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Webcurios 19/10/18

Reading Time: 30 minutes

Does this mean we now have to stop lauding the Saudi regime for its incredibly progressive decision to let women drive cars? Does this mean that they’re the bad guys again? What? They were always the bad guys? GOD IT’S ALL JUST SO HARD.

Welcome to yet another week in which once again we have been shown that if you’re rich enough you really can seemingly get away with anything, because said wealth means that you are ‘strategically important’ to others. Cheering, isn’t it? At least the disappearance of poor Mr Khashoggi has given us a fresh new horror to distract from this week’s idiocy Olympics in Brussels, so his (probable – let’s give those lovely guys in Riadh the benefit of the doubt, eh?) death hasn’t been totally in vain. 

Anyway, I need to brace myself physically and spiritually for the prospect of spending 45 minutes in a confined space with a naked performer later, so I’m off to deodorise my nooks in preparation – while I make with the cotton buds, you make yourselves comfortable and let me gently lube you up with this week’s steaming, fresh, slightly gelatinous helping of webspaff. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and YOU ASKED FOR THIS. 

robin cerutti

By Robin Cerutti

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE INSTRUMENTAL VERSION OF TYLER’S CHERRYBOMB ALBUM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURPRISED THAT YOU’RE SURPRISED ABOUT FACEBOOK’S METRICS FOR AD SUCCESS BEING ANYTHING LESS THAN 100% ACCURATE:

  • Facebook Expands Lead Gen Forms: To be honest, there are probably more interesting stories I could have led with in this section, but this is just the way that the links have fallen this week and I know noone really cares. Anyhow, this is the FASCINATING news that Facebook has now expanded its Lead Gen ad functionality (you know, those ads that let you harvest emails from willing idiots direct from Facebook) to include ad types focused on brand awareness, reach and traffic rather than only allowing it as a discrete unit type. Oh, and the feature’s now called ‘Instant Forms’. That…that was underwhelming, wasn’t it?
  • Facebook Launching Creative Compass: This is COMING SOON, or at least at some point in 2019 – this is a service which will analyse your FB ads and tell you how effective they’re likely to be, based on the system’s analysis of your image, copy, etc, though obviously it won’t tell you exactly how much Facebook is inflating your ad’s performance to make its platform look more effective than it in fact is (TOPICAL!).
  • ‘Scraped’ Content To Be Downranked On FB: Links to crap content will be downgraded on FB, with the platform suggesting that links will be less likely to travel on the platform “if they have a combination of this new signal about content authenticity along with either clickbait headlines or landing pages overflowing with low-quality ads”. Which obviously doesn’t affect you, with your high-quality content, but, you know, might be useful to know nonetheless.
  • Facebook Expands Retention Optimisation To All Advertisers: Do you advertise apps? No? WELL MOVE ON THEN. For those of you that do, though, this might be interesting – FB is expanding the ability to target users most likely to return to your app after two or seven days with ads, to lure them back to the siren call of your generic shovelware. What a time to be alive!
  • Facebook Updates Branded Content Policy: A couple of minimally interesting updates to FB’s ‘Branded Content’ partnership functionality (you know, that bit of Facebook which lets Pages tag individuals in their updates and mark them as a paid partner shilling tat for money) – this is BIG NEWS: “Today we are adding more clarity and context to branded content posts, updating the language on the label from “Paid” to “Paid Partnership.” While the creator or publisher will continue to tag “with” the brand, people can now also learn more about the two tagged Pages and the partnership by clicking on a new informational “About this Partnership” icon.” Seismic, eh? Oh, and Pages will now be able to comment on / tag other Pages as Pages – just think of all the exciting brandter opportunities (I know you haven’t thought about that word since 2015, but it’s important to occasionally resurrect the horrors of the past as a salutary lesson for all our futures).
  • Political Ad Transparency Comes to the UK: It’s been live in the US for nearly a year now, and here it is in the UK – us Brits will now also have the opportunity to explore the ad buys and targeting of ads deemed to be ‘political’, with any organisation wanting to run promotions of this type required to provide additional information about their location and identity in an attempt to prevent BAD ACTORS from messing with the purity of our democratic process. Although, in a departure from the US model, this only applies to ads which are explicitly promoting a specific individual or political party rather than being extended to a broader range of issues which could be deemed ‘political’, which does rather de-fang the system imho. Still, it’s a step in the right direction (albeit a small, slightly uncertain one).  
  • IGTV Academy: It’s no secret that literally not one person actually cares about Instagram TV or believes that it’s a good thing with a reason to exist. Still, Facebook have punted hundreds of millions into attempting to make it happen, meaning that they’re not going to let it sink without a fight – witness their latest attempt to make it cool, the IGTV ACADEMY! Snark aside, if you’re a ‘creator’ (don’t worry, I’m not going to rant spastically about how much I hate that term, that was last week) then this is perhaps worth looking at – it’s happening in Shoreditch (like it’s 2005!) next week, and places are available on application, so if you want to learn how to shoot vertical and make BETTER MORE ENGAGING CONTENT then you could probably do worse than take a look.
  • Instagram Story School: Or, alternatively, you can check out this suite of instructions direct from Insta on how to optimise your Story creation – it’s VERY basic, but if you need to explain to your grandfather what Stories are and how he can use them to create thirst traps for all the Instagroupies out there then this will be INVALUABLE.
  • Twitter Testing Annotations for Moments: It’s slightly unclear whether this is a feature available to anyone who creates ‘Moments’ on Twitter or whether it’s only something that those created by Twitter will feature (actually I have just reread the article and that’s exactly what it is – Christ, but I’m a p1ss-poor ‘journalist’), but the opportunity to add ‘annotations’ (that is, little explainer text between featured Tweets in a Moment) is being experimented by Twitter, the idea being that it will offer context and a degree of fact-checking to the feature. Although given that Moments have gone desktop-only there’s no guarantee that they’ll even be a thing in a few months time – nor, frankly, do I care.
  • Snapchat Launches Lenses for Cats: This is, apparently, news. Look, if you work for Pedigree then perhaps this of interest to you; otherwise, you and your special little guy can carry on largely as before.
  • YT Changes ‘Engagement’ Criteria For Action Ads: Literally this: “YouTube will now count an ‘Engagement’ whenever a user clicks or watches 10 seconds or more of a TrueView for action ad when using maximize conversions or target CPA bidding. That’s a change from 30 seconds.” It’s…it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for this.
  • YT Launches New Ad Targeting Option: You’ll now be able to target YouTube viewers based on where they’re watching YT – users casting the service to a TV will now be a discrete targeting group, which is potentially hugely useful; I don’t wish to make sweeping generalisations here, but I think you can infer a reasonable amount about the sort of person someone is based on their propensity to watch old TV series thrown onto their telly from their phone, for example.
  • If This Then Domino’s: Domino’s continues its policy of making digital innovations which, at best, three actual people will ever use but which act as excellent little pieces of PR because idiots like me write them up as though they are ‘news’. This is a very smart – and simultaneously very, very silly – idea which applies the basic principle of IFTTT to pizza ordering; the service lets you set up some simple conditional parameters which, if met, will trigger the ordering of your favourite pizza, for example if your GE dishwasher starts leaking, or if it’s snowing outside. As an extension of Domino’s overall ‘we are the pizza brand that owns silly tech gimmicks’ this is absolutely perfect, and the integration of multiple brands’ IoT functionality is smart, and the breadth of pre-scripted recipes is pretty staggering. I am grudgingly impressed.
  • Adidas Yung: I promise, I’m not picking on Adidas (like the brand would care if I was, obvs), but this is another marketing initiative that I can’t help but get slightly annoyed by; this site for it’s Yung range is, for reasons known only to Adi’s marketing team, designed to look like an exact replica of a Geocities-era late-90s site, complete with tiled backgrounds and 90s slang and…look, WHO IS THIS AIMED AT? Are they finally acknowledging that the only people who care enough about trainers to visit this webpage are old people who can remember when the web actually looked like this? Are any young people actually nostalgic for an era of web design that they are too young to actually practically remember? They’re not, are they? This absolutely feels like the sort of project which was greenlit because a bunch of middle-aged blokes fell into a memoryhole and spent a drunk hour shouting ‘WAZZZZZZUUUUUUUUP?!’ at each other. Still, the rhythm game on here is quite fun so, you know, points for that.

jeanie tomanek

By Jeanie Tomanek

NEXT UP, AN OLD-BUT-EXCELLENT JAZZ MIX BY DJ WRONGTOM!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.1:

  • Who Paid $0.99?: The latest in the near-infinite parade of ‘ideas on the web that I am genuinely angry I didn’t think of myself’, this is so simple and so brilliant that it makes me a bit sick. There is only one gimmick to this site – you pay 99 cents to its owner to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has been stupid enough to pay 99 cents to find out who else has…you get the idea. It’s an almost perfect piece of pointless webart, and I bet it’s already made hundreds.
  • Building Hopes: This is cute, and in its AR incarnation reasonably impressive as a piece of dataviz, but I am sort of baffled as to why it exists (WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED A REASON? Christ, Matt, can’t you just uncritically enjoy something for a change without having to scry for meaning and purpose in EVERYTHING you joyless prick? This sort of rhetorical, fourth wall-breaking flourish is exactly the sort of authorial device which really elevates Web Curios above other weekly linkdump newsletters, I find). Building Hopes is a Google News Initiative artproject which exists as this website and an associated AR app – users pick from a selection of issues, choosing four or more, and indicate how hopeful they are about those issues seeing ameliorative change in the future; this creates a sort of virtual balancing stone sculpture which exists in perpetuity, either on the website or in the AR app. The ‘sculptures’ are a datavisualisation of your picks – there are a variety of indicators on each of the ‘stones’ which show how the general public feel about it, using data taken from Google search trends and the like, and when viewing it in AR there’s a really nice UI to the whole thing allowing you to explore the general direction of feeling around, say, renewable energy. Overall it’s a really well-made digitoy, as you’d expect from Google, though it does an even worse job of explaining itself than I have just done. Just fire it up and have a play.
  • Skills From Videos: This is AMAZING – this YouTube video offers a short demonstration of how these researchers have created software which can ‘learn’ movement from ‘watching’ videos. So, for example, they can train a virtual figure in a simulated environment to do backflips by showing it a bunch of YouTube videos of people doing backflips. This is, seriously, quite remarkable – the idea that we have managed to create software that can apply learned skills to a virtual puppet and refine said skills based on repeated viewership is insane, and presages a future in which we’ll basically be able to train our robots to do anything they can watch us doing. I give it less than two months before we see the first application of this to bongo – honestly, combine this with Deep Fakes and we’ll have the first entirely computer generated pr0n movie before you can say ‘is it weird that I’m masturbating to something that is entirely machine-generated?’.
  • Tortoise Media: YOu’ll have read about this already this week, I’m certain, but here’s the Kickstarter that EVERYONE (or at least everyone vaguely connected with the media in the UK) is talking about; Tortoise has smashed its funding target with a month to go, suggesting that there really is appetite for some sort of SLOW NEWS organisation. To be honest, the interview in the Standard yesterday will tell you more than I possibly could about this, but the idea is that Tortoise will offer a smaller number of in-depth articles per day, eschewing the churn and pace of the modern newsroom in favour of a more considered and less click-hungry approach to news. The idea of the ‘collaborative conference’ as a forum for discussion and to shape the agenda is fascinating, although imho perhaps a touch utopian, and it will be interesting to see whether or not it can sustain readership once the initial hype has died down; whilst there’s obviously a market for longform, quality journalism online (*ahem*), I’m curious as to whether there’s going to be enough output to keep this moving. Still, the people behind it seem a lot smarter than I am and I’m sure they’ve thought this through.
  • Wearspace: You will, I’m sure, have seen a visual of these doing the rounds this week – Panasonic’s prototypical concentration visor, designed to ensure that you, worker drone, are deprived of your peripheral vision so as to be able to better focus on the glowing, flickering screen in front of you. NO! DO NOT LOOK OUT OF THE WINDOW! DO NOT BECOME TEMPORARILY DISTRACTED BY THE LOVELY HUMAN COUNTENANCE OF YOUR CO-WORKER! YOU ARE HERE TO PRODUCE! YOU ARE ON OUR CLOCK! WORK FOR US!  Anyway, this is the Crowdfunding page for said prototypical design – it’s all in Japanese and so may well say that it’s all an elaborate joke, but why not chuck them a few hundred Yen in any case? This is set to become a must-have niche fashion item in 2019, mark my words.
  • Oobah: You’ll recall moon-faced peroxide prankster Oobah Butler’s viral restaurant prank from last year, in which he managed to get a totally fictitious restaurant, called ‘Shed’ (because it was his shed), to #1 in the London Tripadvisor rankings – as a result of the scam, Oobah has spent the past 12 months being bombarded with interview requests by the world’s media and understandably got a bit fatigued by the whole thing. He decided to see whether he could get away with outsourcing his media duties to a succession of slightly iffy lookalikes – you can read the (excellent) writeup here, but the upshot is that he totally managed it. He has now launched ‘Oobah’, a service which purports to allow anyone to enjoy the same sort of liberating doppelganger army effect on demand; it’s a joke, fine, but I also get the impression that there’s probably some sort of deeper gag at play here – you can sign up, say what you want the lookalikes for, and….well, we will see. I’ve asked for a lookalike to help me achieve stratospheric Instagram fame, so if I abandon Curios for a career as a speedy lollipop-flogger you’ll know why.
  • MAKERPhone: There’s a line in Houllebecq’s ‘Atomised’ in which one of the protagonists launches into a fairly typical miserabilist riff about how they are an entirely useless example of parasitic humanity because they exist in a world that they simply don’t understand surrounded by objects and artifacts that they couldn’t possible recreate themselves. If you too are afflicted by this peculiarly anthropocene malaise you might want to invest in the MAKERPhone, now 10x funded on Kickstarter, which will deliver to you all the components you will need to make your very own smartphone. This sounds BRILLIANT, for the right type of person – you’ll be able to hack it together, customising the look and the software and the like, and you’ll learn loads about electronics while you’re about it. This is the sort of thing that the slightly whimsical part of me likes to envision parents and kids doing together, while I cry imagining the sort of childhood I never had.
  • Seven Square Miles: Aerial photographs, culled from Google Maps, showing areas of seven square miles from around the world. A truly beautiful reminder of the wonderful diversity of the planet and the weird beauty of semi-abstract landscapes.
  • Sociality: An online art project focused on the ways in which technology is increasingly being used to control and manipulate in covert, concealed ways. “Paolo Cirio identified classes of patents, then collected, aggregated and sorted the data on the website https://Sociality.today where thousands of patents of problematic technologies are exposed. On Sociality’s website everyone is able to browse, search, submit, and rate patents by their titles, images of flowcharts, and the companies that created them. Both the artist and the online participants perform oversight of invasive inventions designed to target demographics, push content, coerce interactions, and monitor people.” Interesting and incredibly bleak once you dig into it – you can read a proper writeup elsewhere on Imperica, but it’s worth a delve around inside the archive; it will take you about 3-4 minutes to find something that makes you feel uncomfortable.
  • Big Mac Data: The Economisty is making the data underpinning its famous Big Mac Index – its regular tracker of the price of McDonald’s most famous product as a measure of global economies – freely available. You can do ANYTHING YOU LIKE with it, so I look forward to seeing all sorts of excellent data projects mapping the cost of a Big Mac against, say, the volume of Pr0nhub searches for ‘Vore’ or similar. Whilst correlation doesn’t equal causation, I bet you can show some VERY odd things with this stuff.
  • Personas: A simple, lightweight cartoon avatar generator, letting you create an easily customisable digital…er…persona for yourself to download and use as you please. You can probably spend an enjoyable few hours this afternoon creating your entire office out of these and then replacing their photos on the company website (this is a GREAT idea, please can someone give this a go? You almost certainly won’t get sacked).
  • Colourblindly: A Chrome extension which enables you to see what a webpage would look like if you suffered from colour blindness. Not only really useful from an accessibility and design point of view, but also the sort of thing which you could use to really mess with someone’s head – try setting it to run on your deskmate’s computer and see whether you can convince them they’ve got some sort of unexpected and inexplicable ocular degenerative disorder!
  • Maniac Pumpkin Carvers: Carving pumpkins is HARD, or at least it is if you’re me and have all the artistic elan of Helen Keller. Maniac Pumpkins are apparently something of a New York institution, and make the whole process look incredibly easy – these people will, for a fee, provide you with professionally-carved gourds depicting whatever you prefer, from faces to abstract designs to everything inbetween. Obviously this is of no use to you whatsoever unless you happen to be in New York, but the gallery of work on the site is astonishing and worth a look and, who knows, maybe one of you reading this will be motivated to start your very own ripoff pumpkin carving business. I feel so inspirational.
  • Piano Genie: Another project which is sort of akin to magic. This is a bit tricky to explain, but imagine a system which would let you improvise on a piano using 8 simple buttons rather than the 88 keys which you’d usually have to use, and which would allow you to do this with literally no musical talent whatsoever. You imagining? GOOD. This is exactly that – you can see the whole site here, which details how the tech works in proper detail and lets you see the code and the rest, but the main link here takes you to the webtoy version which, honestly, is incredible. It looks like crap, fine, but you will be amazed at the oddly melodious tunes you’ll be able to spaff out just by mashing your keyboard. I’m going to add ‘Jingle Composer’ to the list of ‘jobs that the robots are going to steal’.
  • Macaw: Macaw’s an interesting idea, designed to make your Twitter feed a little more interesting – it basically tracks the things that people in your network ‘like’, and presents you with a daily curated roundup of said things; the idea being that it will surface content and Tweets which are considered ‘good’ by people whose opinions you presumably respect but which wouldn’t necessarily have been surfaced by the algo. Of course, this could simply expose all of your Twitter network as people with appalling opinions and taste, but that’s part of the fun!
  • Asaro: This is one of those occasional things one stumbles across online which makes you realise quite how mad the lives of the super rich must be. Do you own a yacht? Are you bored with the endless sailing and discovery and exploration and diving and eating and sealife and sunsets and booze and the like? Of course you are – who wouldn’t be jaded? Why not employ Asaro – as far as I can tell, basically the Punchdrunk of the superyacht community – to create a bespoke theatrical interactive EXPERIENCE for you and your guests? Whether that be a Pirates of the Caribbean-style adventure, some sort of zombie-themed island escape or maybe something involving Atlantean aliens or suchlike, they will do it for you (for a doubtless eye-watering price). I would LOVE to see the sort of thing they can do, so if any Curios readers happen to have access to a yacht and 5-6 figures disposable income then, well, I am ALL YOURS.
  • Fold’n’Fly: I think it’s half term next week – I imagine those of you with kids are practically FRANTIC wondering how in the name of Christ you’re going to keep your progeny occupied in the schoolless downtime (look, just accept the fact that you’re going to leave them in front of Fortnite for a week and be done with it – it’s ok, they’re probably beyond saving), so I offer this as some sort of potential solution. This website presents schema for a bewildering variety of paper planes to fold and fly – there’s at least a morning’s entertainment in this. For those of you reading this at work, go and raid the printer RIGHT NOW and start folding.
  • Slowly: This is a lovely idea. Slowly is an app which connects strangers from around the world to be penpals – the gimmick here is that your messages get delivered…er…slowly, with the length of time it takes to deliver a missive dependent on the real-world distance between two correspondents, mimicking the time taken for a letter to make its way around the world back when people actually sent physical letters to each other. Honestly, this is so, so cute.
  • Vidometer: A potentially neat little app which lets you record video and export it with a small dynamic map in the corner; the idea being that if you’re a cyclist or motorist or whatever, you can record your first-person video and combine it with a routemap, showing exactly where you are at any point in the film. Look, this might be useful, it might not, you decide.
  • Times New Romance: Beautiful embroidery. Not really got much else to say here, this is gorgeous work with a lovely, fourth-wall-breaking side to it.

devan shemoyama

By Devan Shimoyama

NEXT, HAVE SOME MORE JAZZY STYLINGS COURTESY OF THIS PLAYLIST CURATED BY HARUKI MURAKAMI!

THE SECTION WHICH IS VERY MUCH LOOKING FORWARD TO THE NEXT TIME A UK BUSINESS OR POLITICIAN MAKES REFERENCE TO THE ‘SHARED VALUES’ WE HAVE WITH SAUDI, PT.2:

  • Journey to the End of the Cast List: Kickstarting an artbook celebrating and commemorating the unsung actors who fill such small-but-vital roles in films like ‘Puking Girl’ or ‘Man with Teeth’; “From ‘Exuberant Mourner’ (Analyze This) to ‘Arthritic Cowboy’ (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), ‘Sad Woman with Horns’ (Guardians of the Galaxy) to ‘Man Shot in Head 3’ (The ABCs of Death), movie history is replete with curiously named characters bringing up the rear of the cast list. And Introducing is a survey of those bit-part and background character credits, organising them into almost 100 categories—some predictable (men, women, bystanders, henchmen) and some more surprising (screaming characters, toothless characters, characters whose names are simply their one line of dialogue).” Awesome.
  • Books For The Visually Impaired: The Internet Archive really is a superb resource – not just for things like last week’s archive of C64 games, but also for stuff like this, an incredible selection of digital books designed specifically for people with degrees of visual impairment, available for free.
  • Dress Code Shirts: I can’t quite work out whether these are sort of cool or the naffest things ever (probably the latter, based on that) – Dress Code make shirts which are, as the name suggests, designed around code; so you’ll have patterns based on cursors or binary or whatever else. If you want to advertise the fact that you’re a massive nerd via the medium of tailoring, then this is perhaps a marginally less embarrassing way of doing so than that faded Star Wars tshirt with the curry stains on it (THROW IT OUT).
  • Shoe for Virtual Feet: An offshoot of the Virtual Reality Photo Project, which takes high-res arty photos from within videogame worlds, this is a photo series depicting videogame characters’ footwear. No more,no less, just digital shoes from a wide range of titles. As an aside, if you can name more than about 5-6 of the games featured here just by looking at the characters’ shoes, you have a very real problem and probably need to get out more (I got 5).
  • Insta Story Templates: This is a clever idea, and I think we’ll see more of these sort of template-y creativity-facilitating hacks for Story production as they move ever-closer to being the only way in which people are allowed to communicate with each other online. These are a useful series of template formats into which you can drop images, gifs, video, etc, and stitch them together into a Story which you can then export to Insta (or, one would imagine, Snap or FB or WhatsApp or whatever else you choose). It won’t, let’s be clear, instantly make your content interesting, but it will mean that you can combine a bunch of crap images from your camera roll in marginally more innovative ways than your other basic friends.
  • The NPC Snap Filter: This is apparently being co-opted by lefties as a joke reaction to the ‘SJWs are NPCs’ trope (see last week’s Curios, or this article, if that means nothing to you) – this filter replaces people’s faces in Snap with the blank, 2d NPC avatar for ‘comic’ effect (your mileage may vary).
  • Butterfly Wings: Quite incredible macro photography of butterfly wings – these are AMAZING and beautiful and sort of awe-inspiring, whilst at the same time putting me very strongly in mind of really, really bad velvet print artworks (honestly, you will know exactly what I mean, just click).
  • Anigay: Included in no small part because the name made me giggle childishly, this is a website exploring queer issues in anime – “Our mission at AniGay is simple: To let you in on our conversations about queer anime! We have a ton of thoughts, and we want to present them in a slightly more polished form than is possible on Twitter. So AniGay will host our interpretations, analyses, and theories as well as glimpses into our adjacent research, and anything else we feel like writing and publishing, as long as it’s related to queerness in anime.”. It’s all actually quite serious in a gender studies academian sort of way, but, well, ANIGAY!
  • Destination Reads: Such a good idea, this, to the point that I’m amazed that I’ve not featured it before (Google says I haven’t and that’s good enough for me). A really simple premise, the site lets you tell it where you are travelling and then suggests novels for you to read which are set in your holiday destination. That’s literally it, fine, but it’s a hugely useful service for people who like a bit of literary immersion along with their travels. There are only 8 cities served so far, which is a crying shame – it feels like this needs some sort of Wiki element to allow for the crowdsourcing of a proper list; they are actively soliciting contributions and suggestions, though, so perhaps it will grow over time.
  • The LGBTQ Game Archive: This week’s ‘you saw it last week on B3ta, now get it on Curios!’ link, this is “a resource for researchers, journalists, critics, game designers/developers/publishers, students, gamers and/or people who play games and anyone else who is interested in learning more about the history of LGBTQ content in video games.” Honestly fascinating to see how the depiction and representation of non-cis gender identities has developed through four decades of videogames, as well as the ways in which the queer community has seen and embodied itself through the medium of games.
  • All The Games of IGF: All of the trailers from all of the games at this year’s Independent Games Festival. There are over 200 videos here, which will take you through to hometime seamlessly if you start watching them now.
  • Birds Aren’t Real: This is excellent, and SO well done. Birds Aren’t Real is a spoof truther movement, perfectly mimicking many of the more rabid conspiracy theories of the web, which seeks to expose the fact that birds are, er, NOT REAL. Yes, that’s right, we’ve all been tricked into thinking that these flying things are organic creatures whereas in fact they are specially designed covert surveillance machines. THE BIRDS ARE A LIE! There is so much to love about this, not least the tone which oscillates between concerned and informative to absolutely screaming batsh1t, and were they not sold out I would absolutely purchase a ‘Birds Are A Lie’ tshirt.
  • O-Face or Ow-Face: I have been waiting to write that for 6 whole days now, it’s been a struggle to keep it in I tell you. This is wonderfully bizarre – a video accompanying an academic research project seeking to examine the differences in facial expression produced when people feel pain versus when they feel pleasure. Have you ever wanted to see an animated representation of exactly how someone’s orgasm face differs from the face they pull when they smack themselves with a hammer? OH GOOD!
  • Updated Public Service Announcements: “Between 1936 and 1943, artists working for the Works Progress Administration designed more than 35,000 posters—of which the government printed over 2 million copies—promoting local and national programs, travel and tourism, and WPA-funded cultural programming, as well as doling out health-and-safety advice.” – this site presents a selection of new posters, updated for modernity. These are wonderful and I would buy them all in an instant.
  • The Andy Warhol Photography Archive: 3,600+ photos from the Warhol photo archive, free to browse online. Absolutely wonderful (the site logs you out after about 15 minutes, which is annoying, but you can browse freely outside of that small restriction).
  • Hallowe’en Whimsey Mask: Do you have a Hallowe’en costume yet? No? WELL HERE YOU ARE THEN (this is a *bit* NSFW, but, honestly, live a little!).
  • The Greatest Bear: Finally in this week’s miscellania, absolutely the gayest game you will play all week. A Streets of Rage-style side-scrolling beat em up, The Greatest Bear puts you in the shoes of Joe, a repressed, beaten-down office drone who one night after work stumbles into a mysterious (and VERY GAY) bar – cue you fighting your way through several levels representing various areas of Joe’s subconscious, complete with muscle daddies, massive cocks and an awful lot of…well, not to put too fine a point on it, an awful lot of jizz. This is VERY funny, hugely stylised and an awful lot of fun – it’s also hugely NSFW, although to be honest if you can get away with playing a very obvious 90s-style videogame on your work computer then I don’t imagine anyone will care too much if said videogame includes a large number of massive, veiny throbbers.

 

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS CELEBRATION OF 70 YEARS OF BLACK MUSIC IN THE UK!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Loko: Gorgeous, glorious geometric baking by the hugely talented Lauren Ko.
  • Isabel Peppard: :Peppard is a sculptor and animator whose work tends heavily towards the grotesque and macabre, and her Insta feed is a lovely (not that lovely on reflection) collection of slightly horrifying models in progress.
  • Matti Varga: The feed of photographer Matti Varga, whose work has a particular millennial-palette-aesthetic to it, and a wonderful feeling of distance (he said, pseudily).
  • Watching Mr Bingo: Cartoonist, artist, animator and adland escapee Mr Bingo curates this Insta feed, where he posts photos of him taken by other people spotted in the wild. Proof that he really does seemingly only ever wear shorts.
  • Kazu Studios: Feed of the work of Kazuhiro Tsuji, who makes Ron Mueck-style giant, hyperrealistic heads. These are UNCANNY.
  • The Cheeky Blog: The Insta feed of the website of the same name, this shares illustrations and observations about being a woman. No idea how relatable or whatever these are what with my being a man, but the latest one, about leaving your bra in the fruitbowl, made me laugh.
  • Conservatory Archives: Photos of conservatories and greenhouses across East London, because plants ALWAYS make things better.
  • Cams Dins: Submitted by Curios reader Tom Lawrence (THANKS TOM, WHO I HAVE NEVER MET! It’s always nice when I get reminded that people other than my immediate relatives occasionally read this), this is a feed documenting the meals of one Cameron Sharpe. I have no idea who he is, or who runs this feed, but the quality of the food photography here is…upsetting.

joon lee

By Joon Lee

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • The Other Blog: A collection of experiments with Deep Dream tech, in the main, often using it on videogames to trippy effect.

  • The Blog That Celebrates Itself: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a collection of albums of cover versions – no idea who compiles these, or where they are sourced from, and some of them are DREADFUL (I am listening to a very odd, slightly shoegazy cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Disarm’ right now and rather wishing I wasn’t), but, hey, it’s weird and it’s on the the internet and so I present it here for your ‘pleasure’.
  • She Said I’m A Robot: LOTS of drawings, illustrations, renders, etc, of mech-type robotics.
  • Joel Remy: Arty gifs. Lovely, lovely arty gifs.
  • The Styles Gifs: Lots – too many? – gifs of Harry Styles. Look at his lovely hair!

 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • What Happens Next?: Confession – I haven’t read all 50 of these essays, exploring the potential future of a variety of different sectors and industries, but I have read some of them, and the ones I have read were fascinating and thought provoking. As we hurtle towards the annual predictions season, this is a smarter roundup of some coming trends than we usually see.
  • Escape From Fantasy: If you work in advermarketingpr you might well have seen this this week, but in case not it’s very much worth a look – Martin Weigel here presents a talk (it’s in slides, in the main, but perfectly comprehensible) about the terrible problem that the ad industry has – to whit, we only talk to ourselves and we know the square root of fcuk-all about anyone outside of London media land, whatever we might try and tell ourselves. Compellingly argued – if nothing else, this is a masterclass in how to structure and present an argument.
  • Why Isn’t InstaTV Working?: Fine, it’s a bit premature to call it a flop, but it’s clear that InstaTV hasn’t exactly been a rip-roaring success either (when was the last time you opened the app? I just did, for the first time in about three months, and immediately wished I hadn’t – man there’s some dross on there). This piece presents a reasonably clear-eyed look at how it’s doing so far, some of the reasons it might not quite have taken off (indeterminate format is an issue – there’s no evidence that there’s a market for vertical video longer than 2-3 minutes, for a start), and what it might need to do to fix its issues (discovery being the big, screaming, obvious thing). Obviously we’ll all look back on this with quaint disbelief when we all have IGTV streaming direct into our frontal cortex in 2027.
  • //medium.com/@MSF_USA/creating-a-comic-at-one-of-the-busiest-maternity-wards-in-the-world-7d255a9f393c“>Hila: This is superb. A comic created on behalf of Medecins Sans Frontieres by Aurelie Neyret from her illustrations sketched during a nine-day stay in an Afghan hospital,  Hila is about the war and recovery and womanhood and birth and death, and is absolutely superb. Do have a read.
  • Male Coworkers: A Reddit thread in which women detail some of the things that their coworkers do which creep them out a bit – MAN there are some examples of some incredibly sketchy behaviour here. Who thinks its ok to spontaneously give their colleagues back rubs, ffs? And, er, why is noone offering them to me? Seriously though, this is bleak.
  • Reflecting on Reddit: A revealing, and depressing, interview with former Reddit product head Dan McComas, who talks about his time at the platform in less than glowing terms – his statement that his work there made the world a worse place is unusually clear-headed for someone in tech, and his assessment of the fundamental problems facing social media platforms (that is, the VC-driven obsession with growth as the single most important metric of success) is a smart one. He’s also interesting on the dominance of Facebook and its likely continuation – it’s sobering to see someone who knows about community building at scale basically suggest that Facebook’s scale means that anyone else out to basically give up. Er, don’t give up!
  • Instagram’s Harassment Problem: Following on from a piece last week, another article focusing on the fact that – SURPRISE! – Instagram is an undermoderated hole of people being mean to each other! It follows on rather perfectly from the above piece – the problems here described are absolutely a function of prioritising user growth above all else, and not stopping to think about scaling a service to deliver a decent experience for said swelling mass of users. Obviously AI is going to solve all of this – OBVIOUSLY – but til it does you might as well get used to everywhere on the web being an absolute horrorshow in terms of abuse. Great!
  • Palm: This very much feels like a joke, but seemingly isn’t one – Verizon is launching a new product in the US next month, a mini-phone called ‘Palm’. The idea is that it’s a smaller smartphone with fewer apps and features which you can take out with you at times when you don’t want the distraction or hassle of your full-featured beast. WHAT??? THIS IS MENTAL. People are going to spend $350 on an additional phone that doesn’t do as much stuff as their existing phone because they don’t have the strength of will not to fiddle with New Star Manager throughout dinner? ARE WE ALL UTTERLY MAD?! This is possibly the most pathetic thing I’ve read all week.
  • This Is How Amazon Loses: Obviously it’s not really about that at all – Amazon, and by extension MechaBezos, will never lose – but instead an interesting explanation of some of the UX/UI tricks that Amazon uses to promote its own products and encourage buy-in to Prime and other subscription categories. Diabolically smart, damn them.
  • The Google Pixel 3: A review of a new phone that really isn’t a review of a new phone at all, this is a surprisingly brilliant piece of writing and a weirdly accurate representation of where our relationship to technology feels like it’s at here in Q318.
  • Meet The Steak-Umms Twitter Guy: And so after the Tweetstorm and the analyses, we get the inevitable interview with the mid-20s bloke who writes Tweets for a processed meat products brand. What, as they like to say, a time to be alive. The very BEST thing about this – the thing which will cause ulcers in a lot of brand and social media people – is the whole ‘yeah, there’s no real tone of voice or coherent strategy here. I just write stuff’. IN YOUR FACE, OVERPAID SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY W4NKERS! Oh, er, hang on, that’s me.
  • Dallas at 40: Dallas! Shoulderpads! J.R.! The dream series! Hair! Oil! Shooting! Hats! You may or may not be old enough to remember Dallas – I have fond memories of the theme tune, and watching the show with my mum despite not really having any interest in the power-hungry machinations of a fictitious family of Texan oil barons – but this is, regardless, a fascinating oral history of the programme’s genesis and rise to become one of the most famous entertainment properties in the world. Lots of lovely details here, but the bit that most struck me is the really rather poignant line from Larry Hagman’s daughter where she reflects on her dad’s character: “At least in his conversations with the press, Dad would distance himself from the J. R. character. He wanted everybody to know that he was a nice guy. But in truth, it wasn’t all that different. Dad loved secrets, and he was very good at deals. Only after his death did I realize that he had had multiple affairs. That’s a very J. R. kind of thing.”
  • Depression Diagnosis By App: There have been a spate of articles this past week about patents for Alexa and other platforms which will, it’s hoped, assist in the diagnosis of depression and other mental conditions; this piece specifically looks at an app called Mindstrong which claims to be able to assess users’ mental states based on factors such as their typing speed, the amount of time they spend on certain apps and pages, scroll speed and the like. This…doesn’t sound great, does it? I mean, fine, the theoretical idea of being able to better diagnose people who are sad is positive, but the idea that your devices are constantly monitoring you for the slightest sign of emotional instability is…well…troubling. I’d want to give the Ts&Cs of anything like this a fairly thorough frisking before trying them out, in summary.
  • Extreme Haunts: Last weekend I found myself at an ‘Immersive Horror Experience’ in Brentwood – I went because I thought it would be theatre-ish and because I am a sucker for immersive, interactive stuff (I will be doing this in a few hours, which may or may not be good), not because I particularly wanted to be waterboarded – and spent an evening being forcefed maggots, shouted at by large, intimidating men, locked in a small cupboard with a very worried stranger, subjected to some sort of ‘I’m a Celebrity’-style ‘head in a perspex box of critters’ experience, dragged along a concrete floor by my ankles, doused in ice-cold water and, finally, having electrodes attached to my neck, nipples, hips and scalp. It was….it was horrid, to be honest, and I don’t really ever want to do it again (and to compound my humiliation I was forced to tap out in pain right at the end and so didn’t even get the celebratory photo which you win for butching out the whole thing. My girlfriend did, though, and was smugly unbearable about it for the rest of the night, although I note that at no point did they attempt to put a few thousand volts through her tits. Anyway, this piece is all about the growth of the haunted house experience in the US – frankly some of the experiences detailed here make my Saturday sound like an afternoon at soft play; does this sound like fun to you? You weirdo.
  • The Wasteland Weekend: An incredible photo essay, this, about the Wasteland Weekend, which is a Burning Man-style weekend festival in the California desert, with the gimmick here being that everyone dresses up like some sort of post-apocalyptic warrior and roleplays some sort of Fallout/Mad Max-style world for a couple of days. This sounds SO much better than Burning Man, not least as you get the feeling that Sir Martin Sorrell wouldn’t be welcome here; the cage fighting sounds a touch brutal, mind. Amazing photos.
  • The Magic Leap Con: A brilliant and brutal takedown of the Magic Leap, whose technology is pretty far away from what its creator promised throughout its development process and whose software is seemingly little more than a tiny collection of mediocre games and cutesy toy experiences, all for £3k. This gives you a taste of the arguments: “I met one developer who’d flown from Singapore to retrieve his goggles and attend the event, and another who said he’d scrimped and saved before managing to buy the device, which left him broke. “I made the Leap, I guess,” laughed Brian Wong, a 30-year-old who says he is self-funding a brain-computer interface project. “I’m still paying it back. I had to really scrape every penny I got to come up with $2,400, you know. But honestly, no regrets.” The thing about the first iPhone analogy is that while, sure, it was imperfect, there was a UI paradigm and several elements that were immediately gripping, that “just worked” as a certain late turtlenecked guru might have said. It was immediately clear why a touch-based Google Maps app or a graphics-rich mobile web browser was something you’d want to have in your pocket all the time, or that scrolling through an address book with the flick of a finger made sense—Magic Leap One’s appeal beyond entertainment is almost entirely abstract. Cuteness and whimsy only go so far.”
  • Every Building in the US: More of an interactive than a longread, if I’m being taxonomically picky, this is a staggering piece of work by the New York Times, mapping almost every man-made structure across the United States. Honestly, this is AMAZING – read, play, and marvel at the oddly beautiful, semi-abstract aesthetic of the stripped back landscapes.
  • Eartha Kitt in Istanbul: For reasons I’ve never adequately understood I was sort of obsessed with Eartha Kitt when I was a kid (pretty sure I was one of only a couple of 7 year olds in Swindon who knew who she was); I hadn’t given her any thought for years til I stumbled across this article this week, which tells of Kitt’s trip to Istanbul as a young woman and how she came to record the album of Turkish music which first broke her internationally. This is a beautiful portrait of an era and a city – Istanbul’s always had a magical appeal for me, and this piece very much evokes the wonder of an era when the foreign was even moreso by dint of being unknowable.
  • Stet: My friend Katie found this a bit coldly performative when I sent it to her this week, and I can see what she means, but I am an absolute sucker for writing that plays with form and convention like this, and the use of annotations and footnotes in this short story pleased me greatly. It’s about autonomous vehicles and morality and agency, but more than anything it’s a (to my mind) fantastically realised stylistic experiment.
  • The Life and Death of a Mexican Hitman: A profile of a hitman for Mexican Narcos which manages to tell his story dispassionately whilst at the same time presenting its subject as a real person rather than some sort of soulless gunman. I honestly didn’t expect to find this quality of writing on the website of the charity International Crisis Group – this is superb, particularly when you consider it’s not technically journalism.
  • The Franz Kafka Marriage Manual: Finally in this week’s longreads, an essay about Franz Kafka and marriage and arsehole men; this is a wonderful, personal essay with a lovely subtext about art and the author, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.

oregon zoo

By Oregon Zoo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

  1. You may know They Might Be Giants from ‘Birdhouse In Your Soul’ – this is their new song, and it’s ACE and literary and smart and wordy and lefty, and it’s called ‘The Communists Have The Music’ and the video is AWESOME:

 

2) Weirdly, despite this having 30million views, it doesn’ appear to have crossed over into my bit of the internet at all – this is VIRAL SENSATION Skibidi with ‘Little Big’ and it is basically a 2018 Macarena:

 

3) This is called ‘Rat Kid’, it’s by Suzie True and it’s a lovely jangly piece of indiepop that is just perfect for a cold, Sunny October afternoon:

 

4) Bands I had forgotten about until this week – The Ting Tings. Turns out their new song is REALLY GOOD and makes me almost forgive them for ‘That’s Not My Name’. This is called ‘Estranged’, and, honestly, it’s lovely:

 

5) UK HIPHOP (GRIME) CORNER! New track and visuals from Manga featuring guest verses from JME and Frisco – this is called ‘True to Me’:

 

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is odd, in a good way, and sort of reminds me a bit of CLOUDDead and similar stuff. It’s by Planet B, and it’s called ‘Crustfund’ and it features Kool Keith and it’s very good indeed:

 

7) Last up this week, this is bratty pop punk and I love it. It’s by Antarctigo Vespucci, it’s called ‘Freaking U Out’ and BYE BYE HAPPY FRIDAY I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK UNLESS SOMETHING VERY WEIRD HAPPENS AT THIS THEATRE THINGY THIS AFTERNOON IN WHICH CASE LET ME SAY THANKS SO MUCH FOR SHARING WEB CURIOS WITH ME IT HAS BEEN A PLEASURE AND I HAVE LOVED EVERY SINGLE WORD I HAVE WRITTEN FOR YOU AND PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THEY ARE ALL WRITTEN FOR YOU, EVERY SINGLE ONE, AND YOU SHOULD FEEL SPECIAL AND LOVED AND OK THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK AS I SAID HOPEFULLY SEE YOU AGAIN SAME TIME AND PLACE NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

 

Webcurios 12/10/18

Reading Time: 32 minutes

Can we all agree that noone is ever allowed to use the term ‘4-dimensional chess’ ever again, even ironically? Good, at least we can agree on something

You know, one of the worst things about writing this godawful newsletterblogthing is the fact that I painted myself into a corner a few years ago by creating a sort of editorial policy whereby I would always open with some sort of vaguely topical reference to what a mess everything was, meaning that each week I have to come up with new and different ways of, effectively, screaming in prose (I appreciate that this pales into insignificance when compared to the tooth-rattling horror of having to read the damn stuff, but I’m sort of expecting that most of you just skip past this bit by now and just Ctrl+F5 for ‘bongo’). 

This week though, I have nothing – yesterday’s TrumpYe meeting of minds has rendered me incapable. So instead, let’s focus on the good things in this opening – it’s not (presently) raining! We’ve not yet entered the horror that is Christmas advert season! Er…nope, sorry, that’s pretty much it in the credit column. You’re on your own here. 

So in the absence of anything good to say here, I’m going to take a leaf from Ronan Keating’s book and say nothing at all; except, that is, to invite you to close your eyes and lift your tongue as I gently place the soluble infocapsule full of bitter, bitter webspaff underneath; let it dissolve, and when you raise your lids you’ll have been magically transported to a world in which everything is…well, largely exactly the same, frankly, except full of more useless rubbish off the internet. This, as ever, is WEB CURIOS. 

simon schubert

By Simon Schubert 

LET’S START THE MUSIC WITH THIS MIX SELECTED BY THE GLOBAL 18 YEAR OLDS REFERENCED IN THAT LONGREAD WAY DOWN THERE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS AS THOUGH THE FACEBOOK PORTAL THING IS PRETTY MUCH WHAT THE TERM ‘CAVEAT EMPTOR’ WAS CREATED FOR:

  • Facebook Portal: Sounds EXCITING, doesn’t it? Or sinister, in the manner of portals in horror/scifi films, which grant the momentarily excited and hopeful protagonists access to a dark and eldritch dimension where, it’s pretty strongly implied, there’s going to be some flaying and screaming happening pretty soon. No word as yet on exactly how much flaying and screaming Facebook’s planning on ushering in with its latest big announcement, but it’s probably safe to say the answer will be ‘some’ (and now I’m incapable of thinking of Zuckerberg and his Big Blue Misery Factory as some sort of weird digital Cenobytes which is…punchy, at 655am). Anyway, that unnecessarily wordy and unclear digression was by way of introducing Facebook Portal, the FB Home Assistant which was announced the other day and which will ship in November and which, let’s be honest, noone in their right mind is going to buy because Facebook is creepy – and, because it’s got Alexa built-in, you’re also inviting MechaBezos into your home too, which is a lovely additional corporate surveillance bonus. Anyway, the device will let you chat to people via Messenger voice chat, do Livestreams and video calling, and there’s some interest for brands here – the site alludes to ‘Partners’ such as Spotify et al who have already built integrations into the platform, so we await to see what sort of opportunity there is for the creation of Portal-specific experiences, leveraging the Facebook AR Lens which is also built in. Seriously, though, WHO IS GOING TO BUY THIS?
  • Messenger Voice Control: In parallel, FB also announced that it was testing voice controls for Messenger. Oh, and some AR sticker effects. That’s it really.
  • A Bunch of Updates to Facebook Workplace: None of these strike me as hugely interesting, I must say – the main ones are to do with the development of a more Slack-like chat functionality (don’t want it) and an algorithmic newsfeed within Workplace to better surface relevant stuff for staff (really, don’t want it) – there’s a slightly broader writeup of the features here, should you want one.
  • Facebook Adds 250-person Group Chat: Oh, look, here you go: “Starting today, Facebook will gradually roll out the ability for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics that up to 250 members can join. They can also start audio or video calls with up to 50 members. A dog owners’ Group could spawn threads for discussing spontaneous park meetups, grooming tips or sharing photos as their puppies grow up.” Is there any way in which that sounds good? 250 strangers connected through a shared interest / passion / worrying obsession, now able to engage in synchronous multi-user shouting matches online? 50 person video chat? WHO WANTS THIS? Still, they’re BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER and FOSTERING REAL CONNECTIONS and…no, sorry, this still sounds honestly awful.
  • FB Adds 3d Photos: These are not, let’s be clear, 3d photos in any real sense; they’re photos that do that very gentle ‘tilt to slightly pan’ effect, which gives you a slight illusion of limited depth – still, these are now ALL OVER Facebook and available to anyone whose phone has 2+ cameras on the back; with a little bit of thinking and a decent photographer you might just about be able to parlay this into a decent one-off brand thing (find hidden details around the edge of photos, some sort of light visual gag based on stuff happening slightly out of frame…Jesus, I don’t know, do your own fcuking jobs), but you’ve got about three days to execute it before everyone realises that the feature’s not actually all that fun or interesting.
  • Insta Introduces New Anti-Bullying Tools: Absolutely A Good Thing in theory, this – Instagram’s introducing a suite of new measures to attempt to clamp down on bullying on the platform, specifically using machine learning to seek to ‘detect’ bullying in individual photos or captions and flag them for review. The captions thing I can understand, but I am genuinely fascinated as to what signals within a photo they’ll be looking for; oh, and they’ll be adding the comment filter to Live videos on Insta too, to limit the ability of people to hatebomb other users’ streams; oh, and they’ve added a…uh…’kindness filter’ in honour of US National Bullying Prevention Month which, once you’ve read this piece about some of the lovely ways teenagers are using Insta to make each others’ lives a misery, might strike you as, well, as bit fcuking pointless. Still, cosmetic gimmicks aside, it’s hard to argue with the bulk of this.
  • Twitter Institutes Emoji Equality: In possibly the most seismic announcement of the week, Twitter will no longer apply different character counts to different emoji – til now, certain emoji (ones using anything other than the default colourset, for example) counted as more characters than others (there’s an interesting side-note here about another instance of unintended racism in code, should anyone want to think about it for a moment), but this distinction has now been eliminated. Huzzah!
  • You Can Now Access Podcasts on Spotify: This is useful. “Spotify For Podcasters works as an RSS submission, allowing podcasts hosted elsewhere to be added to Spotify’s catalog once users provide the streaming service with their podcast feed. It will also provide access to performance analytics which will let podcasters know how many people are listening, where they’re listening from and insight into the demographics of their listeners.” If you do podcasts it seems like it would be stupid not to put them through Spotify, no? Am I being a moron? Are YOU? I feel quite uncertain today for reasons I don’t adequately understand.
  • Byebye G+ (at least the consumer version, anyway): And lo, it finally came to pass that, due to a security issue that noone had noticed because noone uses the bloody thing, Google finally took G+ out back and did the thing with the nailgun that to be honest it ought to have done many years ago. Have you ever used Google+? I mean actually used it, not just the brief three-day period in…2011(?) when it launched and you made an account and got briefly excited by the prospect of a FACEBOOK KILLER? I tried, I honestly did, even to the point of harassing the poor person doing social media for Firezza pizzas on there for a while in the hope that being their only active friend on the platform would get me free pizzas (it didn’t. Damn you, Firezza social media person), and even now I still post a link to this on G+ every week, but it’s always been a slightly pointless, embarrassing place (unless you’re a gamer or photographer, some of whom I am reliably informed did use it rather a lot, or, apparently (and weirdly) Daniel Radcliffe) and I can’t imagine anyone at all is going to be sad to see it go. Although they are announcing a few new features for the commercial version, as apparently there are some businesses that use it – WHO?
  • YouTube Clamping Down on Algo/Duplicate Content: Mainly of interest to people on YT’s Partner programme – the platform’s clamping down on content that it deems to be ‘duplicate’, and, interestingly, content that it believes has been generated algorithmically. I have nothing to add. Do you care?
  • Google Slides Now Does Autocaptioning: OK, fine, this is of limited interest to many of you I’m sure but I am SO IMPRESSED; you can now run a presentation off Google Slides, turn on captioning, and Google will magically use its speech-to-text software to provide autocaptioning of your slides on the fly. SO FUTURE.
  • Vimeo Now Powers Those Holographic Video Projection Things: This is LONG and quite technical and, look, let’s be honest, I really don’t understand the tech here very much or in fact at all if I’m being honest, but if you do INNOVATIVE VIDEO AND TELLY or anything related then you probably want to know about this; with the right sort of camera, Vimeo will now support filming in a way which allows you to output as a live 3d stream – as they put it, “what can you do with it? A telepresence virtual reality experience? An augmented reality concert? A mixed reality news broadcast?” 99.9% of you will get nothing from this, but for the 0.1% it could be genuinely fascinating.
  • Adidas Creators Club: WE ARE ALL CREATORS NOW! THE MERE ACT OF EXISTING IS A CREATIVE ENDEAVOUR! I MAKE, THEREFORE I AM! In the continual rush for brands to EMPOWER us to LIVE THE BEST LIVES WE CAN and EXPRESS OUR UNIQUENESS, so Adidas has made ‘for the creators’ (or somesuch massive w4nk) part of its brand positioning; the latest expression of this is the Creators Club, a grandly-named loyalty scheme which just launched in the US but which feels like it will be global eventually. You sign up to the scheme, download the app, and then DO STUFF in exchange for points – and points, as we all know, mean PRIZES! Sign up to the programme – 50 points! Spend $1 on Adi products – that’s 10 points! Write a review of some gear – another 50 points! Acquire points to ascend through the tiers of creatorhood, earning yourself early access to new ish, special events, free customisation of Adidas tat, that sort of thing. Which is all literally fine, and in no way innovative, and has – let me be clear – NOTHING TO DO WITH ‘CREATING’. NOONE IS MAKING ANYTHING HERE (writing a review of a product so as to get paid in magic beans by the maker of that product is not, I would submit, a creative endeavour). I don’t mean to nitpick here, but I am sick to fcuking death of being sold this idea that simply interacting with capitalism is an act of creation on the part of anyone; look, I get that democratising the idea of creativity is A Good Thing, and the ready availability of the means of creative production is positive and good and opens up doorways to new voices and styles and stories and whatever, and that the fact that anyone can make things whenever they want (in theory) on this magical device in their pocket is, honestly, brilliant…but STOP CALLING EVERYONE A FCUKING CREATOR BECAUSE IT IS AN INCREASINGLY MEANINGLESS TERM. Ahem. Anyway, this has put me in a rubbish mood now, damnation, I will try and snap out of it while I try and think up a heading for the next section.

georgy kurasov

By Georgy Kurasov

NEXT UP, TRY THIS TECHHOUSEDISCOTYPEMIX BY VOLVOX FOR BOILEROOM!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU’RE STRAPPED FOR TIME THIS WEEK YOU SCROLL STRAIGHT TO THE C64 EMULATOR AND KISS GOODBYE TO THE AFTERNOON, PT.1:

  • Brett Kavanaugh: There is nothing good to say about the Kavanaugh situation and what it means for US politics and gender relations and the Culture Wars and the rest; the one, small thing that pleased me about it was the realisation that Mr Kavanaugh and his team had never thought to buy his own doman name, meaning that www.brettkavanaugh.com now hosts a banner reading “We Believe Survivors” and linking to support organisations for victims of assault. It’s still, however, all really quite sh1t.
  • Romeo Hearts Juliet: Another year, another (potentially doomed) attempt to make Transmedia storytelling happen. One might have thought that post-SKAM (see Curios passim) this might have been the year in which someone managed to nail a multi-character narrative delivered through social media, though on the basis of this I’m not convinced – Romeo Hearts Juliet is, as the Shakespeare scholars amongst you will doubtless have guessed, a Buzzfeed retelling of the love story with the gimmick being that it’s all done through Instagram. The link above takes you to Romeo’s feed – other players are, obviously, Juliet, Tybalt, and Mercutio, with a sort of Greek chorus effect being provided with a daily ‘wrap up’ show on Insta TV presented by Paris and Rosaline in the guise of a sort of magazine by the students of Verona High. It’s…it’s bad, I’m sad to say – the acting’s poor, the content (as it is so far, we’re only a few days in) thin, and there’s no sense that this is going to work as an Insta-only endeavour. You can get links to all the different accounts on this page – see what you think, but the fact that Mercutio’s Insta handle is Mercutie_yo made me momentarily taste blood and pine for Baz Luhrmann, which is never a good sign.
  • The Bellingcat Investigative Journalism Toolkit: I featured Bellingcat on here 4 years ago when they ran a Kickstarter to fund their work – it’s fair to say they’ve come a long way since, as the past week’s journalism attests. This is an INCREDIBLE resource, housed in a freely accessible GDoc, collecting a truly awesome collection of online research tools, ostensibly for investigative journalists but just generally fascinating to anyone with any degree of curiosity about what, and how, you can find out online. From online maps of EVERYTHING to a bunch of interesting tools leveraging the Facebook Graph, flight tracking, domain info…seriously, if you ever need to do any online snooping, this is a pretty incredible resource.
  • Lena Lisa Wurstendorfer: Apologies to Ms Wurstendorfer for my inability to work out how to type umlauts on a UK keyboard and thereby butchering here name here. Anway, she is a famous and highly-regarded young conductor, and this is her website – there might be loads of other great stuff in here, but I was transfixed by the homepage which presents abstract representations of the movements of the conductors’ baton as she…er…conducts orchestras playing a variety of different pieces; click and hold to toggle between the visualisation of her baton and the video of her conducting. It’s simple but beautiful, and a practical reason to use that ‘click to switch the viewpoint’ trick that was so popular three years ago and which we are now sadly all a bit bored of.
  • The Dermestid Cam: I warn you – depending on when you click this, it might be a touch macabre (well, it’s always a touch macabre, fine, but it could be more macabre). Do you know what Dermestids are? If so, congratulations, you are a better entomologist than I; for the rest of you, they are (I learned this week) a type of FLESH EATING BEETLE. This is a live webcam trained on FLESH EATING BEETLES. You get to watch them EATING FLESH. At the time of writing they are chowing down on a fresh Groundhog, but at the rate these little lads get through stuff I’d imagine that this is going to be little more than clean skeleton in about 6 hours’ time. This is a weird combination of utterly, skin-crawlingly horrid and ‘don’t know why but must keep watching’ compelling – suggest you send it round the office and see what sort of spurious judgments about your colleagues’ characters you can make based on their reactions.
  • Weighing Animals: A Twitter thread of photographs of all the different ways in which professionals weigh animals. Ever wondered how you assess the mass of a tapir? WONDER NO MORE! I warn you, there is an almost violent amount of cute in this thread and you may well fall into some sort of critter-based coma as a result (you know who you are).
  • Parallel Text: This is a really clever idea and, potentially, a really useful service. Parallel text is a language learning app/site which presents a bunch of texts (old fiction, presumably out of copyright, like Three Men in a Boat or the Three Musketeers) in a variety of languages for you to read – it lets you display the text in a variety of ways, including side-by-side in your native tongue and the one you’re hoping to get better at, you can click individual sentences or phrases to hear how they are meant to be pronounced, and, frankly, as a way of improving my French I think I’d prefer to read Journey to the Centre of the Earth than attempt to maneuver my way through a variety of “the goat has eaten my passport”-type Duolingowank.
  • TFL Jam Cams: Weird voyeuristic link of the week! This site collects feeds from every single TFL traffic cam in London for you to peruse at your leisure – I mean, I have literally no idea what sort of benefit you could derive from this, other then potentially giving really useful traffic updates to people attempting to plan a smash-and-grab Hatton Garden raid, but there’s something weirdly cool (in a very, very uncool sense) about being able to…er…look at traffic. I’m not selling this, am I?
  • The East London Group: A Twitter feed promoting work by the East London Group, a pre-WWII East London art collective – “Although the East London Group of artists is now almost forgotten, even by art historians, it was one of the most innovative and productive to have flourished in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. The East London Group stemmed from classes by the inspirational teacher John Cooper at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute in East London from the mid-1920s and comprised two basic groups: first, aspiring East Enders; secondly, a smaller contingent who were Slade School of Fine Art-trained, like Cooper himself. An early mentor was Walter Sickert, who addressed the Bow classes and showed with the Group for a short time.” A lovely, gentle, beautiful follow, this.
  • Leave Me Alone: I hate LinkedIn, and I make no secret of this fact – particularly on LinkedIn, where each week I post a link to this with some accompanying rubbish attempting to parody the type of person on LinkedIn who gets up at 4am to do an hour of cardio whilst listening to two business audiobooks simultaneously, each at 2x speed, so as to MAXIMISE THEIR WINNING or somesuch w4nk. I like to think that it’s this aggressive networking strategy that is driving my non-stop professional success. Anyway, Leave Me Alone is a Chrome extension which lets you filter and bulk-reject connection requests on LinkedIn, meaning that you can, with one click, eliminate all the recruitment cockroaches from your inbox – a small but not insignificant victory for good.
  • Transcribe: Look, I know that this is boring but if any of you do any journalising then you will also know that transcription is one of the worst jobs in the world – not only is it tedious, but it forces one to undergo the cruel and unusual punishment that is listening to one’s own voice (WHY DO I SOUND LIKE AN ACCOUNTANT I AM A FUN AND VIBRANT MAN WHOSE LIFE IS FULL OF JOY). Transcribe is a GREAT service – it’s cheap, quick and can do multiple voices AND IT LABELS THEM PROPERLY. Honestly, a godsend.
  • Tactical Mapping: This is a really interesting idea, and the sort of thing that a few of you – the ones who have STRATEGY in their job titles, possibly, or those of you interested in systems theories and stuff (God, I make you all sound fascinating, don’t I? Sorry about this). Tactical Mapping is ostensibly created for people working in human rights – to quote their description, “The Tactical Mapping tool equips activists to collaboratively expand their understanding of relationships and develop strategic and effective action. By diagramming the relationships that surround human rights abuses we can see an interactive overview of where we are and the pathway toward change.” What this means in practice is that it gives you the tools to define a system, the actors within it, the interactions between them and the outcomes that these interactions engender – you can then see how the ecosystem you’ve mapped operates as a whole, with the idea being that this will enable to you to better assess how you can act to alter the ecosystem as a whole, or the role of specific actors within in. If that meant anything to you then I suggest you click the link; if not, I promise that there will be NOTHING else like this in here this week so, you know, give me a break.
  • Voice Access For Google: Really useful Android app which enables voice commands for your phone – switch apps, screens, type using voice commands…if you or anyone you know has physical issues which make using a small touchscreen hard, this could be an absolute godsend.
  • Strip Together: IT IS NOT WHAT YOU ARE THINKING (I know you, with your GUTTER MINDS). Instead, this is Exquisite Corpse for comic book artists – anyone can start, or continue, a strip, the idea being that it’s a way for artists to flex their creative muscles and to explore scenarios that they wouldn’t necessarily come up with themselves. Obviously the quality of the work varies wildly, and there’s rather more…er…’adult’ content on there than I personally would have expected (it’s like I don’t know the internet AT ALL), but if you like drawing comics then there might be an interesting community here for you.
  • Taku Inoue: Taku Inoue is a model maker from Japan, whose Twitter feed features some of his creations; he’s got a pretty incredible series of Tom & Jerry models depicting, in the main, Tom after he’s had some reasonably unpleasant stuff done to him, and they are GREAT. Quite want some of these if you’re reading, Taku.
  • Bread Stapled to Trees: Don’t try and explain this to yourself. Don’t think too hard about the fact that there is an entire subReddit devoted to photographs of slices of bread – in the main white sliced, although there are occasional artisanal offshoots from the more creatively-minded contributors, alongside a few bagels. I went through a phase of being obsessed with leaving cucumbers in inexplicable places when I was about 15, so I can TOTALLY get behind it as a thing.

andy gilmore

By Andy Gilmore

NEXT, TRY SOME REASONABLY HARD TECHNO BY HENRY VENGEANCE!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY SUGGESTS THAT IF YOU’RE STRAPPED FOR TIME THIS WEEK YOU SCROLL STRAIGHT TO THE C64 EMULATOR AND KISS GOODBYE TO THE AFTERNOON, PT.2:

  • Food Hype: I know that we’re supposed to be done with hipsterism, and we sort of are, thank God, except for when it comes to food – there’s still a slightly awful whiff of the trend-chasing about eating, certainly in London at least, which is why this food hype generator (churning out headlines in the style of Eater or similar) is so satisfying. It’s not an original gag, but I laughed a lot at some of these whilst others are just too believable – I am sure I have seen the headline “Have You Tried The Mushroom Banana Pop Tart Yet? Is The Hype Real?” on Buzzfeed already.
  • The Button: Again, not a new concept, but the fact that this is a new-ish variant on an old theme and that it’s seemingly managing to make some cash despite being the nth one I’ve seen makes me think that there’s maybe still something in the concept. The Button is a simple site with a single premise – log on, hit the button, and it will take you to a different site, which site being determined by whoever has paid the most-recent highest bid for the privilege of setting the url. At the time of writing it’s been bought by some legal firm in the US (of COURSE), but prior to that it’s some people peddling crypto (imagine my shocked face) – it could, for the measly sum of $46.03, be YOUR website receiving that sweet traffic goodness. Feel free to pay to promote Curios on there by way of thanks to me for all the many years of work I have put in, why don’t you? Rhetorical, btw, I have no desire whatsoever to know why you don’t.
  • Flagstories: The most comprehensive resource exploring flag design around the world that you ever will find. “Yes, we like flags. We like them a lot. Actually, we are so fascinated by flags that we decided to explore them in every possible way in order to share our fascination with you. Sure, there are a lot of books and websites covering the different aspects of flags like history, demography and culture, through heavy text, but we wanted to add new aspects to this field by only looking at the graphics and telling the story visually. So we started this Flag Stories project to discover the hidden stories behind the graphics.” Really very nicely done, and the visualisation work here is lovely.
  • Shared BPM: You will, I am sure, have seen this by now – in case not, though, this is an EXCELLENT subReddit which collects examples of two songs whose BPMs match so perfectly that you can layer the audio of one over the video of the other to uncanny effect – SO many good ones, my personal favourite being the Drake/Darude combination which is actually incredible (no, seriously, look!).
  • Blink: Do you like making lists? Do you consider the making of lists to be not just a helpful pursuit but also a genuinely fun thing to do with your time, to the point whereby you often have ‘make a list’ as a line item on another list you are writing, simply so that you can maximise your listmaking time? You need help, Saz, is my main takeaway, but then you might also like this app which is, fine, just A N Other listmaking app for iOS but which has a lovely interface and one or two really gorgeous bits of UX/UI (the slideup/hold/release interface beats to clear individual items is just gorgeous).
  • Arcades of Tokyo: A photoessay exploring some of Tokyo’s videogame arcades. Look, I know it’s not cool, but oh for 24h and a LOT of change – these look wonderful.
  • The Architectural Photography Awards 2018: Photos of buildings! But, you know, really good photos of buildings. Each and every single one of these would look fantastic as a large-scale print, though they don’t seem to sell reproductions which is a crying shame. Still, these are universally wonderful photos, as you’d expect.
  • Pixel Speech Bubble: Have you ever wanted a little webtoything which lets you create a pixellated, animated speech bubble saying anything you like which you can export as a gif and, potentially, use as a sort of snarky comeback-type-rejoinder-thing to anyone who sasses you online? OH GOOD. Make one that says “shut up i disdain you and everything you stand for” and use it to respond to all work requests for the remainder of the day. GO!
  • Chromebook Data Science Course: I’ve realised that there are a few more ‘serious’ links than usual in Curios this week – I’m sorry, and I will endeavour to make next week’s edition more full of, I don’t know, sexy anthropomorphised bonsai-based Hentai or something. Still, if you or anyone you know is interested in undertaking a fully accredited course on Data Science from Johns Hopkins University, delivered in 12 parts entirely online and on a pay-what-you-can basis, starting at $0.00, then this is GREAT. Such a wonderful idea to make this foundational instruction available to all – fine, it’s sponsored by Google Chromebook (hence the name, and, presumably, how it’s able to be made available on this basis), but even if you think Google is Satan it’s hard to look at this as anything other than A Good Thing.
  • 100 Hours and Counting: A film review and criticism site focused primarily on ‘wrong’ films – to quote the owner, “ This isn’t strictly a B-movie site, nor is it strictly a horror movie site, although the great bulk of the movies reviewed here will be B-horror films. My instinct is to say that my business is exploitation movies, but recent years have seen the definition of that term contract to the point that it no longer gets the job done either. So instead, I’ll simply say this: For the most part, if a particular movie played or would have played at a drive-in or an old Times Square grindhouse, you can reasonably expect a review of it to show up here one of these days.” What this means is that there’s a really eclectic mix of reviews, from the predictable Bubba Ho-Tep to the slightly unexpected Attack the Block, to undiscovered gems like 1951’s ‘The Giant Gila Monster’. You want to read about weird, obscure, cultish and quite often terrible films? Good, you’ll like this then.
  • The US Geographic Names Interface System: Have you ever wanted to be able to access a database of every named civic location in the US? No, I can’t imagine you have, but just on the offchance that you’d like to organise a roadtrip to the States in which you visit every town named after you, or one which takes you through each individual place with a slightly juvenile name (Cougar Butte, Oregon, I am looking squarely at YOU) then this might prove invaluable.
  • Sans Forgetica: A clever idea, this, certainly from a PR point of view as it’s been everywhere this week – Sans Forgetica is a font designed specifically to be memorable, so as to assist with the retention of information. A product of RMIT’s Behavioural Business Lab, “Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.” Aside from anything else, it looks quite cool AND THAT’S THE MAIN THING RIGHT KIDS?
  • Tattoo Ideas: Regardless of your thoughts on tattoos – and, seriously, we must be on the cusp of a backlash now, right? Given that everyone and their mum has got some degree of ink, and given that we’re JUST at the cusp of a whole generation who got big ink in the early 90s starting to sag in quite significant an aesthetically compromising fashion, surely we’re about due a NO MORE TATTS PLEASE backlash? – this site collects some truly incredible work across a wide range of styles; if you’re considering one, you could do worse than check the selection for inspiration (before settling for a star on your inside wrist because THAT’S JUST WHO YOU ARE, RIGHT?).
  • The C64 Emulator Library: You might have seen this last weekend when Rob put it in the B3ta newsletter, but for those of you who don’t subscribe to both then ENJOY – this is a collection of over 15,000(!) pieces of Commodore 64 software, mostly games, playable in-browser on the Internet Archive and OH MY GOD this is a proper time capsule to when I use to go to my friend Jim’s house and play Pirates! and Christ are there some great (terrible) games on here. I am going to finish writing this and then, quite possibly, lose the rest of the day to The Last Ninja like it’s 1991 all over again. I suggest you do too. Be warned, just like original C64 games these take a fcuking age to load.
  • <13k Browser Games: Each year there are a variety of coding competitions which challenge people to build stuff within specific limits of memory, etc – this is a writeup of some of the best entries into this year’s js13kGames competition, where developers were given a month to build a browser game no bigger than 13KB. These are INSANE – if you play only one, make it the shooter called ‘Underrun’ – the music alone makes it worth a go, but the whole thing is hugely fun and an incredible achievement when you consider the constraints within which it was built.
  • Grow Comeback: Finally this week, a slight internet throwback – Eyemaze, makers of the ‘Grow’ series of browser games, quietly released a small new one over the Summer which I totally missed. This is called ‘Comeback’, it works in exactly the way the ‘Grow’ titles have always worked (select the objects in the right order to win) and features the standard cute animations and surprisingly tricky combinations you (fine, I) have come to love. This is SO soothing, and a lovely way to pass 10 minutes before you head into the longreads and get all sad and miserable about life and the world.

catherine hyland

By Catherine Hyland

LAST UP, A FULL FIVE HOURS OF J DILLA INSTRUMENTALS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Bees & Bombs: Dave lives in Dublin, and makes black and white animated geomatric gifs which he puts on this confusingly-named Tumblr. I know nothing else about Dave, but which him the best.

  • Hexeosis: Psychedelic kaleidoscopic animations seemingly inspired by every single flyer ever made for a psytrance party.
  • Doctor Beth: An EXCELLENT Tumblr written by the titlar Doctor Beth who tends to stuffed animals at a doll’s hospital, and who here documents the LIFE-SAVING INTERVENTIONS undertaken on a whole bunch of stuffed toys. Even I, a person who it’s fair to say is, perhaps, on the bitter, twisted and cynical end of the emotive spectrum (ha! ‘emotions’!) couldn’t fail to be moved by this, it is ADORABLE.
  • Videogame Skies: Literally just those – lots and lots of them. Feels like this ought to be an art exhibition somewhere (on which note, if you’re yet to see the videogames show at the V&A then GO, it is ace).

 

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

  • Guy Fieri: Every day the same picture of Guy Fieri, except every day it gets more and more fcuked – combining the ‘every day the same’ trend from last week with deep-fried memery, just TRY explaining why this is a thing to someone who is not of the internet (or, actually, don’t, it’s a waste of all your lives).

  • One Year, 365 Cities: Thanks Dan for the tip = this is one of those ‘every day a thing’ accounts, but which each day is sketching a rough design for a city in no more than 10 minutes. Lovely stuff, not least because it’s obviously sticking within the rules – these are rough and choppy and all the better for it.
  • Noah Deledda: Art from aluminium cans. WHY NOT?
  • Bird Graveyard: Capturing photos and videos of people fcuking up those Bird electric scooters that have been all over SF and LA for the past few months – the compilation of people stacking it on the vehicles is honestly worth the follow on its own here.
  • The Worst Insta Ads Ever: WHY ARE THESE BEING PROMOTED? HOW IS THE TARGETING WORKING? WHAT HAS THIS POOR WOMAN DONE TO GET THESE?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • The Digital Strategy of the Library of Congress: Not, I concede, the sort of high quality prose you’re possibly used to me picking for this section, but if you do ‘strategy’-type w4nk (a word I am so uncomfortable with, strategy, that I need to put it in inverted commas to stop myself feeling like a fraud) then this is an excellent example of how an institution might go about writing a digital one – this is clear, it’s well-written, and it MAKES SENSE – honestly, it’s really impressive and the sort of thing which you might be minded to email to people you know with the subject line: “LEARN”.
  • What Is A Neural Network?: Do YOU work in an industry that has nothing whatsoever to do with AI or machine learning but which, despite this fact, seems incapable of going through the week without one or more of your peers and colleagues making a tooth-clenchingly ignorant reference to technologies they simply do not understand even the most basic principles of? Yes, yes of course you do! This guide to what a neural network is, what it can do, and why it might not actually be what you need for your thing, is honestly brilliant and ought to be required reading for anyone talking about how BIG DATA AND AI IS THE FUTURE OF CONSUMER PR or somesuch wankery.
  • The Phantom of the Obvious: A stellar review of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s autobiography, notable and enjoyable in the main for the fact that the author quite evidently really wants to slag Lloyd Webber off – you can feel him coiling up, ready to strike – but seems to be unable to get past the fact that the guy seems, basically, to be sort-of ok; I mean, obviously insanely arrogant, and let’s not ignore the musical crimes, but, you know, basically not anywhere near Piers Morgan levels of awful.
  • What Question Did You Not Expect To Be Asked During Sex?: A Reddit thread (of course) in which people offer their responses to this promising question. The answers don’t disappoint – you’ll find your own favourite, but I personally now cannot get the term ‘cheese pot’ out of my head.
  • The Closure of Tsukiji: Tsukisji fish market in Tokyo closed last weekend – it had been operational for nearly 90 years, and was by all accounts a quite incredible place. This Reuters photo essay takes you right there, but thankfully without the presumably omnipresent odour of fish viscera which, as a general rule, I prefer to do without.
  • The Commodification of Home: An essay examining the manner in which Airbnb has changed hosts’ attitudes to the concept of ‘home’, and the subtle way that it, and other services of similiar ilk, erode the boundaries between personal and professional space in a way that’s psychologically a bit, well, wearing. I’ve touched on this before here, but the commodification of interaction and humanity is very much one of the odder side-effects of the past 8 or so years of the development of the web.
  • The Automation Charade: A really interesting essay – and a nice companion to the guide to machine learning piece above – which argues that much of the hysteria and hype around the inexorable rise of automation and the effect it’s going to have on the job market is just that – hype – but that one of the potential side effects of that will be the increased extent to which actual human labour will be hidden and rendered less valuable, and easier to exploit as a result. “The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate.” Cheering, isn’t it?
  • The Sordid Truth About Degass’ Ballet Dancers: A brilliant piece of ‘behind the art’ history, looking at Edgar Degass’ depictions of Parisian ballerinas in the late 19thC and the miserable reality of said ballerina’s actual existences. I love stuff that recontextualises work in this way, particularly when it makes you think about the relationship and power dynamic between artist and subject. Fair to say Degass doesn’t come out of this hugely well – not that he’ll care, what with being long-dead, but still.
  • What Are NPCs?: Little dispatch from the frontlines of the culture wars here – an explainer piece in Kotaku on what the ‘NPC’ designation in the context of alt-righters means and how it’s being deployed to undermine left-wing discourse in certain bits of the internet. Interesting in the main for the way in which the slightly hackneyed redpill ideology is evolving and mutating, but obviously in the main just hugely depressing.
  • Weaponising The Brain: Or, ‘What DARPA Did Next’. This is FASCINATING, all about how DARPA (the bit of the US defence force concerned with R&D – you may know them from such innovations as ‘the internet’) is working to develop techniques which will potentially allow for mind controlled supersoldier robot things, and the ethical considerations which are holding them back (AHAHAHAHAHAHA JOKE!). There are, it may not surprise you to learn, about 30 separate things in this piece that will make you do a slow “oooo-ok” and a mental step back from the monitor – my personal favourite was the throwaway comment about soldiers being able to telepathically control indestructible combat jelly cubes, but you’ll doubtless find your own personal favourites.
  • Forbidden Satires of China: Thanks to Alex for the tip here – this is a profile of Chinese author Yan Lianke, former Army staffer and famous writer, whose works are largely banned in China. This piece sees the journalist accompany the writer back to his childhood village, and is one of the best pieces I’ve ever read in terms of giving an account of the almost incomprehensibly doublethink-ish nature of 20thC/contemporary China; you will finish this (if you’re anything like me, at least) with a very real sense that China is very, very far away in every sense possible. As an added bonus, the writing’s great too – this is fascinating.
  • Alexa, How Will You Change Us?: A really interesting look at how Alexa’s – and voice assistants more generally – are designed from a linguistic/interpretative point of view, and how increased interactions with increasingly human voice assistants can and will shape certain aspects of society and human interaction in the future. The bits in here about the backstory to the Google Assistant voice character is mental, and gives some indication of the complexity of creating humanoid interfaces in a manner that doesn’t feel massively fcuking creepy. Here’s a summary paragraph for you – this is very much worth reading: “Perhaps you think that talking to Alexa is just a new way to do the things you already do on a screen: shopping, catching up on the news, trying to figure out whether your dog is sick or just depressed. It’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of switching out the body parts used to accomplish those tasks—replacing fingers and eyes with mouths and ears. We’re talking about a change in status for the technology itself—an upgrade, as it were. When we converse with our personal assistants, we bring them closer to our own level.”
  • This is 18: Superb NYT feature which presents the world as seen through the eyes of a bunch of 18 year olds from around the world. Looking at their interests, attitudes, behaviours and lifestyles, it paints a picture of a diverse and conscientious generation absolutely crippled by all the great stuff (not in fact great at all) we have bequeathed them. Try reading this and not feeling a little guilty: “I feel like social media has corrupted our generation a bit. We are meant to be this generation of new hope but it’s all so warped.”
  • Matreon: McSweeney’s riffs on the idea of a Patreon but for emotional labour, and it’s very funny but perhaps maybe less so if you’re a woman.
  • Kelly The Sassy Dolphin: SO MUCH SASS IN THAT BLOWHOLE! This is a great profile of Kelly, a veteran dolphin who is part of the entertainment troupe at some luxury hotel in the Bahamas – the piece tries to determine whether or not dolphins can be said to have ‘personalities’ in any meaningful sense, or whether in fact this is just another instance of anthropomorphisation and in fact it makes no sense at all to ascribe human qualities, or at least qualities we would perceive of as human, to a creature so bio/neurologically distinct from us. Kelly is ACE, fwiw.
  • Daniel Radcliffe and the Art of the Fact Checker: This has been referenced all over the place this week, but the piece is lovely and it’s worth reading in its entirety. Daniel Radcliffe is playing a fact checker in a Broadway play he’s currently in – this is the account of what happened when he went into the New Yorker offices to get some on-the-job experience. Really sweet, which isn’t a phrase I often (if ever) use positively.
  • Child Marriage in the US: This was something of a shocker. “Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, most of whom were girls, some as young as 12, wedding men. Now, under pressure from advocates and amid a nationwide reckoning over gender equality and sexual misconduct, states have begun ending exceptions that have allowed marriages for people younger than 18, the minimum age in most states. Texas last year banned it, except for emancipated minors. Kentucky outlawed it, except for 17-year-olds with parental and judicial approval. Maryland considered increasing the minimum marrying age from 15, but its bill failed to pass in April. Then in May, Delaware abolished the practice under every circumstance, and New Jersey did the same in June. Pennsylvania, which may vote to eliminate all loopholes this autumn, could be next.” The prose and images here mainly relate to Phil and Maria, he 25 and she 16, and, honestly, this is absolutely heartbreaking. You very much do not get the feeling that things are going to turn out particularly well for either of them, though here’s hoping.
  • Morality Wars: Does art have to be ‘right’ to be good? Can something with the ‘wrong’ perspective ever be art? And does something that’s very evidently coming from the ‘right’ side of the argument automatically get an artistic pass? My answers to those would, in order, be ‘no’, ‘yes’, and ‘no’, but this piece explores the questions around why we think what we think about the link between art and morality, particularly in this most polarised and polarising of eras. Smart and important writing / thinking.
  • Meet Mr Bolsonaro: In case you weren’t aware, Brazil is the latest nation flirting with electing an absolute prick. This is a profile of Jair Bolsonaro, giving you all the reasons you need as to why it would be best for everyone if he didn’t win the eventual electoral run-off at the end of October. CHEER UP IT MIGHT NEVER HAPPEN (let’s hope it doesn’t).
  • When Classical Musicians Go Digital: Really interesting look at how the advent of digital scores and annotations is changing the classical music world, not only from the point of view of modern performance – reading off an iPad! No more page turners! – but also from an archival/historical point of view, with these technologies now allowing for in-depth and interpretative readings of original manuscripts, and for the creation of iterative documentation showing each stage in the creative process. You don’t need to be a musician to find this interesting, promise – anyone working in or around digital archives will enjoy.
  • Naming The Unspoken Thing: One of those occasional “you’ll never believe the crazy stuff that those Valley people get up to!” pieces, this time all about these super-secret and exclusive psychedelic happenings called ‘clambakes’ which apparently involve a lot of Silicon Valley bigwigs dropping a shedload of DMT with a coachload of old-school hippies from the days of Esalen and Big Sur; the piece is a fun read, but as with all these things my main thoughts are a) I don’t know if I really believe this; b) this sounds like NO FUN at all.
  • A Brief History of Speedrunning: Probably only one for the gamers amongst you, this is a look back at how the process of speedrunning (that is, competing to finish a game, or a level of a game, as fast as possible) came about, and how the pastime has evolved. Excellent nuggets of game history in here.
  • He Actually Believes He Is Khalid: 2018 has been a good year for grifter stories – after that one from a few months back about the fake Eurotrash princess, this is an even more insane scam involving an adopted Colombian child who somehow repeatedly managed to convince people he was variously a Saudi Prince or someone being bankrolled by a Saudi Prince. Some of the numbers and scams in here are astonishing, though there’s very much a sting in the tail when you get to the end – it’s fair to say that the subject of this piece doesn’t come across as the most…stable person, but what’s most remarkable is the number of times he got away with it. Has there ever been a better time in recorded history to pretend to be very, very rich?
  • 20 Thoughts on Being a Man: I was in two minds about including this – after all, noone really needs to read anything about how HARD it is being a bloke – but I figured it was worth including, not least because it’s very well-written but also because it does a good job of touching on certain tropes of masculinity that, I think, most would agree are universal to a large degree and which have significant negative consequences on men (and, as a result, on everyone else). To be clear, this isn’t a pity piece, rather an exploration of some of the peculiarities of growing up as a man and how that maybe fcuks you up a bit sometimes. See what you think.
  • Relax, Ladies: Then of course we get to this piece and the last one just feels a bit, well, unimportant. This is a brilliant essay about the pervasive sexism which embodied the 80s, and how it shaped and characterised so much of the two decades which followed. Really, really very good indeed by Anastasia Basil.
  • Breaking The Codes: And this was heartbreaking, and in the week of the Kavanaugh confirmation a proper punch in the stomach. Trigger warnings about here, but if you can then I recommend this unreservedly – Suzanne Roberts in The Rumpus writes angrily, sadly and superbly about the minor and major aggressions that qualified her and her friends’ youth, and where those led.
  • The Big Disruption: Finally in the longreads, a REALLY long read – a whole novel. The Big Disruption is a Silicon Valley / tech satire, and whilst I have yet to read all of it the bit I have read is very funny – also, it’s a whole book and it’s brand new and it’s on Medium for free – WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT? Christ.

scentwehst

By Scientwehst

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) Let’s start off with Willie J Healey – this is called ‘Lovelawn’, and it’s sort of excellently lofi and downbeat and a tiny bit Sparklehorse-y:

 

2) This is a GREAT song, inexplicably messed with via a video that starts with 90s of pointless unfunny monologue. Skip to around 1m30s and enjoy this – it’s very good indeed. It’s called ‘Growing Into A Ghost’ by Swearin’:

 

3) This is called ‘White Lies’ by Tatran, the animated video is superb and the song is really, really sinister in an unexpected sort of way. Give it a try:

 

4) 18 minutes of truly excellent music and filmmaking here – this is by Petite Noir, it’s called ‘La Maison Noir: The Gift and the Curse’ and don’t let the length put you off, it’s honestly worth it (for the art direction alone):

 

5) UK hiphop corner! Curios favourite Loyle Carner is back with a new track – it’s called ‘Ottolenghi’ (who else could write a legitimately great rap about a cookbook? NO FCUKER that’s who) and I love it like I love all his work:

 

6) Next, this is part of a wider project by Girls Who Code – Sisterhood is a visual album of tracks celebrating and empowering girls and young women (tomorrow is international day of the girl, if I’m not mistaken, hence them launching this week), and this is the lead track, called ‘Ooh Child’ and honestly it’s so much better than it needs to be. So good, and I normally despise ‘uplifting’ or ‘inspirational’ things:

 

7) Last up this week, a song which I wouldn’t normally feature because, well, slightly twee comic songs performed on the ukelele are basically the worst thing IN THE WORLD, and yet this one manages to be not just good but GREAT – funny, biting, and timely. This is called ‘Tough Time For Boys’ – ENJOY, AND BYE, BYE, BYE, TAKE CARE AND WHY NOT TAKE THIS WEEKEND AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO WEAR A LARGE JUMPER AND DO SOME HIGH-QUALITY PARK WALKING AND LEAF KICKING IF THE WEATHER PERMITS BECAUSE IT IS NOW VERY MUCH THAT TIME OF YEAR AND IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A DRINK WITH TOO MUCH CINNAMON IN IT JUST BECAUSE IT’S OCTOBER THEN YOU GO GIRL ANYWAY TAKE CARE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE!

Webcurios 13/07/18

Reading Time: 29 minutes

Oh Christ. What a MESS. 

Look, let’s focus on the positives – the kids got rescued! 

What else? Eh? Oh. 

Sorry everyone, I have literally NOTHING else today – it’s all just TOO MUCH (and I have a lunch to get to, then theatre with a godchild, and then dinner with my girlfriend and then Fat Bob’s birthday tomorrow and then, doubtless, an awful lot of tears and recrimination on Sunday). Look, everyone, see if you can somehow derive some certainty and comfort from what follows, because God knows I have none to offer you myself. 

It’s July 2018 and everything is a total and utter fcuking mess, but at least I am a consistent presence in your lives – THIS, AS EVER, IS WEB CURIOS!

raku inou

By Raku Inoue

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A VAST PLAYLIST OF THE BEST FIRST TRACKS ON ALBUMS!

THE SECTION WHICH ISN’T WRITING ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT’S GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH ADVERMARKETINGPR AND BECAUSE IT’S ONLY IN THE US AND BECAUSE, WELL, THERE’S ALREADY TOO MUCH STUFF GOING ON, ISN’T THERE, BUT WHICH THINKS THAT FACEBOOK’S APPROACH TO INFOWARS DOESN’T DOVETAIL VERY NEATLY WITH THEIR STATED AVERSION TO ‘FAKE NEWS’:

  • Facebook Testing AR Ads: I know, I’m excited too! Facebook, in typical fashion, headlines this as “New Ways to Inspire Holiday Shoppers with Video” which, Christ, is pretty much the most miserable and joyless way to describe the fact that now retailers (in the US, in certain categories, but, as per, this is the universal future do not try to fight it) can buy ad units in the Newsfeed which will exhort eager consumers to TRY ON GLASSES or TRY ON MAKEUP in AR! Isn’t it exciting? You can read a slightly clearer account of what you’ll be able to do in the TechCrunch writeup here, but, look, let’s all be realistic about this – there will be a couple of interesting, novel and reasonably high-quality uses of this and then there will be about 300,000 executions which let you, I don’t know, wear a Gregg’s pasty on your head, thereby hammering another nail into the coffin of the idea of ‘AR as something normal people might ever actually want to interact with a brand through’. Still, virtual sunglasses!
  • Facebook Stories Adds ‘Highlights’ Option: Just like on Insta, you’ll now be able to compile expired elements from Stories past into ‘Highlights’ which can live at the top of your profile. Which is…nice? Is it nice? Has anyone willingly watched one of their Facebook friend’s Stories? NO MATTER, for this is the universal future (see above) as dictated by the Big Blue Misery Factory and who are we to question it? NO FCUKERS, that’s who!
  • Instagram Question Stickers Are HERE!: You’ll know this, of course, as every single cripplingly dull (but so pretty!) narcissist you follow on the platform has spent the past few days exhorting their army of egofellators to ask them stuff about themselves, thereby turning Insta into Curios Cat or Ask.fm. Still, it was trailed last week and now HERE IT IS – in case you haven’t yet been exposed to it, anyone can now add a ‘Question’ sticker to their Stories, into which anyone can type a question for them to answer in future content. The questions or comments submitted aren’t anonymous – a fact I imagine has already let to one or two socially awkward moments – though they are when reshared to a subsequent ‘gram; this is, my inevitable, tedious snark aside, a really good way of driving interaction with an audience and I can imagine a bunch of ‘influencers’ (sorry) going full Diceman with this for the lols.
  • Insta Expands Collection Ads and Shoppable Stories to All Brands: You remember these – made available to certain exclusive partners last month, now here for everyone to ‘enjoy’. Obviously if you flog tat to people, the ability to do so directly through Insta is A Good Thing – who knows, perhaps you could be the next ‘self-made billionaire’ just like Kylie Jenner!
  • WhatsApp To Label Forwarded Messages: No real relevance here at all, but in the pantheon of ‘measures ostensibly designed to combat ‘Fake News’ which will do literally nothing to combat the spread of said ‘Fake News’’, this one is SPECIAL. If you forward a message to another user within WhatsApp, that user will see a notification informing them that it was indeed a forward. Er, what about simple c&ping, though? HAVE I JUST DISCOVERED A GENIUS WORKAROUND?
  • The Twitter Cull: Not quite as dramatic as the Thanos subReddit cull (only click that link btw if you want to get a very, very detailed rundown of a very, very silly piece of internet culture), but still – as part of its efforts to clean up its bot problem, Twitter this week has started removing locked accounts (that is, ones it’s identified as being part of a botnet, spam accounts, etc, and which it has prevented from posting) from users’ follower counts. As such, those with large followings may see a drop in overall follower numbers – don’t worry, though, it’s probably not because everyone hates you.
  • Twitter Offering New Promoted Trend Option: You know when you click ‘Explore’ in Twitter and it opens on the trend list above which is an image/headline banner which takes you to a Moment? Well Twitter’s testing the idea of selling that as adspace, with Disney being the first to buy it in the US. I can only imagine the sort of cost they’ll be attaching to that, so of interest only to those of you with 6-figure pockets and a pleasingly loose approach to targeting.
  • Snap Teaming Up With Amazon: Not just Amazon, according to the piece, but that’s the most interesting one. It’s not official, but the reporting seems sound – code buried within Snapchat suggests it’s working on giving users the ability to take photos of products, barcodes, etc, and for those photos to be used to identify products and take them direct to purchase. Which is exactly what Amazon’s abortive attempt at a phone did, except, well, more useful, as you don’t need to buy an Amazon phone. Useful, unless you’re a retailer who isn’t Amazon and for whom this is in fact nothing more than another shovelful of dirt being dropped from a great height on your coffin lid.
  • YouTube vs ‘Fake News’: YouTube, another platform whose relationship with the truth is an interesting and varied one, is also taking steps to combat the outright lies which tend to spring up seconds after anything moderately contentious happens in the world (oh hi, false flag accusations!). As of…soon, in the immediate aftermath of major news events, YT will surface links to written news reports in its results, given, as it says, it takes more time to make proper journalistic video than it does to write fact-checked copy. Which is A Good Thing, I think, though obviously the choice of sources will in itself be hugely contentious. The other stuff it’s doing is through investment in helping newsrooms around the world get better at making news video faster – what? What’s that noise? IS THAT THE SOUND OF NEWSROOMS REPIVOTING TO VIDEO?? It would be funny were the entire profession of journalism not so utterly banjaxed.
  • Some Google Pay Updates: They’re adding P2P payments and mobile ticketing options. I am quite bored of writing this section and so am going to move on now.
  • DO NOT STEAL MY MEMES: Not ‘mine’, you understand, but those belonging to self-described ‘memelords’ behind a bunch of super-popular astronomy accounts on Insta who, according to this brilliantly angry and *slightly* shrill presentation, have been consistently ripped off by Harper’s Bazaar and are NOT HAPPY about it. Funny, yes, but you can see why they’re annoyed – it really isn’t ok to do this sort of thing, and you will get found out (if you follow any cartoonists or illustrators you’ll know quite how prevalent this sort of crap is, and large brands really ought to have more shame).
  • 4-Minute Showers: The sort of idea which I think is really clever and then, on further reflection, I think is exactly the sort of thing that only advermarketingprtwats like me will EVER see and is a classic example of agencyland having a public wnk if you see what I mean. Anyway, this is a smart little execution by Y&R for Water Aid, which sees them creating a playlist of songs which are exactly 4 minutes long, to highlight the need to save water in the shower (you time your wash to the track length, thereby ensuring an optimal duration for an environmentally acceptable scrub, DO YOU SEE?). Cute.
  • The Body Hair Image Library: Billie is a US brand which sells female grooming and body products, made by women for women (or at least that’s very much the vibe they give off). This campaign is based on the ‘insight’ (SUCH INSIGHT!) that…oh, I’ll let them tell it: “There’s a serious lack of female body hair on the internet. Search “woman” in any image gallery and you’ll be scrolling for a while before finding a single strand. We’re here to change that. Because womankind is both shaggy and smooth. Help us grow our library by using #projectbodyhair or uploading your own photo below.” Now I really like this – it’s a nice idea, very of the now, etc – but reactions were more mixed amongst those I asked about it. What do YOU think? Why are you so weirded out by female armpit hair? WHY????

margaret curtis

By Margaret Curtis

NEXT UP, A TRULY WONDERFUL NOSTALGIA-EVOKING PLAYLIST OF CLASSICS PAST!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT WHILST IT IS LOVELY TO PROTEST AGAINST DONALD TRUMP THERE ARE, THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS, A BUNCH OF PEOPLE SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER TO HOME WE OUGHT TO BE PROTESTING AGAINST IE THE ENTIRE FCUKING POLITICAL CLASS OF THIS COUNTRY, NOT JUST THE CABINET BUT ON ALL SIDES REALLY, WHO EVEN BY THEIR LOW STANDARDS HAVE HAD A SPECTACULARLY INEFFECTUAL AT BEST AND CNUTY AT WORST WEEK, PT.1:

  • The Elsewhere Visitors’ Guide: This is a lovely thing to kick off with; Elsewhere is a recent EP by Face Culler, which comes with this accompanying website taking you on a tour of the imaginary place that inspired the music (which, in case you’re interested, is electrofolkynoodling, which is a genuinely awful description but one which I can’t improve on here at 7:41am in my kitchen, sorry). Navigate the map, click on places of interest, read the descriptions and listen to the accompanying song – I am a total sucker for imaginary maps and places, and the writing is quirkily reminiscent of Fallen London and that sort of thing. Have an explore.

  • GTA USA Gun Homicides: I am also a total sucker for videogame-derived art projects, and this, by Joseph Delappe, is right up my street. Every night at midnight the automated game will restart on Twitch, using in-game dead bodies to show how many Americans have died due to gun violence since January 1, 2018. It isn’t controlled by a player; instead it is updated automatically every night using data scraped from the Gun Violence Archive. This is far, far more affecting than you’d imagine from the description – it’s honestly really horrible, and I mean that in the best possible way.
  • Captionbot: Or, depending on how cynical you’re feeling this morning (guess), another instance of us giving up our labour to train the army of AIs which will eventually enslave us! Still, it’s a fun toy, powered by Microsoft’s own image recognition software – upload any picture you like and the software will have a go at telling you what that image is of; you can rate its answer on a scale of 1-5, thereby helping the machine get better. Do we think it’s going to be perverted by people trying to train it exclusively on bongo? Part of me really hopes that that’s exactly what happens tbh.
  • Slitscan Space: You remember Slitscanning, right? “The slit-scan photography technique is a photographic and cinematographic process where a moveable slide, into which a slit has been cut, is inserted between the camera and the subject to be photographed” (thanks, Wikipedia, I really didn’t remember, turns out)? Anyway, give this site access to your webcam, move around a bit in front of it, and watch in marvelling wonder at the strangely watercolourish semi-abstract visions that scroll across your screen (and don’t think too much about exactly what / who you’ve just given webcam access to).
  • ICE Spy: This is interesting but genuinely creepy and not, I don’t think, a particularly good thing. ICE in this context is the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, who have been responsible for much of the…let’s call it draconian enforcement of US border policy in the past months, to large-scale public disapproval and anger. Not totally sure that the answer to that anger is this, though – ICE Spy is a website which, using hundreds of ICE employee photos scraped from LinkedIn, invites users to upload photos of people they know which the site will cross-reference against the aforementioned LinkedIn archive to determine whether in fact you do know someone who works for ICE. Which, let’s be clear, doesn’t sound good AT ALL. Can you see where this sort of thing ends up? If you can, and it isn’t ‘somewhere really, really bleak and quite scary’ then you’re a far greater optimist than I am.
  • Editing Music In Videos Using AI: Fine, it’s not quite editing music in the way in which you might be imagining, but this video shows how it’s possible to isolate individual audio tracks automatically and it’s hugely impressive; the applications here for quick audio editing are really quite exciting (unless you’re an audio producer, in which case that sound you hear is the robots coming for you too).
  • Blockshade: What do you get if you mash a bunch of rubbish about STUFF ON THE BLOCKCHAIN with elements of the ‘erotic’ writings of EL James? You get this! Mostly doesn’t make total sense, but I am oddly charmed by phrases such as “Perhaps it was you who decided on gazpacho soup and a periodic, randomly chosen deterministic block signing order”; your mileage, though, may vary considerably.
  • Comicon Cosplay: There’s nothing new or exciting any more about photos of people dressed up as cartoon or game characters – it’s actually sort of cute how mainstream this sort of thing has become, compared to the times a decade or so ago when I used to honestly feel for my little brother’s safety when he got on the DLR wearing massive parachute pants and a scratchy blond wig and carrying a 5ft wooden keyblade (RIP Cameron you massive geek, you) – but this is a lovely collection of seriously impressive efforts from the attendees of Montreal Comicon. Unrelated, but can you imagine exactly how unfun it must have been to be on the Furry float at Pride last weekend in that heat?
  • Bumblebee Spaces: As all available space in London is taken up by high-rise apartments built for people who will never, ever live in them (latest in this fabulous trend, a new development near me whose exterior boards proclaim that the interiors are being designed by Versace Home – lads, NOONE WHO CAN AFFORD INTERIORS BY VERSACE HOME WANTS TO LIVE WHERE I DO!), so we need to look to more innovative storage solutions as we’re forced to continue subdividing our apartments until we each have 9 square feet to dwell in. Enter Bumblebee Spaces, a storage solution based ON THE CEILING! Yes, that’s right, instead of cluttering up your floorspace, place boxes on the ceiling which you can raise and lower with motorised straps, controlled by an app which also theoretically keeps track of what you’ve stored where. Click the link, look at the video, and then take a moment to imagine exactly how many times a day you’d be jostled by a wobbly IKEA box squeakily inching its way ceilingwards; or how much fun it would be to not be able to wear clean pants because the WiFi was out or you needed a software update. This is SILLY.
  • Capsule Crit: A new website collecting ‘games criticism, personal essays, reviews, and fan fiction in micro genres’, Capsule Crit is a welcome addition to the increasingly diverse range of voices writing about games and related subjects in 2018, to which in your collective faces, GamerGate pricks.
  • Parli-N-Grams: Or, Google Trends for the UK Parliament. Curios reader Giuseppe Sollazzo (a man who I have NEVER MET, demonstrating Web Curios incredible reach should any interested sponsors be reading this) sent this in – his own project, it allows users to compare a series of search terms from Hansard over time, meaning you can track the relative popularity of terms or concepts or issues in the UK Parliament over time. Try comparing anything you like with ‘Brexit’ for one of the more miserable illustrations of exactly how tediously one-note and suffocating parliamentary discourse has become of late.
  • Parliawint: Tweets by Dril superimposed over political imagery from BBC Politics; this is far funnier than it should be, except when it features Boris Johnson and you realise that this isn’t funny it’s actually all our lives oh god.
  • Women In Parliament: There will come a point when I stop featuring work by The Pudding as it’s just too consistently good and it feels unfair; not yet, though. This week they published this superb visualisation exploring the presence of women in the UK Parliament over history – it takes you through the growth of women as a political force in the UK in typically well-designed fashion, showing the impact of all-women shortlists and pointing out the still not-insignificant gender gap which exists in the Commons. I am slightly amazed that they are not yet shilling these services to brands, as they would make MILLIONS.
  • Sensory Meditation: Many, many years ago I did a bit of work promoting RJDJ, an app which effectively used some sort of VERY rudimentary AI/ML to create augmented soundscapes of whatever you were listening to, based on ambient noise, your movement speed, etc (it has since pivoted to be this – which is a variant on the original and worth a look). This is a similar-ish idea – Non (for that is the app’s name) is a series of ‘generative sound meditations’  which deliver the user a series of unique sound experiences based on a whole raft of factors including location, previously determined preferences, etc. The visuals on this are LOVELY, and if you do meditation and mindfulness and stuff then this is probably RIGHT up your street.
  • Talking To Alexa With Sign Language: This is only a proof-of-concept, but it is BRILLIANT. Abhishek Singh rigged this up so as to enable him to give instructions to his Amazon Echo device simply by signing at his webcam – I say ‘simply’, but obviously Abhikesh is a very, very clever person indeed – which ‘sees’ his gestures, converts them from sign language to speech, and then ‘talks’ to Alexa on the user’s behalf. The ingenuity and coding skill here is super-impressive, and however (rightly) wary I am of the domestic surveillance box (sorry, domestic voice assistant) there’s no denying the huge utility of technology like this for the less able-bodied.
  • Freelance Wars: Do YOU like Star Wars? Are YOU a freelancer struggling to afford to leave the house or eat as a result of FCUKING INTERNATIONAL COMPANIES WITH MULTI-MILLION-DOLLAR TURNOVERS FAILING TO HONOUR YOUR PAYMENT TERMS (let’s not be so crass as to name names, but were I to use the term ‘Photoshop’ without a little ™ sign, can you guess which FCUKING INTERNATIONAL COMPANY I might be referring to?)? Well you might enjoy this, which Tweets gags mashing up the two concepts. Or you might think “this isn’t funny, this is yet another jokey normalisation of the appalling manner in which large organisations treat piecework”, and you’d be right!
  • Browsh: More technical people than me might be able to come up with a reason why you’d want an entirely text-based browser. I have no idea, but the fact that it can render videos in text on the fly is quite remarkable (watch the demo video if, as is probable, this description means nothing whatsoever to you).
  • You Can Get Your Phone To Respond To Harry Potter Commands: Or at least you can if you’re on the very latest version of iOS (I think it’s easier with Android) – be clear, this is not really ok at all, but I know that some of you children out there won’t be able to resist.
  • Birth Undisturbed: A selection of artworks depicting childbirth in all its…er…bloody, meaty glory. “’Birth Undisturbed’ is a fictional narrative series by British photographer Natalie Lennard. Travelling through the world and history to depict birth from ancient to modern, and squalid to famous, the series depicts stories of woman both real and imagined. Using images and video to examine current Western birth consciousness, the artist strives to speak a new language to bring the rawness of primal birth into the art world. Highlighting key figureheads and writers from the realm of birth philosophy, the series’ timeliness is ever more appropriate in a global maternity crisis.”
  • Roadtrip: Oh this is SO GOOD. Roadtrip is an app (presumably using Wikipedia’s built-in ‘Nearby’ Page) which is designed to be used whilst on car journeys and which will read out Wikipedia entries for places of interest as you pass near them on your route. Ok, so when I tried it again just now it thought I was in Wollagong (I am, to be the best of my knowledge, really not in Wollagong), but the idea is so hugely appealing and there are SO many *ahem* inspirations you could take from it. Just lovely.
  • Michal Sawtyruk: Sawtryruk works in a vector-ish style which I really rather love – take a look at his site, there’s some gorgeous art on there.
  • Walmart’s Randomly Generated Inspirational Quote Posters: I am honestly devastated that these don’t seem to ship to the UK; as far as I can tell, this works off the same sort of algorithmic creation method which all those tshirt manufacturers from a few years ago did, whereby it pulls quotes from…somewhere, and then overlays them on a randomly chosen sunset-type inspirational scene and offers them for sale for $13 or thereabouts. I have no idea AT ALL where they are grabbing them from, but it leads to gems like this – who wouldn’t want “I have to tell you I enjoy Jon Stewart. That’s the truth. I actually think he’s very funny. I’ve paid to see him do his stand-up routine” on their wall? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Amazing; I want a UK version please.
  • Yuni Yoshida: Yuni Yoshida is a South Korean (I think) art director and this is her Instagram feed featuring her work. Such lovely style throughout, and some rather good visual gags to boot.
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day: From NASA, so the quality’s always pretty good. You can see the whole archive here, going back to June 16 1995 – early adopters, NASA, as you might expect

natasha law

By Natasha Law

CLICK HERE TO ACCESS A TRULY GREAT SELECTION OF OLD PRINCE BOOTLEGS AND RARITIES!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT WHILST IT IS LOVELY TO PROTEST AGAINST DONALD TRUMP THERE ARE, THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS, A BUNCH OF PEOPLE SIGNIFICANTLY CLOSER TO HOME WE OUGHT TO BE PROTESTING AGAINST IE THE ENTIRE FCUKING POLITICAL CLASS OF THIS COUNTRY, NOT JUST THE CABINET BUT ON ALL SIDES REALLY, WHO EVEN BY THEIR LOW STANDARDS HAVE HAD A SPECTACULARLY INEFFECTUAL AT BEST AND CNUTY AT WORST WEEK, PT.1:

  • 80s/90s Football Culture: Or at least the hoolie side of it. Photographer Bethany Kane has published a zine collecting photographs her own father took when on tour with England in the late-80s/early-90s – a few of them are collected here, but to see the full set you’ll have to buy a copy of the physical mag. One of the nicest things (as a non-England fan there weren’t many, true, but it’s important to be honest about these things) about England’s World Cup performance this year was the feeling that this sort of wing of the fandom doesn’t really exist any more, and that there’s little or no appetite for lads on tour beatings. Thank Christ.

  • Chest Strongwell: This Facebook Page has one joke – it takes members of the Trump administration and photoshops them with no little skill onto the sort of staged studio photos beloved of a certain type of person in America’s South. Scroll down to enjoy the majesty of Ivanka, Donald, Sean and other stars of the past two years in mullety soft-focus. So good.
  • Wilson: People have worked out that podcast discovery is a mess – Wilson aims to help sort that out by presenting a weekly selection of curated, hand-picked new podcasts as a playlist, the idea being that it will give you a weekly bunch of new listens, some of which may make it onto your personal rotation. No registration, no  algorithm, just human curation, like in the good old days. It could catch on, this sort of thing.
  • Tag Walk: If you’re into fashion – I mean, really, into fashion, the catwalky, LFW-style fashion, not so much your Missguided – then this is potentially really useful. Tag Walk is a search engine which is pointed exclusively at shots from the past few years catwalk shows each seasons in the major capitals; you can search by city, season, designer or keyword, to pull out, say, all the cerise bandoliers from Milan SS 16 (is a bandolier an article of clothing or a weapon? I am now stricken with terrible doubt). I have no idea how good this is – tbh, I wouldn’t really know a Missguided from a Missoni, despite my earlier snark – but I can imagine it being very useful indeed in certain circles.
  • The 2018 Underwater Photographer of the Year: As per usual, these are absolutely insane. In the absence of any new Blue Planet for the next 7-10 years, you’ll want to get your fill of these – LOOK AT THESE SHARKY LADS!
  • Room Racer: I confess to not having tried this yet, so all the usual caveats apply, but it looks fun – Room Racer is an AR racing game for iOS which lets you create a virtual track around any environment you choose, meaning you can make a virtual Scalectrix (does Scalectrix exist any more? Does that mean anything to you? AM I LOSING ALL MY FRAMES OF REFERENCE AND CULTURAL TOUCHPOINTS???) around your living room or wherever you like really. Try it and let me know if it’s any good.
  • Ben Langworthy: Ben is an illustrator. This is his Instagram feed, where amongst other things he occasionally posts drawings of lighthouses which are SO SOOTHING although I can’t adequately explain why.
  • Wakie: The sort of idea that very much seems like a relic from the early days of the web in which there wasn’t a semiautomatic assumption in place that anyone who attempts to engage with you online will be quite a lot of a dick, Wakie is an app which offers the opportunity to connect people with questions and people with answers – as they put it, “Wakie is free, anonymous, and connects you with people 24/7. Just post a topic, and jump on a phone call or have an online discussion. No phone numbers or personal info is exchanged.” Which is nice, except the problem with stuff like this is that the lack of mass adoption tends to mean that the people using it are, well, outliers; it might be that it’s a great place if you want to find out about Linux builds (but those people are, excuse my stereotyping, maybe a touch less likely to want to talk on the phone), but otherwise I imagine it will be a lot of tumbleweed punctuated by the odd bout of heavy breathing, clotted ejaculation and then embarrassed silence. Still, give it a try!
  • This Is America Done On MacPaint: You’ve probably seen this by now, but if not it’s incredible and worth a 5-minute explore, particularly if you’re interested in pixelart/animation.
  • RIVR: I know I’ve mentioned this to you before, but if I have to look at one more proposal with lines like “We will make a 360 degree VR video” in it, I will kick somebody in the face. Still, if your agency is at the point whereby you include the term ‘VR’ in every single proposal REGARDLESS OF THE FACT THAT YOU WILL REACH LITERALLY NO PEOPLE AND YOU DON’T KNOW WHY YOU’RE DOING IT (breathe, Matt, breathe) then you might want to take a look at this site, which might at least give you some ideas as to what you could do with the tech if you had some actual budget. RIVR make photorealistic VR experiences – so, if you want to recreate a warzone, say, or a crime scene, they might be worth a look. If, though, you’ve just chucked a line about ‘a VR film’ into a presentation about medical diagnostic technology and when asked ‘why is this here – what, exactly, do you think that VR experience might be?’ respond with a blank look, then, really, fcuk off (can you tell I am talking from bitter personal experience here? CAN YOU???).
  • New Voices Fund: An investment fund for Women of Colour entrepreneurs. It’s in the US, but there doesn’t seem to be anything on the site about investments being geograhically limited so it might be worth a look if you or anyone you know fit the criteria.
  • Independent Voices: This is an amazing collection of the independent and the countercultural: “Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.” Brilliant stuff in here, and such an excellent resource – seriously, just look at the list of titles you can browse, it’s mental.
  • Armadillo Online: You didn’t know, did you, when you woke up this morning, that you’d today find that online resource of armadillo facts that you’ve been longing for in that most secret corner of your heart? And yet here we are! Beautifully, there’s a page where it lists the remaining armadillo species for which the site has yet to acquire adequate photos – there are 8 of the scaly little buggers still proving elusive, so why not dedicate the rest of your life to getting a shot of one? It will be a better use of your time than attempting to sell deodorant to people, I promise you.   
  • Big Clapper: It’s been a whole half-Curios and only now do I reach the stupidest Kickstarter of the week – maybe things are getting better? Big Clapper is a robot which, if funded, will sit and clap with its BIG SOFT HANDS, wherever you choose to place it. The only possible use for this is to train Michael Gove, Nicole Kidman and other aliens how to clap properly.
  • The Spinner: Sometimes in the course of a week’s web-spelunking I come across stuff that I honestly think “no, no, that really can’t be real in any way, shape or form” – so it was with The Spinner, which purports to offer a service whereby husbands (of course!) can get their wives targeted with adverts promoting content designed to make them more…pliable, more desirous of sex, that sort of thing (the tech checks out – the idea is that the site provides a link which you send them; they open it, and thanks to a quick redirect get a cookie dropped on them before being redirected to a seemingly innocuous video; the cookie allows for the targeted content drops). You pay this lot $30, and in theory can start targeting anyone you want with articles about how they really ought to fcuk you more, is the upshot. Sounds like a scam, right, or a stunt to promote something else…well, thanks to Rich Leigh’s detective work we learned that whilst it might still be a scam it’s definitely not a front for something else; it’s definitely offering EXACTLY that service to a bunch of the sort of men who think that the best way to convince their partners to have sex with them more often is to spam them with Outbrain content. Oh, 2018, you really are a constantly evolving miracle.
  • Propose…On The Moon: Got a spare 125 million quid? Are you a total idiot who can’t tell an obvious PR stunt from truth? GREAT! This is a French ‘propose in Paris’ service for the terminally unimaginative who are branching out and offering, from 2022, a GUARANTEED (not guaranteed at all) opportunity to take a spaceflight into lunar orbit where you’ll be able to propose to your beloved. Seriously, please do click the link – the description of the offer is SUPERB and will cheer you up no end.
  • Get Eddie: A site which lets you order Viagra online on a monthly subscription basis via an almost-certainly risible ‘online consultation’ with a doctor. Included not because I believe you all to be in need of it, but more because I am suddenly curious as to how much you can get away with selling Viagra for on a pill-by-pill basis, and whether this might make for a useful shortcut to dealing (that is obviously NOT what I am thinking, mum).
  • Ultraboardgames: Another week, another site collecting HUNDREDS of online versions of boardgames for you to enjoy instead of staring at Powerpoint for the nth afternoon in a row.
  • Thunder Bella: Small timewasting game of the week, #1! Thunder Bella is an excellent little top-down shoot-em-up in which you play an umbrella trying to shoot down a cloud and, fine, whilst that might sound unbearably twee it’s actually really good ok?
  • Roomba Quest: Small timewasting game of the week, #2! Roomba Quest is just BEAUTIFUL – a small little adventure-y story game in which you play a Roomba, the most poignant of all the domestic appliances.
  • Industrial Accident: Finally in this week’s selection of miscellania, Industrial Accident is a very neat little (5-10 mins, max) Twine game/story – I don’t want to spoil it, but it is VERY satisfying in a way that you might find unsettling. Enjoy!

Dennis Wojtiewiczart

By Dennis Wojtkiewicz

LAST UP, THE NEW ALBUM FROM LEFT BRAIN WHO YOU MAY RECALL WAS IN ODD FUTURE BITD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Jun Cen: “Jun Cen is a Chinese illustrator and animator who is currently based in New York. He is the Overall New Talent Winner of the AOI Illustration Awards(UK)” His work is ACE, take a look.

  • Opus Analogico: Not sure I 100% understand this, but it seems to present photographs (in the main) in pairs based on a shared framing or aesthetic. I rather like it.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • 150 Great Essays and Articles: Just in case I don’t provide you with enough superb reading material each week (I do, fyi, you are WRONG), this is a brilliant collection of wonderful essays by a variety of authors on a wide range of topics, all linked to from a single index. Worth bookmarking and dipping into next time you can’t face refreshing the BBC homepage again at 230pm on a Wednesday.

  • How Google Started: An excellent oral history of the early days of Google; when I  sent it to a friend of mine who used to work there he replied that it was the most accurate thing he’d read, which is hopefully some sort of endorsements. Lots of great details about the madness and oddity of a bunch of young geeks inventing the future for fun – my favourite being the story about the bloke crouching in a cupboard, taking apart a DVD player, who was just fiddling around with ‘digitising all of broadcast TV’ – and a very real sense that noone really knew what they were doing at all, but that it didn’t matter. IMAGINE being this smart.
  • Brutalist Web Design: A whole treatise on Brutalist design for the web – principles and practical tips. Only of interest if you’re a web designer but I know that at least a few of you are and, well, consider this a PERSONAL THANKYOU for reading this bastard thing.
  • Survival of the Richest: In another week in which Elon Musk has, whilst on the one hand doin ostensibly good and helpful things, demonstrated himself to once again be something of a colossal prick, it’s timely to read this piece which looks at the peculiar obsession the super rich seemingly have with a) everything imminently going to tits, really hard, planet and civilisation-wise, and b) making sure that when it does they are WELL out of it. If we really are all moving towards a point where we expect the ultra rich to sort the planet rather than, say, governments attempting to do so through taxation and redistribution, I have to say that the outlook doesn’t look great.
  • Everything I Know About Football: Friend of Imperica Mr Biffo, the man responsible for Digitiser on Teletext back in the day, writes up some nostalgia, talking us through his strange relationship with the sort of football – a pastime he’s never enjoyed and yet which has been an oddly consistent presence in his life. There are some GREAT anecdotes in here, and a description of at least one almost certain murderer, which really ought to be reason enough for you to read.
  • Things That Happen In Silicon Valley That Also Happen In The Soviet Union: You have almost certainly read this Twitter thread, but in case not it’s the best ‘hahahaha oh no hang on this is true and isn’t actually that funny after all’ bit of ‘comedy’ you’ll see all week.
  • The Academic Emoji Conference: A really interesting piece about how academics see emoji, why they are not a language (I TOLD YOU SO), and how they ought to be contextualised within the broader pantheon of methods of communication. Which description makes it sound anything other than really interesting, fine, but trust me here.
  • The 3d Printed Firearm Future: You know that there is…a lot going on right now, when news that 3d printed firearms are no longer technically illegal in the US slips under the radar like this. You may recall that a few years back legislation was put in place to try and limit the distribution and printing of 3d gun templates; well, thanks to one impassioned free speech defendant, no more! THANKS, GUY! This is a really, really un-cheering read, and the combination of NRA zealotry and high tech on display here suggests that the oh-so-fun gun control debate in the US isn’t going to be moving anywhere in the near future.
  • My Depression Is Like Having A Bad Dog: A comic about depression that takes the black dog metaphor and runs with it; this is a lovely description of what it’s like living with it, in all its changing forms.
  • On Fortnite: Absolutely THE best piece I’ve read on the Fortnite phenomenon; so, so smart, from the understanding that its closest analogue is probably not other games but social apps, to the discussion towards the end on the skill with which the design team have built in streaks, reward mechanisms and the like to create an even more compelling, Skinnerbox-y set of mechanics. Required reading if you want to understand the phenomenon at least a bit.
  • Fear of a Black France: The English football team’s narrative – a young team, multicultural, reflecting the diversity of the country it represents in a way that brings people together in a way previous teams perhaps haven’t – is in part mirrored by the French finalists; this piece looks at what the team’s success, and in particular the elevation of Kylian Mbappe to superstar status, means to France’s non-white population, in a country where racial lines are even more firmly marked than they are in the UK.
  • Saul Williams at the Roundhouse: I don’t normally feature reviews, but this, of Saul Williams’ recent performance in London, is worth reading as William Drew has written it in verse and done an exceptional job to boot. This is, honestly, GREAT.
  • I Murdered Some Trophy Hunters: In GTAV, that is. Exactly the sort of writing about videogames I love, where real world morality and ethics collide with the virtual space. What would YOU do if you met people in-game who, you realised, you really didn’t like the politics of? Would you take the opportunity to fcuk them up a bit? You might, mightn’t you? Lovely, and exactly the sort of emergent narrative that online play in MMORPG-type worlds is allowing for.
  • On Semicolons and The Rules: I love me a semicolon; no idea if I always use them correctly, mind, but WHO CARES EH? There’s a particular cadence of speech that the voices in my head do which can only be reproduced with judicious application of the semicolon, you see, regardless of grammatical convention. Anyway, this is a good piece about why it’s such a good form of punctuation, which meanders off into a wider discussion about writing rules and when it’s acceptable to break them – readers and writers will particularly enjoy.
  • What Happens When A Computer Runs Your Life: What would happen if you let an algorithm decide what you wore, what you ate, what you got etched into your skin? Depending on the algorithm, some PRETTY BAD STUFF, fine, but that’s not stopping intrepid software engineer Max Hawkins from doing exactly that. Dice Man (second mention this week, how queer) for the modern age, this: “Hawkins will say yes to whatever the computer chooses, just as he has regarding almost all aspects of his life since leaving his job as a creative software engineer at Google three years ago. In a world where technologies promise humans ever more control over their choices and preferences, Hawkins has decided to surrender his will to the whims of computer algorithms. He’s created programs that randomly choose where he eats, what he wears, where he lives, what music he listens to, and how he spends his time. In so doing, he says he’s discovered a different kind of freedom.”
  • A BBQ, Not An Orgy: I don’t normally post heartwarming Buzzfeed human interest stuff on here, but this is a necessary exception; a man in the US posted an invitation to a 4th July BBQ on Grindr, specifying that it was NOT an orgy – this is what happened. SO CUTE (and not an orgy).
  • Liquid Ass and its Uses: You may have heard of Liquid Ass – an actual product available for sale which basically just smells TERRIBLE and is intended for the terminally unfunny to use for pranks. It is, however, also used extensively in the training of medical and trauma personnel, and this article looks at how – and goes into some quite, er, challenging detail about some of the tools used in mimicking battlefield conditions. I don’t think I’d ever thought about the practical realities of administering emergency treatment to someone with a ruptured bowel, and now I wish I never had.
  • Kylie Jenner, Self-Made (nearly) Billionaire: I am not the first to observe this, but the term ‘self-made’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Nonetheless, you can’t admire the hustle here, the naked opportunism and the very smart (I must admit) of modern marketing, branding and logistics that enable Jenner to have a company with this sort of crazy turnover and next to no staff (or indeed real physical assets at all). Like anyone’s going to bother being a brand ambassador in the future when you can just launch your own line of, I don’t know, incontinence products or somesuch.
  • Court: A brilliant, harrowing account of the James Bulger court case by Blake Morrison in Granta. So, so sad, and it’s hard to do anything but agree with Morrison’s assessment that the use of an adult court to try the case was at best a misjudgment and at worst an act of cruelty to all concerned.
  • I Turned My Jawbone Into Earrings: On body dysmorphia and self and surgery and the limits of one’s own rights over one’s body. This is a great piece of writing, if not for the very squeamish.
  • When Your Muse Is Also A Demonic Dominatrix: Salvador Dali’s muse, Gala, was in one way responsible for his fame and notoriety and fortune; in another, she was responsible for the complete decimation of any sort of reliable catalogue of Dali’s work, or consensus as to what can or ought to constitute an ‘original’. She was also, according to this piece, a, er, character. This is a portrait of someone who you sense not only didn’t suffer fools gladly but who wasn’t that certain about her attitude to, well, anyone at all; one did not, I suspect, fcuk with Gala (although Gala would very much fcuk (with) you.
  • The Endless Reign of Rupert Murdoch: This is VERY LONG, but an exhaustive portrait of the oldest, biggest bastard in all of media – there are so, so many things to love in this piece, not least the constant barbs about Murdoch’s lack of culture and curiosity, but there’s no denying that he’s been phenomenally successful at jdging what the public want from ‘news’ and how best to make as much money as possible whilst giving it to them.
  • China’s Surveillance Future: I can’t work out whether I was slightly cheered by the end of this or simply more depressed about the panopticonic future. The Chinese state’s affection for mass surveillance, combined with AI, to keep the people ‘happy and safe’ (you never know who’s reading), is well-documented; this piece looks at the technology and its applications, as several others this year have, but is also rather better at taking a realistic look at how much it actually works – the slightly depressing conclusion (I have decided it’s depressing on swift reflection, so that’s that) is that despite the fact that the tech doesn’t actually work anywhere near as well as advertised, at least not yet, the mythos around it is sufficient to cause even greater adherence to the rules by the frightened populace. It’s Mussolini’s cardboard tanks all over again, except not really funny in the slightest.
  • We Are All Public Figures Now: Absolutely the best essay I have read on the Plane Bae story (you know the one, come on) – this is a brilliant piece of writing on where the bounds of personal and public blur in an era in which we can, and will, document everything and everything for The Timeline and The Culture. If you have ever taken a photo of a stranger on public transport for the lulz, read this and no why that isn’t really an ok thing to do, ever.
  • Sweetness Mattered: A gorgeous personal essay about the author’s discovery of his sexuality as a young man, and the contortions he went through trying to access that sexuality whilst staying within the rigid social norms of teenage boydom. Beautifully-written and pleasingly optimistic in a way much of this sort of writing is not.
  • Lecter, My Therapist: Lastly in this week’s longreads, this is one of the best pieces I’ve read all year, no exaggeration. It’s about The Silence of the Lambs and going to therapy and abuse and recovery and it is SO well-written. Glass of wine with this one, for preference.

Eddie Kamuanga Ilunga

By Eddie Kamuanga Illunga

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

  1. First up, an eleven-minute video featuring a series of shorts about girls and their boyfriends, accompanying the new EP by Becky and the Birds. This is SO LOVELY and it’s worth every second of your time:

2) This is by Ships – it’s called ‘Another Way’, and aside from the song being great the kid in the video is an absolute SUPERSTAR:

3) This is called ‘Candles’, it’s by a band called Daughter, and my friend Jim (HI JIM) sent it to me saying that the video really reminded him of the novel Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and by God it really does. Lovely song, too:

4) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Have I mentioned recently how good Big Zu is? HE IS SO GOOD! Enjoy his recent Fire in the Booth – this is a GOOD ONE:

5) UK HIPHOP (WELL, GRIME) CORNER PT.2! This is Manga’s new one. He’s ace, it’s ace, it’s called ‘Trip Around The Sun’, enjoy:

6) Finally this week, this is sort of terrible but also SO OF THE NOW. 100 YouTubers do a rap about Fortnite – THIS IS THE CULTURE HAPPENING RIGHT AT YOU.  It’s…it’s horrible, isn’t it? Anyway, that’s it for this week, BYE TAKE CARE TRY NOT TO GET ARRESTED IF YOU ARE PROTESTING AND PLEASE WEAR SUNSCREEN AND ENJOY THE WORLD CUP FINAL IF YOU WATCH IT AND, GENERALLY,, JUST TRY AND TAKE IT A BIT EASY, EH, IT’S BEEN A VERY LONG WEEK AND EVERYTHING’S STILL QUITE FRAUGHT BUT IT WILL HOPEFULLY BE OK I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU:

 

Webcurios 15/06/18

Reading Time: 31 minutes

Another BIG step towards full dystopia this week – you don’t need me to list all the reasons, but my favourite “Christ, we really are living in a poorly-crafted miserable future novel from the mid-1990s” moment came with this Twitter thread which, amidst all the furore over Don’n’Kim, really is worth reading.

Otherwise though it’s been more of the same, although I did get to go on loads of rollercoasters on Tuesday so frankly I’m marginally less full of dread and fear than usual. You, though, probably didn’t – in fact, you’re probably feeling more jittery and scared than usual, what with all the EXCITING FOOTBALL TENSION / TANNED MORON CHIRPSING EXCITEMENT (delete per your preference) happening right now. Why not, then, ease off for a couple of hours – take my hand and let me guide you through the sunlit uplands of this week’s internet, pointing out the contentflowers and contentbees and contentbirds and definitely NOT leading you further and further along a twisted and confusing path from which there may well be no return and from whence you may quite possibly never come home – this, as ever, is WEB CURIOS.

grabelsky

By Matthew Grabelsky

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE CZARFACE/MF DOOM COLLAB WHICH I HAVE BEEN LISTENING TO RATHER A LOT THIS WEEK AND WHICH I THINK YOU WILL ALSO ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS JUST HEARD THE TODAY PROGRAM ASKING WHETHER KIDS’ OBSESSION WITH SOCIAL MEDIA IS A PUBLIC HEALTH HAZARD AND HONESTLY JUST WANTS TO GO BACK TO BED AT THIS POINT TBQHWYM:

  • New Rules Around FB Custom Audiences: We’ve all basically forgotten about Facebook being privacy-denying dataminers, haven’t we? Turns out NOONE ACTUALLY CARED!!! Fine, yes, that’s perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but it does rather feel that the whole ‘hang on, these terms and conditions are dreadful!’ furore has blown over somewhat. Still, the fallout continues, and Facebook this week announced that the way in which you use data to create Custom Audiences on the platform will change from 2 July; the change is basically just a series of arsecovering measures from Facebook to comply with the exciting new post-GDPR world, and will require advertisers who create custom audiences from email or telephone records to…er…TICK A BOX! Yes, that’s right, you’ll now have to confirm that you have the right to use those emails or phone numbers in your marketing, and WOE BETIDE YOU if you don’t. This is sort-of laughable, really, but from a legal perspective probably just enough to make sure that compliance is YOUR problem rather than Facebook’s, regardless of the fact that the company is probably better equipped to pay any resulting fines than you are.

  • Users Can Now Report Misleading FB Ads: Part two of this week’s series of cosmetic FB announcements designed to give users the illusion that they are more important to the platform than advertisers comes in the shape of this exciting development – users will now be able to leave feedback on adverts to let Facebook know whether the ad buyer in question has lived up to the promises made in the promotion, with advertisers who get significantly bad feedback being…er…well, it’s not really certain what will happen, but one might imagine there would be a process of denial of Facebook privileges and the like. See? They DO care about us! They DO!
  • Facebook Doing Blood Donation: We’re not quite at the point where you can open a major artery, spaff the resulting lifejuice over your phone and magically deliver it to a needy car crash victim on the other side of the world (of course we’re not, what are you, an idiot?), but this is an interesting (and, depending on how you feel about social platforms being used to effect widespread behavioural change, quite significant) development for Facebook. Users in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan will now see a ‘Blood Donations’ tab on Facebook which will alert them to opportunities to donate in their local area; the platform will also be promoting the feature to raise awareness of blood shortages in each of the countries in question. By no means a bad idea, but grist to the mill of those who are slightly concerned at the degree to which Facebook is presenting itself as The Internet to users and governments in the developing world.
  • Facebook Puts Memories In Its Own Place In The App: This is literally all I have to say about this development, other than that if your most treasured memories are housed on Facebook then I am so, so sorry.
  • FB Provides ‘Clarity’ On Its Definition Of Political Ads: By which I mean, no clarity at all! I’m including this solely because I think it’s illustrative of exactly the sort of semantic clusterfcuk that’s resulting from attempting to define ‘political’ in an ad context; this post basically says “Yeah, we know a lot of you, publishers in particular, are a bit scared that we’ll just define anything we think is a bit contentious as ‘political’, but, well, tough!”, and basically acknowledges that whatever Facebook says goes. Which, per the NIB in Private Eye this week, doesn’t really seem to be working that well at all. Still, MORE ARSECOVERING!
  • Insta Adds Shopping Tags To Stories: YOU CAN NOW SELL TAT TO IDIOTS USING INSTA STORIES! I could write more, but frankly that’s all you need to know. The piece is annoyingly unclear as to whether this is a feature available to everyone or just select retail partners, but, regardless, this will be everywhere in six months so DON’T FRET KIDS.
  • Twitter Goes Big(ger) On News: As per usual, news of Twitter making changes to some of its features was met with POWER USERS (I really do hate that term) wailing and gnashing their teeth and making a series of predictable gags about how the platform really ought to BAN NAZIS instead. Which would obviously be A Good Thing, but sort of also fundamentally misinterprets the nature of Twitter as a business, to whit IT NEEDS TO GET MORE PEOPLE USING IT. That means normal people, not the sort of weirdos who already enjoy getting their kicks from being ‘funny’ in front of an anonymous audience of webmongs – these updates are not for us, they’re for the normies ffs. Anyway, “Twitter is making some major updates to the Explore feed, which will now surface curated pages dedicated to news stories surrounding breaking news, live events and stories in a way that will drive a closer fit to individual users’ interests and help them find more of what’s happening across the site. Some of these changes will also be popping up at the top of user home timelines in a bid to draw users down exploratory rabbit holes that expose them to new accounts and new communities.” In the main, this is going to mean a mixture of algo- and human-curated news and information being delivered to users through the app, positioning (or trying to position) Twitter squarely as the ‘I want to know what’s going on, let me open this and see’ app. Which is, one the one hand, an interesting idea; on the other, perhaps Twitter is underestimating the degree to which normal people want to keep UP TO DATE with the world vs the degree to which normal people actually want to completely ignore the world and instead masturbate to a nightly parade of pituitary meatheads on ITV2. Anyway, you can read Twitter’s own announcement here if you like; there’s literally nothing I can see here for brands ATM, though obviously I may be violently wrong about this.
  • Snap Kit Launches: As mentioned in THESE VERY PAGES a few weeks back, Snapchat has now launched its developer kit which allows, er, developers to leverage the app in EXCITING WAYS! From logging in via Snap, to allowing users to use Snap functionality within third party apps, to, bafflingly, letting you do things like use Bitmoji in your Tinder chats, this is a whole HOST of fascinating opportunities; the article linked to here is actually very good indeed on what you might be able to do with this, not least the integration of Snaps and Stories into third-party apps. Seriously, read this one, it’s useful and potentially important.
  • Snapchat Launches Ticket Sales: It’s only a trial, and only in LA, and only with one commercial partner, but obviously this is going to be a THING everywhere and for everyone eventually, so, you know, PREPARE.
  • Snapchat Adding Sales Tracking To Ad Impact Metrics: I saw quite a few articles this week touting this stuff with a strapline along the lines of ‘Snap wants to show advertisers its products are as good as Facebook’s’, which, well, made me laugh quite a lot; still, this initiative (launching, apparently, with a UK supermarket ‘imminently’) is a useful step in the right direction towards them being able to prove exactly how little a Custom Filter will actually impact your bottom line. Oh, and “Snapchat has also launched its marketing mix modelling (MMM) partner programme, which includes tie-ups with Neustar Marketshare, Analytics Partners, Kantar and Nielsen, to Europe. In coming this side of the ponds its also adding new collaborations with the likes of D2D (Dentsu Aegis), Ninah (Publicis) and independent MMM providers Ebiquity, Ekimetrics and Nepa. Skewed towards helping marketers justify their spend on Snapchat, the MMM scheme will see advertisers being given access to third-party data to better understand Snap’s impact on actions like sales and sign-ups.” Let’s…let’s not think about exactly how fudgey these numbers are going to be.
  • You Can Now Delete Snapchat Messages Whenever You Want: What have you been sending?
  • Reuters Digital News Report 2018: A whole report on how we, the world, are consuming news in 2018, with country-by-country breakdowns of media trust, popular sources and the like. The main takeaways are that Twitter is surprisingly popular as a news source, suggesting that, my pointless snark aside, they may well be right in their decision to go hard on this in their latest update, that people are sharing less news via Facebook and more via messaging platforms, that embedded video on publisher sites is hugely unpopular, and that Whatsapp is absolutely dominating news distribution in the developing / second world. You can read some topline analysis by Rob Blackie here, but it’s really worth looking at the whole thing (no, really, I promise it is).
  • How Online Ad Tracking Works: There was an article on VICE last week – which I didn’t link to because it was appalling journalism – which once again rolled out the ‘your phone may be listening to you! And targeting ads! Based on what you’re saying!’ line without any actual proof whatsoever; it was subsequently fairly comprehensively debunked, but made the appearance of this Twitter thread (here conveniently unrolled) this week rather timely. This is an excellent, simple explanation of all the totally legitimate ways in which ads can follow you around the web, which is not only worth reading but worth sending to all your normie mates to explain that, honestly, the online tracking horse has not only bolted but is in fact happily eating grass and frolicking in a field several miles east of here now, so they may as well not worry too much about the gate.
  • An Ad For TBWA: I saw this this morning and thought it was honestly one of the best agency promos I’d seen for a while, and pretty much captures perfectly (and simply) how comms can (or ought to) work in 2018 (it also captures perfectly how completely fcuking stupid EVERYTHING is in the here and now, but let’s not worry about that so much).  
  • The Lockdown: This is billed as ‘The Wold’s First AR Mobile Phone Escape Room’ and OF COURSE it’s a piece of sponsored content by a bank! Step forward ABN AMRO, who have paid an unknown (but doubtless chunky) fee to build this AR game for both iOS and Android in order to, er, well…nope, I have no idea WHATSOEVER why they built it, but well done them. It’s actually quite fun, in a slightly clunky way, but, honestly, I would LOVE to hear how this was pitched.
  • Universal Love: Last up in the ‘tedious stuff about social media and advermarketingpr and brands’ section, this is, fine, a bit of Pride bandwagoning, but I rather like the idea and so I’ll give it a pass. MGM Resorts has commissioned a bunch of pretty famous artists to rerecord classic love songs in gender switched versions (so, for example, Kele from Bloc Party singing ‘My Guy’, or St Vincent doing ‘And Then She Kissed Me’) and made them available to stream or download. It’s lovely, you honestly can’t hate this even if you try.

liam cobb

By Liam Cobb

NEXT UP, WHY NOT ENJOY LISTENING TO THE BACK CATALOGUE OF DJ SHADOW’S ‘FIND, SHARE, REWIND’ SHOWS?

THE SECTION WHICH WENT TO THORPE PARK THIS WEEK AND HONESTLY BELIEVES THAT THE AUTHORITIES NEED TO STEP IN AND BAN CONTOURING MAKEUP VIDEOS FROM YOUTUBE BECAUSE THERE IS AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF TEENAGE GIRLS WALKING AROUND OUT THERE WITH KIM KARDASHIAN’S FACE SEEMINGLY PAINTED OVER THEIR OWN AND IT IS, I WOULD HUMBLY SUGGEST, NOT OK, PT.1:

  • Asgardia: One of the companies that pays me for my time – I mean, that’s really all they pay me for, I certainly haven’t done any work in months – yesterday received a press release announcing that, among others, Lembit Opik (former MP, former Cheeky Girl botherer, asteroid enthusiast and regular contender for the title of ‘handsiest MP in Westminster’ for much of the 00s) had been elected as one of the first MPs of the ‘Space Kingdom’ Asgardia. Well, I couldn’t not check it out and, wow, WHAT A PLACE! Asgardia is set to be (it is not set to be) the first ever Space Nation! It has a flag, and a coat of arms, and an ANTHEM! (Never mind that it doesn’t exist!) “Asgardia was created with three top goals in mind: to ensure the peaceful use of space, to protect the Earth from space hazards, and to create a demilitarized and free scientific base of knowledge in space. Asgardia also has a long-term objective of setting up habitable platforms in space and building settlements on the Moon. We believe that the creation of a new legal platform for the exploration of near-Earth and deep space is crucial to keep pace with humanity’s rapid technological and scientific expansion off-planet. Universal space law and astro-politics have to replace the current outdated international space law and geopolitics.” Which is all nice, fine, but sort of ignores the fact that there may be one or two issues down here on Earth which we might want to look into first. Still, with Lembit leading us into this glorious space future, how can we fail? Wonderfully, ANYONE can become an Asgardian just by signing up with an email address, so I look forward to seeing you in space in a few short years time. Honestly, it’s worth checking out the FAQ; it goes into quite startling detail about how electoral systems will work, but doesn’t do a great job of explaining WHAT THE SHUDDERING FCUK THIS WHOLE THING ACTUALLY IS OR WHY IT EXISTS.

  • Stonewall Forever: A website collecting and presenting the history and story of Stonewall, from the riots to its establishment as a movement and byword for LGBTx rights worldwide. “Stonewall Forever is a project to find, preserve and share the untold stories of the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the early years of the LGBTQ rights movement. The LGBT Community Center with support from Google.org is gathering, digitizing and archiving this crucial history. The stories will be included in an interactive monument in honor of the 50th anniversary of Stonewall.” An important archiving project which deserves to be spread far and wide, please do share this around.
  • GOAT: A rather beautifully designed website for sneakerheads, presenting a frankly incredible lineup of trainers (not just any trainers, you understand, but the sort of trainers that get bearded men in their 30s/40s who were bullied at school but have never looked back since they grew a beard and got into BAPE and DJing and Ninja Tunes in the 90s and who now describe themselves as ‘A Creative’ INCREDIBLY excited) available for sale – new, used and slightly defective versions of the sort of footwear which commands hushed, reverent commentary from the fandom. Some of you might like this – actually, who am I kidding, most of you work in advermarketingpr, this is basically like crack for you.
  • The Weather Report: A really interesting idea, this. The Weather Report is a site which lets anyone write a short series of answers to some set questions, which can then be shared via a URL with anyone they like; the idea is that it’s a way for people to share difficult or hard news with others in a relatively low-friction way. So, rather than having to email everyone, or answer individual questions, or write a Facebook post, you can fill in this stuff and just share the url – which strikes me as an eminently sensible idea which it would be great to see being adopted more widely, perhaps as a baked-in feature within platforms. As someone who did the whole ‘a bad thing happened, here is a post about it so I don’t have to explain it to everyone’ FB post a few years back and really wished I hadn’t had to, I can heartily endorse the thinking behind this.
  • E3 Recap: This week has seen the annual Vegas jamboree that is E3, the videogames world’s BIG EVENT where publishing studios announce a bunch of new stuff, and thousands of overly-entitled men (it is always men) get angry about it and shout online about how EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE and ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM and SJWs SPOILING EVERYTHING (you think I’m joking? Take a gentle stroll through some of the reactions to a new title trailing a same-sex kiss) – you all have real jobs and things to do, so probably haven’t been able to keep up with all the news, so this site collects it all for you in helpful fashion – every title, with trailers, collected in one place. Only of interest to videogame nerds, obviously, so the rest of you can happily ignore this one.
  • Slay Duggee: Continuing my occasional series of ‘Kickstarters We Can All Get Behind’, this is a project to create a metal / punk album for children, inspired by kids’ TV favourite ‘Hey Duggee’ (whose World Cup anthem ‘Kick’ is honestly amazing, and only improved by this metal cover version). Do you want to listen to the fcuking CBeebies album AGAIN in the car, or do you want to listen to a child-friendly version of Extreme Noise Terror? Well, quite. BACK IT.
  • The World Cup API: An API! For the World Cup! I don’t know what you might do with it! But I am including it anyway! Maybe you could use it to, I don’t know, make a particular song play every time a goal is scored. Look, you’re the ‘creatives’ and ‘planners’ and ‘strategists’, I just collect links and try not to feel too scared.
  • The World Cook: Obviously this is a RUBBISH month for anyone who dislikes football – I am sorry, I feel for you – but there are some World Cup-themed things which should be tolerable even for the refuseniks among you. This, for example – THE WORLD COOK! Collecting recipes from each of the 32 countries participating the in tournament, with new dishes dropping throughout, this is a lovely project and as an added bonus the recipes are presented in genuinely appealing fashion – the step-by-step photos are really helpful, particularly when making stuff from FOREIGN LANDS that you might not have cooked before.
  • Control Your Phone With Your Eyes: Your latest shot of AR future tech – this is very cool indeed.
  • The Most Iconic World Cup Photos: Here at Web Curios I have a fairly strong policy about the word ‘iconic’ as it’s almost always meaningless; in this instance, though, it’s deserved as these photos are AWESOME. You can’t help but feel the prickly onset of WORLD CUP FEVER as you look at these.
  • Football Fields Around The World: More photos of football, this time of slightly idiosyncratic pitches around the globe. Awesome – the photo of the kids playing in Southwark, modern cars aside, could have been taken at any point in the past 100 years, and is SUCH a perfect ‘jumpers for goalposts’ shot, for example – and oddly reminiscent of Goal Click, a project I’ve featured on here before but which I’d urge you to check out again as it’s ace and they are friends of mine.
  • All The World Cup Predictions: Do we still believe in Nate Silver? Not sure what the answer to that one is post-2016, but in case we do then here’s FiveThirtyEight’s World Cup prediction hub, updated LIVE in order to help you make statistical sense of all the FOOTBALLING MADNESS (NB I promise that all the football links are done now, honest).
  • Dialogue: Everyone thinks they can write a novel, don’t they? And you can! Just be aware that it most likely won’t be worth reading! I imagine much the same applies to screenplays to be honest – helping fuel that slightly deluded fire of creativity is this app, which offers you the opportunity to write dialogue in an interface styled around messaging on your phone; the idea being that the display will help you write ‘natural’ dialogue which you can then export. Which is sort of funny when you consider exactly how ‘natural’ people’s text message exchanges are, but wevs I guess.
  • The Creative Future Literary Awards: I am VERY late to this, and the deadline is in a few days, but if you’re a writer from an underrepresented group with work they would like to submit then GET TO IT. Open to poetry and prose, short stories and articles and all sorts of forms, this is a prize awarded to work by the sorts of people who don’t normally win literary prizes. Fcuk Shriver, this sort of thing is important and A Good Thing.
  • Ludwig Favre: A photographer’s Insta feed, but a particularly good one. Glorious landscapes, pastel colours and a particularly nice line in depth and layering to these, imho.
  • The Olympians: An incredible one-man labour of love, this site is seemingly written and maintained by one person – the idea behind it is to look forward to the 2020 Games in Tokyo, whilst simultaneously looking back at the last Games to be held in the city in 1964. This is very, very dense, but there’s so much fascinating material in here – I honestly don’t care about sport at all, but this is so full of stories and history that it’s hard not to get sucked in.
  • Layers of London: An interactive London map which lets you layer various other historical views over the standard 21C view to give you an idea of how Tudor London mapped onto the present day, say. I particularly like the way you can adjust the transparency so as to be able to see exactly how the city’s changed over time; this is really rather fascinating.
  • Performative Woke Man: A one-note gag, but a good one – this Twitter account skewers the sort of painfully earnest wokeness of a certain type of Twitter man (not you of course – I couldn’t possibly be talking about you!), whose performative allydom (is that a word? It’s a fcuking ugly one if so, sorry about that) masks a fairly strong desire to get into the pants of every woman he encounters. Is this about you? Is it by you? I feel like I know its creator from somewhere, but that might just be because this is basically every single London media man in their 20s/30s.
  • Polymega: This is middle-aged nerd heaven. Seemingly not even available to pre-order yet, this won’t stop some of you getting all sweaty-palmed with anticipation – the Polymega (appalling name, lads) is a modular retro gaming system, which will let you basically construct your own bespoke old-school gaming stack comprising whichever systems you prefer. Want an NES, Megadrive, NeoGeo and PS1? NO PROBLEM. It looks really rather slick, includes all the sorts of fancy bolt-ons you’d expect from 2018 (Twitch streaming, Bluetooth controller, OS, etc), and, should it ever actually make it to market (I have skeptical feelings, to my shame) will rocket right to the top of every tshirt wearing manchild in Christendom (except this one).
  • AR Pogs: Pogs are one of those weird 90s relics which I was just too old for and which as a result I don’t really understand – like LA Gear trainers or something. Nonetheless, you may be younger than me and currently winding your way down a nostalgia rabbithole back to those good old analogue days in which all you needed to make you happy were some cardboard discs with some slightly shonky 90s-style XTREME artwork on them – now forget that, and come back to a present in which this is instead turned into a digital game but with the added bonus that you can, er, scan all your old Pogs for AR fun. WHO STILL HAS POGS???? Seriously, these people are asking for $50k to cater for the audience of people who, bafflingly, have kept all their old Pogs from the 90s? I’m not pretending to have any sort of deep knowledge of the Pog enthusiast community, fine, but it does rather feel like every single person within that demographic would have to donate a grand to make this work. Still, if this appeals to you then chuck them some cash – they need about 35k in the next 3 weeks to make AR Pogs a reality (dear God, even typing that made me sad).
  • Wheel of Fortune Answers: Tweeting pictures of incomplete boards from the Wheel Of Fortune game and suggesting answers which might be, but probably aren’t, right. You sort of need to click this to get it (unless you’re better at understanding my garbled prose descriptions than I am), but it’s worth it, honest.
  • Archive Tweet: VERY useful, if potentially a bit cnuty – reply to any Tweet @-ing the Archive Tweet account, and the service will, er, archive the Tweet in perpetuity, meaning that you’ll ALWAYS have the evidence that THAT PERSON said THAT BAD THING on the internet. Like your very own personal wayback machine tagger, and exactly the sort of thing that journalists and other online arseholes will adore.
  • Daily Purr: An Insta feed which posts minimalist cartoons about cats. These are fcuking WONDERFUL.

noirchen

By Noirchen

NEXT, WHY NOT CHALLENGE YOUR EARS AND MIND WITH THE VERY WONKY SOUNDS OF DAVID SHANE SMITH?

THE SECTION WHICH WENT TO THORPE PARK THIS WEEK AND HONESTLY BELIEVES THAT THE AUTHORITIES NEED TO STEP IN AND BAN CONTOURING MAKEUP VIDEOS FROM YOUTUBE BECAUSE THERE IS AN ENTIRE GENERATION OF TEENAGE GIRLS WALKING AROUND OUT THERE WITH KIM KARDASHIAN’S FACE SEEMINGLY PAINTED OVER THEIR OWN AND IT IS, I WOULD HUMBLY SUGGEST, NOT OK, PT.2:

  • Anon Opinion: I don’t know what’s happened to Rob Manuel of late – he’s gone one some sort of massive online creation bender, for which I am obviously hugely grateful, but does rather run the risk of me having to make him his own section in Curios. Anyway, this is his latest game/toy/project, Anon Opinion, which is tweeting out a selection of user-submitted ‘unpopular opinions’, riffing off the recent-and-slightly-played-out Twitter game. There are some GEMS in here, and you can rest (fairly) assured that Rob’s applying some manual curation to make sure that it doesn’t end up getting 4Channed and just shouting “ACTUALLY HITLER HAD SOME QUITE GOOD IDEAS” over and over again. You can submit your own unpopular opinion, anonymously, here – they’d better be anonymous, or some of you are never working again (although to the person who wrote “I am actually quite into the idea of incest, it’s just my family are all ugly”, BRAVO!).
  • Libraire Mollat: The Insta feed of an indie bookshop in Paris. Retailers, look at this and LEARN, it is just lovely.
  • Hit Like A Girl: Hit Like A Girl is an annual drumming contest for women – the website collects all the winners and entrants from the 2018 round, and CHRIST are they good. You may have seen the winner doing the rounds online this week, but it’s worth looking at all of these as there is some awesome talent on display here – parents, buy your daughters drum kits! Electric ones, though, with headphones, because I don’t want to have to hear them practice. Thanks.
  • List Cleaner: You almost certainly don’t need this, given with how you’ve cleaned up all your mailing lists post-GDPR (HAVEN’T YOU???), but on the offchance that yours are still a bit dusty then this might be of use – an automatic service that does deduping and all the basic things which otherwise you’d have to bully an intern into doing.
  • Aural Archipelago: Web anthropology is increasingly one of my favourite things (yes, I am fun at parties, why do you ask?) and this site, collecting the sounds of the Indonesian archipelago along with associated history and stories, is a lovely example of it, “an online repository for the musical sights and sounds of Indonesia, the most musically diverse country on the planet. Part digital archive, part blog, Aural Archipelago mixes field recording, video, photography, and in-depth articles compiled from years of travels across the archipelago.” Gorgeous – and, if you’re a DJ or musician, an excellent source of unusual inspiration.
  • Art Passport: A wonderful idea, this – Art Passport is an app through which you will regularly be able to access ‘VR’ (not really VR, just 360 filming) viewings of exhibitions at major museums around the world, with new ones being added regularly (they say daily, in fact)- if you’re an art lover then this is pretty much essential. Honestly, I know I’m a miserable and pessimistic and bleak-hearted, dead-souled mess in the main, but stuff like this is genuinely wonderful and makes me slightly happy to be living in the future. Slightly.
  • Ovie: Then, of course, I find another Kickstarter and the rage returns. This is Ovie, a SMART TUPPERWARE SOLUTION that noone asked for; should it get funded (of course it’s getting funded! It’s a pointless solution to a non-problem aimed at the global one percent!) it will allow you to put stuff in tupperware, set an expiry date, and then have all your electronic devices (including your Amazon Home Surveillance Device!) yell at you incessantly that THE CARROTS ARE GOING OFF. Yes, that’s right, you can now ensure that inanimate objects will reinforce and amplify your own existing sense of guilt and shame at your food wastage, you lucky, lucky things. There is one person who will be genuinely excited at reading this, I know, and to them I say “GET HELP SAZ”.
  • Cat Explorer: This is a piece of software for the still-seemingly-illusory Magic Leap headset, whose makers continue to claim that it will one day actually be a real thing but who are concurrently doing absolutely nothing to convince that it’s not in fact all a very long-running and elaborate scam. Still, they’re releasing tech demos like this one – confusingly, available to play with on standard VR (Oculus/HTC) sets – which give a theoretical idea of the sort of things you’ll be able to do with the kit. In this instance, that means exploring the insides of a cute, CG cat – yes, you basically get to play X-Ray doctor with a cartoon moggy, running your hands up and down its body to expose its skeleton and viscera (but, let me reassure you, in a cute way!). It’s hugely impressive and very fun-looking, but doesn’t go any way towards making me think that Magic Leap is ever going to be reality.
  • Xtian Miller: Typographic poster design on Instagram. REALLY GOOD typographic poster design on Instagram, in fact.
  • What Did Earth Look Like 240m Years Ago?: Put in your postcode and see where YOUR house was hundreds of millions on years ago (clue: not where it is now). Pangea is quite a mental thing when you see it all laid out like this – geology’s quite cool really (sentences that mark one down as firmly embedded in middle-age, part x of a series of y).
  • Creator Resource: A repository of advice, help and useful resources for people who are trying to make a living as independent comic book artists; there’s stuff here on contracts, copyright, getting paid, etc, and whilst it’s got a North American skew one of the people behind it is from the UK and so they should also be able to potentially help non-North Americans out a bit too. A Good Thing – share with anyone you know who’s trying to eke out a career as an indie artist of any stripe.
  • Canals Of Britain: Christ, there really is no way around this – I am getting OLD. There’s no other explanation for quite how pleased I was at finding this, a map of all the old, abandoned, disused and soon-to-be-restored waterways of the British Isles which you can zoom around to plan your next walking holiday. See? Walking holidays. This is what I am reduced to. It’ll be Hornby trainsets and haemorrhoid cushions before you know it.
  • Mara: Simple, easy-to-use online photo editor – if you know how to use photoshop then you won’t need this as there are far more powerful versions of this sort of thing elsewhere, but if you’re a…er…slightly less sophisticated image manipulator, you’ll find the helpful and clear interface here a boon.
  • Instant 3d Photos: Not quite yet, admittedly, but this is the closest look I’ve yet seen at the tech which Facebook announced at F8 earlier this year which they claimed would let us turn our standard photos into VR-explorable 3d landscapes. It’s undeniably impressive, as long as you take it with the appropriate pinches of salt, and I can see this sort of thing being hugely impressive when applied to sports photography, for example. Before that, though, we’ll have to sit through all the tedious ways in which it’s going to be used for low-grade bongo – hold tight, ignore the poorly-rendered 3d cocks and we’ll be in the exciting future of photography before we know it.
  • Focusmate: This is a very, very odd idea indeed. I spend quite a lot of time working from home, and even when I don’t I may as well be due to my charming insistence on ignoring my coworkers in favour of the wonderful and exciting WORLD OF THE WEB; others, though, seem to derive more comfort from a sense of company and companionship when toiling, and it’s for them that Focusmate seemingly exists. As far as I can tell, this is basically Chatroulette but for work – you tell it when you want to work and for how long; when that time comes, the service emails you with a link whereby you and your anonymous work buddy can log on, observing each other by video link so that you can…er…work silently in each others’ presence. WHO WANTS THIS???? Can you imagine anything worse than sitting at your kitchen table typing away and knowing that someone else is watching you do it? Seeing them doing the same in a little window in the top-right of your screen, getting silently, seethingly annoyed at the way they type and the way their nostrils flare? This is an atrocious idea; the only people I can see this appealing to are the types of men who like to aggressively masturbate at blameless strangers online – are YOU one of those men? I do hope not, I like to think better of my readers.
  • Neverthink: This is quite a smart idea, I think, whilst at the same time being a really silly one. Neverthink is telly on the web – you fire it up, pick a ‘channel’ and watch, mindlessly, as it presents you with a seemingly infinite collection of videos on whatever theme you’ve chosen. Crippled by the INFINITE CHOICE of entertainment available to you? Abnegate that choice to a mystery algorithm – although actually the channels are ‘curated’ by actual people, which makes the whole thing more interesting than I’d first thought. There are LOADS of channels, they add news ones all the time (the ‘Bourdain’ one is new, for example), and if you are prone to senseless surfing and mindless staring then this could be right up your street.
  • Wobble Yoga: This is very, very silly, but oddly addictive; if you can get past level 6 I will be hugely impressed.
  • The Last Days Of Our Castle: Finally this week, a ‘game’ story in the style of an old CGA PC adventure – I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but I can’t recommend strongly enough that you try it; the music is gorgeous, the writing is great, and the whole thing has a perfect, abandoned fairytale vibe that is just wonderful. Enjoy.

pejac

By Pejac

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Hungover Owls: It’s been a slow week for Tumblrs, hence the inclusion of this venerable classic – it’s still fcuking great, though.

 

LAST UP, THIS IS THE B-SIDES COLLECTION ACCOMPANYING DJ SPOOKY’S NEW ALBUM AND IT IS EXCELLENT AND DANCEHALL FEELS VERY MUCH LIKE A WORLD CUP APPROPRIATE SOUND TO END ON!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • Don’t Eat Before Reading This: The death of Anthony Bourdain last week saw a greater-than-usual outpouring of online grief, at least in the bits of online I see; what was interesting to see how many different tranches of people had been touched in some way by his work, from his Kitchen Confidential days to the recent global TV superstardom. Kitchen Confidential was the first book I ever read about food that made me want to work in a kitchen – it simultaneously proved to me that I was nowhere near hard-working, driven and obsessive to do so. This is the essay in the New Yorker in 1999 which launched post-Les Halles Bourdain onto the world, and which eventually became the book that made his name; he repudiated the more macho stuff in later life, and was honest and open about how much of an arsehole his addict self had been, but, regardless, this is a wonderful piece of writing and is so, so sad to reread.

  • Bourdain and the Truth: There have been many, many tributes written to Bourdain this week; this, again from the New Yorker, is by Helen Rosner and is an excellent portrait of the man, his life and work.
  • Tony: This, by contrast, is an intensely personal and very, very sad essay by David Simon (who wrote The Wire and worked with Bourdain on a variety of scripts), about losing his friend – this is a beautiful elegy.
  • Inside VICE: The big story in media land this week – if you discount The Man and The Hookers, obvs – was this expose of Shane Smith and the VICE empire, which to the surprise of precisely noone told the story of how the entire thing was built on smoke and mirrors and lies, and all done very much by the seat of their pants. I knew one of the guys who worked on VICE when it was a Canadian-only offshoot bitd; he’d moved to London and was working on the UK version which was just starting up at the time, and the parties I went to (and the…uh…relaxed attitude to the law and drugs and the general concept of ‘work’ that maintained at the time) makes me think that there’s a truly wonderful Wolf of Wall Street-style film waiting to be made about all of this. VICE, let’s be clear, sounds like a pretty fcuking bleak place to work.
  • Culture and Economic Development: An interesting essay about the relationship between culture and economic development, specifically looking at London and New York and presenting the argument that culture is a major driver – if not the major driver – of economic development and regeneration in major urban centres. Which the data suggests is true, fine, but which also ignores the other inference from this, to whit that it’s culture which is the major harbinger of the sort of gentrification which is pushing normal people out of cities and replacing them with empty high rises and generic media wankers like me.
  • AI Is Not A Community Management Strategy: A really good piece about the limits of automating community standards online, and how whilst it’s an understandable method of attempting to define the terms of discourse, it’s fundamentally insufficient when it comes to attempting to actually develop and maintain a culture in any meaningful sense. I particularly like the sideswipe at AI as a catch-all solution to stuff – “try replacing the term ‘AI’ with ‘recipe’ and see if it still makes sense” is a statement which should be applied to basically everything which is banding ‘artificial intelligence’ around in 2018.
  • How Terence Eden Became Da Vinci: This is EXCELLENT and a perfect example of why ‘WE WILL VERIFY IT ON THE BLOCKCHAIN’ is not perhaps the universal solution to everything in the world ever. Eden shows how he was able to become verified on an online art platform – POWERED BY THE BLOCKCHAIN, natch – as Leonardo Da Vinci, neatly exposing the fundamental flaw in a lot of this universal record ledger stuff (that being, people).
  • The Influence of Twitter’s Power Users: Quite a timely piece, this – the past month or so has seen various bits of Twitter discussing the rights and wrongs of ‘pile-ons’; that is, the practice of quote-Tweeting someone to your followers with the implicit expectation that said followers will give the writer of the original Tweet some warm, cuddly Twitter love on your behalf. We’ve seen Elon Musk do it (and it’s he who’s the subject of the piece), and even lefty Twitter’s been in a tizzy about it with Owen Jones repeatedly being accused of encouraging his somewhat frothy-mouthed devotees to have a bit of a go at people who don’t share his one true faith. The piece basically articulates that there’s a point on a platform such as Twitter, with its necessarily aysmmetric power dynamics, where you have sufficient clout so as to be able to make other people’s lives unpleasant and, based on that, maybe people ought to be a bit less dickish. Seems sensible, doesn’t it? And yet here we are.
  • Makeup Shades: This is ANOTHER of the Pudding’s superb dataviz articles, which I’m including in the longreads as there’s quite a lot of meat to this one and I found the subject matter generally interesting. The piece compares the tones of major makeup ranges on sale in various countries around the world to explore whether Rihanna’s recently-released Fenty range of cosmetics do in fact offer a revolutionary range of tones for people of colour (spoiler: they sort of do). What’s remarkable looking at this is how poor the offering for non-white skin tones has seemingly traditionally been – and the extent to which, looking at the Indian market, colourism really is a depressingly real issue.
  • Skam: If you work in TV development, the only show title you’re more sick of hearing than Love Island is Skam – if you don’t, though, there’s no reason you’ll necessarily have heard of it. Skam was last year’s BIG INTERNATIONAL BREAKOUT SUCCESS STORY – a Norwegian show set in a school, presented weekly but with the groundbreaking conceit of having the characters lives play out across social media in realtime between broadcasts, offering viewers not only the opportunity to delve into their favourite characters’ inner lives but also to get clues and hints to how the plot might play out. The series was a HUGE hit in Norway and beyond, and has recently been picked up by US TV – it’s being remade for Facebook Watch, and the platform’s staking a lot on it being a success. This piece is a really nice overview of what the show is, why it’s special, and why you are likely to see an awful lot more stuff riffing on the online/offline thing in 2019 (although the grumpy old man in me wants to shout “YES BUT SKINS AND MISFITS DID THIS STUFF YEARS AGO FFS”).
  • Wooodcut Memes: There is nothing new under the sun, a point proved perfectly and eloquently by this piece which explains how medieval woodcuts fulfilled the same function as internet-era memes, being endlessly repurposed for different audiences and with different messages. I would be VERY HAPPY if someone could make one of these the next American Chopper, so could you hurry up and do it please? Thanks
  • The Local TV Scam: This is a brilliant piece, and a truly crazy and very British story – Local TV is a company which is seemingly exploiting loopholes around regional broadcasting to secure government funding for its work, to the tune of millions, despite making programming which is being watched by a few hundred people at most. Some of the details here are just perfect – the line about the guy behind the company calling the reported back by accident from his pocket is just too perfect. Feels rather like it might be the setup for a Drop The Dead Donkey-style sitcom, which isn’t the worst idea I;ve had all week tbh.
  • Instagram Threads: Equal parts baffling and depressing (to me at least, a nearly-40 year old man sitting in his kitchen at the tail end of 7000 words and feeling a touch enervated, if I’m honest with you), this article explores the phenomenon of self-care ‘thread’ accounts on Insta, which post (as far as I can tell) incredibly anodyne ‘self care tips’ for teens. I don’t know what’s more saddening – the fact that I am almost certain that a lot of these are going to pivot to trying to monetise their audience, or that children are so lost and weirded out by LIFE that they’re finding some sort of hope and comfort in this sub-Hallmark bullshit. HMMMM.
  • Snowflake: A beautiful photoessay (more essay than photo, fine, but the photos are incredible) about Wilson Bentley, who used home-made equipment and a ridiculous amount of ingenuity to take some truly staggering photographs of snowflakes in quite remarkable close up. This is heartwarming.
  • You Have The Right To Remain Silent: I always enjoy reading Dan Hon’s thoughts, and this is a typically smart essay about the increasing extent to which we as web users are being asked questions by the services and systems we use to which there is no obvious means of opting out, and what that means from a human and UX/UI point of view. JUST SAY NO TO THE MACHINES.
  • The Sinful History of Canoes: This is WONDERFUL. Did you know that back in the olden days, when teens wanted to get some QUALITY ALONE TIME and to touch each others’ mucus membranes they would occasionally repair to a canoe to do so? NO YOU DID NOT! Just take a moment to imagine your own awkward, teenage fumblings – now take another moment to imagine them, but transposed to the inside of a canoe. There is no WAY you wouldn’t capsize, deposited overboard, bum akimbo, to the laughter of your bankside peers. I love the moral outrage displayed in this 1912 newspaper article – “misconduct in canoes has become so grave and flagrant that it threatens to throw a shadow upon the lakes as recreation resorts and to bring shame upon the city.” A CITY SHAMED BY CANOE CHIRPSING! Seriously, take a boat out on the Serpentine this weekend and get fingering; it’s basically historical reenactment.
  • The Politics of Now: An LRB piece on the World Cup, looking at the in-no-way-at-all-corrupt manner in which it happened to be hosted in Russia this year and Qatar the next time around. The stuff about Jack Warner won’t be new to regular readers of the back pages, but the sheer scale and brazenness of the corruption’s quite remarkable. I was quite taken by the line at the end, which questioned how long it would be before we saw a similar degree of fervour about virtual sporting tournaments – if the Fortnite craze is anything to go by, and the Twitch numbers on it are mental fyi, not long at all.
  • Ethical Cannibalism: WARNING: THIS IS ABOUT COOKING AND EATING PEOPLE, AND CONTAINS QUITE GRAPHIC PHOTOS OF HUMAN TACOS. I confess to having felt a bit, well, funny after reading this; it’s the story of a bloke off Reddit who had to have his leg amputated and decided to see what it would be like to cook and eat his now-no-longer-needed foot. People are odd. Maybe don’t read this over lunch.
  • What If I’m Just A Minor Writer: I loved this essay so much. One of the best things my mum has ever said to me (up there with other classics such as “I may love you, Matthew, but I don’t have to like you”) was a few years back where she casually dropped into conversation that she had “realised you weren’t special many years ago”; I mean, fine, it sounds brutal, but it’s also eminently true. This is a beautiful piece about being a writer and the creeping realisation that your work is…ok. Not storied, not for the ages, but…ok. CELEBRATE YOUR MEDIOCRITY WITH ME, WEBMONGS!
  • Looking For A Fight: Finally this week, a beautiful and sad look at the last touring boxing tent in Australia, which travels the country with a ragtag bunch of washed up old soaks charging $20 a pop to the public to go three rounds with them. This is poetry, and has the feel of something that could be novelised without much effort – the characters are wonderful and broken, and you can practically smell the stale weed and boozesweats by the end. Truly glorious writing.

milena naef

By Milena Naef

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS:

  1. If you only listen to one song this week, make it this one. It is AMAZING – it’s called ‘Girls’, it’s by Girl in Red, and it’s about being young and queer and it’s such an INCREDIBLY beautiful piece of indiepop that it makes me want to be 15 again:

 

2) This is called ‘War Dance’ – it’s a housey-electro-type track, but the video’s the real star here; this is a wonderful piece of filmmaking:

 

3) I don’t normally feature country music here because, well, I don’t like it, as a rule; this is a rare exception, as this track by HC McIntyre rather grabbed me. It’s called “Baby’s Got The Blues”, which is SUCH a cliche title, but the song’s a lot better than that would suggest, and the video’s a lovely series of compositions in chiaroscuro and worth paying attention to; the lighting on her face is just wonderful:

 

4) I saw Cigarettes After Sex last year – they were wonderful, but they do lend themselves more to listening on record than at a gig imho. This is their latest, called ‘Crush’, and it will make you want to do both the things their name suggests:

 

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is a newish one from Tyler; he is SO SO GOOD:

 

6) 10 minutes of oddly satisfying things. Because it’s been a long week, I know, and you need this:

 

7) Finally this week, absolutely the best fusion of Scottish and Punjabi music you will hear all year. This is ‘Drowsy Maggy’, as performed by The Snake Charmer, and it is pleasingly mental, and I can imagine it being played at multicultural weddings North of the border for many years to come. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE FOOTBALL CONSOLE YOURSELF WITH THE FACT THAT YOU CAN DO LOADS OF COOL STUFF LIKE GOING TO LARGELY EMPTY CINEMAS OR TO THE THEATRE OR TO FANCY RESTAURANTS WHILE THE ENGLAND GAMES ARE ON SO CHIN UP AND CHEER UP I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!

 

Webcurios 08/06/18

Reading Time: 26 minutes

HAHAHA BORIS! HAHAHAHA DAVID! HAHAHAHA ISN’T IT FUNNY! ALL THIS INCOMPETENCE AND INFIGHTING AND BACKSTABBING AND MACHINATING AND

No, it’s not, is it, really? It’s boring and tedious and childish. WHY IS EVERYONE – AND I MEAN SEEMINGLY EVERYONE, GLOBALLY – WHO PURSUES POLITICAL OFFICE SUCH A COMPLETE FCUKING CNUT?

I mean, it’s a rhetorical question and I don’t expect an answer, but if you have one to hand then I’d love to hear it. Now, though, I must run – I have a HOT LUNCH DATE and I probably ought to shower before I get there, so I’ll just leave these links here and leave you to sort them out. Don’t, whatever you do, make a mess. This, as ever, is WEB CURIOS!

jonnie chambers

By Jonnie Chambers 

FIRST UP, LET’S KICK OFF WITH WHAT WAS DESCRIBED TO ME AS ‘WOOZY MOOGY AMBIENT NOODLING’, WHICH IS ABOUT EXACTLY RIGHT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT THE FUTURE IS JUST GOING TO BE LOVE ISLAND ON EVERY SINGLE PLATFORM, EVERY SINGLE SCREEN, EVERY SINGLE FLAT SURFACE, FOREVER:

  • Facebook Basically Rips Off Musical.ly: I mean, there’s more to it than that (a small bit), but that’s basically the headline here – FB’s launching a lipsyncing service remarkably similar to kids’ favourite app Musical.ly, complete with licensed tracks. It only works with Live videos at the moment, but this will doubtless change. No brand applications whatsoever that I can think of at this juncture, thank God.
  • Facebook Attempts To Entice More Streamers: Zuckerberg’s slightly late-to-the-party attempts to steal Twitch’s thunder continue apace, with an update to its game streaming service which introduces a special ‘creators’ programme for streamers which promises to help them improve their numbers (and, it’s implied, monetisation thereof) for their streams whilst also incentivising them to stop using Twitch and move to FB. They’re also launching a dedicated stream discovery platform at fb.gg, where you can access the full gamut of streamers’ feeds – just like Twitch! The numbers are a fraction of those on Amazon’s rival platform at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see if this picks up traction at all.
  • Facebook Launches New Non-Profit Fundraising Tools: Two useful updates to Facebook’s options for fundraising – now Brand and Personal Pages can associated themselves with a fundraising cause and solicit donations through their own channels, which is obviously hugely useful for charities who want to leverage and ambassadors or corporate partnerships they have in place; and fundraising organisations can establish more of an administrative team, nominating upto three additional ‘organisers’ to effectively admin the collection efforts. Which is all seemingly positive, and I can’t think of anything snarky to say about it at all.  
  • First News Shows Come to Facebook Watch: In the US at least, but if you want to get slightly less in-depth news than you’re used to, delivered through a platform you mainly use to argue with idiots about complex political issues you barely understand, then WOW are you going to enjoy this!
  • FB Introduces Bidding for In-App Advertising: I can’t, honestly, be bothered to attempt to paraphrase this stuff. “Publishers who manage their app monetization technology in-house as well as those managed by a select group of partners – MoPub, Fyber and MAX – can now include Facebook ads through Audience Network in their auctions.” Happy now? No, I didn’t think you would be.
  • Facebook Kills ‘Trending News’ Section: You wouldn’t have known unless I’d told you, would you?
  • Insta Introduces Story Resharing: You can now share other people’s stories on Insta! But only if you were tagged in the original! “When someone mentions you in their story, you receive a notification in your Direct message thread with that person — now, you’ll see an option to add that content to your own story.” Watch now as we see a spate of incredibly beggy tagging of more popular people in Stories in an attempt to extend their reach (though if you’re sharing content featuring INFLUENCERS this is a nice, low-friction way to enable them to share it).
  • How The Insta Feed Works: I mean, not exactly how it works – if I knew that there’s no way in hell I’d be up at 7:04am writing about s*c**l m*d** platform news – but a bit about how it works. Instagram did an slightly unusual open day with the media last week, during which they gave a load of online outlets some detail as to exactly how the algorithm is weighted (this week). Nothing hugely surprising in here, but it’s worth reading to remind yourself of how you can try and game the system.
  • Instagram May Launch Longform Video: Imagine Instagram videos – an endless procession of identically-contoured, callipygian, straight-haired, white-toothed, perfectly-coiffed mahogany beauties, monosyllabically tripping over the breathless eulogy for speed lollipops they’re desperately trying to remember. You imagining that? GOOD, isn’t it? Now imagine that, but with each video stretching up to an hour in length. BETTER, isn’t it? The piece suggests that the platform’s taking a(nother) leaf out of Snapchat’s book and will start to offer original scripted content, much like Snap’s ‘Discover’ platform – in fact, here’s the spiel so you can be as underwhelmed as I was “Instagram will offer a dedicated space featuring scripted shows, music videos and more in vertically oriented, full-screen, high-def 4K resolution. Instagram has been meeting with popular social media stars and content publishers to find out how their video channels elsewhere would work within its app. It’s also lining up launch partners for an announcement of the long-form video effort tentatively scheduled for June 20th.” WOW!
  • You Can Now Geolock Videos on Twitter: You don’t care! Noone does! Poor Twitter!
  • Google’s AI Principles: Overnight, Google has released a series of principles which, it says, will inform its AI development practices from hereon in. It sets out seven conditions which AI projects will have to meet to be considered worth pursuing by Google (be socially beneficial, be tested for bias, etc), as well as those things that Google AI projects will never do (work specifically on weapons, work to contravene ‘internationally accepted’ standards on privacy and surveillance, etc). These principles are sensible and A Good Thing, and having them plainly articulated is a sensible and responsible thing for a company of Google’s size, scale and ambition; they are also, were this current reality/timeline a scifi short story I was editing, the point in the manuscript in which I would scrawl ‘OBVIOUS FORESHADOWING – MAYBE LESS APOCALYPSE SIGNPOSTING NEEDED?’ in the margin, so who knows where this will end up?
  • Yossarian: Speaking of AI (so smooth!), this is supposedly an AI assistant for creativity (remember? That thing that everyone in adland thinks is our SPECIAL SAUCE and will stop the machines taking over? AHAHAHAHA) – the idea is not, to reassure you, that it will spit out fully-formed creative concepts, more that it will use machine learning to help you make unexpected or interesting connections between ideas and concepts. At heart it’s really just a fancy online moodboard / concept wall tool with a thesaurus attached to it (sorry, but it is), but you may find it a useful addition to your BRAINSTORM ARSENAL.
  • The History of Telecommunication: Last up, a pointless-but-shiny site by Italian telecoms company TIM which takes you on a journey through the history of telecommunications; I have a soft spot for this mainly as I like the graphical style, but it’s also pleasingly slick in execution and animation and look, Italy’s a mess, ok, let me at the very least laud it’s ephemeral webwork.

gomez balbontin

By Gomez Balbontin

NEXT, WHY NOT FORM YOUR OWN OPINION ON THE KANYE RECORD (FWIW I AM UNDERWHELMED!)?

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE GOOGLE THING AND NORMAN, IS FEELING SLIGHTLY LESS WELL-DISPOSED TOWARDS AI THAN IT WOULD LIKE TO, PT.1:

  • Oat The Goat: I confess to having done a little bit of an emo at this when I found it; you may do to. Oat the Goat (I have no idea why he’s called Oat – I mean, it rhymes, yes, but it’s not really a viable name, is it? Anyway) is an interactive kids story, aimed at children between around 3-5 I reckon (people with actual children will be a better judge, I’d imagine), which tells the story of the titular Oat on a QUEST to reach the top of a mountain. On the way he meets friends and learns some IMPORTANT LIFE LESSONS, and, well, it’s just charming, really, down to the fact that it’s made by a New Zealand anti-bullying charity to the art style and the animation and the sound…I would quite like an Oat stuffed toy, should anyone in possession of such a thing ever get round to reading this.

  • Meet Norman: Pretty much on the opposite end of the ‘cute and heartwarming’ spectrum to Oat, Norman is an AI developed by researchers at MIT; the gimmick with Norman is that he’s been trained on a corpus of knowledge drawn from a particular subReddit that ‘enjoys’ looking at photos of death, and as such his worldview is entirely composed of descriptions of corpses. “Norman is an AI that is trained to perform image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. We trained Norman on image captions from an infamous subreddit (the name is redacted due to its graphic content) that is dedicated to document and observe the disturbing reality of death. Then, we compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network (trained onMSCOCO dataset) on Rorschach inkblots; a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders.” So you might look at a Rorschach blot and see, say, a flower blossoming; Norman will look and see ‘Man gets pulled into dough machine’. Which is, you have to say, imaginative if nothing else. It’s hugely interesting as a project, and a neat reminder of the fact that these ‘machines’ only learn what we teach them (and which, actually, dovetails quite neatly with Google’s statement, so perhaps it will all be fine after all. Won’t it?). Beautifully, its creators have said that people are apparently emailing Norman telling him it’s all going to be ok, which makes me rather more concerned about us than it does him.
  • Sign President Trump’s Official Birthday Card: Look, fine, it’s childish, and he’s never going to see it, probably, but you know you want to.
  • Strml: Samuel Reed builds things in code for a living; this is his developer website where he lists his projects and his availability for work. I’ve seen variants on this trick before, but never done quite as nicely as this; the site effectively codes itself as you watch which, honestly, for a sausage-fingered code refusenik like myself is pretty much as close to seeing actual, real-world magic in action as I’m ever going to get. I would like to see this done with a lot of money and shine behind it, please – for the right project I think you could make something genuinely amazing.
  • Reporting on Suicide: Just a semi-regular reminder on what the guidelines are on how best to report or comment on suicide in responsible and helpful fashion, because they are worth repeating.
  • Make Your Own Kanye Album Cover Generator: I get the impression that this had a cultural shelf-life of about 24h to be honest, but I imagine that there are still people on Facebook who might be impressed by this.
  • Soccer Pattern: A beautifully-designed site celebrating all the World Cup kits of each of the 2018 World Cup’s finalists, in lovely, block-colour, minimalist fashion. Minimalist presentation, a lovely interface, and the way the display the kit designs is really nicely stripped-back. If you’re the sort of person who has a pristine collection of rare / obscure / vintage football kits then this will probably give you at least another 5 designs you’ll want to track down (but don’t; all the old ones will be made of polyester and will smell HORRIBLY, I promise you).
  • The Second Shelf: Continuing the recent trend for Kickstarter projects that aren’t totally terrible and pointless ideas, The Second Shelf is a just-funded project with another 4 days to go, which is raising money to produce a quarterly magazine and online bookshop, featuring and promoting the work of female writers – “Our mission is to highlight and rediscover the accomplished work of women, inspire new and established collectors to read and invest in the work of women, and finally balance the bookshelves. The Second Shelf is intersectional, inclusive, and expansive in our use of the term women as we embrace the multidefinitionality of gender identity and expression.” A good idea, chuck them a fiver if you can afford it.
  • Book Cover Concentration: The only annoying thing about the B3ta newsletter being back is that occasionally it will include stuff like this, that’s really good and perfect for Curios and which I put on The List and then realise, when it comes round to the whole week later when I come to write it up, that you have almost certainly already seen because, really, you’re all the same readership, aren’t you? Except there are more of them. Anyway, this is an excellent game which tasks you with picking which of the bookcovers on display are both for the same title, published in different countries. Which makes a lot more sense when you play it, obviously.
  • Dinosaurs: Not the ONLY place for dinosaur-related stuff on the web, fine, but probably one of the more comprehensive – this is the Natural History Museum’s one-stop-online-portal for all their GIANT TERROR LIZARD content; from explainers about all the different species, to zoom-and-rotatable 3d models of exhibits, this should be enough to keep a small boy silent in the back of a car for a good 15 minutes, maybe even 20, before they start clamouring to be allowed to go back on Fortnite.
  • Defekt: This is quite incredible – if you have an iPhone, really do give this a go. Defekt is a video app which lets you apply some truly incredible CGI effects, on the fly, to whatever you film – particle stuff, tracers, a whole suite of really impressive stuff, with new effects apparently promised every fortnight. As you’d expect, you can then save and share the videos on other platforms; I promise you, you will temporarily win the Stories game with this stuff, til next week when it’s installed as-native on Instagram.
  • 10 Hours Of Undersea Footage: Literally that. You want 10 hours of deep, slow, blue footage, of massive whales sucking plankton, of sharks and rays and jellies and sprats and tuna and SHARKS oh me oh my? OF COURSE YOU DO! The BBC (not a bit of it I’m involved with, so I can say this without fear of looking like a sycophant) is getting really good at this – 123k views in a week of, let’s be clear, 10 hours of commentaryless fish video? I mean, WELL DONE. If you work in an office which is soundtracked by the horrendous cacophony of 24h rolling news, why not set one of the TVs to play this instead as some sort of small, soothing antidote to the tornado of dread playing out elsewhere.
  • Dear Machine: Sometimes – not always, certainly not often, but sometimes, code art is my favourite art. This is a lovely little project, which takes the ‘comments’ developers leave in code on webpages and presents them as an infinite, intimate letter from us to the machines which underpin our world. Some of the lines are gibberish, some are weirdly emotional when presented like this, devoid of context, and some of them are dully functional in a way which serves to bring the more magical elements into sharp relief – I think this is beautiful.
  • The NSA Security Posters: YOU MUST CLICK ON THIS! No, really, ALL of the links are great, obviously, just like EVERY week (you know that it’s true), but I think this one is particularly strong. This is a PDF collection of hundreds of…propaganda? Not the right word…I suppose ‘public information posters’ is probably the best descriptor, created by the US National Security Agency in the 50s and 60s which, history buffs will recall, was a somewhat…er…paranoid era in US politics, in which citizens were being urged to keep on their toes and to keep their eyes and ears peeled for evidence of the Red Peril coming along to fcuk up the American whitte picket fences and apple pie status quo. These are SO GOOD – surreal to the point where they look and feel almost exactly like Richard Littler’s fictional ‘Scarfolk’ series – and you really ought to take a few minutes to scroll through; personal favourites include the deranged hipster captioned with “You should make security YOUR thing!”, and the beautifully, incredibly sinister winter snowscape accompanied by the legend “Christmas…a hush falls on the land / KEEP THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT ALL YEAR ROUND!” which I now want on my wall forever.
  • A List of Fictional Bars and Pubs: Because Wikipedia may well be the greatest cultural resource at our disposal. Skews a bit game-y, because, well, it’s Wikipedia, but useful if you want to, I don’t know, come up with a name for your latest theme pop-up for whatever dreadful ‘craft’ beer client you’re representing this week.
  • SHTF Survival: I confess that the name makes me think of people messily voiding  themselves – I can’t help it, it does! – but this is not nappies as a service but instead a monthly subscription service which promises to send YOU all the materials you’ll need to stock your bunker for the point at which civilisation eventually collapses into a bloody, cannibalistic mess. I have a lot of questions about this, not least WHAT HAPPENS IF THE APOCALYPSE HAPPENS BEFORE I HAVE ENOUGH STUFF? I don’t know, this monthly parcel thing suggests, perhaps, a rather more relaxed approach the impending breakdown of social mores and structures than might have been expected. Still, worth subscribing too for when we fall off the Brexit cliff and all the supermarkets are stocked with nothing but Victory Gin and Woodbines.
  • Thunkable: Do we still care about making apps? If we do, this is seemingly a really easy drag-and-drop web service for app construction, allowing for pretty sophisticated functionality on iOS and Android with minimal actual skill required. You’ll need to get your head round the interface, but it’s honestly about as simple as I’ve seen this stuff; take a look if you’re interested in creating something.
  • Scary Signs: Classic subReddit, collecting images of sinister or frightening signs from around the world. Why does a workplace need a sign that says “NOT FOR FRESH EYES”? You can’t think of a reason, can you? Horrid, isn’t it?
  • Lunatap: Boring-but-useful-so-therefore-sort-of-interesting (is this that multihyphenate thing that everyone’s talking about? Am I doing it right?), this is an extension to payments system Stripe (you know, those little white boxes you can plug your card into and which they use at trendy farmers’ markets where no actual farmers have been seen since 1998) which lets merchants process payments without the box; they can enter card details or just take a photo of it, and the software does the rest. Not that the Stripe box was a hugely onerous thing, but this is a nice, simple build on it.
  • The Safe Rooms: A Twitter account which shares images of safe rooms in videogames; those in-game areas where you can save, pause, and generally take stock (skin up, get a beer, go for a wee). Ah, memories! So many wasted hours I will never get back!
  • Philip Kremer: I popped into Internet Oddity Sadeagle’s birthday last week, which was lovely, and someone had bought him a little book of the images of Philip Kremer and MY WORD were there some doubletakes and gasps. These are…odd, is probably the best word, although ‘toothy’, ‘fleshy’ and ‘upsetting’ might also feature; ‘erotic’, not so much.

pierre mornet

By Pierre MornetNEXT, HOW ABOUT A SURPRISINGLY GOOD PLAYLIST OF THINGS WHICH CAN TECHNICALLY BE DESCRIBED AS ‘ONE HIT WONDERS’!

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE GOOGLE THING AND NORMAN, IS FEELING SLIGHTLY LESS WELL-DISPOSED TOWARDS AI THAN IT WOULD LIKE TO, PT.2:

  • All Of The World’s Coal Power Stations: Look! Mapped! I can’t think of a single reason why any of you would want or need this, but I live in the possibly futile hope that one day I will include an obscure link to something like this which will change the course of someone’s life forever. So, er, if YOU look at this and suddenly decide that you want to make a career change into sustainable energy or something then do drop me a line and let me know that this isn’t all for naught.
  • Quest: ANOTHER Kickstarter! There’s been a massive resurgence in Dungeon’s & Dragons in recent months, with plenty of people online telling quite heartwarming stories of playing with their kids and groups of friends and stuff. If YOU are willing to don the slightly uncool +2 robes of roleplaying storytelling games (I just outed myself slightly, eh?) then you might be interested in Quest, which is already funded with three weeks left; Quest’s basically a card-based, stripped-down D&D analogue game, designed to let you have all the storytelling and flexibility and freedom an imagination of the classic Gygax but without the kilometric rule book and 100-sided die. Seems like a nice idea, and the entry-level backing tier to get the game is only about £15, which seems pretty reasonable to me.
  • Void: A N Other read later / productivity app, to help you MAXIMISE YOUR LEARNING AND READING. There are other gimmicks to it too – I am including only as I know that lots of people are constantly searching for new/better versions of Pocket, etc, and this might such a thing.
  • Gridpaper: You think you have seen impressive origami? YOU HAVE NOT SEEN IMPRESSIVE ORIGAMI! It seems weird to speak of this looking good enough to eat – and, on reflection, it is weird – but take a look at this Insta feed and you will I hope understand. So, so good.
  • Radical: This is, potentially, amazing. Radical is an app which will let you film people (I think it only works with figures, though I could be wrong) with your phone, and will then convert that footage into wireframe models of those people for use in 3d space. So, say, you could film someone dancing, transform that into a wireframe model of their body, then use software to create a CG character for use in a virtual environment based on the movement set you filmed. Which is MENTAL, and transformative (potentially at least) for small/no-budget filmmakers.
  • Every Other Beat Is Missing: A collection of famous songs, edited so that every other beat is missing. I honestly had to step away from my computer and listen to something soothing after hearing the edit of Smooth Criminal on this YouTube channel (thanks Shardcore!), but some actually work really well – Seven Nation Army in particular is oddly great when chopped to buggery. See what YOU think!
  • Pictures Of Cats On Audio Gear: Inexplicable but incredibly long thread on an audiophiles forum, featuring LOTS of photos of people’s cats sitting on top of amplifiers and the like. This is honestly amazing – it was started in November 2008(!) and is still active now, with people logging in and sharing their photos of their cats showing NO RESPECT for them or their kit, the chiefs.
  • The Tube Heartbeat: This is OLD – like two whole years old, the shame! – but it only crossed my path this week; it takes TFL tube user data and maps it over the tube map, over time, giving you a neat visual representation of which lines and stations are, on average, most crowded at what time. It could use an update with more recent data (says the lazy man who never makes anything and just criticises other people’s labour, given mostly for free into an uncaring world – man, what a prick I am), but it’s a clever way of displaying the info and one which I’m sort of amazed TFL haven’t ripped off a bit.
  • The Rose of Versailles: Thanks to Julia Errens for sending this my way, inspired by my discovery that the anime series was going to be streaming in full on YouTube (it is, but you’ll need a VPN if you want to watch it in the UK), this is an archived selection of the original anime comics on which it is based. The Rose of Versailles, for the uninitiated, is one of the GREATEST animes ever (don’t @ me), telling the story of a young woman making her way in the court of Louis XVI – WHILST PRETENDING TO BE A MAN! It’s ACE – it’s got history and romance and duels and EXECUTIONS and tears and some really incredibly progressive genderqueer stuff in there, and, honestly, watching it all in Italian a few years back made me SO HAPPY that I want to sort of urge you all to look it up. I promise you, you won’t be disappointed.
  • Kickstarter Chili Sauce: Oh, here we are, silly Kickstarters are back. This is 2x funderd (to the tune of nearly £50k!) with three weeks left, and promises you the BEST chili sauce ever, made in and shipped from China. If you’re one of the tediously macho brigade who cares what a Scoville is – or, more charitably, if you just like hot sauces – then you might want to get in on this.
  • Colour Photos of WWI: A beautiful collection. The expression on the face of the middle Senegalese soldier in one particular photo in this set is honestly quite haunting, look out for it.
  • Stitchfix: Or, clothing as a (subscription) service – Stitchfix is a monthly box delivery company which every 5 weeks or so will send you a collection of items of clothing, picked ‘especially’ for you based on the style prefences you’ve outlined; you send back the ones you don’t want, on a totally non-committal no-fee basis, and the system allegedly ‘learns’ (that’s right, kids, it’s 2018 so there’s an AI component!) what you’re into and adjusts future recommendations accordingly. I’m pretty sure that this is US only, but expect UK ripoffs to appear in literally weeks – I have to say that I am VERY tempted by this, if only as it might be a pleasing alternative to my current clothes buying policy which is basically either “buy exactly the same thing as I had last time, preferably in bulk” or “buy something BRAND NEW and then be so intimidated by the prospect of wearing it that you continue wearing the old clothes well past the point where their structural integrity might be said to have been ‘compromised’” (this is honestly true).
  • Naoqo: I’m 100% certain that I’ve featured ‘text to speech’-type software which basically turns all your longreads into podcasts for on-the-go consumption, but I’m buggered if I can recall what it was. Anyway, that’s also what this does – called Naoqo, it’s selling point is that the outputs aren’t in the usual sub-Hawking artificial drone, but in something more human-sounding, but, as ever, your mileage will inevitably vary.
  • Nobe Cars: I don’t drive, and am now probably of an age where I would be pretty much incapable of learning without causing major damage to scenery and pedestrians alike. That said, if I were a driver and in the market for a car then I would TOTALLY be tempted by this project, currently seeking investment on some funding platform or another – Nobe are electric vehicles which are designed to be recycleable and upgradeable, and whose design has something of the 50s/60s about it; effectively they are HIPSTER SCOOTERS, I know, but they look like the automotive equivalents of those chrome-and-lacquer SMEG chest fridges from the mid-20th Century and I WANT ONE. Anyway, they have 50% of the required investment secured with a few weeks to go, so get involved if you fancy buying a proper ‘look at me! I’m a twat who works in the creative industries!’ car.
  • GTA Roleplay Videos: You may recall I featured a longread last week about the people who roleplay GTAV as very, very diligent British policemen – these are videos of those very roleplayers, going about their business having STERN WORDS with the virtual miscreants of Los Santos. I just started watching one of these again and had to stop as I was in literal tears – the BANALITY! It is so, so perfect, and the fact that this is some people’s hobby is utterly joyous and they should be celebrated. CELEBRATE THE VIRTUAL VIDEOGAME POLICEMEN! At least these ones definitely didn’t make people fall in love with them under false pretences (Topical!).
  • Date an Incel: It has to be a joke, and yet it doesn’t seem to be a joke. This is a website where YOU, kind women, can offer yourselves up to be the soothing balm that prevents an entitled online virgin from offing himself and a bunch of other people because he somehow believes that society, and in particular women, owe him sex. WHAT A WORLD! The testimony from the almost-certainly-fictitious Rebecca, 32, from Boise Oregon is worth a look too – see how noble, selfless Rebecca uses her sexuality for the greater good of the world, in much the same way as, say, a medical doctor might use their knowledge by signing up for MSF or similar. Please, please let this be a joke.
  • Cospenis: There was a Tumblr I featured a few years back, featuring photos of the penises in fancy dress – oh, here it is! – and now there is a WHOLE subReddit of the same. Photo after inexplicable photo of the male member, made to look even more ridiculous than in its state of nature – special shouts out to the man who made his girlfriend a whole calendar of fancy dress penises, and the guy who inexplicably this week decided to share a photograph of his penis made up to look like a used tampon. It’s people like you who really make the web, so thanks for your contributions.

alessandro gioiello

By Alessandro Gioiello

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, SOME EXCELLENT AND REASONABLY HARD TECHNO MIXED BY JULIANA YAMAZAKI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • GST: Or, less perplexingly, game soundtracks! Collected! For you to listen to!

  • Homophones Weakly: Not actually a Tumblr! “A visual exploration of words that look the same, sound the same, or are otherwise easily confused.” So now you know.
  • Silent Intertitles: You remember in silent films where they occasionally flash up a card with text on it to move the plot along a bit? Those, but out of context for comic effect.
  • The Adventures of Business Cat: Is cat! Is also businessman! Is also not Tumblr! Is internet classic!
  • Classic Programmer Paintings: Slightly tortuous gags about Perl, via the medium of classic artworks. NEVER LET IT BE SAID I DON’T KNOW MY AUDIENCE.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • Harmonia: Interactive Fiction corner! No, wait, please – as I always say with this stuff, ignore the ‘interactive’ bit, even if it makes you feel a bit uncomfortable; this is primarily a really nicely-written if slightly old-fashioned mystery story, in the style of early 20thC mystery magazine shorts, with some beautiful interactivity layered over the top of it, allowing you to explore plot and character details in more depth, and lending a very gentle sense of reader agency to the whole thing. Even if the term ‘interactive fiction’ makes your teeth itch ever so slightly this really is worth a click.

  • The Oxygen of Amplification: Caveat – I HAVE NOT READ THIS ALL. Mainly because it’s seemingly an entire Phd thesis looking at how malevolent actors attempted with varying degrees of success to hijack the news media with FAKE NEWS and misinformation’; specifically focusing on the period 2016-18, the work is presented in three ‘volumes’ looking at various elements – tactics, ideology, outcomes, etc – with a specific focus on what modern news outlets and newsrooms  can do to mitigate this sort of stuff in the future. Not for general consumption, probably, but if you’re vaguely professionally (or personally) interested in this sort of thing then this might be hugely useful.
  • A Nurse’s Story: This is a beautiful piece of writing, about the Nurse’s experience of hospital work, from transplants to organ donation to telling people their loved ones are dead. It’s not sad, exactly, but obviously deals with some HEAVY STUFF, but the writing is honestly exceptional.
  • Flesh Moves: Describing near-future dystopian scifi as Gibsonian is, fine, a bit lazy, but this is very early-Gibsonian – Flesh Moves is by Adam Rothstein and Brendan C Byrne, riffing on where the current trend of mass-commercial automation, retail, logistics and supply will take us. Reads like a sort of hard-boiled Mad Maxish romp through the blasted landscape described in Count Zero, to me at least, which may or may not mean anything to you (I hope it does, it’s a good comparison).
  • The AI Winter is on its Way: This is a fascinating piece – I don’t know if I agree with its premise, mainly because I don’t have anywhere near enough knowledge of the AI tech landscape to comment, but I found the thinking a pleasing antidote to the near-universal AI utopianism you see in certain sections of the business / tech community. The premise, presented by author Filip Piekniewski, is that we’re heading for a massive slowdown in practical applications of what is currently called AI (in particular machine learning / neural nets) due to the fact that we have overestimated (and in some cases misunderstood) the applications of machine learning without taking into account its inherent limitations (much of what I took from this was less about the machine limitations and more about the fact that BIG DATA does not always equal good data, to which A-MEN). Worth a skim – even if you don’t get the hard science (I didn’t get the hard science) you’ll glean enough to make it worthwhile.
  • The Soda Jerk Slang: Soda Jerks, it turns out, was the name given to the kids who manned soda fountains in the GOLDEN ERA of post-war American teen culture, where everyone had disposable income and those horrid, dirty hippies hadn’t spoiled everything yet, and the future seemed like a perfect and pristine one, full of chrome and rockets and TV dinners and wife-swapping (I read too much Updike as a kid, turns out). Anyway, this is a lovely bit of cultural history, looking at the particular language and slang that developed around ice cream bars – if nothing else, this will absolutely make you want to order an elaborate milkshake and stand around looking moodily while girls in conical bras dance around you on rollerskates. Also, the lexicon at the end is great – the fact that cherries were apparently known as ‘Maiden’s Delight’ made me honestly cackle.
  • Ghoul Bet: See, I read this and automatically thought ‘nah, this isn’t real’, but the Twitter account checks out, and reads reasonably authentically and now I don’t know WHAT to think. Anyway, Ghoul Bet is a service which, allegedly, offers books on deathtolls – so you can basically do spread betting where you’re betting on how many people are declared deceased in, say, a mass shooting or earthquake. Which is, obviously, incredibly bleak, but I struggle to imagine that anyone would be committed enough to set up a system whereby you could do this, and yet…here we are! The writing in the piece isn’t the best, and it feels a bit, well, light, journalistically speaking, but it’s bleakly interesting if you want another reason to firmly believe that the world is fcuked and in need of resetting.
  • The Valley of the Ragdolls: Ragdoll cats are MASSIVE – like those mad Maine Coon things that some people have that are basically like a shetland pony that wants to kill you – but, oddly, incredibly placid and docile and almost doglike in nature; my friend Katie who lives in Copenhagen has one, and I catsat for it a few years back, amazed to discover that it would do things like play ‘fetch’ and not attempt to remove each single layer of my epidermis with its claws at any given opportunity (a skill other cats, naming no names, could do with learning). Anyway, this piece is about the weird accident of breeding which may have rendered them such – it’s honestly really interesting, even if, like me, you don’t actually care about animals very much.
  • The Body Positivity Scam: I really enjoyed this – an excellent essay looking at why the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ and all the subsequent bodypositivity campaigns it spawned, maybe weren’t in fact that great after all when it came to dealing with body image issues among women and in wider society – the point it makes towards the end, about how all these campaigns in fact do is reinforce the primacy of the others’ gaze in the way in which we think of ourselves, and that they make physicality the be all and end all of being in a way which is maybe a touch counterintuitive to their stated aim, is very well-made imho.
  • My Wheelchair Glamour Shoot: What it’s like being in a wheelchair and wanting to be looked at by someone who fancies you and sees you as a person rather than a disabled person. I confess to not having ever considered this before, to my shame.
  • A Complete History of the Millennium Falcon: I don’t care about this, but I appreciate that many others will care LOTS.
  • The YouTube Burnout: Almost inevitably, there’s been a spate of high-profile, very successful YouTubers who’ve either quit or taken extended sabbaticals from the platform as they realise that having to make daily, tightly-edited, high-energy 10m+ videos as well as being a PUBLIC FIGURE, or streaming 12+h a day from your chair, is, well, horrible. Might be worth showing your teenagers this, just in case they’re harbouring unpleasant dreams of being the next Jake Paul. The video embedded in here of the female YouTuber turning her breakdown into a new YouTube video is, well, pretty fcuking horrible, actually, and rather emblematic of the problem in question. Still, WE NEED THE CONTENT, so keep working, TubeMonkeys!
  • Did CA Change FB Users’ Behaviour?: Rhetorical question, obviously, we don’t know yet, but this piece does showcase research suggesting that, unsurprisingly, people are tending to share fewer pieces of personal information / content on social platforms, and that this is a trend that seems likely to continue. Which, and this is alluded to in the piece, is potentially a touch concerning; if we don’t meet up in person any more to see or talk to our friends, and if we no longer feel comfortable sharing personal feelings and information online, where is this emotional exchange going to take place?
  • The Best Twitter Hoax You Will Ever Read About: This is honestly incredible and I don’t want to spoil it by running any of the details, but, honestly, this is an INCREDIBLE 101 on how to pull the wool over the world’s eyes using a few photos, some photoshop and a sense of mystery and timing. Depressingly, a brand is going to use this playbook for a stunt by the time October’s out, mark my words.
  • The Boys from the Banlieus: I’m still finding it hard to get excited about the World Cup – FCUK YOU SWEDEN – but thankfully there’s some excellent writing about it around to try and get me out of my funk  (FCUK YOU, SWEDEN). This is a piece about Kylian Mbappe, the French player who’s the latest world-scale talent to emerge from the estates around Paris, and about the environment which manages to produce such an incredible and unlikely conveyor belt of footballing excellence despite economic and social conditions which might best be described as ‘challenging’. I do love reading Americans writing about football – there’s a sense of difference in their perspective which I find rather refreshing.  
  • On So-Called Millennial Entitlement: A BRILLIANT piece which neatly skewers the ridiculous and lazy ‘most entitled and selfish and lazy generation EVER’ rhetoric trotted out about this generation (which, not to labour a point, is exactly what has been said about EVERY generation since the 50s – google ‘the me generation’ for a primer on past iterations); the central thesis is that to talk of ‘entitlement’ in a generation that has been taught to expect literally NOTHING that its parents were able to reasonably expect (employment, salary, security, pension, retirement, etc) is, frankly, stupid. Seriously, this is very good.
  • Average: This is superb. Candice Carty-Williams, on her body and beauty and blackness and her perception of all three. I know I tend to feature an awful lot of stuff about female self-image in this section – it’s not, I promise, an obsession, more that I find that some of the best shortform writing online at the moment tends to be from women on questions of identity.
  • The Professionals: This is four years old, and a many-thousand-words long, and it’s all about long-forgotten 70s TV show The Professionals. BUT WAIT! It is SUPERB, and even if like me you’ve never watched the show it won’t matter – I promise you, you’ll be taken right back to an era of draylon and drinks trolleys and incredibly banal sexism and racism, and casual violence perpetrated by and on men wearing windcheaters, an article of clothing so peculiarly 70s that it is almost entirely impossible to even envisage it in 2018. Honestly, it’s clever and very funny, and you will want to watch the show after this. Promise.
  • The Survivalists and the Bears: I guarantee you, this is the best ‘bears vs people’ story you will read all year. Read it.
  • Really Techno: About a visit to Berghain, but really more about the ethos of ‘queer’ as a culture, and about the weird fugue state that you can get into with techno and other repetitive dance music which basically gets you all meditative and blissed out and is (part of) the reason why acid got all mixed up in one end of the techno scene in the early 90s. Really, really well-written; it reads in black and white, if that means anything to you, in the very best way.
  • Orange World: Finally this week, a superb short story from the New Yorker – Orange World is about a new mother and fear and the devil, and it’s excellent. Coffee rather than tea for this, though, or even better a glass of red.

joseph lee

By Joseph Lee

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

 

  1. This is called ‘Why I Love You’, it’s by CRi (no idea), and it’s sort of dreamy and Summer evening-y, and the video, with this slightly lonely-seeming man dancing, running and skateboarding through what looks like a Mediterranean port town, fits perfectly:

 

2) Next, this is the mysteriously-named Vansire (feat. Floor Cry) with a song called ‘Nice To See You’ – this is another Summer evening, sun setting-type vibe, to my mind at least:

 

3) This is called ‘Misheard’, it’s by Moaning, and it’s sort of angular and a bit math-y and the video’s all weird CGI objects and basically I love it so have a listen:

 

4) The latest from Die Antwoord, called ‘Alien’, sees them move even further away from hiphop and more into art/performance/filmmaking territory, though they’d probably forcefully argue that that’s where they’ve always been if I had only been smart enough to notice. Anyway, the song is brilliantly creepy and the video’s as WTF/brilliant as you’d expect:

 

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Rival’s latest single, the first off his new EP. I think it’s excellent – it’s called ‘Rivz Strikes Back (Intro)’:

 

6) Last up this week, IT’S MORE JIMOTHY! Here he is, chirpsing away in a foreign language. So smooth. I honestly love this SO MUCH, and entirely non-ironically, and I hope you do too. ENJOY! HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE I LOVE YOU AND SO IN ALL LIKELIHOOD DOES JIMOTHY, HE SEEMS LIKE THAT SORT OF KID, I HOPE YOU HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS AND THAT THE WEATHER IS NICE AND THAT THE FEAR AND WORRY ABATE, EVEN IF IT IS ONLY FOR 24H THANKS SEE YOU SOON BYE BYE BYE!:

 

 

Webcurios 01/06/18

Reading Time: 28 minutes

Even by the standards of 2018, this has been an absolute ROLLERCOASTER of a week. A Government falls in Spain, one stumbles and maybe gets back on its feet in Italy (but if it makes it to Christmas I will personally be AMAZED), Don met Kim, a Ukrainian journalist came back from the dead, and we all continued to gawp, amazed, through our magical glass rectangles as the shitshow circus limps round the ring once more. 

WHAT LARKS!

Still, though, balls to all that. It’s SUMMER! I mean, not that you could tell looking out at the massed rooftops of SW9 right now, but all the major news outlets assure me that it is in fact the first of June and that means ICECREAM and SPRINKLERS and SUNBURN and DRUNKEN NIGHTBUS ARGUMENTS WITH STRANGERS and SALMONELLA and ALCOPOPS and ILL-ADVISED FIRST TIME DRUG EXPERIENCES and FALLING IN LOVE EVERY 5 SECONDS and DISAPPOINTMENT and LONELINESS and MIVVIS! All of those things!

So, while you soak in that PICTURE IN PROSE and contemplate your first big weekend of the Summer, while away the waning hours of the working day with the following LINK PLATTER to roast over the red-hot coals of your intellect – carefully selected, marinaded (don’t ask in what), and arranged below for you to select the choicest cuts at your leisure. Do not, whatever you do, attempt to consume them all, though (no really, please do, otherwise this is all for naught and frankly I could do without the existential worries right now) – this, as ever, is WEB CURIOS!

nicholas uribe

By Nicolas Uribe

SEEING AS IT’S JUNE 1, LET’S KICK OFF WITH AKIRA’S LATEST SUMMERY LO-FI HIPHOP MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT LIFE IS TOO SHORT TO WADE THROUGH ANOTHER SET OF MARY MEEKER’S SLIDES:

  • Facebook Messenger Stories Add Polls: Look, let’s be honest with each other here – I didn’t go to bed as early as I probably ought to have done last night, the amount of ‘news’ this week is honestly negligible, and so I’m probably going to phone this first section in a bit while I get myself used to the fact that it’s 6:54am and I have a good 5 hours’ writing to get through. You don’t mind, do you? Good! Anyway, you can now add a ‘poll’-type function to the Stories you may or may not be creating using Messenger. Are you excited? ARE YOU???
  • Snapchat Launching Developer Platform…Soon!: Really, there is NOTHING happening this week. Even this, a moderately interesting piece of news indicating that developers are soon going to be able to get their hands on the ability to integrate Snapchat into third-party apps, is only a ‘maybe in the future’ piece; still, let’s work with what we’ve got. Reports suggest that Snapchat will soon open up its developer platform, meaning that app makers will be able to implement ‘log in with Snapchat’ options which will then take all of Snap’s interesting and fun and GOD I AM SO FCUKING BORED OF SEEING PEOPLE AIRBRUSHED AND WEARING DOG EARS CAN WE CALL STOP? visually arresting features and allow them to be used by the app in question. Which, if you’re into the idea of making AR-type app experience but don’t want to actually have to code any of it from scratch, is probably quite an appealing idea. Anyway, it’s not hear yet and there’s no indication as to when it might be, so CALM YOURSELVES.
  • Google Launches Neighbourly: Or at least it does in India. Neighbourly is a new Google product, designed to effectively work as a localised Q&A app, enabling people to ask questions of the community within a set geographical radius of them – the idea being, I imagine, that it will act as a competitor to Facebook Groups and other local-area information services. Sadly it’s VERY geo-limited and only available to users in Mumbai – I am not, sadly, in Mumbai, and so don’t have any additional info as to whether it’s any good or not (also, it only launched yesterday GIVE ME TIME), but the concept is potentially a very useful one, and I’m curious to see how this does and whether it gets a broader rollout.
  • Airbnb Launches Stories: Included here mainly as evidence for my ‘everything is going to be a fcuking Story soon’ narrative.
  • Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2018: I just did a quick check on what I said about this last year – I won’t paste it here, it…it may shock you to hear this, but it turns out it wasn’t  funny or insightful – and I realised that this is the fifth year in a row that I will have mentioned Mary sodding Meeker and her Internet bloody Trends report and oh God I am so, so tired. Anyway, if you want 300-odd slides of largely contextless DATA about…well, not really the internet if we’re honest, more a general grab-bag of business, tech and economic trends, and if you want those slides to be incredibly ugly and slightly grating on the eye, then once again it’s an early Christmas present. You can read some topline thoughts from Rob Blackie on WHAT IT ALL MEANS here, but your basic takeaways are that we’re all using the internet more than ever, that mobile is BIG, lots of people are buying voice assistants, we like purchasing things online, and – and this really did strike me this year – THERE IS NO NEED FOR THE SLIDES TO BE THIS UGLY. Seriously, can we have a whip-round and hire Kleiner Perkins a Powerpoint monkey to make this all less painful to look at? Anyway, I personally don’t think that this is that much of an indispensable read any more – there’s plenty of other data out there about TRENDS and stuff, and there’s more published every day, and most of it is far less deliberately ugly and obtuse than this stuff, and, frankly, most of these slides just seem to say “LOOK! A GRAPH GOING UP!” without any of the necessary wider contextualisation of said slide and I can’t be bothered. You shouldn’t bother either. Can we all decide to stop worshipping at this particular altar? Come on, REJECT MEEKER!
  • Teens Hate Facebook: Or at least, American teens, as surveyed by Pew, hate Facebook. Or, more accurately, American teens are, according to this survey, using Facebook significantly less than they were three years ago. Although, hang on, didn’t we do ‘THE TEENS ARE ALL LEAVING FACEBOOK!’’ about, er, three years ago?Anyway, here is some MORE DATA, which is obviously all US but which won’t prevent lots of people from glossing over that and inferring some sort of universal truths from this. Winners are Snapchat, Insta and YouTube, unsurprisingly – the stats about internet usage stood out to me as interesting, also, as this is the first report of this ilk that I’ve seen that acknowledges the fact that, contrary to those spurious ‘5-6 hours’ claims made by other surveys of this type, kids are online literally all of the time; they cannot conceive of an instance in their waking life when they are not able to access the web and associated tools. Which is obviously true of all of us, but I did get an honest little futureweird frisson from reading that.
  • The Hope Page: I am slightly amazed that I haven’t seen this done before, not least given we’re a whole year or so away from the boom in ‘use your spare processing power to mine crypto!’ scams. Anyway, this is an excellent, simple idea by UNICEF Australia – give the site access to your CPU and it will start doing some low-key Bitcoin (or whatever) mining, with the proceeds going to the charity. Simple, clever, easy to participate in, this is a lovely execution.
  • The Jurassic Box: This links to a writeup of a US stunt for the latest Jurassic Park film (SPOILER: THE DINOSAURS ARE MORE DANGEROUS THAN FOOLISH, HUBRISTIC MAN IMAGINED!) which isn’t itself that interesting – large box with film logo on it driven around LA is about the extent of it, frankly – but the ‘Ask Alexa’ call to action is an interesting idea and the sort of thing which you can probably do some fun and moderately creative stuff with, should you be so inclined to rip it off.
  • Generate Your Own Bullsh1t Accenture Slogan: Riffing on Accenture’s jaw-droppingly bad ad campaign around the POWER OF AI (which if you haven’t encountered it yet really is spectacular – read the transcript of its ad here for the full effect), this little site autogenerates its own versions of the ad’s appalling slogans (COULD AI MAKE CRUISE SHIPS CLAIRVOYANT???? COULD IT??? ARE YOU FCUKING MAD??? WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN???) for lulz. I just got “Can Google Duplex make a dog avuncular?”, which has cheered me up no end.
  • Women Cannes: Finally this week, a move to acknowledge the often…unequal gender power dynamics in adland at this year’s annual festival of egos, cocaine and rose on the Croisette. Women Cannes is asking female attendees at this year’s Festival to echo the #timesup campaign by wearing black to highlight the industry’s own burden of sexism, and is also inviting people to nominate women in the industry who deserve, but do not necessarily receive, recognition. A good idea, and, should you be planning on heading off to spend other people’s money in the South of France in a few weeks’ time, something that is worth supporting.

lindsay bottos

By Lindsay Bottos

NEXT, HOUSEY VIBES FROM DJ PAULETTE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE IN THE PUBLIC EYE IS SECRETLY A DREADFUL RACIST, PT.1:

  • Gif Cube: Gifs! We all LOVE gifs! What could be better than a gif, all looping and sassy, infinitely spinning in an idle browser tab, FOREVER? Nothing! Except, perhaps, that same gif, printed onto a cube of hollow sandstone and sitting in ACTUAL PHYSICAL SPACE before you! I have absolutely no idea whatsoever what the point of this is – to be clear, this is taking an innately kinetic form of media and  transposing it onto an inanimate object to no discernible end whatsoever – but if you’d like to have a permanent reminder of your favourite reaction gif then WOW are you in luck here.

  • The Longest Poem In The World: This very much has the look and feel of a site that has existed forever, but I’ve never seen it before and as such I’m going to claim that it only blinked into existence recently rather than admitting that there may be inadequacies in my all-seeing web panopticon. The Longest Poem In The World pulls tweets from the ether and arranges them into a rhyming poem, with no thought to anything other than the rhyme scheme. As wonderfully, beautifully, poetically nonsensical as you’d imagine – you might think it will just throw up rubbish, and you’d largely be right, but then you get juxtapositions like “I want a truck so bad ” / “So all my friends left and now I’m sad” and, well, are you telling me there isn’t a HIGHER POWER behind this sort of beauty?
  • Mix: Do you remember StumbleUpon? It was a very web2.0-type site, a bit like Digg or pre-Reddit Reddit, which effectively sought to work as a content discovery and recommendation engine and was basically killed by social media. Except it didn’t die – it’s limped on beyond what I would have expected its natural lifespan to be, and is now pivoting to become Mix. Mix is designed to surface content based on what you tell it you like – like a million and one recommendation engines before it, it promises much but the experience is a fundamentally empty one, imho. The problem I have with these things is that the recommendations are never leftfield or interesting enough – it all feels very Fiat 500, if you know what I mean, the curatorial equivalent of the ‘Hot New Stuff!’ tab on an MSN homepage or similar. Contrast the sort of thing you get served from this with the sort of stuff you’ll find by lurking a few popular subReddits around a topic of interest, for example, and you quickly see that algocuration is still a little way from being any good. Although, er, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
  • The Queer Comics Database: An excellent resource which lets you discover comicbook series based on their representation of LGBTx characters – you can search by queer representation, subject matter, etc, and there’s a HUGE wealth of titles in here, many of which are webcomics which can be read online. Regardless of your sexuality or interest in queer issues, this is a great way of finding new comics to read.
  • Flopstarter: Crap Kickstarter ideas – all fake, but beautifully-imagined and wonderfully dystopian and Black Mirror-ish. I particularly like the trust app, which automatically sends a copy of every message you send on your phone to your partner, and the ‘Natural Death Beef – made from cows who have just died in their sleep’, but you will find your own favourites.
  • In The Eyes Of The Animal: Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mosquito? No, I don’t imagine you have – WHY NOT?? In The Eyes Of The Animal is a VR experience which seeks to rectify your appalling paucity of imagination by letting you step into the…er…eyes of a selection of animals, including a frog, a mosquito, a dragonfly and an owl. It’s…not quite as immersively amazing as you might hope – certainly not when experienced onscreen, at least – although I imagine it’s more effective when you do the whole VR helmet thing; I am hugely disappointed that the mosquito experience doesn’t involve the insertion of a virtual proboscis into some plump, fresh epidermis, though.
  • Recursive Recipes: This is SO CLEVER! Recursive Recipes is a recipe site which alters the recipe guidelines based on the amount of time you tell it you have at your disposal – the more time you tell it you have, the more of the recipe’s individual steps it will suggest you take; the less time, the more it will suggest timesaving measures. What’s WONDERFUL about this is the way it does all this on the fly – the coding is lovely – and the way it will, if you tell it you have a LOT of time, take you all the way back to milling flour or raising a cow for milk. Really, really smart and impressively-made; I am slightly in awe, and would like all recipe sites to work like this from hereon in, please.
  • The Jack Torrance Trip: Ooh, I love me an IMMERSIVE DIGITAL NARRATIVE EXPERIENCE. The Jack Torrance Trip is a new project by artistic duo The Kissinger Twins, and the blurb is as follows: “The moon landing is one of the greatest milestones in human history. What if it wasn’t real? Meet Jack Torrance, the man who made it all happen. @jacktorrancetrip, one of the most complex interactive storytelling experiences on Instagram, tells his story. Follow his adventure to the dark side of politics and manipulation and learn how surveillance technologies have changed since 1969.” I don’t want to tell you too much more about it – get on Insta and have a delve, this is really very nicely made indeed (or read more about it elsewhere on Imperica).  
  • Molecularis: This only has 11 hours left on Kickstarter so you’ll have to hurry if you want to get in at the crowdfunding stage – Molecularis is a supremely clever update to the traditional flipbook animation, which basically contains 6 different animations within it, accessed by flipping the pages in slightly different ways, all of which can be coloured in by YOU, the owner, and which will let you create some beautiful and psychedelic animated…things as a result. Very clever, very cool and if you’re an artistic, doodly-type person then the sort of thing I imagine you will find very satisfying indeed (I can barely colour inbetween the lines, so won’t be investing).
  • ASCII Tattoos: Honestly, these are SPECTACULAR. I can only imagine how long these take, but the work – by Andreas Vrontis of Limassol in Cyprus, in case you’re after one for yourself – is truly superb. The taste of some of the models is…questionable (WHY DO YOU HAVE ANGELINA JOLIE’S ASCII FACE ON YOUR THIGH, FACELESS CYPRIOT???), but there’s no doubting the skill on display here.
  • Routeshuffle: Do you jog? Do you strap on a pair of trainers a few times a week and haul your weary carcass around London’s grey and fetid streets, hopping gingerly between chicken carcasses, nitrous ampoules and the slumped bodies of the homeless? Do you think it will save you, that it will stave off death? IT WILL NOT. Still, if you are a jogger and want some assistance in varying your chosen route then this site is a godsend; tell it where you’re starting from, tell it how far you want to go, and it will churn out a new randomised route each time; clever, useful, and a nice way of breaking your routine whilst still, er, adhering to your routine.
  • Have I Been Sold: Check whether your email address is on any known lists that have been flogged. Not that you’ll be able to do anything about it if it is, of course, but it might be nice to know why you’re getting all the Viagra spam.
  • Neon AR: This is a version of the future. Probably not the future, but certainly a future. Neon is an AR app which effectively works in a similar way to the Snapchat Map, except it shows you where your friends are as an AR overlay – look at the world through your camera lens and it will superimpose your friends’ avatars onto your view, showing where they are relative to you. The app sells this as a solution to finding people at festivals, etc, which makes sense, but the obviously stalky side of this is hard to overlook. You’d hope that there’s some fairly robust two-sided opt-in consent built in, but WHO KNOWS?
  • General Public: I have to say, I didn’t have Portia de Rossi on my list of ‘Hollywood famouses with a tech business’, but here she is going full Will.I.Am with this side project, which seemingly has no lesser aim than to basically ruin art forever. OK, fine, that’s a touch hyperbolic, and it’s certainly not how Ms de Rossi couches it, but really, that’s exactly what it is. To quote the blurb, “Unlike the current method of printing, which is merely a flat poster version of a painting, our textured prints are almost identical to the original with all the texture and articulation created by the artist.I like to think of the originals like sculpture molds, and that the prints are as valuable as the original painting. A SYNOGRAPH ™ like a photograph, allows the artist to create multiple works from the original, thereby taking great paintings out of galleries and making them available to the GENERAL PUBLIC.” So, to be clear, this is technology which 3d prints reproductions of works in potentially-infinite quantities, in a manner close-to-indistinguishable from the original – WHERE IS THE SOUL, PORTIA DE ROSSI? WHERE IS THE ARTISTRY, THE BEAUTY, THE TRUTH??? Although, fine, if it means I can get myself a reasonable Schiele knockoff for a few hundred quid then I’m IN.
  • Black Messiah: Black Messiah is a forthcoming French(?) comic book featuring a lead character who’s a former male escort and the head of Neo Paris’ trendiest ad agency (so FRENCH!) – this website offers a slightly oblique introduction to the character and the setting, and whilst light on actual content I found the visual style to be rather arresting.
  • The Emoji Tarot Bot: One-man bot factory Rob Manuel’s latest creation is this – a Twitter bot which will deal you a tarot card on request, to answer any knotty life questions you may have and to help guide you through the labyrinthine horror that is existence. No guarantee that you’ll find any sort of spiritual guidance from this, but, well, you probably won’t find any anywhere else either, and at least this bot has jokes.
  • The Politics of Advertising: An Insta feed sharing cartoons about adland. Your appreciation of this will vary in direct proportion to how much you relate to gags about how undignified it is to make banner ads, or laugh lines like “Fine, the campaign was sht but the case study will clean up at Cannes”. I imagine rather a lot of you will enjoy it.
  • Augenblick: Silly, brilliant tech art project which uses a face-mounted camera and sensors to capture those images you miss when you blink. “Blinking is a highly invasive mechanism for our eyesight. Everyday we close our eyes thousands of times without noticing it. Our mind manages to never let us wonder what exactly happens in the moments that we miss. Augenblick catches those exact forgotten moments and puts them in a whole new light.” There’s something wonderