I write it down, but I promise it isn’t really).
• Gone: I can’t work out if this is just a genuinely terrible idea or whether I am missing something brilliantly obvious. Gone is a listmaking/task-planning service whose gimmick is that any list you make will disappear within 24h, thereby, so I presume the theory is that this will pressure or incentivise you to do the things before they vanish and you forget…or, alternatively, you’ll just procrastinate as usual and then all your tasks will vanish and you’ll simply never, ever do them. “Did you remember to pick up the teabags?” “No, I wrote the shopping list yesterday and so it vanished into the digital oubliette and so I had nothing to remind me what we needed and now we’ve got a fridge full of pepperami and special brew” is basically how I imagine this working out.
• The Shoal Tent: A concept so biblically stupid that when I saw a video iof it doing the rounds I had to go on a solid 10-minute Google to assure myself it’s not in fact a host – it’s not a hoax. The Shoal Tent is, as its name would suggest, a tent, which has one singular gimmick – IT FLOATS! Yep, that’s right, the Shoal Tent is also an INFLATABLE, meaning that you can sleep in a tent which is bobbing up and down on whatever body of water you choose to place it on. WHAT IF IT DEVELOPS A LEAK WHILE YOU ARE ASLEEP? WHAT IF A CROCODILE COMES? I don’t think these people have thought this through AT ALL. Although at the time of writing it appears to be sold-out, so once again it appears that I am the know-nothing bozo here and everyone in fact literally does want to sleep with the fishes.
• Student Recipes: Some of you will have kids who are in the throes of preparing to go and saddle themselves with £60k’s worth of debt solely to be able to ‘enjoy’ a soul-crushing existence in front of a screen for the 50 years post-graduation; CHEERS! If your offspring are about to fly the nest, this website’s not the worst thing in the world to point at them, comprising as it does about 5000-odd recipes which, for a change, aren’t American and so don’t refer to ‘cups’ (the worst unit of measurement in the world, hands-down). Lots of the recipes, fine, are for smoothies and variants on ‘banana pancakes’, but they will still be better than the ‘chilli soup’ which my mate Dave made at university and which caused the walls of our hovel to be coated in a thin film of sweat and we all ate it in silent suffering.
• Matteo In Tour: This is all in Italian, but it translates reasonably easily and even if you don’t speak the language you can get the gist; this is a datavisualisation and analysis project tracking Matteo Salvini’s perigrinations around Italy and indeed the world; this Summer alone, the man who hopes to become Italy’s next leader (pray God no) has been rocking up at beaches and resorts across the peninsula, pressing flesh and dancing with upsetting erotic abandon and generally getting his fash on. It would be sort-of wonderful to have this level of detail on the movements of all politicians, although I accept probably not for them.
• 2020 Madness: This is a really interesting idea; using a sort of fantasy stock market approach to raise money for whoever the eventual anti-Trump candidate vomited up by the Democratic party is. Users buy into the game with real money to earn tokens which they can then use to buy, sell or short any of the Democratic candidates, with said candidates’ ‘value’ being determined by polling, debate performance, media coverage, etc etc; players compete against each other for fun and bragging rights, and there’s no prize; instead, the funds raised will be donated to the campaign of whoever’s finally selected. No idea how much it will make – they’re aiming for $1m, which good luck – but it’s quite a smart premise.
• RSS Mailer: Get your RSS feeds in your inbox. That’s, er, literally it, but if you’re in the market for something which collects updates from sites you like and mails them to you once a day then, well, here you are!
• Music Pro: Slightly confused as to who this is for, but I guess if you don’t want to shell out for Spotify then you might use YouTube as your music playing service of choice; in which case this app, which lets you stream music via YouTube on your phone continuously, without ad interruptions and with the ability to turn off the video and just leaving it alone without it turning itself off. As far as I recall those are all premium YT features, which makes me think that this is a hacky workaround which might not exist that much longer, but while it lasts it might be worth a look.
• Nuts AbouT Squirrels: Steve Barclay is NUTS ABOUT SQUIRRELS! This is his YouTube channel, which has been going for a few years but which has recently been re-upped, with a new trailer and renewed focus and, basically, if you don’t love Steve a little bit then you and I are not going to get on. This is what I can best describe as a series of Ninja Warrior-type assault courses, for squirrels, with commentary and some truly appalling puns, with no seeming trace of irony – just a deep and abiding love for the tree rats. Honestly, this is the purest thing you will see all day.
• Sunrise Search: Also nicked from B3ta (THANKS ROB!), this is regular contributor Monkeon’s very clever little hack, which presents a list of webcams from around the world which are imminently going to show you a sunrise or a sunset. At the time of writing (10:05am fwiw), Barbados is next up; this is quite a pleasing thing to bookmark, as I promise there are few things more soothing than being able to watch the sun rising somewhere in the world (almost) whenever you want.
• Arise & Shine: Or, alternatively, “The Official Website of David Berkowitz former Son of Sam”. I like the fact that you can be a ‘former’ serial killer; you could argue that it’s not really a thing that one can leave behind, but Dave is very much trying to do that, with his love of Christ and his repentance and his wonderfully web 1.0 website and his slightly-terrifing 9-part ‘In My Own Words’ series of autobiographical videos. Quite, quite mad, and a tiny bit chilling (ok, quite a lot chilling).
• Waves: What would make dating apps better? The ability to get right down to it and match with people based on your kinks, fetishes and the like? The ability to search for people who are into domination, whipping and, er, sleeping (no, really, that’s a category)? Who knows, but I suppose there’s an almost admirable degree of honesty inherent in all this; the list of kinks is a touch on the vanilla side, though. If you were going to do this properly you’d lean in hard and include the furries, the fatties and the fisters, no? The p1sspigs and the scat-daddies and th- oh, ok, fine, I’ll stop.
• Satoshi’s Games: Finally this week, a free 8-bit-style arcade featuring a variety of delightful little games with slight Bitcoin themes in tribute to that Satoshi. The micro-version of No Man’s Sky in particular is a joy.

By Kiknavelidze

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY DJ NATE’S CARNIVAL MIX 2019 AND HAVE A FUN CARNIVAL IF YOU’RE GOING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Stray Cat J: J is a Japanese cat. He is very cute. MAOW WHAT A LOVELY NECKERCHIEF!
• Ken Albala: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, this blog is a rather wonderful find. Ken Albala is a culinary historian who experiments with old recipes, often from the 70s – you know, the ones where everything is in aspic and salads come with mayonnaise florets – along with photos and tasting notes; this is joyous.
• Relatable Pics of Roger Waters: So many relatable pictures of Roger Waters!
• Fifteen People: Also not actually a Tumblr, but this is a great project (or it will be as it progresses) where the site’s author is going to go through every record in Momus’ back catalogue and review/ assess them; I appreciate 99.9% (recurring) of you will have no idea who that is, but, I promise you, he’s absolutely one of the smartest musicians of the past 30-40 years and you will relish discovering him.
• Sh1tpost Sampler: Crosstitch patterns of VERY Tumblr posts. You ever want a pattern for a needlework picture reading “Just because I am in the shape of a person does not mean I am one”? Course you do!
• Sh1tty Movie Details: Slightly bro-ish but still reasonably funny gags about stuff that you might have missed in popular cinema.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Bob Bicknell-Knight: I featured one of Bob’s paintings in last week’s Curios – Zuckerberg with felled antelope – and it’s worth you checking out his Insta feed as it’s rather wonderful.
• Dolen Carag: You want a hand-carved human skull, turned into a lovely, bespoke piece of post-mortem art? You want some pictures of such skulls? YES YOU DO!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 1619: This is a wonderful interactive from the New York Times, looking back on the 400 years since the arrival of the first slave on American soil, and presenting a history of the African American experience in the context of slavery. This is just brilliant journalism and digital work, and I recommend it unreservedly.
• Mark Zuckerberg is a Slum Landlord: We’ve not been short of metaphors for the way big tech uses and abuses us, but this one was new to me – I rather like it. Bryan Menegus uses the concept of property and space as a vehicle to, as you might expect, explain why the Big Blue Misery factory is so, well, miserable: “let’s plainly define what Facebook is: an entity which extracts monetizable data in exchange for a place to store and grow our digital lives. At its most basic, the relationship resembles that of a tenant to a landlord. So what kind of accommodation does our personal information afford? More populous than any single country, and six of the seven continents, the 2.4 billion people crammed within Facebook’s blue and grey walls are spending their data to rent a digital equivalent of a tenement, constructed to maximize profit at the expense of safety and quality of life.”
• A Walk In Hong Kong: Part travelogue, part political musing, in which the author describes their experience of being caught up in the Hong Kong protests. I’ve not been able to quite work out who they are, but as a Polish immigrant into the US who’s currently in HK, their perspective is really interesting; there’s a sort of double-outsider feel to the whole piece, and I slightly adored his observation at the top that the US is a ‘less developed’ nation vs HK (for by most indicators it almost certainly is).
• Trump 2020: I know, I know, THAT MAN AGAIN; ordinarily I wouldn’t bother with A N Other piece talking about how he’s awful but might win again, but this, but Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone is always a good read and this is a happily ranty piece, seething with understandable anger and pointing fingers everywhere. It’s nice to remember occasionally that it’s not just us who’s fcuked, it’s everyone!
• The TikTok Hate Speech Problem: Ok, there has to be a law for this, right? That any network of individuals will become hateful beyond a certain size or number of connections? You know that classic image you’ve all seen on too many powerpoint presentations, with all the phones in a circle, demonstrating how network effects multiply? At what point in the size of the network does one of the phones go mental and start communicating only in racial epithets? Anyway, that’s a long-winded and largely nonsensical way of teeing up this piece about TikTok’s issues managing abuse, specifically caste-led abuse, amongst users of the platform in India; the general conclusion to draw is that the problem is, as ever, people, and that TiKTok is yet another app which has been driven to scale violently without adequately bothering to think of the consequences of said scaling on a human / social level. HAVEN’T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE FFS?!
• Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience: Segueing smoothly from the last piece, this is a wonderful, terrible, horrible read, all about the guilt plaguing Silicon Valley about what it has wrought on the world, and what the big players are doing to assuage that guilt – in the main, it seems, talking a lot of spiritualist w4nk and doing kundalini. This really ought to make you angry – if nothing else it’s the sheer arrogance demonstrated here, with these people thinking that they are so smart and so special that they can somehow just talk all these problems out of existence, and that all it’ll take to put the genie back in the bottle is some hot stone therapy and a really good colonic.
• Depop: Had you heard of Depop? I had not, and yet apparently 1 in 3 UK teens has it on their phone (this seems…untrue, I must say, at least based on visible download numbers); it’s basically like a mobile-first ebay for 90s fashion, and this piece is a nice introduction into how it works and the social craze around i – it sounds a bit like Wavey Garms used to be bitd, except, well, it’s an appt. Honestly, if only I’d known this stuff would come back I’d have kept all my old tshirts (what do you mean ‘you still wear them you pathetic throwback’?).
• The End of Bronycon: This year saw the final Bronycon – the convention aimed at adult fans of the very much not-for-adults cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which became inexplicably wildly popular with a certain type of young man about a decade ago. This isn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but it’s interesting to me that we’re now at a position when these slightly odd internet moments in time can come and pass and be left behind as perfectly-preserved relics in our collective memory; “do you remember when Bronies were a thing?”, we’ll ask, and the children will wonder what we’re talking about and we’ll smile ruefully from behind the protective masks and suck down a long huff of Huel and we’ll go back to talking about what real food tasted like before The Event.
• Why Can’t We Just Quit Twitter?: This piece puzzled me a bit. Sarah Manavis in the New Statesman writes about the odd compulsion that Twitter exerts on its users, many of whom believe it’s actively doing them harm but still can’t quite seem to shake the compulsion. I totally buy the addictive bit, no question, but…harmful? Look, everyone, YOU CAN TAILOR THE EXPERIENCE! IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT! FOLLOW DIFFERENT PEOPLE! USE LISTS! It doesn’t have to be miserable, does it?
• The Failed Social Networks: Another article in Gizmodo’s week-long series of pieces about an ‘Alternate Internet’, this is a laundry list of failed social networks – not exhaustive, fine, but it covers off most of the big ones. It’s fascinating mainly for some of the small details; how quickly some of these went under after having been at the top of the pile, for a start, and the absolutely OBSCENE amount of money that AOL paid for Bebo back in the day – honestly, go and look at that figure, you will do a proper involuntary gasp.
• Parliament of Owls: It’s really not a good time for those of us who really don’t want to believe that there is a shadowy cabal of super-rich deviants running the world; here’s another piece which might make you feel a bit weird: “Once a year, the enigmatic redwood forests of Monte Rio in Northern California host some of the most powerful people in the world, who meet for reasons nobody knows for sure. The secrecy surrounding this bizarre frat party has sparked the public’s imagination for over a century, igniting a flurry of conspiracy theories that Bristol-based photographer Jack Latham elegantly explores in his latest book Parliament of Owls.” Latham does say quite explicitly that “I’m certain they aren’t an affront to the occult and certainly do not sacrifice children”, so that’s probably ok.
• Confessions of a Professional White A$$hole: Entertaining story of an actor who made a living for a while getting repeatedly cast as ‘racist white guy’ in sketch shows and comedies; I do love these stories of people on the fringes of glamorous industries, or doing the crap jobs amongst the glamour, and this one’s very well-told.
• Crotchball Card: This is WONDERFUL, and a brilliant story about minor workplace disobedience. Keith Comstock was a professional baseball player who was never immensely successful, but did achieve the unique distinction of having the best baseball card portrait ever; this is the story of how that came about. Honestly, if you have ever collaborated with colleagues to do something entirely stupid, a bit disruptive and entirely benign in the office then this will resonate with you massively.
• All The Facts: No Such Thing As A Fish is the QI Elves’ (the people who research the quiz show) podcast, where they talk about AMAZING AND OBSCURE bits of knowledge; this website lists every single episode along with the facts discussed; it is a BRILLIANT repository of odd, interesting information – I mean, look: “The seventh time park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning coincided with the 22nd time he fought off a bear with a stick”. You can’t tell me you’re life’s not marginally better for knowing that – the whole site’s like this, it’s a goldmine.
• Thirst Trap: On Bukowski’s drinking and writing, and the odd fetisation of the former that accompanies admiration of the latter. With the exception of a very short list of books (Bad News by Edward St Aubyn, Speed by William Burroughs Jr, maybe a couple of others) I find books about booze and drugs very boring indeed, and I’ve always found it slightly odd that the incredibly self-indulgent and often-vile Bukowski gets quite so much literary love when it seemed that the drink was an impediment to his talent rather than a catalyst for it. Regardless, a really good dispassionate essay about the myth of the great, drunk man of letters.
• A Review of Airmail: I mentioned Airmail, a new online magazine with a monthly subscription fee and a high-end aesthetic, a few weeks ago; this is a wonderfully waspish review of the project, which starts with a brutal headline (describing Airmail as a ‘magazine for the rich and boring’) and then really gets into its stride. On the one hand, I never like to read a kicking of someone’s creative endeavour; on the other, I always like to read a gleeful hatchet job, and this is a wonderful example. Also contains this line, which, well, YES: “There’s too much content on the Internet, and it remains difficult to separate high quality from low. The newsletter’s static quality, its weekly promise of comprehensiveness, is appealing despite its impossibility. We need human editors and curators more than ever so we don’t fall prey to purely algorithmic selection, and we need to pay subscription fees so independent media continues to exist.”
• Wayne’s World: An Oral History: Looking back, I think Wayne’s World might be the perfect film. Dumb/Smart, consistently hilarious, fourth-wall-breaking, pop cultural in a way that feels weirdly post-internet…I want to watch it RIGHT NOW. This is a great look at how the film got made with all sorts of nice little anecdotes about the filming process and creative differences that made the movie so great. Wonderful.
• Super Sad True Chef Story: A rumination on the death of the classical French kitchen system as characterised by Escoffier, with the rigidly hierarchical staffing structure, the rigidly-policed recipes, all supported by the rolling mass of stageistes, the people at the bottom of the pile who do the back-and-arm-and-neck-breaking work of prepping everything for the actual cooks. The piece’s author goes to try his hand at a stage in a Michelin-starred restaurant – it’s not a spoiler to say the experience breaks him. I love cookery, I love the practice of cooking, but it’s when I read things like this that I am usefully reminded of exactly how much more lazy I am than I would need to be to do it for a living.
• The Dorothy Byrne McTaggart Lecture: Byrne is Channel 4’s Head of News; this is her lecture to the assembled grandees at the Edinburgh TV festival currently taking place. Covering sexism in the industry, the Murdoch press, the BBC, being a woman in media and SO much more, this is a truly barnstorming speech that I wish I had written; it should be required reading for anyone doing any public speaking ever, and I wish more people had the balls to write and speak like this in the workplace.
• Day Trip: A mother takes a child to visit its father in prison. This is a beautiful, very sad piece of writing. If you’ve never visited a prison, know that seeing kids in the visiting area is one of the most heartbreaking things in the whole entire world.
• Elliott Spencer: Finally this week, this short story by George Saunders in the New Yorker. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, other than to say that, as per with Saunders, it’s linguistically inventive, very funny and quite deeply disturbing. It might take you a few minutes to get into the style, but it’s very much worth it – I can’t think of a short story writer whose work I enjoy more.

By the seemingly-unGoogleable ‘Dennis S’, more of whose photos you can see in this VERY NSFW collection

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is FASCINATING – this short film shows how they make the sound effects for the new Mortal Kombat game. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to effectively and convincingly simulate the sound of someone’s lungs being pulled out through their splintered ribcage then this is for YOU!

2) This is called ‘Take Control’ and it’s by the Mysterines and it’s just a great, hooky rock song – honestly, you’ll be humming this fcuker all afternoon:

3) What’s really going on in world politics? Shardcore and the computers explain:

4) Excellent indiepop now, by Kitten – the track’s called ‘Memphis’:

5) BRAND NEW MISSY ELLIOT! Still excellent, and this is a corking video – the teeth freak me out rather, though:

6) I heard this yesterday and thought ‘Hm, this sounds almost exactly like I would imagine having a panic attack on the underground would sound if panic attacks made sound’. See what you think! It’s by Uniform and the Body and it’s called ‘Day of Atonement’:

7) This is by Shi Online, whoever they are – it reminds me weirdly of Die Antwoord, if Yolande was the only one fronting them up. It’s…odd, but weirdly catchy and poppy despite being very much not really pop at all. This is ‘Где ты’:

8) There’s a sort of odd Sleaford Mods / Iggy Pop-type vibe to this, by Tropical Fcuk Storm; see what you think, but I rather like it:

9) Finally this week, this is PURE INTERNET. Cashmere Cat, with ‘Emotions’. No, I am not sorry, I promise you that by the end of the track it will make a sort of weird sense, in a sort of ‘oh, so this is the 21c equivalent of Alvin & The Chipmunks, I get it’ way. Oh, and THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK THANKS FOR READING I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY BANK HOLIDAY IN PROSPECT AND THE WEATHER STAYS NICE AND YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE CONVERSATION WITH SOMEONE WHICH MAKES YOU FEEL HOPEFUL AND THAT THE NEXT WEEK IS AS GENTLE YOU NEED IT TO BE AND THAT YOU TAKE CARE AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE BYE!:

HI EVERYONE! I MADE IT! Yes, despite having only had three days in which to scarf down all of the week’s internet, I have somehow managed to curl out an almost-fully-formed Curios this week! Yes, OK, fine, it might be a little light on the miscellaneous links and videos this week, but I’ve made up for it with WORDS (which are the bit that noone wants)! Special thanks to the people who paid me for my time on Wednesday and Thursday and who have basically paid for this this week (pretty sure none of them read this). 

Anyway, I went to Rome for my Grandmother’s 100th and it was, honestly, lovely, and made me feel almost warm and positive about life (although that may just have been the heat – it hit 48 in the centre of the city on Monday, which is frankly not ok hun). That mood has sort-of continued through to the weekend – I’m off to the seaside for a few days, to eat fine food, drink less fine wine (as a man who drinks more Casillero del Diablo than water, I’m in no position to be snobbish about a vintage) and, hopefully, win a selection of keyrings thanks to the magic of TICKETS. 

Whatever YOU are doing with your 48h of freedom from the stupid, pointless waste of time that is your dayjob (NB – it’s probably worth me pointing out here that when I talk about work being a pointless waste of time, I am obviously only talking to the advermarketingpr folk among you; in the unlikely event that anyone reading this does a real job then know that I am not talking about you at all), start the weekend off RIGHT by immersing yourself to the very hairline in this week’s linky miasma, a warm, vaguely glutinous slop which will osmotically imbue you with all of my knowledge as you scroll. HOW WILL YOU FIT IT ALL IN?! I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you can’t keep me waiting any longer. 

My centenarian grandmother, taken by the bloke who does her hair and who looks uncannily like me after a go on one of those face-ageing apps

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A TRIP BACK TO THE OLD SCHOOL COURTESY OF AN LTJ BUKEM MIX FROM 1992!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT MAY NOT BE A COINCIDENCE THAT VERIZON TOOK THAT MASSIVE HAIRCUT ON TUMBLR JUST AFTER SHINGY ANNOUNCED HE WAS LEAVING (AND WHICH APPRECIATES THAT THIS SENTENCE WILL BE LARGELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO THE MAJORITY OF YOU):

• Facebook Makes Some Utterly Cosmetic Changes To Groups!: There will be NO MORE secret Groups on Facebook! I mean, there will be – they just won’t be called ‘secret’ any more. This seems like basic housekeeping from Facebook – it’s simply not a good look for the platform to have Groups that can self-describe as ‘secret’, what with all the hate and white supremacy and illegality and other unsavoury things happening in the private nooks and crannies of the platform; ‘private’ is a far less politico/tabloid-riling designation. This change will make NO DIFFERENCE to almost everyone – look: “By default, a group that was formerly “secret” will now be “private” and “hidden.” A group that was formerly “closed” will now be “private” and “visible.” Groups that are “public” will remain “public” and “visible.”” See? Nothing to worry about.
• New FB Ad Units for Films: New ad-types! Specifically to get people to go to the cinema! Ad units which will let users set reminders to alert them when a film shown to them in an ad appears in cinemas nearby! Ad units which will let users immediately see film times at nearby venues! These are genuinely useful, and you’d imagine that this sort of functionality will be rolled out beyond just films in the not-too-distant future. Or at least I would – that’s the way my imagination works, you see, wild and free and unfettered by tedious shackles of convention.
• Facebook Stories Now Let You Add Slideshows: Once again I defer to Matt Navarra, a man so dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about s*c**l m*d** that he barely even exists in corporeal form any more, instead manifesting as a buzzing swarm of 1s and 0s. He’s learned that you will be able to add image slideshows to your Facebook Stories, and now, via me, you know that too, and isn’t your life better for the fact? Humour me.
• You Can Now Schedule Instagram Posts Through Creator Studio: I imagine for some of you this will be as a soothing, cooling balm on a hot summer’s day; no longer will you have to log into the ‘gram to post that desultory ‘Who’s having BOTTOMLESS BRUNCH?!?! We love bubbles!!’ twelve-liker to the corporate account on a miserable, comedowny Saturday morning; instead now you’ll be able to schedule that post and keep keying the ket long into the afternoon with nary a thought of work! Sadly this doesn’t currently allow for the scheduling of Stories, though, so don’t get too excited.
• Instagram AR For All: Spark AR, Facebook’s AR kit for Instagram, is now open to all in Beta – so if you fancy messing around with creating Snap-style effects for the ‘gram, this is your chance. This is all very much experimental at the moment, but the tools are actually really user-friendly and there’s quite a lot of quite cool stuff you can do if you put the time in. The sort of thing that could work as a competition for the right sort of brand, or just somewhere to make some fun, throwaway digital tat – get the tone right and there’s at least one WACKY CORPORATE FUNSTERS viral thingy in this, I reckon.
• Instagram To Launch Revised Boomerang Formats: Jane Manchun Wong, the world’s other indefatigable social media sleuth and tipster, has discovered that Insta is apparently going to roll out half-a-dozen slightly tweaked Boomerang formats which will let users make ever-so-slightly-different back/forward-looping video clips! There’s no timeline attached to this, but just so’s you can start thinking of all the EXCITING NEW CONTENT you can create. There’s some other ‘coming soon’-type stuff in here too, including a bunch of new image-grid formats for Insta stories which do actually look quite useful.
• Insta To Allow Flagging of False Information: Literally just this. A good thing, though one perhaps might argue (not for the first time) that this is another instance where the platforms are, metaphorically-speaking, carefully-locking up the farm and applying the deadlock whilst the sounds of happy whinnying drift across the evening sky from several fields away.
• New Snapchat Specs Let Users Film First-Person 3d: Well, sort-of 3d – the specs will have two cameras, though, which will provide a degree of depth to footage shot with them, meaning you’ll be able to apply more interesting digital after effects to your videos; the examples shown here include a rather natty little pink bird flying around elements in a user’s film. These are available for pre-order in the UK at the moment, turns out, and if you’re a CONTENT CREATOR (sorry) and have a spare few hundred quid, these could be quite a worthwhile investment.
• Spotify for Podcasters: Or, specifically, how podcasters can get better analytics through Spotify. Attach your podcast account and you’ll be able to get detailed information on listener numbers, which seems like a Useful And Good Thing.
• Plus-Sized Stock Photos: I’m including this solely because I think that’s now literally every conceivable application of the ‘stock photos but this time for this otherwise ordinarily underrepresented group of people’; you can’t, sadly, really rip this idea off any more. Don’t look at me like that, it’s been a whole bloody year I’ve been pointing these out to you and telling you to jump on that bandwagon, it’s not my fault you don’t listen.
• AXA #KnowYouCan: I’ve been having to work on quite a lot of employee engagement stuff at the moment, but sadly none of it has been blessed with quite the same sort of evidently insane budgets as AXA had at its disposal when planning this particular activation. JUST LOOK AT THE VIDEO! “AXA launched #knowyoucan, its new brand slogan about self belief -” NO HANG ON HANG ON WHAT?!?! Its ‘new brand slogan about self belief’? WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK? YOU ARE A FRENCH INSURANCE COMPANY WHY DO YOU NEED ONE OF THOSE? Take a moment to deal with that idiocy and then carry on watching, and marvel at the fact that they have seemingly built a giant interactive wall of video screens displaying negative phrases which employees could…er…hit tennis balls at, to banish said negativity in in-no-way-clunky metaphorical fashion. WHY TENNIS? Also, hang on, IS THAT SERENA WILLIAMS?!?! Honestly, watch this, try and work out, roughly, what the budget was for all this, and then spend some time thinking about better ways to spend that money. It won’t be hard. Do you ever think that everything we do is totally fcuking pointless waste of time, money and energy and we would all be better served by, well, just stopping with all this pointless rubbish? Do you? You fcuking well should you know.

By Jason Anderson

NEXT, ENJOY THIS INTENSELY ECLECTIC SELECTION FROM JON AVERILL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO WISH SAZ A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOR TOMORROW, PT.1:

• Living Ferguson: A digital memorial to Michael Brown Jr., the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, 5 years ago. It’s interesting – and by interesting I mean ‘depressing’ – the extent to which that incident seems oddly like a precursor or catalyst to declining US race relations since; the website is a beautifully-put-together collection of interviews with local residents, sharing their memories of the day, their experiences with police, and their reflections on how the community and its relationship with law enforcement has changed since. “Reporters at St. Louis Public Radio interviewed more than 20 people for this project. Some spoke to us alone, others alongside friends and family. All were directly touched by the inequalities that #Ferguson’s eruption showcased to the world. Several themes emerged during the interviews. Those themes became the chapters of this project.” Not only an interesting piece of documentary website-making, but a really nice example of how to land this sort of project sensitively and effectively.
• Relativity: Another week, another link for which I have to say thanks to Josh– this is a lovely site which seeks to show how the behaviour of light goes some way towards providing a proof for Einstein’s theory of relativity. I won’t pretend that I understand any of the physics here – honestly, I really don’t; there’s a point with physics at which my brain simply stops attempting to understand or engage with the topic and instead just sort of slides over and around the surface of it, not unlike a fried egg on a well-greased non-stick surface (no, no idea why that’s the analogy my head’s decided to fixate upon here, but there we are, nothing I can do about it) – but the visualisation and interactivity are both really nicely-done.
• The Google Question Hub: This isn’t live for the UK at the moment – it’s currently in beta for users in Nigeria, Indonesia and India – but it’s SUCH an interesting idea, with a load of potentially-interesting use cases for CONTENT PROVIDERS. The Google Question Hub lets users see what questions people are asking Google in their area that don’t currently have high-quality answers to them, so that they can then create content which answers said questions; the idea being that users get the information they need, whilst website owners who provide GOOD QUALITY STUFF will get the SEO and traffic boost their helpful behaviour deserves.Worth keeping an eye on this to see when it expands to other territories as it almost certainly will.
• The Al Safar Project: This is a…slightly frustrating website. The Al Safar Project is…well, part of the problem is that the site doesn’t make it hugely easy to tell, what with the somewhat buried nav and the fact that it’s all in this fcuking horrible cursive font. I think that the Al Safar Project is a not-for-profit association promoting projects that advocate international understanding and cooperation, and that this website collects some of those projects, and the stories and people behind them. It’s SUCH a shame that the site’s such a mess, as I get the feeling there’s actually lots of really interesting stuff in here, from promoting a female rally-driving team in Palestine, to supporting the work of a French photographer who’s retracing the cross-country pilgrimage of a 14th-Century Islamic scholar; there are some lovely pictures, but reading this is HORRID. Can someone please CHANGE THE SODDING FONT PLEASE? Thanks.
• Pegleg: We’re all comfortable with the fact we’re all cyborgs now, right? Even those of us who haven’t gone full implant can happily acknowledge our advanced state of human/machine symbiosis and our status as centaurs in pretty much all aspects of our lives? Good! Now we’ve got that cleared up, let’s swap ourselves down with medicinal alcohol and prepare to insert what looks like a cigarette-packet sized circuitboard under our skin! “PegLeg is a distro of the PirateBox platform, designed to be meshable, and run on hardware small enough to implant in the human body.Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movement, PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and file sharing device. PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless file sharing networks where users can anonymously share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content”. Click the link and just look at that – would you want that inside you? It looks unpleasantly glisten-y and Cronenbergian, for a start. Beautifully, the disclaimer at the end reads: “please seek out someone with the skillset to put this in a human body instead of blindy [sic] cutting yourself open. If you do not feel entirely confident in this procedure, please consider turning this device into a wearable.” STERLING ADVICE.
• Coinlocker: This is all in Japanese, but if you click the button on the landing page you’ll see an option to change it to English – doing so will reveal that Coinlocker is a service designed to help you break your digital addiction. So far, so meh, but the truly dastardly thing about this service is that it really doesn’t fcuk around; you give it your passwords to the accounts you want to be deprived of access to, and Coinlocker will change them without telling you what to. You’ll then be locked out of the platform til the specified time period has elapsed, at which point you’ll be emailed the new password so you can get back in and scratch the itch again. This is SO clever – I think that technically it breaks a lot of various platforms’ Ts&Cs, though, meaning there’s a small chance that it’ll get shuttered at any moment and leave you unable to ever get back into your Twitter account, which is another really fantastic reason to use it if you ask me.
• Method Of Denim: I don’t normally feature clothes in here, but I’ll make an exception for this, mainly as this company sells denim stuff which you can customise to a quite frightening degree on the website; I can’t vouch for the quality of the output, but which of us can resist the opportunity to order a stonewash denim jacket with ‘WEBMONG’ written across the shoulderblades in that sort of weird, spiky, almoost chitinous script so beloved of death metal bands? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Honestly, you can make some truly preposterous garments on here – the interface is really nice, reminiscent of quite a few of the old ‘design your own tshirt’ sites from a decade or so ago, and it’s really rather fun to spend 20 minutes designing your own entirely customised edgelord rock god denim getup.
• The Version Museum: “Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives. Much like walking through a real-life museum, this site focuses on the design changes of historic versions of technology, rather than just the written history behind it.” If you’ve grown up on the web, this is a quite uncanny time machine – the collection of screenshots of Facebook alone is a strange and rather unsettling trip back to a more innocent era in which we poked each other and threw tacos; there are also historical images of old Office versions, operating systems and a few game series as well, and the whole thing is a fascinating look at quite how much webdesign has evolved in a relatively short period of time.
• Cutie Pi: This is an interesting prototype project, seeking to produce a tablet based on the Raspberry Pi, being developed by a team in Taiwan. It’s a really impressive piece of design and build, and while the team are looking to manufacture it themselves (with an aim to sell it around £200 or so) they have also done the decent thing and make the whole project open source too. If you’re a codery, hackery, tinker-y type, this is worth a look.
• Reals: Do we really need another social platform? Do we need one, in particular, that exists specifically for people to share their REAL selves and their REAL feelings and REAL thoughts about REAL things? Do we really want something else that encourages that most tedious of communications-types of the 21st Century, the ‘rant delivered into phone camera held in outstretched arm’? No, no we do not, and yet here Reals comes, all POSITIVE and puppylike, with its standard spiel about how it wants users to find an ocean of sincerity and ‘realness’ in the crowded sea of digital fakery. Look, people behind Reals, I am sure that you mean well, but the one thing we have far too fcuking much of in 2019 is people unaccountably feeling that they should have some sort of a fcuking medal for SPEEKING THEIR FCUKING BRANES at the internet. Being ‘real’ isn’t always good, you know, as anyone who’s ever met the sort of person who has ‘if you don’t love me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best’ in their profile.
• Bovine Obstruction: The weekly moment in Web Curios when I start wheeling out the links I nicked from last week’s B3ta (HI ROB!) – this is a very silly site, but a very pleasing silly site. Try typing something. GO ON, TRY IT.
• No Bias: This feels like a great idea that sadly won’t have the impact it might due to limited adoption; I know, obviously, all the reasons why it would never happen, but wouldn’t it be nice if something like this was installed into Chrome as a default? Oh, hang on, I haven’t actually explained what it is, have I? Ahem. This is a browser extension, available for Chrome and Firefox, which does one thing – once installed, it allows users to get information about news sources – their likely political leanings and credibility – directly from Google Search or Facebook. It’s a really nice interface – the extension just applies a little paw graphic next to the link, which on hover-over displays some info about the site that the article appears on, and a rough visual guide to its political leanings on a left/right scale. The whole project is really interesting, with an impressive team behind it – I really want this to do well, so please do share it far and wide.
• Digital Security and Privacy for Domestic Violence: Sorry, there’s literally nothing ‘fun’ about this one at all, but it is a really good collection of resources to help people either suffering from, or at risk of, domestic violence maintain their digital security and safety; as they put it, “to help IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] survivors, advocates, and technologists discover and mitigate tech-based risks and vulnerabilities”. I hope none of you have reasons beyond the professional to click this link.
• US Flags: I know that there’s at least one flag enthusiast (what a characterisation!) amongst my readership, so, er, this one’s for YOU! US Flags is a site which, er, collects all the US Stae flags and analyses the principles behind their design, which, fine, might not sound interesting, but I promise you that if you’re in the market for designing your own flag for your own fledgling micronation you will find no little inspiration in here. Also, American State flags are on occasion REALLY silly – what were you thinking, Wyoming?!
• 8 Bit Workshop: Do YOU like 8-bit games and the general sort of nostagia for a bygone era that they evoke? Would YOU like to learn to code your own, with a web-based interface that lets you do EXACTLY that in a variety of 8bit languages? GREAT! This site is a wonderful collection of resources and information all about making 8-bit games; a bit technical, fine, but if you’re interested in tinkering with this sort of thing it’s a good starting point.
• Google Maps Shenanigans: I hate the word ‘shananigans’ – it speaks to me of a particular sort of aggressively-unfunny and unfun North American, which is perhaps unfair of me but there we go (this is MY blognewsletterthing and MY irrational prejudices are part and parcel of the ‘fun’) – but I will let it slide for this excellent subReddit collecting a wide range of Google Maps fcukups, oddities and, er, penile lakes and landmasses. Often quite childish, but, well, childish is funny and I will brook no argument on this. Also, this kid deserves to be famous.

By Bob Bicknell-Knight

NOW LET’S GET CONCEPTUAL WITH THIS MIX BY BRITISH MUSICIAN AND SOUND ARTIST RICHARD SKELTON!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO WISH SAZ A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOR TOMORROW, PT.2:

• The Library Land Project: This is the project website for…hang on, I’ll let them explain it: “We are Adam Zand and Greg Peverill-Conti, the principals of SharpOrange and the guys behind Library Land. Since late 2017, we’ve visited more than 200 libraries across Massachusetts – a strong start to our goal of visiting every library in the state. We have also visited libraries in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, DC. When we visit a library, we rate it on 11 criteria: parking/transportation, WiFi, meeting rooms, condition, completeness, community, friendliness, restrooms, noise, comfort level and the all-important “Good place to work?”” Yes, this is a website that rates libraries – the perfect combination of weirdly obsessive, deeply tedious and ultimately pointless that regular readers will know forms the sweet, sweet heart of the Web Curios experience. A question, though. The ‘Sharp Orange’ they refer to is their PR company, which they founded a few years ago and which doesn’t have an office because they just work out of libraries instead – erm, is that ok? That does seem rather like a massive pisstake, insofar as they are rinsing free wifi, heating, desk space, etc – are any of you librarians? Can you offer an ethical perspective on this? Or are we all idiots for bothering with offices and should we instead run our business empires from the small seating area in the kids’ books section of Clapham Library? I am now very confused.
• Globe Living: This feels like a Bad Thing, though I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why. Globe is a service that can best be summarised as ‘Airbnb, but for an hour or so’; users sign up and can get paid, short-term access to domestic properties in a range of cities, the idea being that you can nip into someone’s house to do some work, take a shower, have a nap, etc, while they are at work; they, on the flipside, get to monetise the vacant space of their apartment while they’re staring dead-eyed at a monitor all day. Part of my irritation with this, I have just realised, is that it’s basically the idea I had five years ago – except mine was better, as it was going to be marketed exclusively at philanderers and was going to be called (lawyers be damned!) ‘Affairbnb’ (I know, it’s a GREAT name, right?). DAMN THEM! Anyway, if you don’t mind the idea of some stranger nipping into your house, rinsing your WiFi and DEFINITELY defecating mightily into your bathroom then sign yourself up!
• Eunoia: Or, ‘Words That Don’t Translate’. A database of those wonderful words which existing languages from all over the world which simply don’t have a simple, single-word English translation. These are always a joy, and I just lost 5 minutes to scrolling through a randomly-sourced selection of the 500+ words on there. Honestly, there is nothing you will learn today which will give you greater joy than the fact that there is an Indonesian word, Desus, which means, quite precisely, “The quiet, smooth sound of somebody farting, although not very loudly”. This is basically perfect.
• The Kosmaj Project: Thanks to editor Paul for finding and sending this to me – The Kosmaj Project collects drone photos and videos from a bunch of kids from Russia, who travel around looking for cool things to capture, and they are awesome. There are a few particularly nice shots of isolated figures in blasted landscapes which are particularly affecting, but everything on here is really rather wonderful.
• Urban Nudges: A site that collects examples of nudge-type initiatives in cities, specifically those that are designed to improve road safety. I think this site is part of a student’s graduation project – regardless, it’s a useful collection of interesting, creative approaches to a specific problem which might prove useful in terms of inspiration, or just some cool ideas on how to make people do what you want them to do.
• US Government Comics: It’s of course no surprise that Governments used comic books as propaganda materials through much of the 20th Century, but this collection contains some absolute gems – from the ones aimed at Native communities, which just feel quite incredibly sad for some reason, to the frankly glorious SPROCKET MAN (no, really), created by the Consumer Product Safety Commission to teach children about bike maintenance and road safety. Honestly, if there are any graphic designers out there who fancy making an easy few quid, I reckon there’s absolutely a profitable clothing range to be gotten out of retro-hipster SPROCKET MAN designs. Anyway, there’s loads of interesting stuff in here, both in terms of funny retro communications and some rather excellent oldschool art styles.
• Serial Reader: This is a nice idea. Taking all those out-of-copyright classic books of yesteryear that are all over the web, Serial Reader packages them as bite-sized daily episodes, offering you a new one each day for consumption through the app. If you feel like you’ve lost the ability to read anything other than Twitter and the sidebar of shame (and Curios – PLEASE GOD DON’T STOP READING CURIOS) this might be a useful way of training those particular muscles again; equally, if you’ve got kids who struggle with it, this could be a way of attempting to get them over that particular hill (presuming of course they’re those unlikely kids who REALLY want to read Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde).
• Balmain Boats: This is pretty much the ultimate in rich person’s indulgences for their kids, but is also quite cool in an ‘idyllic childhood Swallows & Amazons’-type way. Balmain Boats is an Australian company, whose entire sales pitch seems to be ‘buy something that will make your kids think you’re a lot cooler than you are’; in this case, a VERY SMOL rowing or sailboat for you all to go pottering about in. These are, obviously, all lovely and wooden and sustainable, and are flat-packed so as far as I can tell they’ll ship anywhere; you then get to put together the boat LIKE A FAMILY (that’s the idea, obviously – what will actually happen is that there will be a brief moment when your kids are halfway interested, and then one parent will be left to swearily hammer together an unconscionable number of bits of timber into a shape almost but not quite exactly unlike the one advertised which will start to take in water within 30s of being launched). These start out at around 1500 quid, which, honestly, made me applaud the chutzpah of these people quite a lot.
• Alienstock: Remember a few weeks ago when I linked you to the plan to raid Area51 and FREE THE ALIENS? Well that’s pivoted now to become ALIENSTOCK! A festival near Area51! With bands that they can’t announce yet for security reasons! Where the nearest town has literally 100 people and no petrol station or shop! This is going to be an absolutely legendary disaster if it ever goes ahead – it almost certainly won’t, but we can live in hope.
• BBBreaking News: Another B3ta link (THANKS ROB!), this one’s a really clever project which simply looks for Tweets from journalists asking people if they can use their pictures or videos in their news reports, and then pulls that media onto this website. This is in part a GREAT place to just scroll mindlessly through some moderately-interesting media, but also a decent way of tracking breaking news stories; at the moment, it’s all simply stuff from overnight in the US of people going mental on planes and the occasional bout of mad weather, but this is one that’s very much worth bookmarking and going back to on and off throughout the day.
• Flixier: This is basically an in-browser version of Final Cut, and looks INCREDIBLY useful. It’s a paid product at heart, but there are some features available for free, and it’s definitely worth a look if you want a lightweight-but-powerful editing and collaboration…er…thingy.
• Adversarial Fashion: Clothing designed very specifically to throw off automatic surveillance technology. In a week in which everyone in London was pleasantly reminded of the fact that it’s not our city, it’s money’s city and we’re just living in it and money can do whatever the fcuk it pleases including secretly tracking our faces because it fcuking well can, ok, stop asking questions, this seems oddly timely. The current range is designed to mess with Automatic License Plate Readers in the US, but I would love to see a UK riff on this to mess with the King’s Cross panopticon. Can someone make it please? Thanks.
• Import Doc: “Put a Google Doc in any web page. Updates instantly. Setup takes a minute.” So says this website. I have no idea why you might need this, but as you should know by now, Web Curios neither questions or judges.
• Generated Space: This is SUCH a lovely art project, producing computer-generated art of surprisingly broad stylistic scope. “Generated Space is the result of a year-long endeavour to make computers do unexpected things. It presents a wide range of different generative algorithms; from organic flow fields and particle systems to rigid fractals and grammar-based shapes. Some more serious than others. All the code is open source and available on GitHub, so feel free to change and improve upon any sketches that interests you.” It’s worth taking your time and clicking through a few of the projects to get a feel for the broad range of styles the site encompasses; these are SO LOVELY.
• The Amazon Interview Airbnb: On the one hand, there’s nothing at all weird about preparing assiduously for a job you really want; on the other, there is something very weird, to my mind at least, about this setup, whereby you can use Airbnb to book yourself a 5-hour simulated Amazon interview in downtown Seattle. Presumably this is designed for people who will be interviewing for a place in MechaBezos’ glorious, fully-automated future, but I like to think that there is a dedicated core audience of Amazon-heads who would do this as an actual holiday just for the kicks. Anyway, for the fee you get access to ex-senior Amazon people who will coach you, pretend-grill you, and then, best (not in fact best) of all, let you sit in on their deliberation and scoring process as they rip you and your professional deficiencies apart in the post-interview debrief. The best part? The cost. For this glorious experience – an experience which, you will recall, lasts 5 hours – you will shell out an eye-watering $5k. HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO MEET MECHABEZOS? I really don’t like the future of work, you know (I don’t much care for the present either, if I’m honest).
• Chesses: Last up in this week’s miscellania, another selection of small, fiendish, wrong games from Pippin Barr – this time another set of riffs on Chess, whereby in each of the games the rules are given one or two small but very significant tweaks. These are all designed as two-player experiences, but you can mess around with them to get the jokes – I LOVE Barr’s work so much, and this is as clever as you’d expect from them.

By Tom Hegen

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, SOME ABSOLUTELY UNAPOLOGETIC PSYTRANCE WITH A SUPERB HOUR-LONG MIX BY CHACRUNA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Hyperart Thomasson: Unintentional art, created by the city. Contains images of the sorts of mad architecture that makes urban spaces worth living in sometimes; strange staircase follies in the middle of car parks, odd pipes attached to nothing, walkways leading into space…the odd, the surreal and the vaguely-menacing in the urban jungle.
• Dr Phil Imagines: “I’m Phillis. I’m a 34 year old white woman who adores Dr. Phil. Welcome to my hospital. May post imagines sometimes, though lately I have not had much time for that. Apologies.” I really, really hope that this is a joke, otherwise this person is…unwell. PLEASE click the link and have the sound up – this is VERY important.
• Thiccer Waifus: Ah, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good, seamy-underbelly-of-the-weird-sex-web-type-Tumblr on here – WELCOME BACK! Thiccer Waifus is, for those of you unfamiliar with the lexicon, a Tumblr featuring girls from anime and manga (the ‘waifu’ in question) whose already often-preposterous proportions have been jacked up to frankly terrifying scale by fans with photoshop. This is really not very SFW – there’s no actual nudity, fine, but there are lots of cartoon women with planetary-sized busts (I am really not exaggerating). HOW DO YOU DISCOVER THAT THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU OFF?!?!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Gallagher Tools: Sean Gallagher photographs the tools owned by his family and tells the stories behind them. Lovely, in a very soothing sort of way.
• The Rio Cinema Archive: I featured a collection of photos of Dalston in the 80s on here a while back; this, I think, is an Insta feed featuring similar pictures, focusing specifically on the area around the Rio Cinema up by Kingsland, but also taking in the wider Hackney area. Superb.
• Odnoboko: I have no idea at all why this Russian person photoshops massive cats into all their photos, but, well, MAOW!
• Micah Adams: Micah Adams carves coins. These are quite, quite astonishing.
• Birdfreaks: The best avian photos I’ve seen on Instagram – there are some beatiful shots on here. Also, thanks to this video I just learned what sound an eagle makes and now feel you should too as I don’t want to suffer alone.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

• The Tumblr Venn Diagram That Predicted The Future: This is obviously, on the one hand, a very silly article which goes in far too deep in a piece of popculture faux-profundity churned out years ago for the lols. It’s also – and this is the weird Schrodingerian (not a word, I know, but it ought to be) nature of the now – simultaneously a very smart look at how mid-10s web culture effectively foretold a lot of where we are now, in terms of online factions and attitudes shifting and melding and overlapping. This is THE most online thing I read all week, and contains the following quote which ought to win someone somewhere an award: “as a media archaeologist, I can tell you that this is an amazing artifact of an observant Tumblr user in the still-strong normie meme era of the web.” I mean, REALLY.
• Remember Gamergate?: The NYT goes deep on Gamergate 5 years on, and does a reasonable job of drawing the lines between the mass-mobilisation of gamers through 4Chan and Reddit and how the movement was cleverly, covertly coopted by a whole host of unsavoury people with unsavoury ideas in order to sow the seeds of the online far-right cesspit that occupies certain corners of the web in 2019. This is a genuinely good read, and something that’s worth sharing with people as a ‘this is how we got here’-type primer; there are parallels with the ideas raised in this viral Twitter thread from earlier in the week, about how boys are turning hard-right via meme culture, though fortunately the tone of the article is less tooth-grindingly smug than the thread was.
• The Other Article About #FBPE: The Guardian piece on the mental side of the Remain campaign got all the clicks this week, but I personally though this piece on Medium, by a Remain campaigner exasperated by the fcuking idiocy of so much of the wider mob, was a better read; this tells a more interesting story about why the campaign hasn’t had any actual proper public traction at all, despite its visibility (I mean, really, it hasn’t, and I say that as someone who thinks that Brexit is obviously an idiocy and who wishes it wouldn’t happen), how and why the left has once again fragmented, and what lessons campaigners can and should learn from it. Regardless of your politics or perspective, the responses to both this and the Guardian piece on Twitter illustrate both their points perfectly.
• Do We Create Shoplifters: This is a really fascinating piece about the unintended-consequences of automation, and the unseen value that human engagement in a process can bring, whether it be on a supermarket checkout or driving a car. Interesting, and made me think differently about automation and its value.
• Three Years of Misery at Google: Misery’s perhaps a strong word, but this article, all about Google’s travails as it attempts to manage its staff and its status as the de facto gatekeeper of information to the majority of the species, is a hell of a read. I wrote this somewhere else earlier this week, but I’ll reuse it here as, well, I’m lazy: “There is SO MUCH in this piece – Google as a microcosm of the increasingly-polarised post-2016 world, the impossibility of impartiality when you’re a company staffed by humans and whose existence is effectively predicated on managing/gatekeeping human knowledge, the way in which it’s been gamed by the right… I have a mate who used to work for Google bitd (he launched Gmail) and he once told me about being in a hot tub in Mountain View with Sergei or Larry, circa 2004. They were all *quite* fucked-up, and S or L whispered to him at a certain point “You know what, Scott? I have NO IDEA what I am doing”. Which sort of acts as a nice wrapper for much of what’s led us here tbqhwy”
• What Happened To Aung Sang Suu Kyi?: This is a really interesting piece, but also one which made me feel quite sad after reading it; it’s a reasonably sympathetic portrait of Suu Kyi, insofar as that’s possible, but very much paints a picture of a person whose saintliness increased in direct proportion to their time in isolation, and who perhaps was never the woman who the West believed and wanted her to be. More than anything, she emerges from this very much as a person who you would not fcuk with (which is a hugely banal assessment of a world leader, fine, but it’s also true).
• The Arrogance of the Anthropocene: All about how referring to the current age as ‘the anthropocene’ is maybe a case of humanity backing itself a bit too hard – the piece notes that previous ‘cenes’ have been geological era lasting millennia, and so to ascribe that suffix to a period so far lasting 400-odd years is a) a bit of a reach; and b) making some pretty strong assumptions about the length of time we as a species are likely to be hanging around for, which recent events might suggest are…punchy.
• Plastic Davos on a Boat: I mean, that’s not the actual title of the piece, but it’ll do. Soulbuffalo is a company that takes executives from major corporations on cruises to show them the realities of plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean, and then gets them together with envirionmentalists to talk about it and thrash out solutions. On the one hand, this sort-of sounds like a good idea, at least in terms of getting the individuals at the head of these companies to directly confront and engage with the issue; on the other, there’s an unpleasant whiff of corporate solutionism to all of this – there’s a line in here about how ‘Governments can’t fix this’ which really gets on my tits (MAYBE IF YOU ALL STARTED PAYING TAXES THEY PERHAPS COULD, EH?!?), and the idea that some bloke who runs EXXON is suddenly going to have a Damascene moment when confronted by a plastic-choked Minki strikes me as a touch on the fanciful side. More power to everyone trying to do stuff about all this, obvs, but I am not 100% convinced that this particular initiative is going to find the answer.
• The Thotshot Economy: Is…is this a thing? I mean, a real thing – I don’t doubt that there are some people who sell nudes to strangers to get a bit of extra cash, but is this actually a trend? Say it ain’t so. Or at least that’s my initial reaction – am I meant to think that this is somehow empowered rather than sad? I can’t help but be of the impression that flogging a snap of your tits for a stranger to dustily ejaculate over isn’t quite the glorious future of independent womanhood that the sisterhood envisaged, but I appreciate I am a middle-aged man and so my opinion is probably not one that counts here.
• Where’s The Toothpaste?: A truly VITAL enquiry into one of the great mysteries of the modern world – why do hotels NEVER offer complimentary toothpaste to guests? You can have all the soaps and the shampoos and the shower gels you like, but you try getting even a TINY comped tube of Crest in your Premier Inn or Malmaison. NEVER. This may sound like a staggeringly-dully premise for an article, but I promise that, as with nearly all investigations into large-scale logistics-type questions, this is actually really interesting and will make you want to break into the basement of the next big hotel you stay in to check out the gigantic shampoo filling stations.
• How Britain Killed the Aperol Spritz: Aperol Spritz is one of the marketing success stories on the past decade; the way the Italians have persuaded half the world that a bright orange drink which tastes mildly of earwax is the signifier of a BANGING SUMMER is nothing short of masterful (by contrast, their ad copy is fcuking horrendous and if any of you were responsible you should be ashamed. ‘Together We Joy’? Death’s too good for you). This piece looks at how the popularity of the (ersatz) export version has had unexpected negative consequences in Italy, and is a great example of how consumer capitalism has regular and actually quite predictable impact on the social/physical world.
• The UX Of Bongo: On why the Tube sites are designed and arranged as they are. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that the answer is ‘to keep you alternately clicking and wnking’, but despite the fact that you already know the answer it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
• The Taco Bell Hotel: This is neither a particularly long or well-written article, but it is pretty much the perfect encapsulation of the weird state of fetishisation we’ve reached with certain brands. Honestly, SO much of this reads like everyone has been hypnotised into loving Taco Bell. I mean, look, read this and try and simultaneously hold on to the belief that no, actually everything is fine and this is all normal: “House music thrummed as guests lounged by the pool on hot sauce towels. Some were dressed in bathing suits with the word “fire” across the front; one piece of the Taco Bell merch available in the lobby gift shop along with sunglasses, shirts, shorts, pins, towels and pillows. Lauren Godwin, 19, from Los Angeles, said she cut a trip to Cancún, Mexico short to be at the hotel. “I had like a 10-hour drive to get here,” she said. “It’s [Taco Bell] definitely like a weekly basis almost daily basis kind of thing.” In the salon adjacent to the pool, hotel guests can get a Taco Bell manicure or a fade with the words “Taco Bell” or “Live Mas” or the outline of a fire lick shaved into the side of their heads.” You see? It’s not possible, is it? Everything is mad.
• My Wild Weekend at Fairycon: A classic of the ‘I went to a convention with a bunch of weirdos’ genre, this feels a bit like it’s punching down on occasion (although I feel for the author as it must be incredibly hard not to make at least gentle fun of a bunch of grown adults who sincerely believe that they commune with the faerie folk), but it’s also quite interesting on the why of all of this, and the extent to which people are turning to this sort of crazy nonsense (sorry, Faerie Folk, but, well, no) as a sort of buffer against the very sharp edges that reality appears to have right now.
• Baseball Mud: This is WONDERFUL. I had literally NO IDEA that every single Major League baseball game uses mud to take the shine off new balls – and that the mud all comes from one secret place, sourced by one bloke. This is so, so lovely and very silly indeed.Simone Biles: If you’ve not read it, this Twitter thread, breaking down exactly why Simone Biles’ latest jaw-dropping feats of athletic excellence are, well, jaw-dropping and excellent, is excellent – it does a great job of explaining what Biles is actually doing when she performs a triple-double, and showing you how the move evolved from early days of gymnastics, and making you appreciate that this woman is basically a tiny alien as there’s almost no way in hell that someone that small should be able to jump that high.
• Sealand: “Sealand was founded as a sovereign Principality in 1967 in international waters, seven miles off the eastern shores of Britain”, trumpets the Sealand Website. This is a great piece of writing, in which the author takes a trip to the Principality and chats to the man who lives there, alone, guarding it. This is so perfectly mad and British and feels lovely and quaint and odd until you remember where in time we are and you realise that this is just the one person’s ultimate Brexit. Still, a great read.
• Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors: Celebrated chef and author Michael Twitty writes about his experiences of working in kitchens at old plantations, as part of the ‘reenactments’ put on for tourist visitors, and how relates and reacts to the (mainly white) tourists who pass through, and what the very notion of historical reenactment of slavery means to a black person in the US. Such good writing.
• The Enduring Appeal of Trance: Back in those long-forgotten days when I was YOUNG and used to go clubbing all the time (it was the mid-90s, we did that sort of thing then because there was hope) and my music of choice was psy-trance; it wasn’t cool then, and it certainly isn’t cool now, but there was something about the speed (and, er, the speed) and the wibbly bits that really did it for me (the dogs on strings and the white people with dreads less so, but one learns to cope). Then trance got co-opted by the mainstream and became all happy and shiny and didn’t feel anywhere near as fun any more, so I sort of lost interest a bit. Still, I was heartened to read this retrospective of it and find that it’s still a thing – Jesus, I am listening to some as I type and I now REALLY want to get off my tits for 8 hours.
• The Basketballing Nun: This is a truly wonderful story, I promise you. Please read it, even if you think you have no interest at all in the story of a woman who gave up a career as a professional basketball player to join a convent; honestly, I nearly wept, this is SO SO NICE (and I mean that in the best possible way).
• Goats: This is an extract from a novel by Kevn Barrett, but the highest compliment I can pay it is that reading it – an excerpt conducting entirely in dialogue between two unnamed interlocutors – reminded me very, very strongly of certain conversations in DFW novels in which protagonists talk seriously and with increasing urgency about a scenario that is slowly revealing itself to be very, very odd indeed. This is, honestly, superb – don’t let the slightly odd formatting put you off, it’s a proper treat.

By Jemma Arts

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) Shardcore’s been messing around with the deepfakes again. Look what he’s done to Jacob Rees-Mogg:

2) Thanks Dan for pointing this out to me – I’m going to use his description because, well, because I’m lazy and I can: “New(ish) band, first album out next week and with a sort of pleasing video about a big red ball. Described by some as

‘Sounds of early Aphex Twin intertwined with Liquid Liquid repetitive groove climaxing in electronic Grumbling Fur folk’. Featuring none other than snooker legend Steve Davis. Not sure if that explains the red ball.” This is ace, though no idea at all about the Steve Davis thing:

3) This is by Lauren O’Connell, it’s called ‘Shimmering Silver’ and it is heartbreaking – honestly, this makes me cry each time I hear it and I’m deliberately not playing it while I type this as it will just set me off again. So, so beautiful:

4) HIPHOP CORNER! This is by Clipping – it ought to be a Hallowe’en song, as it’s PROPERLY sinister, but have it in August anyway. This is called ‘Nothing Is Safe’:

5) Finally in this week’s slightly-truncated selection of videos, this is a short animation called ‘The Box’. It’s 12m long, and it’s worth each and every second of that time – please do watch it, it’s SO good. And, er, THAT’S IT BYE I LOVE YOU BYE THANKS FOR READING AND SORRY THIS WEEK’S WAS A BIT ON THE LIGHTWEIGHT SIDE BUT I WILL MAKE IT UP TO YOU I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND DON’T WORRY I AM SURE SUMMER WILL COME BACK AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AND TIL THEN WHY NOT SPEND YOUR TIME DOING THINGS YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY INSTEAD OF THINKING ABOUT ALL THE HARD BITS OF LIFE IF YOU CAN ANYWAY TAKE CARE I’M OFF I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU SOON BYE!:

HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! What’s that? It’s not a happy Friday? You feel strangely anxious about the state of, well, everything, and it feels ever-so-slightly like things might be becoming, well, perhaps a tiny bit much?

WELCOME TO THE MODERNITY CLUB! In which every week you’re entitled to a surprise FREE GIFT of HORRORNEWS, which occasionally, as in weeks like the one just past, we get delivered in bulk! Membership is free – at least materially; the emotional cost is, well, incalculable! – but the only way of dissociating yourself from the organisation is through the discovery of time travel or death. Have a time!

Also, enjoy this week’s Web Curios – a fine selection of links which in the main will serve as some sort of soothing balm on the flayed skin of your psyche, and almost certainly won’t act in the same way as lemonjuice on papercuts, oh no siree! Just to warn you, by the way, there’s a small chance that there won’t be a Curios next week as on Sunday I am taking a WHIRLWIND trip to Rome for 48h to wish my Grandmother a happy 100th birthday; sadly, it being Italy, there’s no letter from the Queen; on the plus side, though, Nonna Angela can bask in the strange symmetry of Italy being a largely fascist nation as she reaches her centenary, much as it was (almost) when she was born! Anyway, as a result of that I might not have time to give the internet sufficient attention – rest assured, though, that normal service will be resumed in a fortnite at the latest. 

In the meantime, though, vafammocc a chi t’e mort’ to anyone who voted for That Man in the recent Tory leadership elections – no, please, DO translate it, I mean every fcuking word you utter fcuking cnuts.

This, is ever, is Web Curios – you asked for this, don’t forget. 

[OOH ALMOST FORGOT TWO PIECES OF IMPERICA STUFF FROM EDITOR PAUL:

• Please fill in the reader survey if you’ve not done so already he will be very appreciative (and if you all tell me to stop doing this, maybe you can all get your Friday afternoons back!)
• Imperica continues to seek PAID contributions to its next print magazine – DETAILS HERE!

Right, now on with the webspaff!

By Matthew Grabelsky

FIRST UP, WHY NOT EXPERIENCE THE GENUINELY ODD BUT QUITE BRILLIANT FULL ALBUM BY 100 GEKS WHOSE SINGLE I FEATURED IN THE VIDEOS LAST WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE YOU ALL TO PROMISE THAT YOU WILL NEVER, EVER BUY SUBSCRIPTION TELLY THROUGH FACEBOOK:

• Yes, That’s Right, Telly Through Facebook!: Well, some telly. In America. But it’s still pretty big news; users in the US will be able to buy access to certain shows, from places like Tastemade and College Humor, through Facebook, with the platform taking a cut. Obviously makes all sorts of sense from a commercial point of view, but I’m pretty dead set against anything that a) gives the Big Blue Misery Factory more money; or b) keeps people locked within its ecosystem, and so for that reason I’m…er…going to rail ineffectually against it to no discernible end whatsoever!
• Instagram Rolling Out Easy ‘Instant Video’ Promo Creation: Indefatigable s*c**l m*d** sleuth Matt Navarra, a man so plugged into the networks that I am starting to wonder whether he’s cloned himself and has several of said clones installed under the floorboards in Menlo Park, spotted this new feature the other day; it’s not, seemingly, a universally-available thing, but following the Snapchat ‘we’ll make it as easy as possible to make half-decent ads because we know that for some reason most people still don’t quite ‘get’ the concept of vertical video in promos yet’-feature last week, it seems sensible that Insta would do something similar (plus ca fcuking change, eh?).
• Twitter’s Billboard Ad Campaign: This isn’t interesting or important – SO WHY ARE YOU FEATURING IT THEN? FFS Matt, this sort of attitude is why you’re not Ben Thompson, rolling around lasciviously on a bed of crisp fifties, dictating this newsletterblogthing whilst being fed peeled grapes by acolytes. It is, though, emblematic of how lazy all this stuff is; Twitter’s latest real-life ad campaign is all about the difference between people behave on Insta (all polished and fake) and how they behave on Twitter (all GOOFY AND FUN), using real-life Tweets to illustrate the example. This is annoying for two reasons: 1) anyone who has used Twitter at all over the course of the past three years or so can attest to the fact that ‘goofy and fun’ is not necessarily the overriding vibe of the platform these days; and 2) this is basically exactly the same creative as Snapchat’s recent anti-Insta campaign, all about how ‘real friends’ are on Snap, not Insta. GET SOME NEW FCUKING IDEAS FFS. Also, I thought Insta was all about authenticity and stuff in 2019? I don’t understand anything any more.
• TikTok Adds Giphy Integration: It is now “possible to import Giphy GIFs, specifically its animated Stickers, into TikTok posts, and at the same time, to be able to create new GIFs for Giphy based on what you are doing in TikTok”. I can’t be bothered to explain the exact mechanics of how this will work – look, trust me, read the original explanation and you’ll understand, it’s not exactly interesting – but it’s worth being aware of this as another reason to potentially get involved with Giphy as a platform, if you’re a brand or organisation which lends itself to gifs.
• Live AR Directions Now(ish) on Google Maps: I am SO excited to try this out, but this particular update is yet to reach me; we will all soon be able to get AR directions in Google Maps, thereby (in theory at least) ensuring we will never again be in situations like I was yesterday afternoon when I got very, very lost trying to find Barnet train station after a pitch. The idea with this is that you can hold your phone up and see AR overlays pointing you in the direction of your destination; the reason I’m including it in here is to get you thinking about all of the inevitable ways in which you’ll eventually be able to buy ads in this space – because you will, obviously.
• Pinterest Adds a Couple of New Features: You can tell I’m sort-of phoning this section in this morning, can’t you? Sorry, I promise I’ll muster up more enthusiasm once we’re done with the worky-type stuff. Anyway, this is news that Pinterest is getting an updated product recommendation service, as well as offering retailers a…oh, here: “Pinterest is adding an updated shopping section below Pins from certain businesses, which will showcase expanded brand catalogs based on the items you’ve shown an interest in.” There. Happy? Of course you’re not.
• Voyant Tools: One of several things in here sent to me by Josh this week, for which THANKS, Voyant Tools is an interesting site which lets you conduct corpus analysis on any website or set of website you care to feed it, giving you snapshot views of main words used, frequency and the like. It’s *quite* wonky, but it could be useful for doing toplevel analysis of specific clusters of sites around certain topics.
• Cities Talk Back: Lyft is still trying to compete with Uber, and has obviously decided that ‘we’re a lot less awful than they are and we care about stuff’ is the strategic route to go down; hence this site, putting it squarely in the anti-Trump camp by celebrating the many, many immigrants that make up its driverbase, and telling their stories through this nicely-made, if *slightly* cheesy, site (scroll out on landing – OH LOOK IT’S THE IMMIGRANTS ALL MAKING UP THE AMERICAN FLAG DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY’VE DONE THERE?!?). The company’s also donating to immigrant friendly organisations, and is inviting riders to round up the cost of their fares to do the same, which is generally A Good Thing.
• The Love Island Job: Look, I am not going to judge you – I know that for one of you this is the absolute DREAM gig. Would you like to be ‘Head of Client Partnerships’ for Love Island at ITV? Would you like to be the person negotiating the deals with Boohoo and…er…whatever other brands want some of that sweet Love Island action (I am so far outside the target demographic for this that I can’t even conceive of what they would be. Clairol? Kleenex? A variety of regional lip filler clinics?)? Would you like to be within touching distance of the next set of pituitary meatheads to be held up as the Platonic idea of love (as imagined by Mattel)? YES YOU WOULD! The application process closes on Monday 12 August (if you’re reading this via the Curiobot on Twitter then you are sadly too late), so if you have ‘Experience of working in a Senior Account Management/Account Director role either Advertising Agency/Creative agency or media owner’, and a ‘Passion and interest for Love Island as a format’ then FILL YOUR BOOTS.

By Hans Vandekerckhove

NEXT UP, HAVE SOME EXCELLENT UK HIPHOP FROM NOTTINGHAM MC JUGA-NAUT

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY TERRIFIED THAT A NOVEMBER ELECTION WOULD SECURE ANOTHER FIVE YEARS OF TORY GOVERNMENT AND, REALLY, CAN WE JUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN PLEASE, PT.1:

• Hey From The Future: This is an interesting idea that feels like it could have been a project for a charity or campaign, but is seemingly simply a hobby project which makes me like it more. The concept is simple – anyone can log onto the site, pick an age, and (presuming you’ve registered an account) leave a message for anyone else, giving advice to people of that age that you wish you’d known at that point in your life (not quite sure who the methuselan (it may not be a word, but it should be) people are living life tips for 81 year olds, but you GO you hoary old scholars of existence!). You don’t have to write anything – you can just browse the advice left by others, which range from the irritatingly trite to the genuinely moving, and overall the whole project is gently, quietly, almost sadly lovely. It’s a genuine shame that I can’t imagine any actual teenagers ever stumbling across this site, as there’s some solid advice in there for the 365 Stories: What a wonderful project this is. Matt Zurbo is an author who is also a new father, and who in the first flush of love and excitement at his new daughter decided that he would, selflessly, embark on a mission to write 365 short children’s stories and place them online for free for anyone else to find and read. These are perfectly ready to read as they are, but Zurbo has also included art direction alongside the stories, to allow either for parents with an artistic bent to potentially create illustrated versions for their kids, or for kids themselves to get a bit of a framework should they want to do it themselves. SO CUTE, and the sort of thing you could perhaps co-opt if you were the right sort of kid-facing brand (or, alternatively, we could accept the lovely selflessness of Zurbo’s vision and maybe stop trying to turn everytyhing good into advermarketingpr, thereby ruining it forever. Maybe that’s better).
• Squad: A NEW TEEN SENSATION IN APP-LAND! Well, maybe – I can’t vouch for the veracity of this claim, what with not in fact being a teenager or being in regular contact with any, but I’ve seen it mentioned a few times this week as being the HOT THING, especially for girls, and so feel honour-bound to mention it to you. Squad’s gimmick is that it allows for live screensharing with your mates, the idea being that you can collaboratively watch stuff, shop, etc, in social fashion with your SQUAD. Or, and maybe I’m just being cynical about kids and what they are like, engage in some really spectacularly cruel bullying by collaboratively working on the best ways to torture people in DM conversations and the like. No obvious commercial use for this for brands, at least not that I can conceive of right now, but interesting as a potential trend.
• The ONS GeoDataViz Gallery: Another one from Josh (THANKS JOSH), this is a quite wonderful and slightly silly VR/FPS-style gallery website put together by the Office of National Statistics, presenting a virtual space in which you can wonder round and check out a variety of cartographic works that have been commissioned by their Dataviz team. I have literally no idea why this was created, or indeed why the developers saw fit to include a very weird and slightly shonky ‘footsteps’ sound effect to accompany your passage through this non-existent museum of cartographical wonder, but I am very glad it’s a thing. Why is there a digital bin in there? WHY???
• Favejet: This is a really interesting idea, and potentially useful for journalists looking to snoop on famouses PROBLEMATIC FAVES (is that still a thing that we care about? Possibly, in celebrityland at least). “When you follow someone on FaveJet you follow their faves: tweets they’re faving, starring or liking (it’s all the same). And in turn, they can follow yours. There’s no recommendation algorithm telling you what you’ll like — just a stream of interesting tweets, made easy to follow.” Useful for picking diamonds from the stream of effluvia that is the TL, or indeed for keeping a gentle eye on who’s attempting to gently chirpse who.
• Some Words For Me: Have you ever thought “Ooh, I ought to keep a diary, that’ll be something interesting to read back in a few years and maybe I can track my moods and be all mindful about stuff” and then realised that bothering to keep a diary is in fact really hard and requires a not-insignificant degree of commitment and dedication and, frankly, life’s too short? Well NO MORE! This is a really clever service; you simply tell it to email or text you at a specific time each day; you then reply to that message with whatever you want to say, and it will magically be compiled into a journal for you, which you can access at any time. Regardless of the fact that I think that this is being touted as some sort of appalling WELLNESS thing (I hate wellness and embrace sickness, fundamentally, like some sort of really rubbish goth who didn’t quite get the wardrobe memo), it’s a very neat, simple idea and worth a look if you either fancy keeping a diary or want something to send you a daily, nudge-y reminder to JUST FCUKING WRITE SOMETHING.
• Earbuds: This feels like it could potentially be huge if the sports people get on board. The gimmick behind Earbuds is a really simple one – wouldn’t it be awesome if you could hear all the playlists that your favourite famouses were listening to? NOW YOU CAN IT’S SO EXCITING. It’s been set up by a former NFL player amongst others, meaning that there are a few US sporting famouses on board already, sharing their pre- and post-game/workout/concussion mixes with their adoring fans – the idea of being effectively stream your playlist live is the smart bit here, with the obvious gimmick of allowing fans to experience the same pre-game buildup as their heroes (transpose ‘pre-game’ for ‘pre-gig’, ‘pre-premiere’, ‘pre-awards’, ‘pre-lipo’, etc etc). Will be interested to see if it takes off.
• Certified Artificial: Do any of you notice the RUNNING GAGS that pepper Curios each week? Do any of you care that there are several that I have been doing for LITERALLY A DECADE? No, you don’t, do you. FFS. Anyway, those few of you who do pay close attention to the tortured prose every week may have noticed that I have taken to annotating mentions of AI with the regular bracketed caveat ‘NOT IN FACT AI’, to convey my…skepticism about much of what is being passed off as THE MAGICAL POWER OF THE MACHINE MINDS. This is a joke website which makes a semi-serious point – to whit, that there’s absolutely no accepted definition of what ‘AI’ is in a variety of contexts, and as such it means any old charlatan can claim to be using it for snake-oil gain. The gimmick is that Certified Artificial will independently verify the artificial nature of the intelligence behind your company and give you an actual proper badge to display online – all for a mere $1500! Genuinely do hope they get a few sincere enquiries.
• Alulu: Kickstarter baffles me. This is absolutely the sort of project I expected to be 10x funded, and yet here it is with under a week to go, staring down the barrel of failure (fine, their $300k goal was perhaps a bit punchy, but DREAM BIG KIDS!). Anyway, me linking this here is likely pointless as a result of the not-insignificant shortfall in funds they’re currently facing, but the idea is wonderful. Alulu is a camera which prints in black and white on thermal paper (the sort that receipts are printed on), creating a lo-fi effect reminiscent of the late, lamented Berg’s Little Printer project from a decade or so back (which I have, in searching for it, just discovered has been sort-of resurrected! Huzzah!) – I LOVE this, and am genuinely sad that it will probably never exist.
• Frankenbook: This is a project from last year, but which exists online in perpetuity for anyone to try out – Frankenbook was a collaborative reading project launched by Arizona State University, and which lives on as a website collecting the full text, along with the notes and annotations of other readers, which you can explore and add to as you wish. The interface is simple but really, really clean, letting you toggle people’s annotations on and off at will so you can read the text uncluttered if you will; I love this, and sort-of like the idea of there being a future in which we could in theory read all books like this, with access to the marginalia of every past reader, kept forever.
• Amazon Can Now Mimic Human Speech In Newsreader Style: “At AWS re:Invent 2016, we announced Polly, a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing customers to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Zero machine learning expertise required: just call an API and get the job done! Since then, the team has regularly added new voices, for a current total of 29 languages and 59 voices. Today, we’re happy to announce two major new features for Polly: Neural Text-To-Speech, and a groundbreaking newscaster style.” This is quite incredible; the way it nails the cadence of newsreader speech – the slightly exaggerated inflection and emphasis – is uncanny. It still sounds fake but…only just.
• ADIFO: Or, as it really ought to be called (Christ’s sakes, lads, LISTEN TO THE PR HERE) “THE FLYING SAUCER YOU ALWAYS DREAMED OF!” ADIFO is a Romanian (I think) project which has created an actual, honest-to-goodness working, miniatture flying saucer, controlled by remote control. This is a video of it flying and OH MY GOD it is so cool. Fcuk drones, basically, is my takeaway from this (that and ‘can someone please source me one of these?’) – just IMAGINE the fun you could have doing twilight flybys with one of these.
• Ownersman: I don’t know why you’d need a website which collects complete scans of owners manuals from a variety of different cars, but, just in case you do, this is that very website. If nothing else, you could probably use this to train a neural net to write a car manual for you, though why on earth you’d want to is beyond me.
• Eiko Ojala: Eiko Ojala is designer working between New Zealand and Estonia, and whose work has a wonderful, distinctive style, using layers and cut-outs to give weight and depth to his creations. Honestly, this stuff is wonderful and I would commission stuff by them in a heartbeat.
• The Banana Hill Avatar Design Contest: Banana Hill was a very odd, semi-internet-famous cartoon from a few years back, which mined that very particular Adult Swim/Cartoon Network style of surrealism to reasonable effect (it’s not really my sort of thing, but your mileage may vary). Its creator is planning on making a sequel – here’s the synopsis: “Banana Hill 2 is an adult sequel/pilot episode I plan on releasing by midnight 12/31. We follow 3 friends as they surf the deep cryptic depths of a virtual internet explorer known as WoobWorldz in search for an ancient relic.” As part of the ‘virtual internet explorer’ vibe, they are asking people to create avatars for such a virtual world, which will be included in the final animation to create the sort of early-00s vibe required. If you’re an artist or designer this might be a nice, fun side-project – if nothing else, the Twitter thread linked to at the top of this entry showcases some pretty odd submissions from others which are worth scrolling through.
• Vole: STEPHEN! Ahem. Vole (or, to give it its full name, Vole.wtf) is a site by Matt Round which collects a bunch of silly internet projects in one place – a text generator for websites that uses song lyrics from old kids’ tv shows, a silly little ‘Knight’s Move’ game featuring David Hasselhoff…basically it’s just a bunch of 30s internet amusements, which is EXACTLY what the web was invented for (don’t @ me, Tim).
• Decent: Another Kickstarter, but this one’s met its goal with 9 days to go. Decent is a really interesting idea, and I’m fascinated to see what it ends up looking like – it’s a men’s magazine, created by women, which aims to present a different, more nuanced idea of masculinity than that normally showcased by the more traditional mens’ press. Thank Christ – if I see one more fcuking magazine telling me how Steve McQueen is a style icon, which whiskies I ought to be into as a REAL MAN, what gadgets I must have (because I am a MAN and I love technology and STUFF), and what the one massively overcomplicated dish is that I should master to demonstrate my culinary skills in order to get laid, it will be TOO SOON. Their manifesto sounds genuinely appealing – take a look “We promise you won’t find luxury watches, expensive cars, or protein ball recipes. Just a coffee-table magazine (for the lack of a better buzzword) packed with inspirational people, candid conversation and interesting, fresh perspectives.” About time tbh.
• Subway Nut: Have YOU always hankered after “a website that is dedicated to rail based transit systems and trains in the United States and Canada, and whose goal is to have a photo essay of every station on every system”? ME TOO!

By Katherine Le Hardy

WHY NOT TRY THIS SUPREMELY ECLECTIC MIX BY STEFANO SKOUL? IT’S VERY GOOD, HONEST!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY TERRIFIED THAT A NOVEMBER ELECTION WOULD SECURE ANOTHER FIVE YEARS OF TORY GOVERNMENT AND, REALLY, CAN WE JUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN PLEASE, PT.2:

• The Brick Experiment Channel: I got a message from a friend of mine the other day, who’s on holiday with his wife and kid and extended family, saying something along the lines of “if I have to hear that fcuking YouTuber’s fcuking voice one more fcuking time I swear to god my sister’s kid’s are going to die by my bare hands” (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly). If you too are staring down the barrel of summer holidays dominated by the endless jingle of whatever YT horrorshow your sticky little darlings are currently obsessed by, why not consider showing them the Brick Experiment Channel, which does all sorts of incredibly cool LEGO builds and which are BLISSFULLY free of any annoying voice-over work whatsoever. Practically zen-like, this stuff.
• A Visit to Mount Fanjing: A wonderful collection of images of the UNESCO World Heritage site at Mount Fanjing, which encompasses several temples and some jaw-dropping views. No, really, I promise you this is utterly incredible.
• Mark E Books: A Twitter bot which uses a GPT-2 network trained on some Mark E Smith lyrics and which churns out some pretty wonderful approximations of The Fall every hour or so. You may think this is nonsense, but if you’ve ever spent any time listening to The Fall you’ll get quite how wonderful this is – “It is a new rite of spring… / And I am…. / I am…lympic gold medallist” could well be off Hex Enduction Hour, for example.
• The Hathi Trust Library: Another raft of books from the past century recently entered into the public domain through one of those occasional quirks of copyright law; as part of my reading around that this week, I stumbled across the Hathi Trust Library, which is slowly amassing an incredible collection of out-of-copyright texts, here collected in full. There is SO MUCH in here – literally thousands of texts, full novels to textbooks to cookbooks – and if you’re a bibliophile I urge caution because you could easily get lost in here and never emerge. The Hethi Library will continue to be updated over time; this one’s very much worth bookmarking and returning to periodically to see what new gems they’ve uploaded.
• Typography Resources: You want typography resources? YOU GOT TYPOGRAPHY RESOURCES! Lots of useful stuff here for designers in a helpfully-curated series of lists.
• The Big Face Project: This is all in Japanese, and, whilst you could use the magic of Google to render it comprehensible, I personally think it benefits from being seen entirely bereft of context. WHY IS THE PERSON BEHIND IT OBSESSED WITH CREATING THINGS THAT MAKE THEIR FACE BIGGER? Regardless, if you’ve ever wanted instructions on how to make an oddly-geometric giant papercraft mask of your own face, or a FACE ENLARGING HELMET-BOX (and which of us hasn’t?!), this is very much the website for you.
• Misskin: You probably don’t need or want to know this about me, but I am pretty much littered with moles, including one particularly-fetching example slap-bang in the middle of my ‘damp toilet paper draped over a toastrack’ chest, giving the impression of a third nipple, or an excellent target for the epi-pen should I ever overdose. If you too are a VERY MOLEY PERSON, this app might be useful; if helps you track your blemishes, letting you monitor their size and track changes in their appearance to guard against the skin cance. Sadly doesn’t feature the ability to map all your moles and then play a game of virtual ‘join the dots’ on your own body, but perhaps that’s version 1.72.
• By The People: I love crowdsourced projects like this – the LIbrary of Congress in the US is seeking help transcribing all its old documents in order to be able to better digitise and preserve its archive; this website links out to all the different individual projects currently going on as part of this initiative, and lets you leap in to reading and transcribing documents from the US Civil War, the woman’s suffrage movement and a whole host of other moments in history. It’s interesting, as an aside, that despite the huge advances in automation that have been made in terms of digitising large corpuses of work, things like this that deal with handwritten materials are still slightly beyond current ML capabilities.
• Tiny Animals on Fingers: Your new favourite subReddit. So many VERY SMOL animals! SUCH TINY LIZARDS!
• Octopus Holdings: I really, really don’t get what this is or why it exists – I presume it’s a clever coding thing, but, really, I don’t care; I am just enamoured of the fact that I can now create images of an emoji octopus triumphantly holding up whatever I tell it to. Navigate to the url – now add /XXX to the end of it, where ‘XXX’ is…whatever you like! If there’s an emoji of it, the octopus will now be holding said emoji! Magic! Beautifully, this stacks – try multiple /XXXX/XXXX variants and see what emerges. I have no idea what you might do with this, but if nothing else you can amuse yourself by emailing your colleagues a massive stack of emoji cake or something.
• The Warfield Autograph Room: According the the blurb on the site, the Warfield is a music venue in San Francisco which opened in 1922 and since then has played host to pretty much every musical act of note over the past century. One of the venue’s gimmicks is its ‘autograph room’, which over the years has become plastered with the scrawled leavings of musicians from all over the world, some famous, some infamous, most of whom you will never have heard of – the theatre offers a wonderful high-def 360 view of said room, and it is very easy to lose yourself panning and zooming and trying to find your favourite’s signatures – no idea who it’s by, but my personal favourite is the one happily announcing that you now find yourself in ‘Buttface County’, but do pick your own.
• The Ghost in the MP3: I can’t possibly explain this better than the person who made it, so I shan’t try: “”moDernisT” was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song “Tom’s Diner”, famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 compression.” This is such an odd, wonderful idea; it creates something that is almost entirely, but not quite exactly unlike the original song, and yet in which you can sort of catch the echoes of Suzanne Vega. Wonderful, eerie, strange, and very much not the sort of thing that anyone will thank you for putting on the office Sonos.
• The Club: This is very, very odd, and you won’t understand what’s going on. It’s a sort-of surreal MMO-type shared in-browser web experience…thing, which also is a sort of musical project which lets anyone download a sample pack and use said pack to create music which you can upload and which will then be played as part of The Club’s soundtrack…it’s aesthetically not a million miles away from that VR social network playground thing whose name I forget (you know, the one with all the weirdly-racist echidna avatars – WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT MEANS NOTHING TO YOU?!? FFS), and whilst this is a total mess and quite jarringly weird, it’s also sort-of perfect for those exact reasons.
• Enby: Enby is the first sex toy I’ve seen that’s designed semi-explicitly for bodies in transition or who consider themselves gender-fluid, and whose shape makes it able to be used in a variety of different configurations depending on what works best for you or your partner. It’s also the first sex toy I’ve seen that looks like a cross between a cute stingray and a bicycle seat, but that’s by-the-by.
• Rollhill: Fun, timewasting game of the week #1! This is Rollhill, a game in which you play a tire, rolling down a variety of hills, as quickly as you can. Strangely addictive.
• AI Dungeon: Fun, timewasting game of the week #2! AI Dungeon is a…oh, here you go: “AI Dungeon is an AI generated text adventure that uses deep learning to create each adventure. It uses OpenAI’s new GPT-2 model, which has 117 million parameters, to generate each story block and possible action. The first couple sentences of AIDungeon and the action verbs are handcrafted, but everything else is not. For each choice that is made, the initial prompt, the last story block, and the last action are fed into the neural network. The resulting story and action options are then output by the model.” This is in the main nonsensical, but just coherent enough to make it fun to play around in; some of the scenarios or options it throws up are quite wonderfully obtuse.
• A Small World Cup: Fun, timewasting game of the week #3! Last of the miscellaneous links this week, and it’s a cracker – Small World Cup pits you against the computer or another player – the goal is to score…er…goals, by hurling your miniature footballman at the ball while your opponent does the same, and you both attempt to flail the sphere into the onion bag. This is VERY silly, but practically-perfect as a way of filling in the hour before you can reasonably slope off to the pub.

By Mark Powell

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THE FABULOUS ONE PUT TOGETHER FOR LAST WEEK’S EDITION OF THE ‘LOVE WILL SAVE THE DAY’ NEWSLETTER, WHICH, HONESTLY, REALLY IS WORTH SUBSCRIBING TO; THIS IS ACE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Talking Heads: You want a Tumblr dedicated solely to content about Talking Heads? What? You have no idea who Talking Heads are? FFS, children!
• Album Cover Cover: This is a lovely project, by art director Bruno Ribeiro, in which he sets himself the task of knocking up a new album cover for a certain album, in the time it takes him to listen to said album from start to finish. I’ve got a real thing for artistic projects undertaken within specific constraints like this, and the pleasingly symmetrical nature of this is very satisfying.
• Aircon 1000: Photographs of massive aircon units from Japan. Why? If you have to ask you will never understand.
• Classical Art Memes: The sort of gentle memery which feels oddly out of place in 2019.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Homesick Dot Com: I’m sure that many of you will feel there’s a strong whiff of ‘never happened’ about this Insta feed, collecting letters sent home from Summer camp by (often but not always) homesick kids, but I don’t care – lots of these made me laugh like a drain, and many more of them made me think that perhaps I ought to rebook that vasectomy.
• Gandyworks: James Nolan Gandy describes himself as a ‘drawing machinist’, which as far as I can tell means that he makes intricate pen-and-ink drawings created with Spirograph-style machines he builds himself. I would buy these in a heartbeat (there’s a link to his site on the profile if anyone fancies getting me a present).
• Wblut: The feed of Frederik Vanhoutte, who I can across as a result of his spectacular geometric animations, where he shows three-dimensional shapes being sliced and spun across various axes to create wonderful, abstract black and neon designs. Honestly, these are SO GOOD.
• Emperor Wee: Kenze Wee is a game designer and pixel artist; their feed is full of gorgeous little pixel illustrations, created with unusual artistry.
• Alberto Russo: Russo is a Swiss (I think – or Swiss-based, at least) artist, whose feed is a selection of his works; his style is weirdly familiar, perhaps as it’s reminiscent of several of the people who drew Dylan Dog in the 80s. If that means nothing to you, think strong lines, etched shading and a vaguely 70s Euro aesthetic to the whole thing.
• Gurme Antepli: Baklava. Lots of baklava.
• Ipnot: The most incredible embroidery work you will ever see, which may sound like hyperbole but I promise you really isn’t.
• Hungry: The description here is ‘distorted drag’, which is pretty-much perfectly right if you ask me. Such an amazing aesthetic here, and not a million miles away from the ‘Oligarchs’ CGI video which I featured last week and which you OBVIOUSLY all watched.
• Jedy Vales: To the ranks of Lil Miquela and the other CG influencers/models so in vogue with the fashion world at the moment we can now add Jedy Vales, the world’s first CG bongo star on Instagram! Created by Pr0nhub (who else? Really, some of the best marketing IN THE WORLD right now – so much so that I am now using it completely straight-facedely as my go-to example when people ask me ‘who’s doing good digital stuff these days, Matt?’, mainly as they tend to get quite embarrassed and then leave me alone). This is…odd, though as Shardcore pointed out over Slack, this is obviously just a precursor to the character appearing in actual bongo on the site. I don’t understand the future any more, and nor indeed do I really want to.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (AND WHICH AS A SPECIAL BONUS WOULD LIKE TO OFFER YOU THIS PIECE LINKING TO 10 CLASSIC SHORT STORIES ONLINE, ALL OF WHICH ARE GENUINELY GREAT EXAMPLES OF THE GENRE)!:

• Bellingcat and El Paso: It’s impossible not to start this week’s longreads without some reflections on last weekend’s shootings in the US; this first piece did the rounds in the immediate aftermath of the El Paso shooting, and is Bellingcat’s typically thorough and reasoned analysis of how it links in to the recent pattern of incidents born of 8chan and other extremist communities online, and what clues or learnings one can take from the way in which said communities foster, encourage and lionise actors such as these. It’s…bleak.
• Pandering: Or, to give the piece it’s actual title, “Where listening to the concerns of racists has got us”. An excellent piece of writing about exactly why every time we make accommodations for the arguments of racists, we go one small step towards legitimising the points of view that they hold, and why as a result it is an important and necessary act to demonstrate wherever possible that ‘being a racist’ is not a valid position worthy of debate or consideration.
• The Savant: Ordinarily I would have put this further down the list – it’s very much on the less-newsy end of the spectrum, more storytelling than journalism – but it fits rather nicely amongst the pieces about last weekend’s Bad Things. US Cosmopolitan tells the…frankly not 100% believable, if I’m honest, tale of a mysterious, anonymous woman living in a nondescript part of semi-suburban America who is some sort of one-woman anti-misogynistic-hatecrime taskforce. The article’s subject spends her time immersed in anti-female communities, monitoring the conversations and keeping a running list of those men she considers most likely to go full assault weapon; apparently she’s been responsible for foiling ‘several’ incidents by dint of her extraordinary nose for these things. This is a very, very strange piece indeed – the tone sort of breathlessly fangirly and hagiographic – but certainly an interesting one.
• Rituals of Childhood: The last piece this week to explicitly address the shootings, this is a devastating essay by Kieran Healy, about how one of the oddest things about US attitudes to their problem with death-by-firearm is the odd accommodation they have made with ‘kids potentially getting murdered whilst at school’, and how the normalisation and ritualisation of the teaching process around shootings is quite, quite horrific when you stop and think about it for more than approximately 3 seconds.
• Tulsi Gabbard: I confess to having largely stopped giving much of a fcuk about the US Democratic nomination because a) it already appears to have been going on for several decades; and b) it’s increasingly clear to me that That Man is very likely to win again (I am very much hoping here by skill at predicting the future in 2019 is as on-point as it was back in 2015); and c) there’s quite a lot going on over here as well, frankly. Still, this profile of Tulsi Gabbard briefly reignited my interest – Gabbard’s a candidate whose anti-interventionist rhetoric has attracted a lot of support from a range of sources, but most prominently a bunch of alt-right adjacent Silicon Valley types (that’s basically what we’re calling Dorsey now, right?). As with all profiles of US politicians, the main takeaway from here is quite how far away from being anyone’s idea of a normal person Gabbard seems.
• How We Got Social Credit Wrong: Tonally-confusing piece from WIRED, this, which on the one hand tells us that everyone in the West has totally overblown the scary, creepy Orwellian nature of China’s social credit system, that in fact there are massive gaps in the panopticon, and that it’s more a load of local administrations messing around with systems to see what works than a whole national-level surveillance-and-control system, whilst on the other making it very clear that all this stuff is very much leading up to something that sounds exactly like the sort of sinister system we all thought it was when we first read about it 2 years ago. I don’t think that the piece is quite the reassuring pat on the arm the author thinks it is, fundamentally.
• Jeffrey Epstein: Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB, writing a short piece about the Epstein case which touches upon the thing I found most troubling about it; the recent Carl Beech story, and Pizzagate, and the other mad-seeming conspiracies about CELEBRITY PAEDO RINGS IN HOLLYWOOD and the rest, all start to sound a little less mad when you consider that that is apparently exactly what Epstein was doing, in plain sight. It seems pretty much certain now that he really was running some sort of international abuse ring, which suddenly makes a lot of the other stuff seem…well, still quite mad, obviously, but you can imagine the hay being made with this amongst the faction of people who’ll quite happily discuss the Clinton’s vampiric tendencies. Troubling.
• How Rising Sea Levels Will Affect Asian Cities: Thanks again, Josh, for pointing me at this rather wonderful (and, if you’re an city-dweller in Asia, not a little worrying) longread/dataviz looking at what’s likely to happen to large urban centres in Asia should predicted climate change occur.
• The Cartographers of North Korea: Another lovely longread/dataviz piece, this time looking at the people who secretly help mapping services get a picture of the murderously-secretive DPRK.
• Quibi: This was totally new to me, I confess – apparently entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenburg is set to launch a new shortform video service called Quibi next year, which he sees as presenting high-quality commissioned episodic content designed to be viewed in bitesize chunks on mobile. This isn’t launching til April 2020, but it sounds…serious: “With $1 billion in the bank and a goal of releasing some 7,000 pieces of content during Quibi’s first year, Katzenberg has been on a buying spree for the mobile-only platform. In June and July alone, Quibi has revealed no fewer than 20 new projects from partners that include Tyra Banks, Darren Criss, Rashida Jones and Veena Sud. They join previously announced efforts from Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Jason Blum, Jennifer Lopez and Anna Kendrick.”
• Not-Alt Meat: An overview of the non-meat industry, specifically Impossible and Beyond Meat, which posits that we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the market for faked animal proteins. The main point here – which I confess I had never thought of before, but which struck me as blindingly obvious as soon as I read it – is that the quality of actual meat currently used in mass-catering (burger joints, hotdogs, Taco fcuking Bell, etc) is so low that these substitutes are already an upgrade in terms of user experience (taste, mouthfeel, etc), and as they become cheaper there is literally no reason why huge swathes of the fast food industry wouldn’t switch them them instead of dead cows or pigs. Might invest (I won’t invest).
• Obscure Plug-In Consoles: Not an essay, this, or at least not in the traditional sense – instead it’s a VERY LONG Twitter thread about the weird trend for those ‘plug it into your TV and play a range of shonky videogames’-type controller things that were popular in the 90s/00s; fine, it’s a *bit* niche, but if you’re interested in games and their history, this is a fascinating footnote.
• The Birth of the Semi-Colon: I love the semi-colon, some (regular readers, my employers, anyone who has to correspond with me for any length of time) would say too much. Regardless, this short piece explains its genesis, and confirms, should any have you been in any doubt, exactly when to use it: “It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon” SEE? PERFECTLY CLEAR.
• Samuel L Jackson and Deep Blue Sea: My girlfriend is obsessed with sharks, to the point that she would quite like to be eaten to death by one (she assures me this isn’t a sex thing, but, well, readers, I have my concerns), and therefore she probably knew all about the iconic ‘Sam Jackson gets eaten’ death scene from the film Deep Blue Sea. I didn’t, though, and had no idea it was some sort of cult thing; this piece is a really enjoyable oral history about how and why it turned out the way it did. Most interesting for me is the light it shines on the sausagemaking process; I had no idea that stuff like this happened when making films, with entire movies being recut to create a completely new, tonally different end-product. Fascinating. Still no interest in seeing Deep Blue Sea, though, sorry Saz.
• The Egg is Bigger Than Before: Partly about a very odd egg ‘hack’ that did the rounds of the web last week, but more about the very, very strange world of 5-Minute Crafts, the YouTube channel that seemingly churns out hundreds of utterly bizarre yet totally compelling ‘hack’-type videos, featuring ‘tips’ that are best useless and at worst genuinely unsettling. What’s interesting about stuff like this – to me, at least – is the extent to which YouTube is ferreting out quite a lot of mass-humanity psychological quirks; who could possibly have known before the advent of this sort of thing that millions of people would really, really enjoy being shown 27 totally pointless things you can make with Coca Cola?
• Endlings: As a result of this article I this week learned that the name for the final living example of a species is an ‘endling’. An endling! How INCREDIBLY poignant! Do you remember the film ‘The Flight of the Navigator’? OF COURSE YOU DO! Remember the impossibly-cute big-eyed worm creature thingy that the kid befriends about the ship? Now think of it as an endling (which it was) – doesn’t that make you want to weep a bit? Anyway, this is about the scientists seeking to preserve some of the last examples of particular species of snails and, well, I might have done a bit of a well-up at this one.
• Lake Duck Pond: A lovely, wholesome example of online creativity, this piece is all about a subReddit about the totally fictitious town and community of Lake Duck Pond, which doesn’t exist and never has done, but has a committed and lively bunch of residents who assiduously roleplay the town’s existence as some sort of weird collaborative online community theatre project. This is wonderful, and the sort of thing that might make you think that the internet is sort-of ok, at least for a few hours.
• Ivanka Aeternum: One of two quite remarkable personal profiles this week, this one focuses on Ivanka Trump and seeks to scry the woman behind the hair/smile. It’s a pretty brutal piece, full of unnamed sources queueing up to paint Ivanka as a strange, contradictory rich kid desperate for her father’s love and who could end up doing quite literally anything in the world once he leaves office, including, perhaps, running herself. Quite jaw-droppingly strange in places, in the manner only profiles of the very, very rich manage to be.
• Imran Khan – Sport, Power, Women: It’s a very silly title, but it’s also apt given the tripartite obsession of this profile of the Pakistani Prime Minister – it’s a wonderful series of anecdotes and observations, and paints a wonderful portrait of Khan as a sort of playboy-swordsman-mystic-savant, but MAN does it lay it on thick about the ladies; you can almost hear the author salivating slightly as he enumerates the Khan conquests. Fun, but an odd sort of stylistic throwback too.
• Coney Island: I’ve never visited Coney Island when in New York, and have no particular connection to the place outside of its mythologised appearances in many of my favourite novels, but this essay about the magic of the place is one of the best pieces of writing in terms of pure style that I’ve read in months.
• London Swings! Again!: Thanks SO MUCH to Charlotte for sending me this – it is Vanity Fair’s 1997 cover story about SWINGING LONDON, penned in the pre-Blair period when everything seemed exciting and pregnant with promise, and it is EVERTHING. It seems so far away, for a start, and whilst I appreciate the breathless style is an authorial affectation meant to evoke the 60s that the piece is making parallels with it’s also a weirdly effective reminder of just how exciting everything seemed then. Fine, that might have been because I was 17, but it did also feel like everything was just sort-of getting better; fast-forward 22 years and, well, not so much. This is just PACKED full of wonder and joy – and, in the case of the author’s weird fetishisation of the normalisation of cocaine use amongst the non-banking classes in the 90s, a strange precursor of why things maybe wenta bit darker 7-8 years hence. Special shout out to the section towards the end featuring Loaded’s James Brown, where he is basically EXACTLY the same person as Jonatton Yea? from Nathan Barley.
• On OCD: Finally this week, this is an exceptional personal essay by James McMahon about his struggles with OCD; it’s a very, very good piece of writing, and I recommend it to you unreservedly.

By Mi Ki Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this sounds like the Pixies which is good enough for me. This is ‘Hertz’ by Black Dresses:

2) I was pretty much convinced to feature this when I saw the band name, to be honest, but it turns out that this 9-minute slice of psychedelic stoner psych-rock is actually pretty good, as is the accompanying short film. This is The Spaceships of Ezekiel, by Mammoth Weed Wizard B*stards (no, really):

3) Would you describe Battles’ music as Math Rock? You might if you were a bit of a pseud from 2013. Still, the beautifully-geometric video for their latest, called ‘Titanium 2-Step’ fits that description too, and this is a wonderfully angular bleepy mess. Enjoy!:

4) Slightly odd mix of styles, this, but it works perfectly (if by ‘works perfectly’ you mean, as I do, ‘sounds like a weird 2019 version of Bodycount except for at the beginning where it momentarily sounds like sort of shoegazey track from about 1993’). It’s by Black Futures and is called ‘Body and Soul’:

5) Last up this week, Lina Tullgren with ‘Saiddone’, a genuinely beautiful little song which I hope you enjoy and which I hope you take with you into the weekend as, well, BYE I AM OUT OF TIME AND LINKS BYE AND I HAVE TO NIP TO THE SHOPS TO BUY INGREDIENTS FOR SAUSAGE ROLLS AS I AM HAVING SOME FRIENDS ROUND THIS AFTERNOON BUT REST ASSURED THAT IF IT WERE POSSIBLE I WOULD MAKE SAUSAGE ROLLS FOR EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU TOO BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND CARE ABOUT YOU AND WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY I HOPE YOU HAVE WONDERFUL WEEKENDS AND GET TO EAT SOME SAUSAGE ROLLS YOURSELVES WHETHER VEGAN OR STANDARD BYE TAKE CARE HAVE FUN HOPEFULLY SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BUT IF NOT IN A FORTNIGHT I LOVE YOU BYE!

A majority of one! It could all fall apart within weeks! PLEASE GOD LET IT ALL FALL APART!

It almost certainly won’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all pray fervently just in case there is a God – if there is, they’re definitely not a Tory. 

Anyway, I usually use this preamble to complain about how everything is terrible and then to make some sort of laboured and unpleasantly-biological metaphor likening this blognewsletterthing to some sort of suppurating, Cronenbergian nightmare, but I’m going to briefly change tack this week – if you can’t be bothered to read this, normal service is resumed below. 

Someone on Twitter this week noticed that Imperica’s been posting linkbuilding articles – paid pieces of content designed to improve third-party sites search rankings by featuring keyword links from other domains. It’s not exactly high-quality journalism, was the implication, what are you doing? What Imperica is doing is attempting to earn some fcuking money so as to be able to pay the hosting costs, and the fees for the other writers who write the proper stuff – this is how fcuked small-scale publishing is on Twitter, and what low-traffic, niche-interest sites have to do if they want to do things like, I don’t know, pay contributors or put out a magazine. 

As I said (also on Twitter) in response to this, Imperica isn’t my site, I don’t run it, and I don’t get paid to write on it (others do, but I don’t – I’m not a journalist and I don’t need the additional money, and I would do this for free whatever), but it’s worth pointing out the following. No money = taking linkbuilding cash to keep the lights on. Pay for stuff you think is good on the internet otherwise in a couple of years it will all be fcuked. 

And no, this isn’t me begging you to cough up for Curios – as I said, this will always be free, whether here or elsewhere – this is simply a statement of fact; this stuff costs, whether it be time or money, and not everyone’s in the same fortunate position that I am, of being able to spend 6 hours on a Friday morning writing self-indulgent webspaff just for the fun of it. 

Anway, this is a long-winded way of asking you to take 5 minutes (morelike 2) to fill in this year’s Imperica reader survey – it will help Paul, who runs the site, get more info on who you are and what he might do to persuade of you to give a fcuk. Go on, make him happy. 

God, that was dull, wasn’t it? Fcuk that sincerity for a game of soldiers, never doing that again. Here, look, take the links and FCUK OFF OUT OF IT. This is Web Curios, and you’re very, very welcome.

By Todd Antony

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS ULTRACURRENT GRIME MIX BY GRANDMIXXER!

THE SECTION WHICH IS UNSURPRISED BY REPORTS EMERGING THIS WEEK THAT SUGGEST THAT FACEBOOK’S AD TRANSPARENCY TOOLS ARE, INCREDIBLY, INADEQUATE IN THEIR TRANSPARENCY:

• The Facebook Numbers: Another earnings report and – guess what?! – the Big Blue Misery Factory made more money than ever before, and had more users than ever before (boosted in the main by growth in India, the Philippines and Indonesia), and despite having to pay out literally BILLIONS in fines continues rake in the advertising dollars like nothing else on earth. FACEBOOK IS DEAD!
• Edit ‘Live’ Videos In FB: Facebook’s ‘Trim’ feature, which allows for in-app editing of previously ‘Live’ video streams when posted to a Page as archive footage, is being made more widely available. You need never again watch back that awkward bit at the beginning of the live when you were wondering whether the stream was in fact working! That’s, er, it!
• Insta Testing Greenscreen-style Photo Background Feature: This is exactly the sort of feature which you look at and think ‘oh, that sounds fun, I bet that will allow for all sorts of momentarily frivolous creative applications and will usher in a whole new era of memery and online lols!’ and which in reality will end up being used to do the same tedious visual gag over and over again by every single fcuking person you know until you wish we could go back to the analogue age forever. Insta is apparently testing the ability for users to use their own existing camera roll photos as background to new photos – thereby allowing for all sorts of infinitely-recursive fun. Brands, you will have ONE SHOT at doing something exciting with this, so start planning NOW (don’t start planning now – it’s pointless and stupid and doesn’t matter, and you’d be better advised fixing the fundamental problems with your business than messing around with this pointless rubbish which makes not one iota of difference to your bottom line and which, frankly, is contributing to making the world a worse and more stupid place).
• Instagram Donation Stickers Launch to UK Charities: This, though, is GOOD NEWS! Charitable organisations in the UK should now be able to benefit from Donation Stickers in Insta Stories, which will allow them (and other users) to append a ‘Donate Now’-type button to their content. You need to be registered as a charity to benefit from this – obviously – but this is unarguably positive so WELL DONE EVERYONE.
• Twitter’s Numbers: I know I say this every time, but LOOK AT THE CONTRAST WITH FACEBOOK HERE. Comparing the two platforms was always a bit silly (they do different things, for different audiences), but seems even moreso now that Twitter continues to limp along with a paltry 140million Daily Monetisable Users compareed to the literal billions using FB. Still, ad revenues are up, so trebles all round!
• Snap Launches ‘Instant Create’ for Easier Ad Creation: This is really useful – a super-simple ad creation tool for Snap, which automates vast swathes of the process to create native, vertical ad units for you with minimal fuss. The amount of automation here is really impressive, even down to the way the tools scrape a destination url for suitable images and crops them for 9:16 with nary a thought (though I guarantee that the results won’t look as good as you hope they will); if you’re a brand or business who wants to attract THE YOUTH then this might make worth Snap considering as part of your ad inventory.
• LinkedIn Lets Businesses and Individuals Ad Services: You can now highlight EXACTLY what it is that you offer on your LinkedIn profile, with the ability to specify the services you provide – information which will now be searchable, making it theoretically simple for users to find accountants or plumbers or urinolagnia-happy dominatrices or whatever. I just popped over to LinkedIn to check whether this had rolled out to me yet – sadly it hasn’t, but know that as soon as it does I am listing ‘BUSINESS’ as my sole service and waiting for the multi-million pound offers to roll in.
• Pinterest Launches Mobile Ad Tools: You can now set up and run ad campaigns on Pinterest from your phone! Yes! I am so excited I may never be able to stop using exclamation marks!
• Stop Using Like Buttons On Your Websites: There are several reasons for this, not least the fact that it’s no longer 2013 and they are totally pointless and they slow down your site and noone likes or uses them anyway, but the main new one is that according to EU law you may well be liable under GDPR as a DIRTY DATA-SCRAPER should you be making use of them. This is technical and legal and, frankly, almost certainly going to be subject to a long-winded series of legal appeals and reversals and rereversals, but the upshot is that it’s probably not worth the hassle to bother with this sort of plugin any more.
• Ofcom UK News Consumption Data: Lovely, exciting, UK news consumption data! Turns out TV news is still by far and away the best way of reaching most people – whodathunkit?! – but that social media is growing as a means of consumption. Although it’s frustratingly fuzzy on some of the exact meaning of this – results are based on survey data, conducted online and face-to-face, and I have literally no idea what people mean when they say they ‘consume news via Whatsapp’. They open links sent to them by friends? They subscribe to Whatsapp-based news services? THESE ARE QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THINGS FFS. Anyway, you want some numbers to prove whatever it is that you want them to? Great, here, take these.
• Approved/Not Approved: I like this. A project designed to highlight some of the slightly odd any hypocritical decisions made when it comes to approving or rejecting adverts for sexual content, specifically those ads designed to flog sex-positive things like sex toys and lube. This is put together – unsurprisingly – by manufacturers of said devices, but despite the obvious vested interest the point stands; ads for pharmaceuticals seem to get through far more often than ads for sex education and the like, which doesn’t quite feel right.
• Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a really good film or TV promo site, but this one, for Tarantino’s latest, is WONDERFUL – presented in the style of a print magazine from the era in which the film’s set, the design here is just perfect; you can almost smell the paper through the screen, the visual design is perfect, the articles draw you into the fictional Hollywood and the wider Tarantino metaverse, with ads for the ever-present Red Apple cigarettes and other familiar brands from Pulp Fiction and other movies…The whole site is excellent and a genuine pleasure to spend a few minutes browsing, and even make me almost want to go to the cinema for the first time in approximately six years (but only for about 10 seconds).
• Gucci Marmont: I think this is the third of these Gucci websites I’ve featured on here, but I am NOT ASHAMED – it’s another of their hand-painted, ultra-confident, super-luxe and VERY SILLY series of microsites which present an entire range in the style of beautiful, opulent still lifes. As per usual, there’s minimal annotation – it’s expected that you just know what these bags are and that they speak for themselves, and it’s perfect. Note the way that the light sources on each painted bag seem to change slightly as you move the cursor around them; now THAT is luxury web design. Also, as my friend Jay pointed out, “Superlux website and then an approachable pricing strategy: getting designer handbags back to £800 / $1000 (a price point they’d all exceeded for a few years) to hit those Millennial & teen wallets. Not stupid.”

By Echo Morgan

NEXT UP, WHY NOT TRY THE NEW ALBUM OF CHOPPY BEATS BY LA PRODUCER BLARF?!

THE SECTION WHICH PRESUMES THAT NOW THAT SAUDI IS LETTING WOMEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY UNACCOMPANIED WE’RE GOING TO JUST FORGET ABOUT KHASHOGGI AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF, PT.1:

• 100 Every Day: 100 people die in the US every day as a result of gun violence, a number so mad and so large that it’s quite hard to countenance. 100 Every Day is a project asking designers to contribute a piece of design – a poster, specifically – highlighting the statistic however they see fit to raise awareness and remind people that this is, in fact, a daily reality. “We are not calling for restric­tions to our Con­sti­tu­tion­al Rights, but just common sense legislation that will help save lives. We’re not an institution. We’re just a group of creative people who think that 100people shouldn’t die every day.” Exactly. There are some lovely designs here, aside from anything else.
• 99 Music: A lovely site by The Ringer, which lets you explore their selection of either the 40 best albums or the 40 best singles of 1999, complete with all the Spotify integration you could hope for so that you can ‘enjoy’ the two-decade old stylings of, say, Lou Bega (yep, he’s in there, and you KNOW that he has every right to be). Each entry includes a bit of trivia, occasional throwback interviews, assessments of whether the track would still be a hit in 2019, and is generally a lovely little nostalgia timecapsule (if you’re me) or a journey in time to a strangely optimistic past where people still naively believed that things could one day get better (if you’re a child).
• Facebook Ad Watch: Despite the reported inadequacy of Facebook’s ad transparency tools, a couple of researchers in Germany (I think) have used it to scrape the dataset and present this slightly-less-shonky searchable database of Facebook ad spend around the world, searchable by topic and with some simple dataviz done in Tableau over the top of it. It’s a bit janky, but nonetheless a nice alternative way to explore some of the GREAT POLITICAL ADVERTISING we’ve all been subjected to over the past year or so – it’s worth clicking the ‘Stories’ section to go through some of the curated datapoints they’ve collected, as it gives an idea of the sort of research you can undertake with a bit of effort.
• Poolside FM: Fcuuuuuuuuuuuuk. I just did a check and I featured the first iteration of this site in FEBRUARY 2014. FEBRUARY 2014!!! 5 and a half years ago! I was…oh, still in my 30s, fine, and already horribly broken and jaded, but, still, WOW have I been doing this crap for a long time. On the offchance, how long have you been reading this crap for? And, er, WHY? Anyway, Poolside FM is a BEAUTIFUL retro-style site which is basically just a bunch of 90s-ish music and video presented in a very vaporwave-y type faux-Mac OS. Which is a pretty nonsensical descriptor, I now realise, so click the link and be transported to an LA poolside two decades prior. Oh, in case you’re interested, here’s my intro from that February 2014 Curios – imagine the wavy lines across the screen presaging a brief moment of time travel…”Well HELLO! Isn’t it exciting? Today we celebrate that wonderful intersection of cold weather and gravity – the WINTER OLYMPICS! A few weeks when we can get all exercised about Russia’s absolutely appalling human rights record and attitudes towards non-heteronormative lifestyles whilst at the same time blithely ignoring the rank hypocrisy of many of our favourite brands who like to talk about how they’re all up for liberalism and diversity and frown upon homophobia and the like whilst STILL paying shedloads of cash for the right to advertise their crap at a wasteful, corrupt event in a country which turns a blind eye to stuff like this on an hourly basis. WELL DONE US AND INDEED THEM! (as an aside, yes it’s nice that Google’s doodle is today all rainbow-ish, but really – shouldn’t the richest and in many respects most powerful corporate entity perhaps maybe do a little bit more than effectively the graphic design equivalent of a subtweet at an entire country? No? Just me?).” Wasn’t that fun!
• FakeText Spotter: The past 18 months have seen an explosion of ‘AI’ (mostly not in fact AI) tools to create images and copy and sounds, tools which are increasingly appearing in versions which can be made us of by normies like us (albeit in slightly janky fashion); the past couple of months have seen a slightly nervous response to that, as people start to rightly question at what point we’re going to stop being able to tell when something’s been algogenerated or not. There have been a number of experimental tools designed to help determine whether an image is a product of a GAN, say, or whether a face filter’s been applied to an image, but this is the first I’ve seen that seeks to analyse text to determine the likelihood that it’s been spaffed out by a GPT-2 or similar. Plug in any text you like and the programme will analyse it to and tell you to what extent each word in the text was likely to be there, based on what the GPT-2 model was likely to predict. Which, again, is a horrible description, sorry – basically if all the words appear in a highly probable order, it’s more likely that the text was machine generated; humans are less predictable, is the upshot. Only a proof-of-concept, and as soon as the machines get better this stuff’s going to become impossible, but, well, have a play!
• Chalmers: A fascinating project, Chalmers is a chatbot designed by the city of Toronto to be an automated source of assistance for the homeless – users visit the site and are presented with a simple conversational interface which will let them find details of the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, medical centre, etc, as well as helping direct them to on- and offline mental health services and other support networks. This is SUCH a smart idea – obviously there are questions around accessibility, and how the target audience for the service can be made aware of it, and how to keep the information current and live, but in principle it’s a useful tool which offers practical support at low cost. There’s definitely a model here to be built on.
• Where You At?: This bills itself as ‘an event app for Snapchat’, and I think is effectively a third-party plugin-type app which allows you to create events and manage guestlists within Snap. Which, obviously, sounds like a terrifying recipe for the sort of parties made infamous in the early teens, when some kid would post an innocent houseparty invitation on Facebook only to find an entire community of meth addicts having complicatedly-lubey congress in the burnt-out ruins of their family home a few short days later. Which gives me an excuse to link to this, which is still one of the greatest TV interviews I have ever seen. Genuinely quite curious to know what Corey’s up to these days, should anyone fancy a bit of light detective work.
• Liquid: A lovely little bit of coding, this, offering you a fancy liquid simulation in-browser, which you can make move simply by waggling your phone. This used to be the sort of thing you had to download an actual app to experience; now it’s a few lines of code to run it in-browser (ok, fine, possibly more than ‘a few lines’, but you get the point) – at this rate we’ll all be able to play Playstation through Chrome in approximately three years, at which point noone will ever get anything done again and we’ll all basically just give up as a species and Wall-E ourselves into oblivion. Probably.
• A Witness Tree: On the one hand, this is a really smart little project in which a tree in Harvard forest in the US has been hooked up to a bunch of sensors and given the ability to automatically Tweet data about climate readings to the world, the idea to better communicate and personalise the very real effect of climate change on living organisms experiencing its effects in realtime; on the other, this is a tree basically live-tweeting its slow demise, which is quite deeply horrible if you think about it too hard. So, er, don’t!
• The iPhone Photographer of the Year Award 2019: Given the fact that I think it’s widely accepted that iPhones have long been surpassed in terms of camera quality by a bunch of other brands, it seems quaint that its the only brand that has its own dedicated photo contest (or at least that it’s the only brand that has a photo contest anyone’s heard of). That said, given the insane extent to which the current generation of phones tweak and manipulate every single image they shoot, the idea of having photography competitions at all seems slightly redundant; we should just let the image enhancing software models duke it out between them. Anyway, this is this year’s crop of excellent iPhone pics; regardless of whatever happens in post, the framing and composition in most of these is as stunning as you’d hope.
• Holoscape: This is a Twitter thread of demo footage of a game that doesn’t exist yet, but it’s worth checking out as a window into a potential future in which we’re all playing persistent, shared-reality AR shooters on our phones. Holoscape is a work-in-progress AR game, in which users can play in teams (MMO-style, ish), do quests, etc, all in a shared AR world in which an individual player’s actions can and do effect other players’ experiences. Which is a big deal – current AR games like Pokemon Go or the Potter one that weirdly noone seems to be playing work on a player-by-player basis, with everyone having their own, separate gameplay experience rather than sharing a gameworld, but this (and the eventual full version of Minecraft AR) is far more cooperative and collaborative and, as a result, potentially interesting.
• The Guardian Digital Design Guide: A beautifully-designed design guide, from the Guardian. This is clean and beautifully-presented and clearly laid-out and generally does a superb job of laying out the design principles that underpin the Guardian website, and is basically an object-lesson in clear communication of visual principles.
• Photorealistic Minecraft Textures: Oh WOW. You think you know Minecraft, right, all blocky textures and janky sprites and really impressive constructions, fine, if you view them in tilt-shift, but basically a kid’s sandbox? Well THINK AGAIN. This is amazing – a texture set designed by a pretty prolific modder which turns the previously childlike visuals of Minecraft into the sort of thing you see in the pages of terrifying ‘My Alpine retreat’-type design hagiographies in *Wallpaper or similar magazines. You can use this to create the most INCREDIBLE interiors, and if someone doesn’t start using this as an actual, honest-to-goodness shortcut for 3d architectural renders I’d be amazed. Aside from anything else, this now affords a really cheap and relatively easy way of creating hugely shiny interiors – pay a decent Minecraft builder, apply this texture and BANG, no need for hours of tedious 3d CAD-type work. Honestly, you could do LOADS of interesting stuff with this with a bit of time and imagination.
• Tera: I think I featured the NASA project that this is born out of in here last year – in any case, Tera is a project currently being crowdfunded on Indiegogo which is seeking funds to build a proof-of-concept eco-structure outside NYC – “Nestled in the woods of Upstate New York with sweeping views of the Hudson River, TERA is a high-tech, luxe, green eco-home that’s unlike any other on this planet – available on a nightly basis for anyone wanting a glimpse into the future of sustainable life on and beyond our planet. Developed from AI SpaceFactory’s NASA-award-winning Mars habitat MARSHA, it’s created with space-grade technologies and materials that were developed for long-term sustainable missions on Mars.” Basically this is going to be a super-trendy Airbnb, but the potential upside is that one can imagine a theoretical future where the learnings from projects like this are applied to mass construction in the future to minimise environmental impact, etc. Although we’ll almost certainly be past the point of no return by the time that happens, so, frankly, who cares? Christ, that was upsettingly nihilistic, sorry – it’s 848am and I am having something of a slump. I’ll try and pull out of it, maybe some toast will help.
• How People Around the World are Beating Summer: Ah, this’ll do the trick – a lovely collection of photographs of people around the world cooling down by whatever means necessary. Genuinely cheering, although it does rather point out that Summer appears to have decided to stop early here in London.
• Sculpt: I am sure you can probably do loads of really cool stuff with this webtoy by Stephane Ginier, but all I really care about is the fact that it gives you a spherical ball of flesh-coloured digital putty to play with and that, with a bit of time and effort and, fine, a bit of skill, you can create some genuinely horrific-looking little bald faces, not unlike those weird balls-with-faces toys that were popular for a while in the 80s/90s. You know, what were they called….Madballs! Jesus, they still exist? Anyway, you can make hideous faces in 3d, what more do you need to know?

By Nvard Yerkanian

NEXT, SOME PROPER TECHNO WITH AN HOUR’S MIX BY EXi!:

THE SECTION WHICH PRESUMES THAT NOW THAT SAUDI IS LETTING WOMEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY UNACCOMPANIED WE’RE GOING TO JUST FORGET ABOUT KHASHOGGI AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF, PT.2:

• Dog Photographer of the Year 2019: OH LOOK AT ALL THESE LOVELY ROFFS! Lots of lovely photos of lots of lovely dogs, all ratified as being lovely by the Kennel Club, no less! Obviously these are great photos of beautiful animals, but I do sort of feel honour-bound to point out that professional dog breeding as ratified by the self-same Kennel Club is a sort of horrorshow of unpleasant breeding practices and genetic lines inbred to a point of near-handicap. God, what a miserable, joyless funsponge I can be. ENJOY THE ROFFS!
• Spoton: Like Uber, but for pets! Is a pitch that I can’t imagine ever working, ever, and yet here we are – Spoton is, seemingly, exactly that, offering a specific car service which caters exclusively for people who want to travel with their animal companions. It’s only available in New York, and to be honest I can’t quite see it scaling; also, do Uber drivers get p1ssy about having animals in their cars? I have taken a very sick cat to the vet in an Uber and the lovely driver did a proper Steve McQueen to get us there before the poor thing died, so I’m slightly skeptical as to the need for this.
• Enfont Terrible: This is a truly appalling pun, but it’s also a very cool font toy indeed so I’ll let them off. The site lets you mess with any font you like to create your very own weird, stretched, compressed, glitched out version; you can drop in a font file to start playing, and the software allows for a pretty spectacular range of effects to be applied to create something truly unique. If you’ve ever wanted a font of your very own – I was once promised one, called ‘Muir’, by Lucy Brown; Lucy, if you’re reading this, I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN – then this isn’t a bad place to make one. It will be a weird, hideous mess, fine, but it will be YOUR weird, hideous mess.
• If This Is A Man: This is a couple of years old now, but it’s no less wonderful for it. This is the reading of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is A Man’ which took place at London’s Southbank Centre in 2017, recorded for posterity and presented as a series of recordings on Soundcloud. The narration is shared between various actors and notable figures from journalism and the press, alongside people with an historical connection to the work, and it’s done beautifully; the music which occasionally accompanies the prose is wonderfully complementary. If you’re not familiar with the book, this is your chance to rectify that – this is one of the greatest things ever written about the Holocaust, and the human capacity for endurance and forgiveness, and it is utterly, utterly brilliant (but you will cry like a child at various points throughout, be warned).
• Tuigram: A Spanish app whose sole purpose is seemingly to allow you to Instagram your Tweets (a sentence which I now want to go back in time and show to someone from 2003 to see what they make of it). I have no idea why you would want to do that, but if you do then this could be the best thing in Curios this week (it is not, how DARE you).
• Tidy Elections: Useful for political researchers and students of psephology, or anyone who wants some electoral datasets to play about with, Tidy Elections offers simple, clear electoral maps for unfashionable elections, created as a response to the fact that it’s often really hard to find clean datasets for less-reported-on nations. You want a clear breakdown of how the 2018 Timorese elections played out? You got it!
• Downie: ‘Download this video off YouTube’ services are ten-a-penny, fine, but Downie is seemingly a one-size-fits-all service which will let you rip any video from any platform with ease. It’s desktop only, and it’s paid-for, but if you somehow need to rip video from all over the web with ease and impunity then a) I posit you’re doing something borderline-nefarious; and b) this will help.
• Imagefinder: 200,000+ royalty-free stock images available to search and download. One to add to the list of ‘places I go when I have to find images for another fcuking pointless presentation and I have to pretend to care about copyright’.
• ORB: Or, the Open Reduction Blocks Project, which is taking the redacted elements of the Mueller report and turning them into individual artifacts – look! “What we did is extract all of the large black blocks in the Mueller Report as individual works of art. These individual works are called ORBs (Open Redaction Blocks). The mission of the ORB Project is to provide an open set of data and visual assets to allow artists and designers easy access to ORBs for use in their creative works. All ORB assets and data are released under a Creative Commons license, and are available for free to the public at “http://orb-project.us” and on Github. On this site you can view and download individual blocks from the gallery. We will also highlight creative projects using the blocks, as they appear.” Which is sort-of silly, but I do like the concept quite a lot, not least in terms of the artists’ chutzpah here.
• Unconsenting Media: A database allowing users to search for sexual violence in film and TV, so as to be able to check in advance whether something is going to contain specific scenes or themes that they or others will find distressing. It’s astonishing that 53% of all the TV shows currently in the database mention sexual assault or rape – is it really that essential a plot device?
• Photos of Old Cinemas: LOTS of photos of old cinemas! This is a fantastic collection, collected by location in the main, which lets you go back to an imagined golden age of the silver screen, when going to the pictures was an event and the architecture and exteriors reflected that. So much excellent design from the 50s and 60s in here, and so many future Wetherspoons.
• The Open Syllabus Visualisation: “This visualization shows the 164,720 most frequently-assigned texts in the Open Syllabus corpus, a database of 6,059,459 college course syllabi…By analyzing this across millions of classes, we can start to get a bird’s-eye view of the relationships among books, articles, and disciplines that emerges from the collective process of teaching and learning encoded by the syllabi.” I have no real idea what any of you might want to do with this, but it’s potentially interesting in terms of getting an idea of dominating themes or ideologies in contemporary academia, maybe.
• Every Windows 3.1 Theme: Are YOU nostalgic for old operating systems of yore? Why? They were awful, and however much you might complain about Windows Vista or whichever version is your personal, particular bete noir, you also know in your heart of hearts that it’s a million times better than it was attempting to navigate a GUI in the 80s or 90s. Still, you want a time capsule to the days of floppies and INCREDIBLY LOUD AND CRUNCHY HARD DRIVES then this is that time capsule.
• Soviet Photography: An incredible archive of the official photography magazine of the Soviet nation, starting in 1926 and going all the way to the mid-90s; this charts the development of a national/political photographic aesthetic, as well as shifts in camera technology, and is a total timesink for anyone interested either in the history of the Soviet Union or photography more generally.
• Scanimate: “Scanimate is an analog computer system that was built by the Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado in the late sixites and early seventies. In all only eight machines were ever produced.” It was used to make early-era CGI-type graphics for film and TV, and this is one man’s labour-of-love website to preserve the memory of the style and aesthetic of that era. If you’re in any way interested in 80s-style retro CG and that sort of general look, there will be a LOT to love on this site.
• Gotham Shanghai: ‘Gotham’ is, I concede, a pretty fcuking tedious and played-out aesthetic – yes, yes, we GET IT, Batman, you are MOODY and CONFLICTED and it is ALWAYS GREY AND RAINING – but this set of photos by Amey Khan, applying that exact sort of gunmetal aesthetic to the generally neon shine of Shanghai exhibits some quite gorgeous contrasts and is generally better than you’d expect.
• Buttsss: A brilliant and incredibly necessary collection of animated gifs of cartoon bums. Bums with eyes, with wings, with lasers emerging from the cheeks, bums with attitude, with sass, callipgyian bums, bums with barely a gradient – ALL OF THE BUMS, basically. If you can look at this without smiling and feeling a little bit happier about the world then you’re probably irreparably damaged by modernity and ought to consider maybe stepping away from the 21st century for a while. Please feel free to @ me on Twitter with your favourite bum, should you so desire (cartoon ones only, though, this isn’t some sort of thinly-disguised thirsty bongo-solicitation).
• The Opening Day of Disneyland: Happy faces! Retro vibes! The most genuinely horrifying Mickey and Minnie Mouse costumes you will ever have seen in your life! No, really, click the link and look at the second photo and wonder what the everliving fcuk Walt thought he was doing with those. Nightmares for days, I tell you.
• Stop Alien Abductions: Thanks SO MUCH Dan for sending me this – you will thank Dan too, once you’ve dived headlong into the exciting world of preventing alien abductions. This is SUCH a good site – incredible old-school design despite still being very much active (there are references to 2019 on there – can someone PLEASE tell this person about WordPress themes?), and a proper, actual, literal, tinfoil hat conspiracy. Michael Menkin is concerned that alien abductions are causing autism in children, and to guard against that maintains this site offering his skills as a constructor of anti-abduction helmets and baseball caps, specially designed and custom-constructed to Menkin’s own design to prevent mind control and interference by said alien visitors (you can find out more on the sister site Aliens & Children, fyi). This is…well, it’s exactly as you’d expect, and all the better for it, and I thank Mr Menkin for his tireless investigation into the root causes of autism. If nothing else, PLEASE can you start spamming this site in the comments of every single fcuking pr1ck on Facebook still banging the autism/MMR drum? I love the idea of their indignation as they insist that no, actually, this particular brand of ascientific mental is just TOO MUCH, whereas theirs is absolutely fine.
• Jace, The Ingham Family Reborn: Finally this week, what might be the apogee/nadir of YouTuber/Influencer grifting. You thought Belle Delphine’s bathwater the other week was a milestone? This is better (worse). The Inghams are apparently a YouTuber family, who recently-ish gave birth to a new addition which they chose to inexplicably name ‘Jace’ (I really, really hope it’s a tribute to this – by the way, WHAT a theme tune that was) – they’ve partnered with a maker of ‘reborns’ (those intensely creepy, ultra-realistic models of small children often purchased by people who’ve suffered miscarriages or early-infant death) to offer a limited-edition run of dolls of their son to whoever wants to pay £300 for one. WHAT?!?! WHAT THE FCUK?!?!? WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTS TO BUY A DOLL IN THE LIKENESS OF A NEWBORN CHILD BELONGING TO A BUNCH OF FCUKING STRANGERS OFF YOUTUBE? WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH SUCH A THING!?!? HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN IT?!?!?! “Evening Karen” “Evening Susan” “What’s that, Karen?” “Oh, it’s just a doll I bought off the internet – did you know that that infant child is an exact replica of that belonging to a moderately-successful family of YouTubers called the Inghams?” “Really? How much did that set you back then, Karen?” “A very reasonable £344, Susan, and I got all the accessories too, and a chance to meet the Ingham family at a meet and greet picnic at which I will present them with a copy of their own child to gawp at in some sort of in-no-way-mad form of worship” “Sounds reasonable, Karen. Fancy buying these magic beans?” Everything is mad and everyone is an idiot, except for us (and I have my doubts about you tbh).

By Steve ESPO Powers

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT ENJOY SOME DREAMY BALEARIC HOUSE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Culinary Canvas: Just the one Tumblr this week, but at least it is in fact actually a Tumblr. Culinary Canvas is a website presenting the creative food photography of Lauren Purnell, who I think is based in the UK. If you ever need a shoot in which a bunch of food is made to look like, I don’t know, a messy pileup on the M6, Lauren may well be the person for YOU.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Sick Sad Girlz Club: Pulled from the longread on chronic Lyme down *there*, this is an interesting Insta feed – it’s meant to offer a supportive position to women suffering with their bodies, whether with chronic illness or temporary pains, and it offers a pleasing antidote to the polished instaperfection of so much of your TL.
• The Pink Lemonade: A VERY well-curated feed of feminist artstuffs.
• Hayley Welch: Hayley Welch makes murals, amongst other things. Her feed is full of excellent work – the slightly sad bee almost broke me just now, though it could also be the very sad interview about Lyra Mckee which is currently on Woman’s Hour.
• Top Of Water Tower: Photographs of the tops of water towers in Japan. No, I know, but you’re wrong.
• Stef Dies: Last in this week’s selection of Instas, Stef Dies is a project in which the artist, presumably Stef, photographs herself looking dead in various places, in a play on the standard selfie pose. I love this SO MUCH.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Fact Checking: This is Full Fact’s (the UK’s independent fact checking body) initial report into Facebook’s fact checking processes – it’s interesting to read as an assessment of the difficulty inherent in implementing fact checking solutions at scale, an acknowledgement of the work Facebook is currently undertaking (which it’s fair to credit Facebook for; Full Fact broadly applauds them for their efforts, though with the obvious caveat that it’s still not enough), and, finally, as a sober corrective to the general Zuckerbergian ‘don’t worry! We’re building systems to automate all this stuff!’ rhetoric. The most important line in here to my mind is the one where Full Fact quite plainly state that they have seen no evidence at all to suggest that tech like this is anywhere near existing, and that the problem it is trying to solve might well be beyond the ken of existing processes and models. Techological solutionism as a flawed ideology? WHODATHUNKIT!
• Johnson as PR Offensive: I’ve got pretty serious Johnson fatigue at the moment (please, no sniggering), as I imagine do you all, but this piece is worth reading if you can stomach it; it’s a good portrait of the man as an exercise in PR, and contains several good observations about how and why that works, and why it’s perhaps a touch on the troubling side that MAINTAINING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE is now basically a sort of national-level diktat.
• Whither Filter Bubbles: Jeff Jarvis is a divisive figure, but this piece, in which he questions the assumption that we all exist in filter bubbles of our own making and it’s this that is contributing the the fractured, fractious nature of public discourse and the fact that everything is a MESS, is an interesting read. It’s less about filter bubbles per se, and more about the media’s tendency to pick a term or trope and uncritically run with it; see also ‘surveillance capitalism’, which Jarvis accurately points out is an unhelpful term in many respects, devaluing to an extent the very real and actual surveillance being undertaken by actual governments by equating it to the way advertisers use cookies. Contrarian, but smartly so.
• Chinese Business Models: VC-penned piece about how businesses in China are developing innovative business models online faster than you can say “wow, we lost the battle for the future before it even started, didn’t we?” Hugely interesting, I promise, even if, like me, you have very little interest in the business of business.
• Neom May Be Our Future: Do you remember Neom? Of course you do! Neom is Saudi Arabia’s planned ULTRACITY OF THE FUTURE: I featured it in October 2017, and described it thusly: “HOW FCUKING WEIRDLY SCARY IS THAT? Read the breathlessly-optimistic future utopian prose! See the photos of the in-no-way-repressed women jogging in croptops! It’s all going to be great! Then think a little bit longer, and consider that if you were Saudi and you were seeking international investment for your proposed future-leading hub city-state, you’d probably dial down the woman-suppressing rhetoric, at least til the first few rounds were closed. Then think quite how much this website looks like the opening 15 minutes of every single dystopian scifi you’ve ever seen, the bit before you realise that there is a HEART OF DARKNESS beating beneath the shiny metallic skin.” Anyway, this piece looks at the ridiculousness of the whole concept – vapourware for the plutocratically rich, kept aloft by puffs of hot air emanating from the mouths of luxuriantly-remunerated management consultants. Absolute madness, and still incredibly sinister.
• Famous Birthdays: One of a couple of articles this week that made me feel incredibly old, this piece profiles the database of famouses that is the website Famous Birthdays, that has seemingly by accident become an absolute magnet for YouTube and TikTok fandoms who congregate on the site to discuss their favourite streamers and ‘creators’ (God forgive me); this is sort of arcane and baffling, but also a great tip in terms of finding new influencers to work with (please stop working with these people, it’s HORRIBLE).
• How GenZ and Millennials Are Different: If you’re a strategyplannerinsightmonkey then this is a VERY useful read indeed, pointing out all of the behavioural and attitudinal ways in which GenZ differ from the now ANCIENT millennial demographic. The ‘why’ here is because apparently GenXers like me, who are currently raising GenZers, have markedly different value systems and parenting styles vs the boomers who raised millennials; whether you buy that or not, or indeed whether you believe anything at all this article says, it presents an awful lot of DATA that you can interpret to make whatever point you want – it doesn’t matter, the tactic is almost certainly going to be ‘co-create with the streaming community!’ whatever fcuking way you frame it.
• Where Everyone Is An Influencer: A slightly dizzying pen portrait of thys year’s InstaBeach event, at which a bunch of internet-famous children get invited by Instagram to hang out at a beach party and, I don’t know, film each other getting high on cola and fingering or something. There’s something quite creepy about all of this – not least the shot about halfway down which shows a slightly fat, middle-aged photographer snapping the beautiful young things in the party pen and looks a touch on the predatory side.
• Jojo Siwa is the Master of the Universe: This is the second ‘wow, so OLD’ article this week – before reading this, I had no idea at all who Jojo Siwa was; now I am slightly in awe of her terrifyingly perky song-and-dance routines, and the military-industriual entertainment complex that has seemingly sprung up to keep this tween at the peak of the pre-teen music business. This doesn’t seem like it can be doing the kid any good, does it?
• VSCO Girls: Oh, I was wrong, there are THREE pieces that made me feel old this week. This is about ‘VSCO Girls’, a term apparently catching on on social media to connote a particular sort of slightly-basic-but-pretty-WASP-type, based on their stereotypical use of the VSCO photoediting app. There’s nothing in here that’s not been a facet of teen life since the 50s – the cliques, the status anxiety, the slang, the bullying – but it’s the language and slightly weird air of self-awareness that pervades this that made it feel totally alien to me. Which, frankly, is good, as I am a nearly-40-year-old man and if it didn’t feel alien there are probably some problems with my lifestyle.
• Drinkable Weed: I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I quite like weed, but even as a habitual user I find the idea of consuming it in drink form a pretty ridiculous one. Still, there are lots of companies in the middle of the North American weed Wild West who are banking on the fact that I’m an idiot and in fact what people really, really want to do is get boxed off their tits on THC-infused mineral water – this piece is a slightly Gonzo-ish look at a few of the players. It does, I have to say, sound like the weed industry is probably quite a lot of fun at the moment (and a massive, massive racket).
• The Man Who Will Save The Grocery Store: This is an absolutely fascinating piece about the future of food retail, from the point of view of the retail and food consultants who are trying to prevent Amazon from consigning yet another bricks-and-mortar business to the past. Honestly, even if you don’t think you’re interested in selling groceries, or how design influences purchase decisions, or what the motivating factors are on consumption habits in 2019, you will find this compelling; oh, and, again, if you’re a plannerstrategyinsightmonkey this is very much worth reading.
• One Night Wonder: Writing a musical is HARD (I say that as someone who tried – we got all the songs, but trying to shoehorn them into a plot proved beyond us (me, mainly). I still maintain that ‘Sex in the Office’ was a stone-cold classic, though, and deserves to find an audience one day); imagine doing it, getting a slot on Broadway…and then having it shut down after only one performance after a critical mauling. This is about what that feels like (it feels horrible) – it’s a lot more uplifting than you’d think, honest.
• A Pre-schooler’s Guide To Managing Your Assistant: From McSweeney’s, this is very, very funny – although I say that as a childless man. Your reaction as a parent may be more of a knowing, slightly-pained chuckle.
• The Duct Tape Typographer: Short profile of Shuetsu Sato, a 65 year old employee of the Tokyo underground who has achieved a degree of fame and affection as a result of his painstakingly-cut, beautifully-designed public information notices on the network, which he makes using duct tape and a stanley knife. This is glorious, and there’s something so peculiarly Japanese about this honing of a single action to near-perfect status.
• A Brief, Awful History of the Lobotomy: Just be aware, if you’ve ever had a member of your family treated by lobotomy and don’t quite know exactly what it entails, maybe skip this one. Otherwise this is a brutal and quite horrifying look back at the early days of brain surgery and experimentation, when it was perfectly acceptable to take a bunch of patients from the local asylum and go rootling around their frontal lobes with a pointy bit of steel just to see what would happen. It’s easy to forget this – that,whilst we are obviously all standing on the shoulders of giants of science and research, whose methodological approach to enquiry enabled some of the greatest advances known to humanity, we’re also standing on the shoulders of the sort of people who’d think nothing of removing large chunks of someone’s cerebellum because, well, they were there and why not?
• Love, Peace and Taco Grease: Or, ‘How I Left My Abusive Husband and Found Guy Fieri’. Fieri, in case you forget, is the much-maligned TV chef and restaurant owner whose food is all about BIG FLAVOURS and who constantly seems to be shouting at a burger. This isn’t really about him at all; it’s instead a very, very good personal essay about escaping from an abusive marriage and finding freedom in unexpected places.
• When Lyme Disease Becomes An Identity: Coincidentally, in a week in which Lyme disease was in the UK news I also came across this piece, which looks at the strange and slightly mad world of ‘Chronic Lyme’, a variant on standard Lyme disease which is marked out by the fact that you can’t define its effects or its symptoms and people get VERY VERY VERY obsessed with the fact that they have it. I am fascinated by stuff like this – it’s adjacent to the other Very Online phenomenon of people who are convinced that they have tiny, itchy filaments embedded all over their skin – and the associated industries of massively awful grifters than inevitably spring up around them. Take a look at some of the numbers being quoted for treatments in the piece; insane.
• Love Island: The Experience: Amelia Tate goes to the Love Island Experience in Brighton, where people paid actual cashmoney to hang out on a shonkily-built replica of the show’s set, take photos with ex cast members and, er, watch the show on a big screen. You want a snapshot of the provincial youth of Britain in Summer 2019? You could do worse than this (this is said with much less snobbery than it sounds, promise).
• Subways Are For Sleeping: A wonderful piece from the archives of Harper’s Magazine, this is a 1956 profile of one Henry Shelby, an ordinary New Yorker who just so happens to be homeless. It takes you through Shelby’s routines – where he eats, where he sleeps, how he finds work and money – and as it does so paints a picture of a time so alien to now it almost feels like centuries ago, one in which it was perfectly reasonable for someone to be homeless and find work, and where Shelby’s status seems to confer him a sort of freedom rather than the abject misery he’d experience in 2019. Really, really interesting, and surprisingly cheering – you’ll leave it wishing Shelby well, and possibly wanting to go for a very long walk.
• The Hell Marathon: If the 20th century’s best sportswriting was largely considered to be that about boxing (pace DFW and tennis), I’d posit that the best stuff I’ve read over the past 20 years has been about running, and in particular distance/endurance events. This is another brilliant piece, focusing on the Hell Ultramarathon: “The Hell Ultra, an annual race in which contestants run nearly the entire length of the [Leh-Manali] highway, beginning in Manali and ending atop the Shanti Stupa—a Buddhist monument—in Leh. The 298-mile trip takes runners through five different mountain passes that reach up to 17,500 feet, equivalent to the higher of the two main Mt. Everest base camps. The first pass, known as Rohtang in the local language, translates to “pile of corpses” because of what it can do to travelers who attempt to cross it at the wrong time of year.” Quite, quite wonderful.
• The Chelsea Affect: Another archive piece, this is Arthur Miller, post-Monroe, reflecting on his sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There’s a lot of era-appropriate namedropping, as you’d expect, which is occasionally confusing unless you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the artistic demi-monde of the 60s, but it’s a charming piece, Miller’s obviously a brilliant writer, and in the form of landlord Mr. Bard, one of the best real life characters I’ve read in a while.
• Longshore Drift: This is SUCH good writing – short fiction by Julia Armfield, about teenage female friendship and feeling out of place and dislocated and uncertain about you and the friend you cling to. I would read an infinity of this; the characters and the place and the prose are all perfect.
• On Writing: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece on writing by poet, copywriter and Friend of Curios Rishi Dastidar. Rishi’s writing makes me angry it’s so good – every line of this short piece is perfect, and I hate him for it.

By Sophie Gabrielle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is from a few years back, but editor Paul found it courtesy of Rupert Goodwins on Twitter; it’s 2001 redone as though it were a Picasso painting, courtesy of style transfer software, and it looks WONDERFUL. Take any frame of this, blow it up and whack it on a wall, it would look great:

2) This is VERY trippy. A video for Bunny’s Dream by Matthew Dear, created entirely through VR puppetry software, in which the titular bunny is chased through a fantastical landscape by…er…a weird VR goose-type-thing? Anyway, it’s very hallucinatory, but it gives an idea of how much you can do with puppetry in a virtual space:

3) Previous Curios favourites, Korean pop-punkers Drinking Boys and Girls Choir, are back with their latest single called ‘Big Nine LET’S GO’ and it is typically excellent. Try not feeling a bit perky after you listen to this:

4) This band is called Snarls, and if I were ever asked ‘what do archetypal art students look like in 2019, Matt?’ I would point the questioner at this video (I mean, LOOK AT THE DRUMMER! He may as well have St Martin’s written through him like a stick of rock!). The song’s called ‘Walk in the Woods’, and it’s really very good in a hugely early-90s sort of way:

5) UK GRIME CORNER! This is ‘Pass The Mic’ by The Heavytrackerz and it’s a multi-MC extravaganza (and Manga, as usual, wins hands-down). The beat here is superb, btw:

6) This is by Emma DJ. It is called ‘Slug’. It is…challenging, and the video is horrible – I mean genuinely unsettling CGI. I would tell you to enjoy it, but I’m not 100% certain it’s possible to do so:

7) This is a quite astonishing piece of music and I absolutely adore it. It is NOISY and SCREECHY and INDUSTRIAL and all-told quite frightening, but it’s also an absolute banger, the video is wonderfully unpleasant, and if you mixed this with some drill’n’bass I think you would have a classic for the ages. Honestly, this may well be my song of the year to date. It’s called ‘Love Is A Parasite’ and it’s by Blanck Mass:

8) This is called ‘Oligarchs’, and it’s one of the most impressive pieces of concept-CG I’ve seen in an age. Slight shame that so many of the models are of the generically-pretty anime girl type, but the overall design and aesthetic here is really strong:

9) Last up this week, this is 100 Gecs. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them – I only discovered them this week, and they immediately catapulted to the top of my list of ‘music that if I had children I bet that they would insist on playing really loud to upset me’. This is utterly baffling, very NOW and sort-of brilliant – see what you think. This is called ‘800db cloud’, and you just try making sense of it OH AND LOOK AT THAT WE’RE AT THE END BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND I WILL SEE YOU IN SEVEN DAYS TAKE CARE AND BE KIND TO EACH OTHER AND BE KIND TO YOURSELVES AND BE KIND TO ANIMALS AND BE KIND TO STRANGERS AND LET’S ALL TRY AND JUST HAVE A GOOD OLD TIME OF IT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY BYE TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!!:

Well, Donald might be a racist, but it looks like we’re getting one of our own in next week so, well, let’s not get too smug about how we’re ‘better than all that’. In less than seven days, barring some sort of miracle, we’ll finally find out what the protocol is about moving one’s mistress into No.10. GREAT!

Let’s not think about that, though. Let’s not think about the rain either. Let’s instead focus on THE MAGICAL AND EXCITING WORLD OF THE INTERNET – the good bits, the fun bits, not the horrible bits with the nazis in. Lie back (don’t lie back, this is the vaguely metaphorical bit of the intro rather than a set of explicit instructions ffs!), relax and let the following 8,000-odd words soothe and destress you, like one of those weird purple massager things that looks worryingly like a dildo but which your mum assures you really isn’t – yes, once again it’s THAT TIME (Friday! Lunchtime!) and THAT PLACE (your inbox! or the Imperica website) and that means WEB CURIOS! Try not to be too upset. 

By Nick Runge

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS 80s-TINGED BEAUTY FROM RADIO GRINGO!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS FOUND IT A *BIT* DARKLY FUNNY WATCHING PEOPLE GET FROTHY-MOUTHED ABOUT ‘THE DEATH OF THE INFLUENCER ECONOMY’ BEING ENGENDERED BY INSTAGRAM TESTING THE DEATH OF THE ‘LIKE’:

• Facebook Workplace Getting More Expensive: I’ve had cause to use Workspace again recently after quite a long hiatus and, well, it’s quite underwhelming, isn’t it? Anyway, my opinion doesn’t matter at all – what DOES matter is that FB is hiking the price of its workplace product by $1 per user for its professional license, and introducing a new PREMIUM pricing bracket for people who, I don’t know, don’t feel like Mark Zuckerberg is getting richer fast enough. It’s not an interesting announcement, fine, but it’s another slow news week and I’m clutching at straws somewhat here so bear with me and we can get through this difficult first section together (or, if you’re unaccountably reading this despite not having any actual professional need to, STOP IT! This is only for the advermarketingprdrones! Save yourself!).
• Facebook Christmas Insights: Whilst for the majority of us Christmas is still a faintly illusory mirage on the horizon, there are a few of you who I know for a fact have this month had to engage in the slightly perverse spectacle of showing off this year’s seasonal wares to a bemused (but mince pie-hungry) press-pack. Yes, it’s CHRISTMAS IN JULY time, when Amazon, M+S and the rest show off the stuff that we’re all going to be fighting over in the aisles come December – or, in Facebook’s case, the time when they release a new tool allowing you to access a bunch of consumer data about consumer behaviour at that most MAGICAL time of year! This is, I have to grudgingly admit, reasonably useful – you can get a whole bunch of country-specific data about how people decide what overpriced, overmarketed crap to buy each year to INFORM YOUR STRATEGIES (or, more likely, to put into a largely-phoned-in presentation explaining why, once again, you’re spending all the budget on FB/Insta ad inventory). IT’S ONLY 5 MONTHS A WAY FFS! START SELLING! Oh, and there’s a whole PDF guide to selling more tat to idiots at Christmastime available to read here if you want it – you may be unsurprised to learn that the main takeaway is ‘buy more advertising through the Big Blue Misery Factory’.
• Instagram Testing Killing ‘Likes’: IT’S KILLING THE INFLUENCER ECOSYSTEM! THEY’RE UNDERMINING OUR ABILITY TO MONETISE! No, kids, not it’s not and no they’re not. It’s just a test, in a few countries, and the UK isn’t one of them, and even if they do implement it all it means is that the influencer racket will become marginally less grifty than it is at present, and, honestly, what’s really killing the influencer game is the same sort of preposterous circle-jerky environment that pricked the mummyblogger bubble a decade or so ago, not to mention the fact that you’ve all been gaming the system with bots for years anyway. Ok? OK!
• Twitter Gets Revamped Design: Noone likes it! They’ll all forget about the old design within a week! There’s no practical difference to the product anyway! Onwards!
• Twitter Launches ‘Arthouse’: ‘Arthouse’, contrary to what you might initially infer from the name, isn’t in fact Twitter’s in-house incubator for new and exciting avant-garde cinema; instead, it’s a new offering to help you…MAKE MORE ADS!!!! Yes, that’s right, it’s another ‘agency within a social platform’-type offering, charging eye-watering rates to connect brands with creators and engender EXCITING BRAND-LED COLLABORATIVE CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES! Indefatigable social media enthusiast Matt Navarra (seriously, Matt, how do you maintain your seemingly-ceaseless enthusiasm for this rubbish? Doesn’t your soul ache?) got hold of the rate card for the service, and with a minimum spend on creative and advertising of $100kish, this is very much the sort of thing you probably don’t want to tell your clients about lest they stop wasting their money with you and start wasting it directly with Twitter instead.
• More Global Digital Statistics: We Are Social have dropped their latest kilometric presentation on ALL OF THE WORLD’S SOCIAL MEDIA STATS. Look! Numbers! Data! All the information you should need to be able to persuade your clients that they will DIE if they’re not on A N Other s*c**l m*d** platform (they won’t die; it probably won’t make one iota of difference at all, frankly!)!
• Reddit Metis: This is a genuinely useful little tool which lets you get a summary of any user’s Reddit profile – most engaged-with subs, most common posting topics, etc etc. If you need a free resource to help inform an influencer or seeding campaign on the platform (kill me now) then this is probably really quite helpful; aside from anything else, I very much appreciate the easy-on-the-eye design (small thing, but often tools like this are eye-gougingly ugly).
• Image Resizer: Plug in an image, export it in the perfect dimensions for whichever social platform you choose. This is a GODSEND – honestly, I can’t stress enough how much this is worth bookmarking and keeping close.
• Emoji Vision: You will doubtless have been celebrating World Emoji Day this week – I know, I was excited too! – and will perhaps have been so excited that you missed this rather excellent campaign from the RNIB, which used the day to announce its work to reimagine emoji to be more accessible to the visually impaired. The website outlines the project, shows the design work in progress, and is generally a nice wrapper for a really nice little PR stunt – I was really impressed by this, so GOOD WORK everyone involved in it.
• Twingo: It’s been a while, but I’m delighted to once again feature one of Web Curios’ favourite types of vaguely work-related content – yes, that’s right, it’s another MASSIVELY OVERDESIGNED FRENCH WEBSITE! Once again the digital creative agencies across the Channel have played an absolute blinder in convincing a client that, rather than a standard, if shiny, website to launch a new thing, they instead need a HUGELY INTERACTIVE WEBGL MASTERPIECE (it may not be webGL, but well, I don’t care)! Drive a Twingo! Play a game! Enjoy the 3d rendering! Wonder at what they trousered for this and how many actual visitors this site is likely to have! This is, honestly, great, and more power to everyone involved in it.
• Rules of a Fcukbuddy: Finally in the ‘professional’ section of Curios this week, this is a very antipodean website designed to remind men that it’s important to use protection when having casual sex with multiple partners. The tone of voice here is ACE – I particularly liked the somewhat-cheeky rule ‘Don’t Tell Your Wife’ – and the photography and design are also really cool. You can submit your own ‘rules’ for consideration – I would love to see the unmoderated submissions here.

By Sarah Delaney

NEXT, ENJOY THE LATEST IN YAEJI’S EXCELLENT ‘BEATS IN SPACE’ RADIO SHOWS (HONESTLY, THIS IS SUCH A GREAT MIX!)!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL SOMEWHAT IN DENIAL ABOUT THE FACT THAT BY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK THAT MAN IS LIKELY TO BE PRIME MINISTER, PT.1:

• The 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest: Long-term readers will be aware of the immoderate love I feel for Adam Cadre and his annual exploration of the very worst in short-form novel openings – this is a cousin to the more renowned Bulwer-Lytton contest, which invites submissions for the worst opening line to an unwritten novel, but with the gimmick that submissions must be 200 characters or fewer. As ever, these are GLORIOUS and I don’t want to quote too many because I want you to dive write in and enjoy the mangled prose. Still, here’s my favourite from this year’s selection – you go and find your own: “Tiffany had always dreamed of attending the Gathering, but even as Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J stomped triumphantly onstage, she couldn’t take her eyes off Brian”. Genius.
• AI Portraits: Upload a photo and watch as it’s reimagined by a MACHINE INTELLIGENCE (not, in fact, an intelligence) and recreated in one of a variety of styles. This is very impressive – it’s not a style transfer, which we’ve seen a lot of before; instead the system has been trained on a selection of different artists’ works meaning that it ‘chooses’ what style to ape itself, but then creates its own image from scratch based on its interpretation of what you feed it. Which is a hugely clunky description, sorry, but is the best I can do. Honestly find a decent, well-lit photo of someone’s face and marvel as this site turns it into a passable Caravaggio pastiche – this is hugely impressive.
• The History of Web Design: An excellent site, created as a promo for the coffee-table book of the same name, which takes you back through 30 years of website design trends and offers a nice window into how incredibly shonky everything online was in the early-00s (although, on the plus side, visible area on an average webpage was more than 30% and you didn’t have to accept fcuking cookies all over the fcuking places, so maybe things were better then after all). There’s something pleasingly time-capsuleish about this, and you’ll be reminded of some web hits from yesteryear like The Wilderness Downtown (or at least you will if you’re like me and have spent far too much time over the past 20 years staring at a screen in the hope that it will make you feel marginally better (it won’t)).
• African Storybook: This is such a cool resource – apparently it’s been around for a few years, and it’s nice to see that it’s still active and being updated. “The African Storybook initiative aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Our vision is for all young African children to have enough enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading. On the African Storybook website users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.” SO many different stories and languages here – my only complaint is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of switching the stories into English, meaning I can’t attempt to teach myself Setswane via the medium of kids’ stories.
• Social Platforms as Physical Tech: Oh I love these! Reminiscent (to my mind) of the work of mid/late-90s Designer’s Republic, this is a series of illustrations imagining what the the world’s social networks would look like if they were physical objects; so, Insta as a camera, Twitter as a morse code tapper, etc. SO good – the artist’s name is Sheng Lam, and the link takes you to their portfolio on Artstation – once you scroll past the social media machines, you’ll discover a whole host of other great stuff; the robot whales are a personal favourite of mine. This person is insanely talented (and based in Manchester, apparently, so why not book them?).
• The Nexar Live Map: This is a quite mental vision of the future. Nexar make dashcams and similar sort of tech – this is a map of New York which lets you see recent footage from their kit, creating a sort of semi-realtime videomap of the whole city. Honestly, I can’t quite express how amazing this is – did you ever read The Circle? It’s basically like the endpoint of that novel (well, almost) where everywhere in the world is networked and visible online – you can jump to anywhere (well, almost) in NYC and see footage from a few minutes ago, enabling you to get specific information about traffic, roadworks, etc, in up-to-the-minute fashion. Fine, there might be some privacy concerns – ha! – but the overall effect is dizzyingly future and quite astonishing.
• Fcuk This Pay Me: Kickstarter as art platform! Fcuk This Pay Me is seeking funding for a ‘conceptual art project that makes visible the invisible labour of an artist’s life’. Obviously this is a LOT of high-concept w4nkery, but, equally, I very much enjoy the conceit here – “a real-time conceptual artwork that reveals the practical aspects of life as an artist, including cash flow, performative social obligations, and other emotional and financial labor (both online as well as the physical investment that goes into making work). The purpose of this piece is to pull back the curtain on the gig economy for contract and creative labor, and to raise awareness of contemporary art practices as they relate to expression and survival under capitalism.” Rewards include a livestream of the artist enjoying the utilities your donation has paid for, or “one of six “limited edition” updates which you can frame as a visual piece of art describing [their] adventures of trying to get responses to unpaid invoices”, which gives you a pretty decent idea of the vibe here.
• Video Object Removal: A Github entry, meaning there’s not a lot to do here unless you’re an actual code-wrangler – still, you can see gifs of how the tech works. Which is impressive enough (for me at least – you may have higher standards, but, if you do, what are you doing here?). This is code which lets anyone input video, highlight an object within it, and then have software automatically remove said object from all frames of the footage. Obviously it’s hardly seamless – you can very much see the joins in the outputs – but it’s again interesting less for what it is now than for what it will inevitably eventually become.
• Journey to the Microcosmos: Would you like a brand new YouTube series exploring the exciting world of INCREDIBLY SMOL WATERBORNE ORGANISMS? Would you like to dive deep into the universe of monocellular organisms? YES YOU WOULD! This is unexpectedly fascinating, I promise – I had no idea that tiny little sacs of assorted proteins could be so engaging. Also, if you’ve got a vaguely sciencey kid, this will enthrall them.
• The Incredible Pet Shop Boys Discography Analysis Motherlode: Do you like a particular artist or band? I mean really like, to the point of having gone to see them more than a dozen times in concert, perhaps having named a kid after them, that sort of thing? However much of a fan you are, I can guarantee you that you don’t like them as much as this person likes the Pet Shop Boys – or, if you do, you’re certainly not putting the same amout of effort into demonstrating your affection. This is…amazing; the navigation is a bit iffy, but just click on the ‘Where do you want to go?’ text in the top left and MARVEL at the wealth of insight available in the drop-down. You want analysis and commentary on every single PSB single and album they have EVER released? GREAT! Honestly, this is obsessionally brilliant – Wayne Studer Phd, I salute your indefatigable endeavour here, you are a fabulous madman.
• Climaginaries: I had a drink with a couple of people from Extinction Rebellion this week; man, they know how to put the fear up you. This isn’t anything to do with them, but it is about how we’re screwing the planet in a variety of imaginative, short-sighted ways. This is a project by “a multidisciplinary group of scholars from Lund, Utrecht, Durham and Warwick Universities exploring innovative and creative ways of envisioning how a post-fossil world might look like, and the means through which it can transpire. The project is a response to the fact that the power to enable and govern transition to a post-fossil society not only relies on scientific facts and legislative measures, but also on effectual means to envision post-fossil worlds. By providing new knowledge on how stories of climate futures circulate, translate and resonate, [they] aim to leave participants with a new sense of the features that make climate change matter socially and culturally.” There’s lots of really interesting stuff to read and learn and think about on here, although it’s also obviously hugely disheartening.
• Decapital: Is this a real thing? Let’s presume it is! Decapital is an anonymous (at least to me) fund offering upto $1000 to anyone with an idea – here’s the blurb. “Decapital funds individuals or small group of folks with a track record of making things. Creative and social projects of all kinds are welcome. You don’t need to be a professional activist or have a fine art background to apply. You don’t need 501(c)3 non-profit status or business plan. A track record of successful projects is more important than anything else. You may include links to previous projects in your application.What kinds of projects? Beautiful, creative, and political projects. Decapital funds a wild variety of projects—protest art, DIY engineering, creative campaigns, fringe art, unusual things, participatory events, projects that challenge structures of power. Primarily, we provide funding for projects that are otherwise difficult to fund.” There’s no indication that this is only open to projects in the US, so why not apply if you have an idea? The deadline is Wednesday 24th July, so GET TO IT.
• RedditTube: A site which lets you plug in any subReddit of your choice and which will pull the videos from it and play them in a neverending unbroken sequence. What you choose to use this for is YOUR business and I will not judge you.
• Freemium: Boring-but-useful site, this, collecting a whole host of free-to-use tools for a variety of purposes – from coding to design to project management and beyond. You’ll have heard of lots of these, but equally you’ll probably come across one or two useful things you didn’t know existed. Worth a look if you’re the sort of person who’s always after ways of CRUSHING IT MORE EFFICIENTLY.
• Elvie: Elvie is a company which makes female-centric technology, the idea being that there isn’t enough tech designed with a female-first ethos and that that needs to change. At present it sells two products – a breast pump and a pelvic floor trainer, both of which are beautifully-designed if nothing else (I’m sure they’re both great, but being in possession of neither lactating breasts or a uterus I’m not really in a position to judge) – and I’ll be interested to see what they decide to approach next.
• Perfectly Cut Screams: My friend Nick was opining on Twitter that there were few things he loves more than online videos that cut out JUST as things are getting a bit intense; then he found THIS Twitter account, which exists solely to post that exact genre of content. Truly, the world is a serendipitous wonder at times. These are SO GOOD, although each and every one will leave you hungrily wondering “yes, fine, but what happened next?”. Also, WHAT is the man in the car screaming about? We will never know, and that makes it all the more beautiful.
• The Audubon Photography Awards: The Audobon Society is an organisation that I managed to pass approximately 36 years of my life not knowing about but which now I cannot go a month without hearing about – is this a result of them becoming markedly better at communications, the internet pivoting towards birds, or the simple fact that twitcher-related content tends to find you as you hurtle reluctantly towards middle-age? No idea, obviously, Anyway, this is a collection of photographs from their annual bird photography contest and WOW are these some fine feathered friends – honestly, even if you ordinarily couldn’t give two hoots (b’dum-tish!) about avians, these are some wonderful shots.
• Text Portraits: Grant Custer has, for reasons known only to himself, made this little webtoy which generates a black and white ASCII version of your Twitter avatar using only letters used in your Twitter bio. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT EH?
• Ferly: This is a sex-ed app for women, designed to assist with ‘sexual self-care’ – it self-describes itself as being “your guide to feeling confident, healthy and sexually empowered. Learn the art of sexual self-care, the most pleasurable activity in pursuit of wellness. Unwind with [our] mindful practices, stimulate your brain and body with sensual stories or take a moment to reflect on what great sex means to you.” On the one hand, this is A Good Thing and sexual openness is always to be celebrated; on the other, when did w4nking get so complicated?
• Chestfaces: The best new Twitter account I’ve seen in a while – celebrities with their faces replaced with their chests. Horrifying, compelling, amazing.
• Throwflame: What could be better than a drone? How about a drone with a flamethrower attached to it and which you can now fly around incinerating anything you fancy in the blink of an eye? No, that is obviously significantly worse, and yet that’s exactly what a company called Throwflame has invented – it’s seemingly a real product, though I’m not 100% certain that it’s entirely legal; still, why not order one and find out (please don’t order one)?

By Giuseppe Palmisano

NOW WHY NOT ENJOY SOME BRAND NEW AND YET STILL VERY OLDSCHOOL DNB?!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL SOMEWHAT IN DENIAL ABOUT THE FACT THAT BY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK THAT MAN IS LIKELY TO BE PRIME MINISTER, PT.2:

• Flash Drives for Freedom: A project which seeks to collect unused USB drives from people across the world, wipe them, fill them with anti-Kim Jong Il propaganda and smuggle them into North Korea ‘by a variety of means’ to get them into the hands of people living under the regime (I know that this is very, very childish, but I can’t help think of the gold watch bit in Pulp Fiction here – I KNOW, I KNOW, I’M SORRY). You can mail in USBs for them to wipe and reuse if you like – Christ knows it’s something to do with all the branded corporate ones every office has thousands of.
• Sleeptalk: This is a VERY old site – I think from 2010 – and you’ll need to enable Flash to ‘enjoy’ it, but it’s almost worth the hassle. Sleeptalk is an app which is designed to record any mutterings you make while you kip so you can listen into whatever it is that your id feels the need to express while you’re REM-ing; the website features the ‘best’ of these recordings that anyone at all can listen to. There’s no indication – ok, fine, I’ve not really looked into this that much – that there’s any consent involved here – do the recordings just get automatically uploaded? DO THESE PEOPLE KNOW I’M LISTENING TO THEM? This is very, very odd, and strangely quite creepy; it just feels a bit wrong, if you know what I mean. Special shout out to the Australian woman murmuring ‘little whorebag’ as she slumbers – so SWEET!
• Go To France: Carolyn Boyle is a writer, journalist and Francophile; this is her website, where she shares her tips and recommendations for tourists, covering the length and breadth of the country and covering food, accomodation and the rest. If you’re planning a trip this is a brilliant resource.
• Smoking Chefs: Photographs of workers in London’s Chinatown, smoking between shifts. Simultaneously intimate, voyeuristic, weary, sad and timeless, these are GREAT shots and I really want a plate of dumplings now.
• Livecams: An excellent selection of working webcams from across the US, each featuring LOVELY CRITTERS! You want brown bears? You want puppies? You want eagles and otters and elephants? O MAOW! O ROFF! SO MANY CRITTERS!
• Etymonline: The online etymology dictionary! Want to find the origin and evolution of any word in the English language? No, you probably don’t, but you SHOULD. BE MORE CURIOUS FFS! I mean, if you’re not inspired to go delving after reading the superbly-comprehensive entry for ‘cnut’ then I don’t know what’s wrong with you frankly.
• Tarot-o-Bot: Created by design agency illo, this is a fun, silly, beautifully-designed little webtoy which draws a three-card design tarot on demand, and then interprets it for you – the interpretations are all whimsical predictions about the design industry, and feature things like ‘your creative director will deliver all feedback via the medium of Insta stories’, which will probably appeal more to those of you working in the industry than the rest of you. What? FFS not everything can be universally appealing, wind your neck in.
• Old Bailey Online: Oh me oh my! “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” This is, honestly, remarkable – you can search the entire archive by keyword, meaning you can find records of trials featuring your ancestors, stories of murder and revenge, and a remarkable number of instances of people thieving each others’ chickens. This is basically the greatest collection of historical writing prompts you’ll ever see, and if you want some inspiration for that historical potboiler you’ve always wanted to write then, well, GET ON WITH IT YOU LAZY FCUK.
• The Pigeon Movie Database: A comprehensive resource detailing avian appearances in modern cinema, and generally looking at the world of filmmaking through the eyes of a…er…pigeonphile? This is obviously not really a comprehensive database of pigeons in flims, but it’s still quite funny so I’ll let it off.
• The 2019 Artistic Swimming World Championships: Or at least photographs of the 2019 artistic swimming world championships. This is synchronised swimming meets Cabaret, as far as I can tell, which a startling number of sequins, rictus grins and jazz-hands, and the photos are astonishing – the first one alone feels like it ought to win all sorts of awards, and they don’t let up as you scroll through the selection. SO good.
• Uninteresting Photographs: A Twitter account which offers exactly what its name suggests – a selection of incredibly underwhelming photographs. I sort-of feel this ought to be an Insta feed really – I just checked, it isn’t – but it’s still pretty good. Where do these come from? Who takes them? WHY?
• Storm Area51: You will, if you’re any sort of webmong worth your salt, be aware of the current meme-y plan to storm Area51 (you know, where the US keeps all the SECRET ALIEN GUBBINS that they’re hiding from us all) that’s been gathering pace over the past few weeks – this is the associated Facebook Group, and, whilst this is obviously just a stupid joke that has snowballed, it is simultaneously an excellent window into the general madness and incomprehensibility of online culture here in the year of our lord two kay nineteen. It’s just an astonishing carcrash of irony, stupidity, sarcasm, meme culture and PURE INTERNET, and I love and hate it simultaneously. If you want a brief idea of how incredibly layered and self-referential the world of extremely online has become, take a read of some of this and then imagine trying to explain some of the jokes to someone from just 5 years ago.
• Unicron: I am not, to be clear, the sort of man who spends money on or owns vinyl toy figurines – I don’t judge you if you are (apart from Fat Bob, who I do very much judge), it’s just not my thing. That said, this makes me ALMOST change my mind – toy company Hasbro has one of those LEGO-esque crowdfunding setups, where limited edition or exclusive designs will get made in limited numbers if a set number of enthusiasts commit to shelling out for the product; this is them offering to make UNICRON FROM TRANSFORMERS, if 8000 middle-aged losers shell out $800 each for the privilege. I COULD BE ONE OF THOSE MIDDLE-AGED LOSERS! For those of you whose childhoods were less Transformers-obsessed than mine, Unicron is a big baddie from the giant transforming robots canon, and he turns into a PLANET that EATS OTHER PLANETS and oh God I am basically 9 years old again and I MUST NOT BUY THIS.
• Queer Scifi: A site collecting recommendations of science fiction and fantasy novels featuring queer protagonists; fantasy’s not my genre, but I can imagine this being a useful resource for anyone who likes that sort of thing but is a *bit* bored of Conan-style heteroboning in loincloths.
• NASA Flickr: Thanks to Paddy, whose newsletter I stole this from this week – this is a wonderful collection of photos from NASA on Flickr. People, planets, spacecraft, moonwalks, stars, nebulae…SO MUCH SPACE.
• Ultimate Ungulate: Have you ever spent an afternoon wasting time at work browsing the web (NO OF COURSE YOU HAVEN’T) but been left vaguely dissatisfied because of the lack of high-quality ungulate material available to you? Have you always harboured a secret – or overt; why be ashamed? – desire to know more about hooved mammals and their wants, desires and secrets? Well don’t I have a treat for you! I can’t be mean about this – it’s genuinely informative, well-maintained and the site’s owner, one Brent Huffman, clearly loves his ungulates. It’s just, well, this sort of VERY SPECIFIC, very deep investigation into niche stuff scratches a peculiar itch deep within me and for reasons I don’t quite adequately understand sort-of makes me want to cry. Best not to dwell too much on it, on balance.
• The Trocadero: When I was but a smol child, I would come and visit my dad in London at the weekends and, if I was very lucky, he’d take me to the Trocadero – in the early 90s, it was THE most exciting place in the world, especially if you grew up in Swindon where the acme of underage town centre entertainment was flicking chips at goths and attempting to eat 15 doughnuts in under 10 minutes. It was PACKED with arcade machines and flashing lights and EXCITING SLIGHTLY OLDER KIDS whose acne and slight smell of stale B&H spoke of FREEDOM and EXCITEMENT and THE PROSPECT OF ONE DAY LOSING ONE’S VIRGINITY! This is a wonderful Twitter thread which tells the history of the venue, including all sorts of wonderful, nostalgia-inducing photos. Honestly, this made me SO happy.
• Popup Trombone: Absolutely the best single-webpage gag I’ve seen all week, and a hugely satisfying one to boot.
• Tina Kraus: Tina Kraus makes rather wonderful paper art- this is her portfolio. The animals are just WONDERFUL.
• Terraria: You might not think that you need or want a YouTube channel devoted solely to presenting soothing videos of people putting terrariums together, but you have no idea what you actually want and should listen to me because only I can see the desires that lurk deep in your soul.
• Kibus: Obviously you want the best for your fur baby (sorry) – OBVIOUSLY. You want all the best toys and the treats and suchlike, and if you could afford it you’d probably want some sort of gourmet chef preparing meals on demand, but you can’t quite afford it, much to your shame and chagrin. Still, never mind, Kibus is the next best thing – “with the Kibus device you will be able to offer your pet a natural and healthy food, which is human-grade, minimally processed and completely tasteful. You only need to program the home appliance and fill a tank with water and the other tank with dehydrated pet food and Kibus will make everything else for you! Your pet will enjoy a healthy, natural and just-cooked meal. The device has also a water bowl which is always full so that pets have always water available.” I mean, what? It’s a device that will…what, warm up kibble for your cat? Can you imagine what this would make your house smell like? Also, I don’t know about your pets, but if my girlfriend’s cat is anything to go by you’d be knee-deep in uneaten, warm kitty chow within about three days.
• Sonny: What bathroom feature do you most want to make portable and carry around with you? Your mirror? The lovely lighting? The…er…bidet? Yes, that’s right! Sonny is the nearly 20x funded Indiegogo sensation offering thousands of people the opportunity to carry a reasonably high-powered water pick with them wherever they go so that they can worry at their bemerded anus with some cleansing H2O. On the one hand, big fan of a clean bum over here; on the other, this feels like it’s going to end up with fecal matter all over the walls of a public toilet cubicle when you get your angles wrong. This feels to me like it might not eventually work 100% as advertised, but maybe I’m just a foul-bottomed cynic.
• Spy Intrigue: This is an EXCELLENT piece of interactive fiction – I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but you can happily kill 45m with it and it will make you laugh a LOT (or it will if you have a similar sense of humour to me, which, given you’re reading my writing, I’m going to vaguely assume that you do. Unless you’re reading this out of some sort of masochistic impulse in which case, really, stop it).
• Bumface Poohands: Finally this week, it’s not big or clever but this book title and premise made me laugh a LOT. Also, it’s by Kunt of Kunt and the Gang ‘fame’, and as such I will recommend it unreservedly; I read his autobiography in an afternoon over Christmas and, while it’s fair to say there are better-written books out there, I laughed more reading it than at anything else I have read this year. Go on, treat yourself to a copy, I promise you won’t regret it (probably, although your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for comedy songs about Madeline McCann).

By Lin Yung Cheng

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, SOME HOUSE AND DISCO BANGERS FROM MELVO BAPTISTE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Tiny Pricks: The awful man in the White House says and does some dreadful things. Tiny Pricks takes them and makes them into works of embroidery.
• Baz Furnell: Baz Furnell makes quite incredibly intricate pen drawings which, I promise, are MESMERISING.
• Zoerism: Street art with a very clear and, to me, slightly baffling focus on cars, both as subject matter and material. Odd, but a very strong aesthetic here.
• Downtown Collective: Collecting drawings and illustrations of New York storefronts and restaurants. Lovely.
• Miki Kim: Oh WOW tattoos. These are sublime.
• Black Forest Woods: Incredibly soothing photos and videos of high-end carpentry and woodworking which will absolutely give you tingles if you’re that sort of person.
• City Live Sketch: Pietro Cataudella is an artist/designer type person; his Insta feed is full of small visual gags in which he combines sketches in his notebook with scenes in the real world to comic effect (and which is loads better than my joyless little writeup here has made it sound).
• Tito Merello: Morello is a painter from (I think) Spain – this is his Insta feed. His work is GORGEOUS.
• Andrew Jonathan Design: FULL DISCLOSURE – Andrew is a friend of mine, though not one of the ones who reads Curios and so he may NEVER KNOW about his exciting inclusion in this week’s Insta roundup. He recently quit his job to pursue his dream of being an interior designer – his Insta feed is basically his lookbook/portfolio, and if you’d like a bit of very stylish interiors inspiration then I suggest you give it a follow. If you ask him nicely he’ll recommend you some throws or something (SORRY ANDREW I KNOW IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT).
• Barbie: Barbie on Instagram is some sort of incredible postmodern performance art project and, honestly, may be the best dissection of Insta culture and the oddity of it all that currently exists. I am totally serious about this btw.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Neuralink: Elon Musk this week announced that his latest project has already managed to get a monkey to control a computer with its brain; this is an overview of the actual science behind the hype, and is sober-enough in tone to point out that this stuff is actually quite a long way away still, and the ability to control anything with any sort of precision using only the POWER OF OUR MINDS isn’t quite to hand just yet, despite what the ever-marching army of Musk fanboys might want to think. Obviously hugely impressive and not a little terrifying, but also obviously still very much vaporware at this stage.
• Hosting Hate Online: I’ve been waiting for this story for a couple of years now, ever since the Murdoch press started going for Google in a big way for hosting hateful content (THE IRONY!) – this story is about the companies that providing hosting to some of the world’s more objectionable websites, the ones peddling nazism and hatred and bigotry (no, not Twitter! LOLzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz), and how they just seem to get a free pass for it from everyone; GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, Google…all the big names, all profiting from the horror. Any proper outlets want to write this one up (sorry Gizmodo, but)?
• How Facebook’s New Ad Transparency Tools Will Work: A really good explainer about exactly what the new ad transparency settings will tell you about why you’re seeing ads on FB, where the advertisers got your data from, etc – the update’s not reached me yet, so I can’t personally comment on it, but based on this excellent writeup it seems to be pretty much incontrovertibly A Good Thing.
• The Facebook Poker Bot: Perhaps I simply wasn’t reading closely enough, but I didn’t see too much of the coverage of the latest advance in gameplaying AI mentioning the fact that it’s a Facebook product. It is, though, and this piece does a decent job of explaining why it’s a significant development and what it might enable future software to do more efficiently – effectively this is a tiny step in enabling machine intelligence to make assessments about the truth value of a statement when delivered by an individual with intention to deceive. Which on the one hand is potentially really useful, and on the other brings even closer a future in which the machines will know everything and we won’t be able to fool them and oh god this ends badly doesn’t it?
• The Future of Video: A report from this year’s Vidcon, the annual jamboree for video platforms and creators which has for years been dominated by YouTube but which according to this report is this year seeing TikTok hoovering up all the attention as YouTube struggles with issues of moderation, community toxicity, creator burnout and the rest. The thrust of the piece is generally that YouTube’s struggling for relevance and attention, which, frankly, is balls; I wouldn’t give up on it quite yet.
• Amazon’s Project Go: A really interesting look at the genesis and evolution of Amazon’s Project Go – it’s physical retail space offering which dispenses with cashiers in favour of a seamless ‘walk in, get stuff, walk out’ shopping experience. As with everything about Amazon it’s hugely impressive and utterly chilling at the same time – I can’t even begin to imagine how terrifying a meeting with Jeff Bezos would be (mech suit or otherwise).
• Have We Hit Peak Podcast?: So, so much of this piece feels like an Onion parody, not least the entire opening section describing two young Americans feelings of dismay and disappointment when their generic, ill-considered, no-effort podcast didn’t instantly garner them influencer status and a bunch of brand deals. Aside from that, though, it’s a pretty good look at the current state of the podcast ecosystem, and a decent illustration of why the world probably doesn’t need an unedited recording of you and your mates LOLing it up whilst hungover (YOU ARE NOT THAT FUNNY, KAREN).
• Level Design Patterns in 2d Games: This is a pretty technical post about videogame design, fine, but it’s also a really interesting insight into the tricks and tools that game designers use to create an optimal player experience, and if you’re an ageing gamer who remembers the halcyon days of the side-scroller then this will be genuinely fascinating; otherwise, it’s still a good explanation of how design influences usage if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
• The Coast of Utopia: Vanity Fair hangs out with the infuriatingly Instaperfect influencers of Australia’s Byron Bay – the piece is largely judgement free, and in fairness none of the people featured come across particularly badly (or at least, not compared to some of the Instadetritus one reads interviews with), but it’s a decent encapsulation of the sheer surreality of the Insta-industrial complex and the people who exist within it.
• Occupy White Walls: Occupy White Walls is a videogame-cum-art-project which lets the player create their own gallery, fill it with work of their choosing, and then explore it and the galleries of others in virtual space – it sounds LOVELY, and seems to raise interesting questions about the nature of the gallery-going experience, discussions of art, etc.
• Warped: After last week’s piece on Blink182, another time machine back to the 90s/00s with this retrospective on the Warped tour (which I was stunned to fnd out was still giong) and a look at this, it’s supposedly final incarnation. It’s funny to think how mainstream all this stuff was 20 years ago, and how long that slightly weird XXXXTREME! Stuff persisted for afterwards – what’s best about this piece, though, is all the photos of ageing pop-punkers looking a big flabby and worse for wear. I often ask myself what we’re all going to look like when we’re all old and the tattoos are sagging – this, it turns out, is the answer.
• The Murky Ethics of Posthumous Music: Because I am old and mainly listen to Radio4 I had literally no idea that a version of ‘Higher Love’ featuring Whitney Houston’s vocals was being touted as THIS SUMMER’S DANCEFLOOR BANGER, but apparently it is. This is a really good piece on the song, it’s genesis, and the oddity of using the vocal track of a deceased artist in this sort of production; as I type this I’m listening to the track and fcuking hell it’s awful; Whitney was so much better than this.
• The YouTube Candidate: What’s politics going to look like when today’s kids become old enough to vote and decide they want to see Ninja, Yogscast and Zoella running the country? At present it’s hard to imagine it will look appreciably worse. This is a profile of US YouTuber Joey Salads, famous for prank videos but who’s now attempting to parlay his skills as…as…as a man who makes prank videos on the internet into a run for Congress. This is by turns very funny – Salads is, it’s fair to say, a man for whom minimalism and restraint are largely unknown concepts – and a bit troubling; you get the feeling that Salads may not make Congress, but it won’t be long before someone else like him does.
• The Impossible Dream: On why the pursuit of happiness is a fundamentally stupid thing to aim for and serves only to make us miserable. “The appetite for pleasure, as understood by Hobbes, has two disturbing features. First, it never ends until death. There is no stable condition that counts as being happy; there are only fleeting experiences that must be renewed constantly. We are (though Hobbes doesn’t use the phrase) in an endless pursuit of happiness, and in order to attain happiness, we are in pursuit of the power and wealth that we believe will make it possible. Second, we take an imaginary pleasure now in our future pleasures. And since happiness is subjective, imaginary pleasures are just as authentic as real ones. Thus fantasy and reality become interchangeable.” Well quite.
• Workers of the World: A brilliant Bloomberg piece in which they profile 10 millennials from around the world, interviewing them about their lives and their jobs, their hopes and fears. Each piece is presented in the voice of the interviewee – honestly, these are all superb pen portraits, each with a beautifully-distinct voice. I fell slightly in love with the kid from South Africa, but you will each have your own favourites; wonderful.
• If Men Carried Purses: A really interesting essay on the extent to which garment design impacts or reflects relative expectations placed on men and women to clean, tidy and generally restore order in their environment. I had honestly never thought about any of the stuff in here, which suggests that there’s quite a lot of truth in it.
• My Unsexual Revolution: Diane Shipley tells the story of her sex life, or lack of it, and the steps she took to understand that perhaps sex wasn’t for her after all, and that she didn’t want to do it. I really like this piece – it’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, honest, and…I want to say ‘neatly-written’, which sounds like faint praise but is very much not meant as such. Very good indeed.
• 9 Months With Fan Bingbing: Fan Bingbing, as you doubtless all already know (having read about her in Curios before, obvs), is China’s biggest movie star who recently got into trouble with the Chinese authorities, was very publicly shamed for tax irregularities, and disappeared for 9 months or so. This article is by Rian Dundon, who was her English tutor for a time a few years ago, and it is FASCINATING, not just about Fan herself but about the weird and VERY dodgy-sounding world of Chinese films. It also contains a slightly-buried allegation that David Carradine was somehow offed by Fan’s gangster manager, which is a bold claim to make in your own name – I do hope Rian’s not easily findable.
• Why We Should Read John Updike: A brilliant essay in defence of Updike – and other authors of the same ilk – which makes the excellent point that, regardless of what we might think about the distasteful masculinism of the author or some of his novels’ tropes,the quality of the writing is such that it withstands criticism. Regardless of what you think of Updike (personally I adore the Rabbit novels and quite a lot of his other stuff as well, though equally there are a few things that are pretty much unreadable in 2019), this is just a really solid piece of writing and criticism, and I applaud the spirit.
• The Murderer, The Writer, The Reckoning: About writing in prison, by a writer, in prison. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but this contains the most arresting opening paragraph of any essay you will read all year. John J Lennon can certainly write, though there’s a chilling quality to the prose; I can’t quite tell whether this is informed by what you learn about him as you read the essay or something inherent in his writing.
• Et Tu: Another superb reflection, this time by Lidija Haas, on the Me Too movement, where it has led us, and what the world feels like now that we’ve ostensibly recalibrated our morals a bit.
• Going Down The Pipes: Finally in this week’s longreads, an article from way back in 1996 – this is the celebrated essay that inspired the film ‘Pushing Tin’, all about air traffic controllers in New Jersey and how insanely, crazily stressful their job is. This is an all-time classic piece of writing – brilliant characters, brilliant setting, tension, humour, the works. Honestly, you’ll enjoy this SO much, I promise. It’s long, though, so make one of those big Sports Direct mugs of tea to go with it.

By Jack Teagle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is my friend Little Chris’ favourite band, or it used to be, and this song will make you feel 15 again – The Menzingers, with ‘Anna’:

2) Excellent advice in this song from Idles – ‘Never Fight A Man With A Perm’:

3) This is a GREAT song – it’s called ‘Don’t Cling to Life’ and it’s by The Murder Capital, and the video is ART:

4) This is A Certain Ratio with a cracking track and a video featuring some EXCELLENT old-school dancing, as well as the wonderful vocals of Barry Adamson – it’s called ‘Dirty Boy’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! Common is an all-time great rapper, and this is a typically great track. Hercules, ft. Swizz Beats – SO good:

6) Last up this week, this is scratchy, odd little number with an absolutely compelling video – I could watch this forever, it’s mesmerising and the model/actor is incredible. It’s called ‘St Seraphim Redux’ and its by Collapsing Scenery and, well, ENJOY AND TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND I LOVE YOU AND WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU AND EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO AND THAT I HONESTLY TO BELIEVE IT’S ALL GOING TO BE FINE I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AS USUAL BUT UNTIL THEN YOU BE CAREFUL OUT THERE AND BE NICE TO YOURSELF OK I LOVE YOU OK BYE!:

Hi! Hi! How are you? How’s it going? What’s new?

I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S NEW IT’S THIS EDITION OF WEB CURIOS! New and FULL OF STUFF! I’ve neither the time nor inclination to wax lyrical about how banjaxed everything is this week – instead let me inform you that there are some CRACKING links in the following selection, that there’s an honest-to-goodness novella for you to look forward to in the longreads (I mean a real one, by an actual proper writer, not my typically-overlong wordvomit), and there’s a dance track all about how TERRIBLE social media is right at the end. WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE??

That’s right, NOTHING. Love EVERYTHING about Web Curios, you ingrates, especially the fact that I DO IT ALL FOR YOU. 

Crikey, bit shouty today, turns out. I’ll leave this here, then, for you to hold and stroke and touch and explore and enjoy in whatever manner you see fit (but, please, do wipe it down afterwards for the next reader). I am Matt, today is Friday, this is Web Curios and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves. 

By Thisset

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL OFFERINGS, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF FEMALE-FRONTED CLASSIC ROCK AND ROLL!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T NECESSARILY THINK THAT OUTSOURCING THE PROBLEM OF ONLINE BULLYING TO RUDIMENTARY AI SYSTEMS IS A PARTICULARLY GOOD THING:

• Instagram ‘Fixes’ Bullying!: It has! No, really, look! Instagram has finally begun to roll out its new, AI-based anti-meanness features, whereby users who write MEAN COMMENTS will be asked at the point of posting if they really want to type those hurtful words or if they wouldn’t prefer to swap them out for those incredibly fcuking irritating praying or praising hands or something equally blandly anodyne – the idea being that this small pause-and-check will cause the negativity and rage to dissipate, and lead to an overall drop in the number of thoughtlessly cruel content on the platform. And there’s more! “Soon, we will begin testing a new way to protect your account from unwanted interactions called Restrict. Once you Restrict someone, comments on your posts from that person will only be visible to that person. You can choose to make a restricted person’s comments visible to others by approving their comments. Restricted people won’t be able to see when you’re active on Instagram or when you’ve read their direct messages.” Except, er, the user will still be able to see the bad stuff! So this ‘Restrict’ feature will in fact just create a situation where the mean person can continue to say awful things under your pictures and only the two of you will see it – which seems, in a weird way, actually more unpleasant, in a ‘trapped in a closet with a cruel bully who keeps whispering into your ear how worthless you are’ sort of way. Look – obviously any steps these platforms take to address how awful we can all be to each other are generally Good Things, but all this does seem to rather ignore the extent to which all s*c**l m*d** is effectively a simmering cauldron of rage and hatred and anger because THAT’S WHAT GETS THE CLICKS.
• Facebook Improves Creator Monetisation Options: Were I Patreon – unlikely, as I am very much a baggy sack of wet and viscera rather than a digital business – I would be looking over my shoulder quite a lot this week and feeling a touch on the nervous side. Facebook this week has announced a slew of new opportunities for creators to squeeze their fans’ wallets, including the ability to pick where ads appear on their content, the ability for fans to buy ‘stars’ that they can bestow on their favourite videgonks which translate to ACTUAL CASH for said videogonks, and the option for creators to create special superfan Groups which said superfans have to pay to access. If you do the whole ‘I am an artisanal digital creator monetising my audience’ thing, this is worth a look – at the very least, it makes sense to consider having a parallel presence on Facebook to hook in the normie dollar (YOU WILL NEVER ESCAPE THE BIG BLUE MISERY FACTORY!).
• FB Improves Ad Transparency (Again): You can now see more detailed information on why you are being targeted with a particular advert on Facebook – the ‘Why am I seeing this Ad?’ button will give you additional information on who uploaded any email lists you’re on which have led to you being targeted, which data brokerages have sold on your info, which interest categories you sit in, etc, along with the ability to skip straight to the ad preferences bit to tweak what you see. This is, potentially, the sort of thing you could have a LOT of fun with if you had a bloody-minded streak and a lot of spare time; I reckon this is a potentially GREAT way of catching out a lot of non-GDPR compliant people who are playing fast-and-loose with email ownership.
• New Monetisation Options for YouTube Creators Too: What was I saying about Patreon? YouTube creators can now access tiered membership options – JUST LIKE PATREON – and their fans can now buy SUPER STICKERS with which to reward them for doing what they do, and there are new and improved merchandising options for YouTubers, and basically the future to me looks like one in which everyone spends their time streaming banalities into the ether to an audience of other banality-streaming morons. It’s increasingly clear to me that one of the main reasons we absolutely NEED universal basic income is that without a basic level of subsidy noone is going to have the time to watch all these hundreds of millions of hours of VITAL CREATIVE OUTPUT that modernity is gifting us.
• YouTube Makes It Easier To Edit Out Copyrighted Stuff From Videos: I mean, this is literally just that. It’s useful, if you’re the sort of person who absentmindedly keeps leaving clips of actual songs in the background of your uploads.
• Twitter Updates Hateful Conduct Rules: After several years of people gently nudging Twitter and suggesting that maybe it could be doing a touch more to tackle the issue of hatespeech which, it’s fair to say, the platform has a teeny problem with, it’s finally starting to move – the first change, announced this week, is to ban language that dehumanises people based on their religion. Again, A Good Thing; again, something of a bandage on an axewound here.
• LinkedIn Adds New Ad Objectives: NEW WAYS TO BETTER-INTEGRATE LINKEDIN WITH YOUR FUNNEL! You can now set up ads specifically optimised to get job applications, drive awareness or get users to do a specific thing on your website – this is obviously an incredibly dull piece of news, but equally it’s the sort of thing that you can probably spend 10 minutes writing up and sharing with clients as IMPORTANT INTELLIGENCE before congratulating yourself on your dedication and heading home for the weekend.
• More Video On Pinterest: Look how exciting this is! “We’re introducing new video features for creators and businesses to reach their audiences including an improved uploader, video tab, lifetime analytics, and Pin scheduling.” Do you care? I don’t!
• The China Internet Report: This is a really good report – you’ll have to give an email address to get it, but it’s only to the South China Morning Post so it’s probably nothing to worry about. Thanks to Alex for sending it my way – it’s effectively like Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, but significantly less ugly and, to my mind, a touch more insightful. Contains lots of interesting information about specific trends around 5g, automation, payments, etc, as well as a whole bunch of platform usage-type stuff. Read it, and enjoy the fleeting sense of expertise that it will afford you.
• Doom Days: Bastille is a band which I am vaguely aware of, but whose songs I couldn’t pick out of a lineup – they exist in my mind as a few half-remembered snatches of past FIFA soundtracks – and I can’t quite imagine them having actual, proper fans (who would pick them as their favourite band? NO FCUKER, that’s who), and yet they obviously make their label enough money that they were motivated to spend what looks like not inconsiderable wedge on this interactive AR musical EXPERIENCE THINGY to accompany what I presume is their new album. The gimmick is that you’re wandering through some sort of house party-type scenario, with different tracks of the album playing in different rooms, and you can unlock little AR vignettes of the band by playing small minigames, which vignettes you can then drop into the real world via your camera, meaning that you too can enjoy the unique pleasure of having a TINY VERSION OF BASTILLE on your kitchen table should you so desire. It’s all neatly put together and slick, and is impressive in the main as an example of quite how much cool stuff you can do as a browser experience these days (Jesus, ‘these days’ – I REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS ALL FIELDS, etc etc).

 By Kenneth Pils

NEXT UP, WHY NOT EXPLORE THE INCREDIBLE OUTPUT OF THE HUGELY PROLIFIC ELECTRO ARTIST CRISTIAN VOGEL?

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK LEARNED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BOOK TOURS AROUND AMAZON FULFILMENT CENTRES WITH YOUR KIDS AND WHICH IF YOU ASK IT IS THE ABSOLUTE MOST LATE-PERIOD CAPITALISM THING IT HAS HEARD ALL YEAR, PT.1:

• The Atlas of Moons: This is an EXCELLENT articlewebpagethingy by National Geographic, telling you everything you could ever have wanted to know about some of the major moons of our solar system. Want to see some exciting 3d representations of Io, Callisto and all that lot? Want to learn lots of EXCITING MOON-RELATED FACTS? I don’t care either way, to be honest, but there is SO much information here, about orbits and surface and suchlike, along with really detailed models of each of the featured satellites; the whole thing is presented on a nicely-arranged single webpage, and, honestly, is more interesting than you’d think (although I feel honour-bound to tell you that at its heart it is still just a bunch of words and pictures of space rocks, and there is no mention AT ALL of little green men).
• Seeing Music: Another in the seemingly endless line of Google Experiments, this one all about the different ways that we can represent audio in visual form – allow it access to your microphone and it will pick up and visualise whatever ambient sounds it picks up, or upload your own music file and see what it makes of it. Fine, it’s basically WinAmp with bells on it, but the different visualisations are rather beautiful at times (the Hilbert ones in particular are gorgeous and remind me an awful lot of a sort-of multicoloured Mr Messy), and the various little additional gimmicks (you can plug in a MIDI input and watch it visualise as you play, for example) are rather fun. As far as I can tell this doesn’t appear to be anything to do with training an AI for an eventual uprising, but one can’t be certain with Google.
• The Redirect Method: More Google stuff, this time on the serious side. The Redirect Method is based on an experiment Google undertook to attempt to get users searching for ISIS-related materials to instead watch videos refuting IS propaganda in an attempt to halt the radicalisation process early on; the techniques employed led to users who had sought out pro-IS stuff watching half-a-million minutes of the anti-propaganda vids, which is pretty staggering. Now Google has made the methodology that it employed available as an open source programme for anyone else to copy – if you have any interest at all in comms, marketing, government, propagandising, disinformation and the prevention thereof or the modern world in general, this is very much worth reading. Not only is it genuinely interesting as a case study, there is SO MUCH here that you can use for shoddy advermarketingpr purposes were you so minded.
• Shoelace: ANOTHER Google thing! This time it’s another attempt at a social network – oh Google+, how do I miss thee! – this one based around people sharing actual, real-world activities that they’re doing so as to encourage others to get involved too. The idea is that I could be going to, I don’t know, an oboe concert at a local church (I COULD BE, DON’T SCOFF), and use the app to tell people that that’s what I’m doing in case they wanted to come too; similarly, it will learn what I’m into and suggest stuff happening nearby that I might want to get involved in. There are various privacy and safety measures built in, to hopefully prevent users from being stalked, harassed or murdered by any local weirdos, and the general vibe of the thing can be summed up in Google’s own disgustingly-folksy description: Shoelace “helps connect people with shared interests through in person activities. It’s great for folks who have recently moved cities or who are looking to meet others who live nearby.” Folks?! FFS Google! This is only currently available in New York, and there’s no guarantee it will ever evolve beyond that, but it’s interesting to see Google attempt to do something network-ish again, as is the local/irl focus of the whole thing.
• The Women In Rock Project: This is ACE – the whole site is effectively its creator’s Phd dissertation, and collects memories and stories of women who were involved in rock’n’roll’s ‘first wave’ in the 50s and 60s, an era in which women played a significant role which hasn’t always been documented. There’s SO much good stuff in here – memoirs and memories and recordings and playlists of great songs, and the way it reframes an era to better centre the women that helped shape it is refreshing.
• Scroll: The latest in the seemingly-endless stream of attempted solutions to the horror that is the current ad-funded web model, which satisfies neither publishers nor punters – Scroll is a service which hopes to REVOLUTIONISE PUBLISHING by letting users enjoy an ad-free experience when reading their favourite sites whilst at the same time ensuring that the publishers get paid at a rate less eye-gouging than the current horrible deal they get from all the appalling display ad clutter of the modern web. It’s very much in beta at the moment, but it’s worth keeping an eye on – it very much feels like someone is going to fix this soon, and whilst it might not be these people they do seem to have reasonable backing and buy-in from a decent roster of sizeable names.
• Colouring London: Thanks to Josh for pointing this one out to me – Colouring London is a delightfully-whimsical project which is asking anyone who cares to get involved to do a bit of Mechanical Turk-style datawrangling by slowly and meticulously classifying London’s buildings by age, land usage, type, etc – the idea being that over time it will turn into an accurate and up-to-date record of the city’s material DNA. There are similar projects going on all over the world – I’m certain I featured something similar from New York which asked people to help teach mapping software the exact boundaries of the city’s buildings, for example – and I am always a sucker for stuff that requires massive collaborative effort for a hugely banal outcome; what’s MOST lovely about this, though, is the multicoloured patchwork quilt of London that is emerging; as the map fills, I do hope they add the opportunity to export image files of specific areas to print.
• Otis: “CULTURE IS A NEW ASSET” screams the site’s blurb, which immediately got my back up a bit; ‘new’ in what sense exactly, Otis? You don’t know, do you? FFS. Anyway, the idea behind Otis is a simple one – it allows anyone to invest in CULTURE (fine art, limited edition trainers, etc) with a low barrier to entry; from an article announcing its launch comes the following miniblurb: “Starting July 9, the platform will allow art enthusiasts to invest in a curated selection of sneakers, comics, and other items starting at $25 USD per share. Inaugural launch items include artworks by Kehinde Wiley, KAWS, Takashi Murakami, alongside Supreme skateboard decks, Rolex Daytona watches, and Hermes Birkin Bags to name a few. Otis acquires high-quality assets, divides them into smaller shares, and offers them as equity investments. When you invest in an asset, you become a shareholder that owns a specific asset. Similar to a stock market, you’ll be able to buy and sell shares after a certain period of time”. Why exactly you’d want to own a 5% stake in a pair of 1998 Jordans in a limited-edition colourway is beyond me – as is whether there will in fact be a secondary market for these shares – but if you’ve ever wanted to feel like a BIG SHOT INVESTOR in, er, graphic novels or skateboards then go for your life.
• This Shirt Company Does Not Exist: Thanks to Gill for this one, perhaps the most ‘me’ site in this week’s Curios, combining as it does slightly crap tshirt design with an internetty gimmick. “The t-shirts feature doodles that were completely generated by AI algorithms using data from millions of drawings submitted to Google Creative Lab’s Quick, Draw! The dataset can be used for anything, from helping researchers see patterns in how people around the world draw, to inspiring artists to create things we haven’t ever thought of before… such as t-shirts :)” Actually I’m perhaps being unfair on the doodles here – these aren’t appreciably worse than the sort of crap I adorn myself with each day.
• Da Bungalow Clips: I’m only sort of vaguely aware of the concept of Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow, being as I was already WAY too old when it was on TV; I do have some sort of strange cultural memory of adult men shouting BOGEYS! at unsuspecting strangers in supermarkets, but I couldn’t tell you why. Still, I know that lots of you children will have fond memories of this formative part of your childhoods, so please enjoy this recently-created Twitter account dedicated to posting clips and gifs from the show for your nostalgic viewing pleasure. This is…quite odd, isn’t it? Was this what kid’s TV was like 17 years ago? Is this the reason you’re all like this?
• Share The Meal: There’s not really any excuse not to have this on your phone imho. “ShareTheMeal is the charity app by the World Food Programme that allows you to feed a child in need with one tap on your phone” – basically it’s a ‘tap to donate’ function, no more, but the bells and whistles and the light gamification / network features it builds in makes it pleasingly sticky, and the mere fact of its existence is A Good Thing. The cost of each meal is around 35p a pop, so presuming you’re like me and comparatively comfortably-off there’s not really any reason not to install this.
• Public Domain Flicks: Are you bored of being fed the endless diet of Netflix pabulum by the app? Have you spend yet another evening scrolling dully through an algorithmically-curated feed full of seemingly endless variations on the same three straight-to-TV movie concepts and not found a single thing you actually want to watch? Well why not break free of the shackles of the modern streaming hegemony and instead get yourself some CLASSIC OLD SCHOOL MOVIE ACTION with, say, the stone-cold 1922 classic “The Primitive Lover”, or 1973’s sexy horror extravaganza “Invasion of the Bee Girls” (which has the potentially-unbeatable tagline “They’ll Love The Life Right Out of Your Body!”, which, honestly, may be the apogee of English-language copywriting)? This site has an absolute treasure trove of copyright-free films to stream, and whilst 99% of them will be absolute tripe there will also be some gems and you owe it to yourself to at least check out the Bee Girls.
• The Archive Downloader: A Chrome extension which lets you batch-download files from the Internet Archive. HUGELY useful, especially for music files (of which more later – ooh, EXCITING FORESHADOWING! What authorial daring I’m displaying here!).
• Run Your Own Social: We are, it’s fair to say, probably all in agreement that this social media stuff was largely a bad idea – still, if you think that you could do better by creating your own miniature version of Twitter just for you and your friends, then why not do that very thing? This is a really interesting site which offers you the tools and information required to set up your own small social network, and whilst 99% of you won’t have any use for this I can imagine that there are a few people reading this who will find it hugely useful; aside from anything else, this feels like it would be a really interesting project for a computing class, or the sort of thing you could experiment with setting up as a bespoke alternative to the family Whatsapp group (oh God, YES – you could design in features specifically designed to exploit familial tensions, it would be GREAT!). Someone go and do something fun with this, please. GO!
• Carrd: On the one hand, services like Squarespace are hugely useful in terms of knocking up a quick website in next-to-no time when you have no coding ability whatsoever; on the other, they always, inevitably, look a bit sh1t. Carrd is a new alternative to those off-the-shelf sitebuilders, whose gimmick is that it lets you make single-page, long-scrollers, of the sort that were really fashionable about three years back. Obviously the quality of the output will depend largely on the quality of your imagery and your general aesthetic sense, but it might be worth a look if you’re in the market for a webpage for something or other.
• The Space Exploration Auction: SO MUCH SPACE STUFF! This is taking place on 20 July, but you can start getting your early bids in for, say, a prototype astronaut’s glove from the Apollo mission, or a globe of Mars, or, er, an old label from the ACTUAL APOLLO 11 COMMAND MODULE! That last one, by the way, will set you back an estimated $125-150k, in case you were wondering.
• Old Weather: “Help scientists transcribe Arctic and worldwide weather observations recorded in ship’s logs since the mid-19th century…Old Weather volunteers explore, mark, and transcribe historic ship’s logs from the 19th and early 20th centuries. We need your help because this task is impossible for computers, due to diverse and idiosyncratic handwriting that only human beings can read and understand effectively. By participating in Old Weather you’ll be helping advance research in multiple fields. Data about past weather and sea-ice conditions are vital for climate scientists, while historians value knowing about the course of a voyage and the events that transpired”! Not unlike Colour London back up there, this is another Mechanical Turk-ish, slightly dull but rather lovely project; it’s also a decent barometer of how much you hate your job because, honestly, if you’re reading this at work and thinking that a few hours of gentle transcribing of historic ships logs sounds like a blissful escape from the drudgery of your work then, well, perhaps it’s time to quit.
• IRL: An app which seeks to socialise your calendar – WHY?!? WHY WOULD I WANT EVERYONE IN THE WORLD TO KNOW WHAT I AM DOING, WHEN, AND TO HAVE THE ABILITY TO ‘FOLLOW’ ME AND COMMENT AND OPINE ON MY ITINERARY? This sounds ghastly, as does the idea that there could be ‘calendar influencers’ whose social lives could be considered compelling entertainment for the poor, less-popular masses. Aside from everything else, the potential counterindications inherent in this are…not insignificant.
• Netflix Hangouts: A Chrome extension which lets you watch Netflix in a way that will make it look to the casual observer that you’re having a four-way video call, meaning you can probably get away with a couple of episodes of Stranger Things in the office before sloping off to the pub (NB Web Curios accepts no responsibility if it turns out your boss is in fact less of a gullible idiot than you at first thought).

By Jack Welpott

NEXT, HAVE A HIGH-QUALITY HOUSE MIX FROM A SET IN BUENOS AIRES LAST YEAR BY ROY ROSENFELD!

THE SECTION WHICH THIS WEEK LEARNED THAT IT’S POSSIBLE TO BOOK TOURS AROUND AMAZON FULFILMENT CENTRES WITH YOUR KIDS AND WHICH IF YOU ASK IT IS THE ABSOLUTE MOST LATE-PERIOD CAPITALISM THING IT HAS HEARD ALL YEAR, PT.2:

• Female D&D Character Art: A selection of about 100 character portraits of female figures in a fantasy setting, notable in the main for being actual, proper pictures of actual, credible (well, ‘credible’ within a fantasy setting, at least) female figures without acres of exposed flesh or impractical chainmail thong bikini armour. It’s amazing how arresting the nature of these pictures is, which makes you consequently realise how ridiculous the visual representation of female characters in fantasy art tends to be.
• The Social Media Death Clock: ANOTHER Chrome extension, this one designed to helpfully remind you of how much time you’re wasting by dicking about on social media; install it, and every time you visit a social site in-browser it will replace the logo with a ticking countdown to the likely date of your death. Sadly won’t work in-app, but I’d suggest surreptitiously loading this onto a colleague’s work computer and seeing how long it takes them to notice that Facebook’s now anticipating their demise.
• Metomic: FULL DISCLOSURE: my mate Ben is doing some work with these people at the moment, which is how I heard about this – nonetheless, it’s interesting enough as an idea that I’d have featured it anyway, The simple pitch is ‘all the analytics stuff you might need on your website, but less awful and evil and exploitative than the stuff currently created by Amazon, Google et al’, which seems like a pretty good reason to check it out if you’re the owner of a bunch of web properties and want to maybe downgrade the creepiness of your cookies and tracking bits and pieces.
• The B-Box: WE ALL LOVE BEES! Why not show them your love by backing this already-funded Indiegogo project which for the admittedly steep price of £900 will provide you with a lovely wooden home for bees which you can set up in your garden and which, you hope, will in a few short months be all abuzz with the fuzzy little lads doing their thing, making honey and serving their queen and hopefully not swarming into your house and turning you into a swollen red pincushion. This sounds VERY cool, although I do think it’s perhaps downplaying the ‘look, you’re also going to have to take care of the bees’ bit somewhat.
• Lightsail 2: “LightSail is a citizen-funded project from The Planetary Society to send a small spacecraft, propelled solely by sunlight, to Earth orbit.” This is the project website, where you can track its progress in orbit, see photos it’s taking, and generally see all the data and information its tracking as it makes its way around Earth. It’s obviously more interesting if you’re into space and associated things, but even if not it’s still quite amazing to be able to see all this realtime information about something zooming around a few hundred miles up in the air (he writes, like some sort of slack-jawed medieval yokel).
• Golden Hour: A website whose soul purpose is to inform you of the absolute best time to take some gorgeous photographs – it will tell you with exact precision what time ‘Golden Hour’ (the first and last hour of sunshine of the day, traditionally) is, so that you can take advantage of all that gorgeous light to take another fcuking picture of your fcuking face.
• All Of The Theatre Gubbins: Or, more accurately, the New York Public Library’s Billy Rose Theatre Division’s digital archive, which contains a truly remarkable collection of old theatrical material, from promotional photos of actors to old playbills and programmes. There are literally HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of individual items in here, organised into thematic collections, and the photos of stars of Broadway past alone are enough to keep your occupied for hours.
• The Economist Essay Competition: The Economist is running an essay competition, open to anyone between the ages of 16-25 – submit an essay of upto 1000 words on the topic “What fundamental economic and political change, if any, is needed for an effective response to climate change?” by 31 July to be in with the chance of winning £1k, publication on the Economist website, and attendance at an Economist event in October. When I was 16 it is…unlikely that I would have had any truck with this at all (or indeed at 25 if I’m honest with you), but if you know a YOUNG PERSON who is all dedicated and ambitious and stuff then perhaps this might be worth pointing out to them.
• Videogame GAN: This is wonderful – Jonathan Fly has paired up old videogame footage with Nvidia’s GauGAN software (see Curios passim), making the software try and create landscape images on the fly based on what it’s seeing happen in the game. I appreciate that that’s a bit of a shonky description, you’ll get the idea when you click the link; this is beautiful and dreamlike and weird and hallucinatory, and better than 90% of actual digital ‘art’ that’s currently being made.
• Various Cassette Tapes: If you haven’t already done so, you might want to scroll back a bit and download that Chrome extension that lets you rip files from the Internet Archive. Done that? Good. Now click this link and GORGE YOURSELF on this incredible trove of MP3s of old cassette tapes – there are WEEKS-worth of music here, and whilst it’s sort of impossible to know what any of it is before you listen to it that barely matters; just jump in at random and see what you find. I’m currently listening to something called ‘Audio Beat Warfare’ which is terrifying and great in equal measure, but why not dig around and see what weird stuff you can find? This is, honestly, WONDERFUL.
• Sunshine: A website which checks your location and then displays a countdown of the number of hours of sunlight left in your day. Put this on a big screen in the office so you can all see how much of the precious, fleeting English summertime you’re wasting on pointless busywork that doesn’t matter!
• The Wood Database: You want wood? SO MUCH WOOD! One of my very favourite sorts of site, this, utterly banal and yet terrifyingly, encyclopaedically comprehensive, and with a serious dedication to its subject matter; one gets the impression that the site’s owner probably has a limited tolerance for lazy, wood-based jokes, and wouldn’t take kindly to people repeatedly asking them if they ‘have wood’. The site’s pretty self-explanatory – it’s a database of information about lots of types of wood – but there are lots of small joys in the obsessional copy and the fact that it sells things like a ‘Rosewoods of the World’ poster for a knockdown $15 (which will make a GREAT Christmas present for a certain special someone!).
• Things Cut in Half: The most satisfying subReddit you will see all week, hands-down.
• The 3d-printed Lamborghini: Wow, THIS is a geeky DIY project. The fabulously-named Sterling Backus (who’s obviously some sort of proper science person in his dayjob) is, for reasons best-known to themselves, currently in the process of creating a full-size working replica of a Lamborghini Aventador (no, I didn’t know either – it’s a VERY ANGULAR sports car that goes very fast) almost entirely from 3d-printed parts. This is INSANE, honestly, and the Facebook Page here linked collects all the work in progress photos and videos and is a fascinating look at a truly insane labour of love.
• Arttwiculate: Last up in the miscellanea section this week is this GREAT game from B3ta’s Monkeon, where you the player are asked to pick which artwork from a selection is being referred to in a Tweet. Simple, silly, and absolutely the sort of thing it would be easy for a major museum to do for some nice ENGAGEMENT.

 By Arnout van Albada

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS EXCELLENT HOUR-LONG SELECTION OF CLASSIC SOFT ROCK WHICH YOU MIGHT NOT THINK YOU WILL ENJOY BUT YOU WILL SECRETLY ADORE I PROMISE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ed Merlin Murray: Murray is an artist. This is his Insta feed. His work is…odd, but in a good way.
• Polly Verity: Verity makes work from paper, in a sort of 3d sculptural origami-type style, playing with texture and shadow in rather beautiful ways.
• The Tiny Chef Show: The Instagram account of a VERY SMOL chef, and his adorable little cooking show in miniature. This is, honestly, ADORABLE, and it’s worth checking out the project’s website for more details.
• Amaury Guichon: I don’t know if I want to eat any of these cakes, but I could look at photos of them for HOURS.
• Hollywood Back-up Plan: I don’t, I confess, have any real clue what’s going on here or why it’s called ‘Hollywood Back-up Plan’ (am I missing a really obvious joke?), but if you want an Insta feed featuring…oh HANG ON I JUST GOT IT! Photographs of company names on vehicles which also happen to be the names of famous film people! ALL BECOMES CLEAR! Thanks to Curios reader John Perlmutter for both creating this and drawing it to my attention and for reading this bastard emailnewsletterthingy!
• Philippa Knit: This is Philippa. She knits. Often she knits balaclavas, which she photographs being worn by largely-unclothed men. You may enjoy this, you may not.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Cadwalladr vs Swisher: Kara Swisher is one of the smartest people in the world reporting on tech at the moment; her ability to get under the skin of the Valley and its heroes is unparalleled. She recently interviewed Carole Cadwalladr for her podcast, and the transcript is now online and makes really interesting reading; I have one or two issues with the way in which Cadwalladr has gone about reporting the Cambridge Analytica stuff – not that it’s not a brilliant and important piece of journalism, don’t get me wrong, more that her absolute insistence that PYSCHOGEOGRAPHIC TARGETING and DARK INTERNET VOODOO swung Brexit and everything else was fundamentally unhelpful in untangling the more important issues which are around electoral funding and the legal framework around it; she’s since gone quite quiet about that side of things, whilst quite rightly continuing to investigate the financial links between a lot of the big vested interests around Brexit, but the damage has been done in terms of people overplaying the magical ability of digital ads to manipulate the masses (don’t get me wrong, digital ads are GREAT for manipulating the masses, but not quite as cleverly as Carole thinks) (also, I feel I should point out that I’ve met her a few times and we’ve had this conversation in person, so I promise I’m not just being a dick and shouting from the sidelines here; well, OK, I am a bit). Still, this is a really interesting conversation which showcases the best and worst of Cadwalladr and her reporting, and which is never less than an engaging read throughout.
• All The Businesses You Never Knew Amazon Owned: Scroll down. Keep scrolling. This isn’t an essay, it’s just a list, but it’s worth perusing and then spending a moment reminding yourself that Amazon wants to run everything, and, at the current rate of progress, probably will.
• The Race To Rule Streaming: This is LONG and very ‘TV-industry-inside-baseball’ in parts, but it’s fascinating regardless as a look at how the streaming industry is likely to evolve and what that’s likely to mean in terms of the market and the sort of programming that’s going to be produced. If you want a decent understanding of how modern entertainment media works, and of how economics defines art, this is pretty much essential reading.
• Half-Quitting the Apps: The NYT examines the weird situation we find ourselves in whereby more and more of us are trying to stop using THE FCUKING S*C**LS but not quite managing it, resulting in this doubly unsatisfying situation where we’re hobbling our user experience in an attempt to render it bad enough to force us off the apps entirely whilst at the same time still getting just enough of a dopamine rush to keep us hanging on in there. Testament to how brilliantly, evilly designed these things are, if you weren’t already convinced.
• The Gutenburg Lie: Honestly, I was SHOOK by this piece; I’d always blithely accepted the received wisdom that Gutenberg invented movable type and that it was he to whom we owe thanks for BOOKS and NEWSPAPERS and FLYERS and STUFF; now it turns out that actually the first printing press was invented 150 years previously in Korea. This is fascinating, not only because of the story of Choe Yun-ui who we really ought to credit instead, but because of what it tells us about how historical narratives develop and are set in stone, and how we ought perhaps to spend a but more time questioning and scrutinising creation stories.
• Being a YouTube Celebrity: A profile of Emma Chamberlain, hottest YouTube star of the moment and newly-signed creator of original content for Snapchat. It’s not going to tell you anything hugely new about the lifestyle of a professional content creator (dear God what a phrase), but there are a couple of details that gave me pause, not least that Chamberlain spends upwards of 20 HOURS editing her videos. Tell that to your client next time they want a ‘viral’ delivered in 36h.
• Twitter Needs a Pause Button: An essay exploring whether our experiences on and interactions with Twitter and other sites would be different were there an inbuilt delay in communications – muchlike Insta’s trialing with its ‘are you sure you want to say that?’ anti-bullying features. It’s an interesting question, but I’m not certain that it’s not anonymity which leads to the horror and the shouting rather than the immediacy.
• Can Hiphop’s Legacy Be Archived: On the immense musical/cultural patrimony contained in the boom in hiphop mixtapes in the 90s and 00s, and how the nature of the medium means that whole swathes of significant work by significant artists may be lost forever. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, from the specific musical history lessons to the wider cultural points about what sort of materials are considered worthy of archiving and why, and what steps we might seek to take to make our approach to preservation of cultural relics somewhat more of an active one rather than the current post-facto scrabble to catch up.
• An Introduction to Speculative Fiction by People of Colour: If you read scifi, fantasy and the like, but wish that you could find more stuff by authors who aren’t white then this list is for YOU.
• Blink 182: A nostalgic look back at Blink-182 and how they briefly made pop-punk sort-of almost socially acceptable. I was really into pop-punk as a teenager (of course I was) and I remember being genuinely annoyed when these idiots came along and made it popular when they weren’t even GOOD like the bands I liked that were all underground and I FOUND THE CONCH, RALPH! God, I was insufferable. Anyway, this is an interesting time capsule, not least because once again it reminds us that the 90s were a VERY weird time when it came to sex and gender politics.
• Disney Won: Another big entertainment industry deep-dive, this one investigating what the shape of the film industry could be if one accepts Disney’s seemingly-inevitable crushing dominance of the market over the next few years. The short answer to this is ‘tediously homogenous’, but it’s worth reading in full to get the more nuanced take. If you want to envisage the future, imagine the fcuking Avengers playing on every single flat surface in the world, on a loop, til the sun consumes us all.
• The Joy Of Grocery Shopping Abroad: I would hope that as readers of Web Curios you’re all sophisticates; the sort of urbane travelers who know that the best thing to do when arriving in a new place is to get straight to the local supermarket and look at the crisps and frozen food aisles to get right to the heart of the local people and their deepest, most shameful desires. This article is a lovely evocation of all that you can glean from perusing the weird groceries of any given destination – it made me want to eat Paprika-flavoured ridged crisps VERY much indeed.
• Meet the Amazon Nomads: Another wonderful piece shining a light on a niche group of people created as an unintended side-effect of our new digital economy, this time the people who spend most of their lives traveling around the US hunting out products that they can buy in bulk and resell on Amazon for profit. Just imagine, for a moment, that being your life – living in a camper van, going from Costco to Walmart to Costco and back, buying palette-loads of Swisher mop handle replacements because you know you can earn a $0.02 markup on each unit. Thanks, Amazon, for enabling such freedom and entrepreneurial spirit!
• This is Quite Gay!: A Nigerian emigre to the US reflects on the challenges of being an out and proud gay black man on social media when your less-tolerant family back home can see whatever you post and rinse you for it every time. The line in here on how ‘Pride is a privilege’ really struck me; this is a lovely piece of writing.
• The Garbageman of Cairo: I love this piece – the author writes about moving to Cairo and encountering the man who sorted out the rubbish for his apartment block and who, as a result, was the most knowledgeable person in the neighbourhood. This is the best sort of travel writing, telling you about place and people with deft, beautiful prose and a lovely spare style; it reminded me a lot of Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, his book on Bombay which is still one of the best modern portraits of a city I’ve ever read.
• Meet The Cock Destroyer: The second article this week from the newly-revamped The Face magazine, this is a profile of the frankly terrifying Rebecca More, a UK bongo actress who’s seemingly transcended the world of sex on camera to become a sort-of mainstream cult figure thanks in no small part to the camp, sexually voracious character she plays on screen. This is a really fascinating interview with someone I knew nothing about before reading – it’s also one of the most weirdly British things I’ve read in years. Can you imagine ANY other country where Rebecca More would be as successful? What does that say about us? God we’re weird.
• The Sad Truth About Goofy’s Family: Did you know that Goofy has a son called Max? Did you know that he once was married? Do you want to know the horrifying truth about the backstory that Disney have actively chosen to bestow upon the cheerful canine doofus? This is…dark.
• Zadie Smith on Stormzy: A bravura piece of writing, in terms of both style and content. She is SO good, damn her.
• The Battle of Grace Church: Oh this is GREAT, possibly the best example I’ve ever read of the ‘snarky piece of reporting that is actually just slightly bitchy gossiping but which is also about some really rich and frankly awful-sounding people so that probably makes it ok’ genre. Grace Church is a very expensive, very exclusive nursery school in a posh area of Brooklyn; this is the story of the incredible power struggles and arguments that ensued as it tried to modernise its approach a few years back. This is FULL of wonderful details and waspish asides, I promise, and you’ll enjoy it very much indeed.
• Trash Talk: Or ‘On Translating Garbage’. A professional translator writes about their relationship with the words they work with, and the personal and professional horror that is having to work with garbage texts. I love this for the feeling it gives of words and language having personalities, and the nuance that a good translator can bring to bear, and most of all for its excoriation of International Art English, the very WORST of all the types of English and something I had to learn to write when I worked in arts PR many years ago; trust me, once you’ve spaffed out a phrase like “Tielemanns’ work speaks to the inherent quiddity of human experience and simultaneously addresses the ego and superego through its negatory uses of texture and palette” something inside of you dies.
• Night On Fire: An essay about menopause, specifically the hot flushes (here referred to in the American argot as ‘flashes’) that accompany it; far, far better than this very spare description makes it sound, I promise.
• This Is Pleasure: Finally in this week’s longreads, this is more novella than short story; regardless, it is MASTERFUL and one of the best things I’ve read all year, let alone this week. This is Pleasure tells the story of a Me Too-ish moment in one literary editor’s life, from the point of view of him and one of his female friends; the narrative switches between them, shifting your thinking and perspective and sympathy as you discover more about each of them and their relationship. Honestly, this is SO good and I cannot recommend it highly enough; this is a FAR better use of your time than that presentation you’re working on.

By Talia Chetrit

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is Rosa Bonita with the rather good ‘Volatile’ – it’s deliciously creepy and the video is wonderful:

2) Next up, this is the latest single by Four Tet; it’s called ‘Teenage Birdsong’ and while the song is great it’s the accompanying video that’s the star here – it’s honestly one of the best evocations of teenage friendship and fandom and fun I’ve seen in years, captured in just 5 short minutes. Wonderful filmmaking:

3) SUCH a good video, and not a bad song either. This is ‘Paramour’ by Anna Meredith and I want a model railway now:

4) This is called ‘God’, it’s by It It Anita of whom I had not heard before this morning and it is NOISY. Turn it up loud:

5) This is ‘Exhaustive’, it’s by Amish Boy, and I honestly have no idea WHAT is going on here:

6) Finally this week, a song all about how social media has ruined EVERYTHING – it’s called ‘Get Likes’ and it’s terrible-but-brilliant, and the video is great, and if you can use this as a bed in your next social media pitch video I will love you forever. Now, though, it’s time to say BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE I HAVE RUN OUT OF LINKS AND OUGHT TO PROBABLY GET ON WITH MY DAY WHAT WITH NEEDING TO GO TO THE SHOPS AND STUFF BUT NOT BEFORE I SAY THANKS TO ALL OF YOU FOR READING AND TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LOVE AND VALUE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU BUT MOST ESPECIALLY YOU AND I WANT YOU TO HAVE A LOVELY WEEKEND AND GENERALLY JUST FEEL HAPPY AND RELAXED OK GOOD THAT’S SETTLED BYE THEN BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!:

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Man, holidays are good, aren’t they? The sun and the sea and the swimming and the ability to read books again and not having to pretend to care about the stupid clients and the stupid job and the stupid industry that you hate and disdain and want to get as fas away from as possible and yet which you exist in some sort of queasy state of symbiosis with…this is universal, right? Right?

Oh. 

You know what isn’t good? YES YOU DO IT’S THE FCUKING TORIES! Why, can someone please explain to me, does this sorry process need to take two fcuking months from start to fcuking finish? Anyone? The only small bright spot on the horizon, the only light at the end of the tunnel (I am, of course, ignoring the oncoming train) is that there’s a small possibility that that dreadful man (no, the other one) might win and then find himself turfed out of No.10 within months as his party eats itself alive and we return to the country; an entire career, lifetime, of ambition culminating in a premiership less long-lasting or significant than any other in living memory, a footnote to a footnote of the whole sorry debacle that has constituted the past three years in UK politics. It’s not much to cling to, but, to be honest, it’s all we’ve got. 

Anyway, it’s been something of a long week but I have MANFULLY put in the requisite 6 solid hours of typing (pace Truman Capote, this is definitely not ‘writing’) required to bring you a Friday lunchtime link-based pick-me-up. The least you ingrates could do is read it and tell your friends (or enemies, or indeed strangers – I am not fussy) how great it is. Anyway, once again, lift up the metaphorical manhole cover, don the rubber waders and breathing apparatus and ease yourselves gingerly into the (metaphorically) malodorous (hopefully metaphorical) sewer that is this week’s Web Curios – I DO THIS ALL FOR YOU, YOU KNOW. 

(Oh, and by the way, Imperica is going to be doing another print magazine and they want contributors and they will pay! So if you have an idea for an article or feature about the NOW and the HORROR and the FEAR and the WARP AND WEFT OF DIGITAL MADNESS then, er, get in touch with them – details here)

By Guim Tió Zarraluki

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH THE BRAND NEW EP FROM WALES’ PREMIER UNDERGROUND RAPPER, ELRO!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE IT IF THIS WAS THE LAST YEAR IN WHICH PEOPLE IN THE ADVERMARKETINGPR INDUSTRY HAD THE FCUKING EFFRONTERY TO SPEND A WEEK QUAFFING ROSE IN CANNES TALKING ABOUT ‘BRAND PURPOSE’ AND ‘ADVERTISING FOR GOOD’ BECAUSE CAN WE ALL PLEASE AGREE THAT NONE OF THIS SH1T IS ‘GOOD’ FOR ANYONE AND THE ONLY PURPOSE IS TO MAKE MONEY?

• Facebook Libra: Is it a cryptocurrency? Is it going to see Facebook’s Big Blue Misery Tokens replacing national currencies and existing payment platforms to become the de facto standard for online transactions for evermore? NOONE KNOWS! Still, that hasn’t stopped an awful lot of hot air and speculation from all sorts of people about WHAT IT ALL MEANS. You, probably advermarketingprdrone, don’t need to worry about it too much at this stage – it’s very nascent, the link only takes you to the White Paper introducing the whole project which is somewhat light on actual detail, and frankly this is the sort of thing you can probably just get away with namedropping in your next conversation about THE DIGITAL FUTURE whilst nodding sagely and muttering something about ‘decentralised ledgers’. Still, if you want to know more, the TechCrunch writeup isn’t bad, and there’s a very good longread on it *down there* for later.
• Facebook Comments to Become More ‘Meaningful’: Ha! Of course not! However, there will be a slight tweak to how comment visibility is determined, with comments on posts from individuals and Pages being upranked if they are interacted with by the original poster or the Page in question. Which means, if you’re in the unfortunate position of having anything to do with the pointless, soul-destroying task of corporate page community management, you’ll like the fact that you can use this to promote positive comments (and, by extension, bury negative ones) on your paymasters’ content. That’s nice, isn’t it?
• Facebook Launches Avatars: It’s basically Bitmoji, and it’s only available in Australia at the moment. Not so excited now, are you? I would expect the opportunity for brands to create clothing and accessories for these (“accessorise your avatar with a refreshing coke!”) to arrive in the not-too-distant future, so that’s something to look forwa…oh, actually, no, it isn’t.
• Facebook Watch Creates Stronger Links With Groups: In the main this post is about how WELL Facebook watch is doing – 140million people worldwide spend at least a minute on the platform, which is small beer compared to Facebook overall, but LOADS compared to piddling, insignificant platforms like, er, Twitter. The main point of interest here is Facebook continuing to place Groups front and centre by promotion official Groups associated with Watch shows right next to the video; just a reminder that it’s worth considering Groups stuff for pretty much anything on FB right now if you want to squeeze the last few remaining drops of utility from it as a non-ad platform.
• Brands Can Now Boost Influencer Posts on Insta: Look, I can’t be bothered to write this up – it’s old news now anyway, and the whole business of influencerwank makes me sick inside: “Now, posts uploaded by creators using Instagram’s ‘paid partnership’ tool(which signposts when content has been paid for) will also feature a toggle that says ‘allow my business partner to boost’. The feature will give the brand in question a chance to appear in the feeds and Stories of a wider audience, even if they don’t follow the social media star.” HAPPY NOW?
• Twitter to Remove Precise Location Tagging: To be honest, this is only really of significant importance to researchers; Twitter geolocation in search and in social monitoring platforms has always been shonky.
• Snapchat Launches In-App Shop for Influencers: Or 5 influencers in the US – including, amazingly, Danielle Bregoli, aka the cashmeousside girl, aka Bhad Bhabie, who has somehow been able to parlay a viral appearance of Doctor Phil into the most baffling music career I have ever seen and a place in the same celebrity pantheon as the fcuking Kardashians, which honestly proves to me that I am too old to understand anything ever again – although obviously it’ll expand soon. This basically means that these people can now flog a range of tat direct from their Snapchat profiles, direct through the app, which, if you’re a tat-flogging famous, is probably great news.
• YouTube AR Lipstick: There are, fine, a few other updates in this post (about display ads – you can now use 3d assets in them, which users will be able to interact with if they desire), but the only really exciting bit is the new feature which will let users watching sponsored makeup tutorials from their favourite influencer use AR to see the makeup being flogged on their faces. It’s only in Alpha at the moment, but it’s potentially huge and quite remarkable in terms of how quickly this stuff is developing.
• Google Adds AR to Mobile Search: This is VERY FUN (and thanks to Kate Bevan for flagging this to me while I was on holiday); on newer Google phones, searching for certain animals will now offer up the option to see a 3d model of the critter in question and, if you like, throw it into real life via your phone’s camera. Which is a fun gimmick if you want to enliven a meeting by putting an ocelot on your colleague’s head, but also presages a future in which IKEA pays Google an obscene amount of money to make sure that its 3d models are the only ones that show up when someone searches for ‘bookcase’.
• Spotify Now Allows Ad Targeting by Podcast Topic: Advertisers will now be able to target users based on the genre of podcast they listen to on Spotify, rather than simply by music genre or playlist. This is REALLY interesting, imho, and I think you can probably do some quite fun / interesting / creative stuff with scripting around it if you were so inclined. It’s unclear whether you can specify listeners of specific sets of podcasts or how granular the targeting can get, but worth exploring as part of your next media buy, regardless.
• A Load of New LinkedIn Features: You can tag people in photos! You can send pictures in your LinkedIn messaging conversations! They’ve made filesharing live! YOU CAN NOW REACT TO PEOPLE’S POSTS IN MULTIPLE WAYS! Sadly there isn’t, it seems, a reaction which allows one to show exactly how one has been CRUSHED by a particular post or insight, but we live in hope. Have I mentioned how much I hate LinkedIn? I hate it so, so much.
• Fortnite Buys Houseparty: There’s not really anything you can do with this information, but I thought it worth noting as another proofpoint in the ongoing ‘no, Fortnite isn’t just a videogame’ conversation. Epic’s purchase of briefly-trendy group videochat app Houseparty suggests that they are well aware of their status as many teens’ favourite chatroom. I wouldn’t be hugely surprised were platform integrations with other messaging brands on the cards. Then again, I am a know-nothing bozo who understands the square root of fcuk all about BUSINESS, so my opinion’s probably not really worth much here.
• Meeker: You’ve all pretended to have read this by now, haven’t you? I bet you haven’t, though; I bet you scrubbed through the first 40-odd slides and then skipped randomly through the rest before going and reading someone else’s summary. I have, though, and you know what? Total waste of time. I think this is the year we should all give up on this; it’s not that interesting, it’s not particularly insightful (EVERYTHING! IS! GETTING! BIGGER!), it’s unnecessarily ugly and, at 333 slides, it’s TOO LONG (I know, I know, pottle). PLEASE DO BETTER NEXT TIME MARY.

By Wonmi Seo

DO YOU WANT A DUB REGGAE DAVID BOWIE COVERS ALBUM? I BET YOU DON’T THINK YOU DO BUT YOU ARE SO WRONG!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WHEN THE TORIES KNIFED THATCHER THEY APPOINTED JOHN MAJOR LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, SO IS THERE ANY CHANCE WE CAN HURRY THIS HORRIBLE FCUKING HORRORSHOW ON A BIT PLEASE BECAUSE, WELL, THERE APPEARS TO BE QUITE A LOT OF STUFF THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE GOT ON WITH SORTING OUT, PT.1:

• Stonewall Forever: It’s nice to be able to mark the continuation of Pride month with this lovely piece of webwork rather than some sort of ghastly bit of corporate queerwashing. Stonewall Forver is a digital monument to the Pride movement, taking as its starting point the Stonewall riots but covering six separate and distinct strands of US queer history, from pre-Stonewall to the riots themselves, to the first Pride march and the state of modern activism. It’s presented as a documentary and a parallel interactive, which lets users explore archive materials, eye-witness accounts of past events, and also submit their own photographs and memories representing their queer experience. This is SO nicely made, and a generally great project.
• The Google Exoplanet Explainer: It’s not actually an exoplanet explainer – it’s a promo site for Google Cloud’s work with NASA, using brute force computation and ‘AI’ to help the space agency search for exoplanets at speed – but it does a good job of telling you what they are, and why finding them is usually such a tricky proposition, and it’s all presented in such lovely, gently cartoony style that it feels far more like something educational than promotional. Plus, once you get to the end there’s a little game that lets you try and find unique planets in space, which is a bit like a slightly shonky version of about 1% of No Man’s Sky! Aside from anything else, this isn’t a bad site to use to explain to people ‘look, this is the sort of thing you can ACTUALLY use rudimentary AI for; can we now all stop throwing the term around willy-nilly as it’s making us all look stupid.”
• The Adversary: A new bot, made by Friend of Curios Shardcore for Privacy International – the gimmick here is that The Adversary will, when you follow it, track your Twitter behaviour and occasionally send you custom videos with its interpretation of your feelings and state of mind, based on what it’s ‘read’. A comment on the illusory nature of online privacy, and typically nicely-designed, this could, you feel, have been a LOT more sinister were it not for pesky considerations of ‘ethics’. You can read Shardcore’s own explanation of the bot and the project here, should you be so inclined.
• Use Less: A great website – a good project, and beautiful design. Use Less is a side-project by creative design agency Nice & Serious, to help Londoners find shops near to them which don’t use single-use plastics, instead offering people the opportunity to refill old bottles and containers with produce rather than bringing home yet another fcuking bag for life. It also contains a bunch of links to various places where you can buy more environmentally-sound domestic staples, such as toothpaste and washing up liquid and shampoo, all wrapped up in a lovely 60s(?)-ish aesthetic. It doesn’t change the fact that everything is fcuked and there is no saving us, but it’s nice to try.
• Pattern Radio: Whale Songs: Another Google project, this time taking several years’ worth of undersea recordings and making them accessible online, using ‘AI’ to isolate and pinpoint whalesong within the wider soundfiles and allowing users to navigate straight to the singing cetaceans. There are various ‘tours’ of the audio available, in which experts guide you through the sounds and ask you to think about what you’re hearing, and how the visualisation of the audiofile maps onto the actual sound, and if you’ve got kids who are interested in nature or audio this is actually a pretty cool general resource. The main draw, though, is the whale chorus – obviously you wouldn’t necessarily want to listen to it ALL the time, but I’ve quite enjoyed them lowing at me as I typed this.
• Break Kickstarter: This is, on the one hand, interesting, and on the other hand invcredibly annoying. Next month, Kickstarter is inviting people who want to run crowdfunding campaigns on the platform to BREAK KICKSTARTER. Except they don’t want you to BREAK anything – instead what they want is for fundraisers to mess with the standard fundraising model, introducing CREATIVE ELEMENTS like ‘choose your own adventure’ mechanics, or a regular webseries, to the process of begging for cash. This feels very much like someone said “WE NEED TO INCREASE ON-SITE ENGAGEMENT AND RETURN VISITS” and this was the first idea they came up with, and I really hope we don’t get to a point where creators are forced to not only design and promote their campaign but also become performing content monkeys just to get visibility on the platform. I will be fascinated to see what comes of this, but I don’t personally see it as A Good Thing. Still, if you’re planning on launching a Kickstarter in July, why not consider also making it an episodic novel of something. FFS.
• Fake Gestural Video From Audio Files: There’s quite a lot of decent audiovisual ‘AI’ gubbins this week, but my very favourite is this one – researchers at the University of Berkeley took audio of John Oliver, fed it to a machine trained on video of him, and asked it to recreate what it thought it would look like if he were saying the words in the audio. The results are astonishing – fuzzy, fine, and they wouldn’t fool anyone at present, but the accuracy with which it models the general gestures is incredible; there’s a point at the end where they compare what the machine came up with with Oliver’s actual movements when speaking the words in question, and it’s close to the point of being a bit disturbing. I know I say this all the sodding time, but, really, BELIEVE NOTHING (or at least, believe nothing in 2021).
• Sub Simulator GPT2: This is ACE. A SubReddit in which every thread is a conversation between GPT2 text bots, each of which has been trained on a different ACTUAL subReddit – it’s totally nonsensical, but it’s also wonderful to see the entire ‘personality’ of these communities boiled down into one slightly stupid but utterly compelling bot.
• Write With Transformer: And if you want to play around with the GPT2 thing, this is another site that lets you try it out in your browser. It’s not as good as Talk To Transformer from a few weeks back, imho, but it’s still fun to type in inputs and let it finish your sentences. Hang on, let’s see what it does with this copy – what follows is what it’s spat out: “”What are you doing in this house with you, 〉 ” I say, but it’s right up there with that.” That was TERRIBLE – BAD AI!
• Styleswapper: Or, to give it its official title, the AI Atelier Demo. This lets you input two different images and apply a style transfer from one to the other, which means with a little bit of imagination and no time at all, you can create something genuinely horrible. Why not spend the rest of the day taking the photos of your employer’s senior management and seeing what they look like when crossed with, say, photos of open heart surgery? MEATY MANAGEMENT. Bonus points to anyone who does this and uses the meaty ones to replace the official versions on the website.
• FakePhoto: It’s not called that – it’s by Nvidia, but doesn’t have a proper name, seemingly – but all you need to know is that this website lets you draw a bunch of abstract shapes and then tries to turn them into a photograph, based on what you’ve told it the abstract shapes are meant to be. Which is, I appreciate, a piss-poor description, even by my low-standards, but hopefully it will be pretty self-explanatory when you click. You can make some genuinely surreal stuff using this – it will all look a bit sub-Dali, fine, but the outputs are sort-of compelling nonetheless, and they can be downloaded should you want to start a side-Insta sharing gorgeous photos of the imaginary landscapes of the AI mind (actually that’s not a terrible idea).
• Nvidia Inpainting: Another Nvidia thingy (they don’t pay me – though they could if they wanted to – it’s just that they really are good at this stuff) which lets you play in-browser with its AI-assisted image-editing toys. Upload anything you like and seamlessly airbrush them, whether to remove the deep trenches on either side of your mouth in which you could reasonably grow potatoes were you so inclined (hate my appearance? Me? NEVER) or to delete an ex from history. A toy, but an impressive one.
• Apollo 11 In Realtime: Oh this is ACE, and such a smart use of archive materials. The site lets you experience the Apollo 11 mission as it happened, beginning 20 hours from the launch and taking you through until Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins stepped aboard the USS Hornet recovery ship. It ONLY uses archive materials, meaning it’s authentic as you like, and you can dip in and out of the memories at will, exploring as you go. Right now in realtime it’s July 21 1969 and the lads are on the moon, chatting with mission control – this is honestly quite remarkable as far as digital time machines go, and an exemplary piece of historical webwork.
• Flextime: This is…very sad indeed. Flextime lets you pick from a long list of celebrities (US ones, so your Kardashians and Jenners and basketballers and stuff) and, using your phone’s camera, lets you fake a screentime conversation with said famous; you, or the view from your phone’s camera, appear in a bubble in the top-left of the famouses’ screens as though you were ACTUALLY CHATTING; I presume that one would then use the resulting video as part of an HILARIOUS Story or similar. Potentially worth a look if you have a small child and want to convince them that you are friends with Kim K (your child is an IDIOT).
• Friendzone: We are all lonely. We are all isolated. We live in the post-Thatcherite atomised society and no amount of tapping and clicking will do anything to lessen the growing emotional distance between us as we move slowly and inexorably to the ultimate solitude of the grave. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! If the above bit of appallingly-teenage prose gave you the fantods, if you feel you would like to move on from the friends you had at University with whom you no longer have anything in common, if you’re sick of spending ANOTHER night with work because, then maybe Friendzone is for you – like a dating app, but for FRIENDS! It looks about as standard as these things get – profile, algorithmic matching, interest-based ‘AI’ pairing, yadda yadda yadda – and it will inevitably be ruined by men whose definition of ‘friendship’ is ‘aggressively sexually pursuing women on an app not designed for that purpose AT ALL’, but, regardless, check it out!
• Olivia AI: IT’S NOT FCUKING AI. Instead, Olivia is an open-source chatbot which you can use for whatever purposes you like; having played around with it, the current iteration doesn’t seem that good – but that’s the beauty of open source. Take it and make it better and STOP COMPLAINING (I can’t make it better, I am a useless non-coder and the future is not mine).
• Navigator: Another chatbot-type thing here, Navigator is designed specifically to make meetings less painful, helping compile an agenda, circulate relevant documents, take notes and multiple other features. I’m not 100% convinced that any of these things are that onerous, or indeed that this sort of hyperspecific bot-as-a-service thing can ever be useful or relevant unless it’s built bespoke for one’s own specific use-case, but if you’d like a virtual assistant to hassle everyone coming to your three’o’clock with increasingly intense “HAVE YOU READ THE STRATEGY DOCUMENT YET??” questions then this may well be some sort of digital nirvana for you.
• Botvolution: A Twitter account which, amongst other things, keeps an eye on the seemingly artificial boosting of political hashtags on UK Twitter. Interesting, and worth a follow – came to my attention this week after a fascinating thread on the campaign to oust Tom Watson crossed my eyeline.
• Arthacking Google Maps: I LOVE THIS IMMODERATELY. Artist Jason Isolini has exploited a Google Maps feature whereby business can upload 360 photos of the interior of their restaurants to specific locations by adding his own, odd, slightly vapourwave-y graphics to a bunch of locations all over the world. The link takes you to the overview of all his hacks; click on one to be taken to the streetview page for it, and marvel at the inventiveness. This is 100% stealable for a campaign (for the right sort of EXTREMELY ONLINE brand), and it annoys me that one of you will do this and win some sort of minor internet kudos for it when it was in fact my idea.
• 80s Hackney: A wonderful archive of pictures taken around Dalston and the surrounding areas in the 80s. I want a photo of that “I Don’t Hate Sharon” graffiti.
• Youper: Youper is an app that ‘helps you monitor and improve your emotional health’. You know what else might help you with that? NOT ATTEMPTING TO OUTSOURCE THE IMPORTANT EMOTIONAL PARTS OF LIFE TO A FCUKING APP. I have featured stuff like this before, and I think made the same point (I’m nothing if not tediously repetitious – although, come on, I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade now so you can probably let me off the occasional retread of old thoughts) – if you are feeling miserable or isolated or depressed, do you really think ‘talking’ to an uncaring, unfeeling machine is going to make you feel better? Also, this claims to be ‘powered by AI’ – OH REALLY? TELL ME HOW IT FCUKING WORKS, THEN? YOU CAN’T, CAN YOU? This stuff really boils my p1ss, honestly.
• Do Not Draw A Penis: Very silly, but also quite funny – the site uses all of the cock data accumulated by Google’s drawing project from a few years back to train an image recognition system which will automatically recognise and admonish you should you attempt to scrawl anything penile. Go on, you know you want to.

By Yves Tessier

CHECK OUT THIS SITE, COURTESY OF CURIOS’ (AND EVERYONE ELSE’S) MAN IN CHINA ALEX WILSON, FEATURING LOADS OF GREAT MIXES OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD JUST LIKE TO REMIND EVERYONE THAT WHEN THE TORIES KNIFED THATCHER THEY APPOINTED JOHN MAJOR LESS THAN A WEEK LATER, SO IS THERE ANY CHANCE WE CAN HURRY THIS HORRIBLE FCUKING HORRORSHOW ON A BIT PLEASE BECAUSE, WELL, THERE APPEARS TO BE QUITE A LOT OF STUFF THAT IT WOULD BE NICE IF SOMEONE GOT ON WITH SORTING OUT, PT.2:

• The National Geographic Travel Photo Awards: A chance to look at a whole host of places you would almost certainly much rather be right now. In a nice touch, all the winning photos are available to download as wallpapers for desktop or phone, which is cute.
• Wiki TMNT: Or, to give it it’s full name, “Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong”. This will make PERFECT sense as soon as you click – I very much recommend following this one, mainly for the fact that means that, if you’re a heavy Twitter user, there will be several times each day when you’ll get the Turtles earworm, which is never a bad thing.
• UIBot: Autogenerate examples of UIs for inspiration. An interesting exploration of the effect of automation on design – “Uibot is an experiment on how far one could automate the generation of visual designs, what kinds of advantages it would lead to and what issues one would face.”
• Storyline: I tweeted this yesterday and then wished I hadn’t, as it’s SUCH a brilliant idea to rip off for almost any client with data they want to make fun and I really ought to have kept the very minor glory of stealing someone else’s idea and passing it off as your own for myself. Anyway. Storyline is very simple – it presents you with the title of a dataset – “sales of fidget spinners, 2015-19”, for example – and asks you to take your best shot at accurately graphing the dataset. Yes, I know it sounds boring, but I promise it’s more fun than you’d think, and can be applied to almost any data you think of.
• The Close Approaches Database: It’s good to know that NASA keeps track of all the foreign space objects that are set to be hurtling worryingly close to Earth- if you’d like to experience a very faint sense of planetary unease, this is a GREAT resource (though you might have to Google what some of the distances actually mean, which I promise will be quite reassuring – honestly, they’re not THAT close).
• Suspicious Site Reporter: Help Google get better at finding and de-ranking dodgy sites by installing their Site Reporter Chrome Extension; any sites that look weird, click the button and Google will check them out. In an age of FAKE NEWS and scams and the like, it seems like the sort of thing we should all do. Or does that make you a cop? Oh God, it’s so hard to keep up with who the ‘good’ people are.
• Doodle Place: This is brilliant and pointless and oddly nightmarish. Doodle Place is a small virtual space, accessible via your browser and navigated with WASD. Populating Doodle World are…doodles – anyone can draw anything they like and drop it into the space, where it will be animated and exist on the site for anyone else visiting to see. It functions like a weird, lo-fi, very shonky virtual sculpture park, but it’s quite nice to wander through and see what everyone else has made. At the time of writing there are NO SWASTIKAS, which is always a present surprise.
• Bullet: This is potentially useful for the podcasters amongst you – Bullet’s an iOS app which lets you quickly and easily create short snippet-vids from your podcast audio, complete with captions, meaning you could, for example, use it to clip out the two STANDOUT LOLS from your otherwise criminally self-indulgent 40 minute chat about nothing with your HILARIOUS mate and use those as a promo on social.
• Leetfree: Very much one for the programmers, this – Leetfree collects actual, real examples of those whiteboard tests that tech companies make programmers do to show that they can actually do real code on the fly rather than just nicking everything off Github like some sort of script kiddie. I obviously have no idea what ANY of this means, but it’s quite interesting even for a non-coder in terms of getting a feel for exactly how (in theory if not in practise) computation can be applied to real-world problem solving.
• Brick: GO BRICK NOW screams the URL. What is Brick? “Brick is a grassroots movement for young people who are dissatisfied with their relationship to screens and social media, and are looking to spend more time engaged in the real world. We challenge our community to turn their phone into a brick for at least an hour a day. That means to set it down, put it in Brick Mode or put it in a box, and go do something engaging in the real world.” A touch smugly “Why Don’t You?”, but you may find something to empathise with here if you’re a tedious mindfulnesstwat.
• Memos: This is smart and, if you’re a big phototaker, potentially really useful – I think that there are several other programs that do the same or similar, but they’re all things like Evernote and therefore horrible and bloated. Memos is basically a search engine for your photos – on iOS only – which does text-in-image analysis meaning you can take pictures of printed text and then search for the photo from the app using text recognition. Very smart indeed.
• A Neural Net Forgets: If you haven’t seen this already – it’s a few weeks old now (SORRY BUT I WAS ON HOLIDAY FFS) – then do watch it. Simply put, it’s what happens when a neural net imagines a face, and then has its neurons turned off one-by-one. This feels far darker and sadder than it ought – it’s an honestly beautiful project and Alzheimer’s UK could do worse than contact the artist and ask to collaborate on something similar on a larger scale as an awareness-raiser (can someone please get them to do that? I think it’s quite a nice idea on reflection). Part of the wider AI Told Me project of AI-based artworks, all of which are similarly well-conceived and executed.
• Photos of the Hong Kong Protests: A typically great selection in The Atlantic.
• Dialup Tarot: Do you do Tarot, either for fun or for…er…darkly occult reasons? GREAT! This app promises to match you up with another random user so that you can do each others cards – it’s an extension of the Dialup ‘random chats with strangers’ app that I featured in April, but it’s a cute, silly idea, and I love the concept of Dialup, so I hope you’ll forgive me the slight repost (please forgive me).
• The Most Brutalist Website Ever: Also, INCREDIBLY geeky.
• MS Paint In-Browser: I don’t quite know why you’d want this, but I suppose if you fancy adding the MS Paint aesthetic to all your camera roll photos to better stand out on the gram, then, well, WHY NOT? Hang on, do all PCs still come with Paint or has it died? *checks* THANK GOD. This is a pleasingly old-school version, though, so perhaps it’s just for the retro lols. Why am I still typing this entry?
• Slutbot: Sadly this is only available to users with a US or Canadian phone number, which is SO UNFAIR; there are, though, ways around this. Slutbot is a chatbot designed to help you get BETTER AT SEXY TYPING! This is pure filth, and SO funny (or at least to me, though I appear to have the sense of humour of a teenage boy when it comes to a machine telling me that it wants to feel me up). Exactly how it’s going to make you better at smutwriting, or what encouragement it gives you if it turns out you’re really bad at it, I have no idea – let’s find out!
• Vapegasm: You can now preorder a vape pen which connects to a vibrator via bluetooth so that each time you take a drag, the toy activates. Just imagine the sort of person who thinks this is a good idea.
• Tiles: A gentle, simple, rather lovely new puzzle game from the New York Times. Honestly, this is excellent and one you could well keep coming back to.
• The Complete BBC Micro Games Archive: Oh my God – if you are of the era in which you would occasionally be allowed to play ‘games’ on the single school computer, so basically about 35-40, then this is a proper time machine. IT HAS GRANNY’S GARDEN ON IT FFS! Honestly, these are all totally sh1t but SUCH a nostalgia trip; if you’re a child, click this link and see what passed for entertainment in THE OLDEN TIMES.
• Mario Royale: This shouldn’t work, but it really does. The first level of Super Mario, playable in-browser, with you racing against 99 other players to complete the level the fastest. This is great, but you will struggle to stop playing it.
• Magirune: Last up in this week’s selection of timesucking sack-baiters is this mini-RPG; explore the dungeon, kill the monsters, find the treasure. Small, simple, but rather a lot of fun – and there’s a proper challenge in there if you want to finish it ‘properly’.

By Thomas Prior

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS IS CALLED “TROUBLE IN PARADISE: SONGS OF LOVE & LOSS FROM LATIN AMERICA” AND IT IS BY NICK STROPKO AND IT IS GREAT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Gif-fiti: Graffiti, gif-ed!
• Mathieu Bordel: An artist whose work I’ve featured on here before, but whose Tumblr collects a wonderful selection of their surreal, slightly 60s collage-type images which are also for sale as prints. I do love this stuff.
• 8–bit Fiction: I’m not 100% sure what this is – the page presents a series of 8-bit-style artworks, each illustrating a single quote, but the provenance of the quotes is unclear. Regardless, I love the style and the overall effect is pleasingly melancholic.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Paul Chaddeison: The work of French concept artist Chaddeison is ace, and a pleasing mix of subjects within his very recognisable BIG SCIFI style.
• Nick Cave and the Bad Memes: The account name lies – these are EXCELLENT memes. I do hope Nick Cave knows this exists.
• Seb Lester: Seb is a very talented calligrapher, and this is a very soothing Insta feed indeed.
• Alchemink: The best tattoo work I’ve seen in a while, this is a wonderful line style; ‘pollock’esque’ is a horribly lazy descriptor but, well, too late!
• Worship Leaders Without Teeth: Thanks to Dan for this – apparently these are all Christian rock band lead singers, without their teeth. This is probably funnier if you know who these people are, but, frankly, gurning rockstars are always worth a few seconds of your time if you ask me.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Will Make All The Money: This Bloomberg piece on the Facebook Libra announcement is the best thing I read on it this week (with the caveat that I got bored of reading takes reasonably quickly) – what I enjoyed was the way it couches the announcement in terms of Facebook’s increasingly clear desire to cement its status as a fundamental part of the web’s infrastructure rather than just a platform on it. It’s not too hard to see small countries in the developing world leaning into this stuff quite hard, not least given the de facto status of Facebook=the web across large swathes of the globe.
• Facebook Moderator PTSD: The latest Facebook PR horrorshow came in the form of this Verg article, in which people who’ve worked at FB’s moderation shops in the US break their NDAs to discuss the working conditions in the content-control farms. It won’t massively surprise you to learn that they are sub-optimal, nor indeed that Facebook (or the company it subcontracts the work to) doesn’t seem hugely bothered with the whole basic human dignity / ends-vs-means distinction. Two things, though, stood out – firstly, again, the fact that people are AWFUL and maybe all that stuff about Red Rooms on the Darkweb was true after all; and secondly, this line, which may be the most poignant thing I will read all year: “Other times, when he was having a particularly bleak day in the queue, a manager would hand him a bucket of Legos and encourage him to play with them to relieve the stress as he worked. Speagle built a house and a spaceship, but it didn’t make him feel better.” I might cry.
• Can Power Be Anything Other Than Zero-Sum: An interesting meditation on whether or not power must, definitionally, be a zero-sum concept (in most cases absolutely yes, is the answer – power is a finite resource; by definition, granting it to one person removes it from another, or blocks them from attaining it); what’s unusual is that it’s written by Jeff Raikes, ex-CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a VERY rich man. One doesn’t usually read stuff like this from people at the top of the pyramid; Raikes was apparently inspired down this road of thinking by a conversation with Anand Giridharadas, someone whose thinking and writing I really enjoy and who is very much worth a follow if you’re not aware of them.
• The New Wilderness: Another in the seemingly-infinite line of pieces about THE DEATH OF PRIVACY or THE NEW PRIVACY or suchlike (by the way, did you know that there’s no native word for ‘privacy’ in Italian? MAKES YOU THINK, EH?), but which distinguishes itself by coining a new (to me at least) way of thinking about the concept – to whit, “ ‘ambient privacy’—the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions with one another remain outside the reach of monitoring, and that the small details of our daily lives should pass by unremembered. What we do at home, work, church, school, or in our leisure time does not belong in a permanent record. Not every conversation needs to be a deposition.” A really interesting read, which whilst not groundbreaking offers a few useful new ways of framing the questions it addresses.
• Detecting Facial Manipulation in Photoshop: This is a very boring paper by Adobe and I don’t suggest you read it properly unless you’re a coder or a masochist; I just want you to know that SOON there will be tools that will enable us all to (in theory) easily see whether or not an image has been ‘shopped or not, praise God. Obviously this will only work for things done in ACTUAL photoshop (and no I won’t capitalise it or ™ it, screw you Adobe you preposterous fools) which means it won’t actually do all that much to curb fakery, but it’s a step in the right direction.
• Creators vs Influencers: A rumination on the difference between the concept of ‘creator’ and ‘influencer’ as they apply across social platforms. It’s a bit silly, but interesting from the point of view of the intersection of culture, the evolution of language, and the web. Let me put it on the record that I despise both terms, fwiw.
• Writing on a 30 Year-Old Mac: One of those occasional “I tried some old tech and WOW it was so good!” nostalgia pieces; on this occasion, the author exhumes an old Macintosh (one of those beige cubes, if you recall) in order to see whether he can write his copy on it. Unsurprisingly, his main takeaway is that the experience of working on a machine with so few features makes it easier to concentrate and offers fewer distractions; that said, he’s only saying that because the piece is entirely personal experience and self-reflecting; I’d like to see him write Curios on that bastard thing.
• The YouTube Rebrand: Primarily one for the designers amongst you, this is an exhaustive walkthrough by the design agency responsible for the YouTube rebrand (WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘WHAT REBRAND?’) – a really thorough breakdown of what they changed and why they did it. These things are often supremely wanky, but this is very clearly-written.
• Recommendations: Another in the THERE IS SO MUCH TAT ON SALE HOW DO WE CHOOSE series of articles, this looks at the retail-adjacent recommendation industry, encompassing review sites, newsletters and the rest. It’s interesting to see an analysis of a parallel / parasitic business area; I reckon you could probably still do reasonably well with something like this on Insta, using Stories, were you so inclined.
• The Ruthless Reality of Amazon’s One-Day Shipping: You know what I said up there about Facebook’s Libra being part of its long-term goal to become part of the fabric of the web? Well this is like that, but for Facebook read Amazon and for ‘part of the fabric of the web’ read ‘everything’. Explaining the lengths Amazon is going to to establish central control over as much of its logistics operation as it can, the piece paints a picture of a company that’s not going to be happy until it’s basically running anything that involves selling people stuff, start to finish. I read a BBC piece the other day which was looking at Amazon’s future plans; it was a bit puff-ish, and they’d been given access to a lot of senior Amazon people. One man they described as one of the company’s ‘visionary leaders’, and he was waxing lyrical about all the ways Amazon would change the world (for the better, obvs); a few paragraphs later, the piece briefly mentioned that he’d made his name at the company for coding something significant that helped save the company hundreds of millions at scale. Now, look, I’m not sniffing (I have never made my name at any company other than for a questionable attitude and a pyromaniac’s attitude to professional bridges), but surely that makes him a fcuking good coder rather than some sort of Jesus-like savant whose guidance we should blindly be following into the future. STAY IN YOUR FCUKING LANE, CODEMONGS!
• What Happened to SpeedX?: SpeedX was a Kickstarter project to fund an internet-connected bike – a very, very successful one. Til it went wrong and everything fell apart and loads of people lost their money. This is fascinating, not least on the quite mad world of doing business in China.
• CDs Are Coming Back: Are they? Are they really? I’m not sure about this one. Still, there’s an article about it online, which means that you can present it as an ACTUAL FACT next time you’re doing ‘strategy’ and need some rubbish to make you look like you’re on the cultural pulse. Apparently GenZ kids are buying CDs not to listen to but as an artefact of fandom or appreciation – which sort of works, I suppose, if you squint.
• The Queen of Mukbang: Mukbang, for those not already aware, is the term for people eating on camera for the pleasure (non-sexual) of the viewer; this is either from watching people eat improbably large amounts, or the ASMR-kick some people get from wet mouth sounds like chewing or swallowing (wow, ‘wet mouth sounds’ is a really unpleasant sentence to both read and type, turns out). Bethany Gaskin is a YouTuber who makes this sort of video, and it has made her RICH. Has any food brand done mukbang yet? It’s a pretty obvious win imho. Fcuk it, let’s go the whole hog and get Bird’s Eye to do a sploshing vid on Pr0nhub.
• Gunfluencers: Ah, influencers! This time, with guns (and, inevitably, breasts!)! This piece looks at the particular influencer economy that exists around firearms in the US, where gun companies are banned from promoting social posts that feature actual weapons; a ban which they gaily circumvent by paying people with huge followings lots of money to hold guns in their photos instead! This…this regulation of social advertising’s not really working, is it?
• Soberfluencers: Ah, influencers! This time, with the 12 steps (and, inevitably, breasts!)! Yep, even not being a raging alcoholic is now something you can be smugly positive about on Instagram; this, to me, is the very worst sort of performative claptrap the platform has to offer, this plastic commoditisation of a very real issue and a very real problem and something that people struggle with on a daily basis, coopted by people for no other reason than to sell an idea of ‘wellness’ to idiots. I need a drink (mum, it’s 11:13 am and I promise I very much do NOT need a drink, ok?).
• The Garfield Restaurant: The first ever officially-franchised Garfield restaurant has opened in Toronto. This is a profile of the restaurant and its owner, and it’s, honestly, one of the strangest things I have read all week. It has the slight feel of Tommy Wiseau about it – you know, someone utterly delusional but basically well-meaning, with a slight whiff of the mad/criminal about them. If any Curios readers happen to be in Toronto could you go along and tell me what it’s like please? Thanks.
• Liu Cixin’s War of the Worlds: A New Yorker profile of the Hugo Award-winning author of (most famously) the Three Body Problem trilogy; this is fascinating, partly due to the very un-writerly nature of Cixin himself (a man who happily accepts he is far more interested in the science than the fiction), partly due to the few details that are sort of left hanging (his drinking, for one), but in the main for the very uncomfortable feeling you get towards the end when he effectively sanctions violent suppression of popular protest by the state and you get the very real feeling that there are certain differences in culture between East and West that are almost insurmountable.
• 100 Fascinating Word Facts: A podcast transcript, so occasionally a bit annoying stylistically, but these are all WONDERFUL. Look: “‘Smart’ has meant clever for some 700 years, but its etymology is from the Old English for pain. Because smarts are a cutting wit. And yes, it is painful, yes.” SO GOOD.
• Jeremy Vine’s Story About Boris Johnson: I don’t really want to talk about that man – this lovely anecdote by Jeremy Vine about meeting Johnson twice at speaking events is beautifully told, and as revealing as anything else about him. What do we think the protocol is when it comes to moving one’s mistress into Number 10?
• An Oral History of Bennington College: If, like me, you spent much of your teens worshipping at the altar of Tartt, McInerny and Easton Ellis, you will be aware of Bennington College as the alma mater of two of those three, and various other gorgeous, doomed members of the 80s literati and music world. This is an oral history of the college when all those people were attending – it reads, wonderfully, like a slightly detached combination of the Secret History and The Rules of Attraction and made me wish I’d been beautiful and damned and sickeningly talented and very rich and there in 1983.
• Mike Tyson Smokes the Toad: A truly excellent profile of Mike Tyson, now in his third act and reinventing himself as a legal weed brand. This is great writing, with some cracking lines – it also does a good job of asking why Tyson’s getting such a relatively easy ride from people despite his history of violence against women and sexual assault. It also contains the assertion that Mike Tyson is a “spiritually awakened shaman/cannabis-entrepreneur warrior of the light”, which is probably a best phrase in Curios this week.
• Boxing: Superb essay by Fatima Farheen Mirza, on boxing and womanhood and strength and family and race. Beautifully written.
• The Lesbian Cruise: Finally this week, the happiest thing you will read all week. Funny and romantic and heartwarming, I cannot recommend it enough. Read it, and then send it to everyone you know who’s even a little bit soppy about LOVE and stuff, it’s genuinely great.

By Naudline Pierre

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) This is by Sleater Kinney, the video is by Miranda July, and it is just fcuking GREAT. Even if you don’t adore the music, the video really is worth a watch:

2) This is by Mexico City Blondes, and as soon as I heard the beat I was transported back to Manchester in 1997 and Fat City Records and OH GOD this is good (if you’re a 90s fetishist):

3) This track is called ‘Dancers’, it’s by Plaid, and it’s a gorgeous slow-build piece of melodic electronica with a truly beautiful CGI video:

4) This is called ‘Runaway’ by Half Alive, and it’s the sort of slightly skippy/glitchy pop song that reminds me a lot of about 2008ish, in a good way. Not un-Hot Chip-esque, if you need a better comparator:

5) This is by Aidan Moffat and RM HUbbart, and I think it might be their last ever song together. It’s called ‘Cut to Black’ and it’s beautiful and VERY Arab Strap-ish, as you might expect:

6) Hiphop Corner! This is called ‘Gang Sh1t’, it’s by Marlon Craft, and I would encourage you to watch, listen and pay attention – this is excellent:

7) Finally this week, this is the second song this year by Mattiel I’ve featured on here – I think she might be my favourite artist of 2019 so far. This is called ‘Food For Thought’ – she is SUCH a good performer, and it’s a cracking song, and I hope you like it and oh that’s it for this week BYE BYE I HAVE MISSED YOU SO MUCH IT IS SO GOOD TO BE BACK DOING CURIOS EVEN IF THE OTHER BITS OF BEING BACK ARE A BIT LESS GOOD I HOPE YOU ALL HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND THAT THE SUN SHINES AND YOU GET TO SPEND TIME DOING THE THINGS YOU LOVE BEST AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK SO DON’T WORRY IT WILL ALL BE OK AND IF IT ISN’T IT PROBABLY DOESN’T MATTER BYE I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!: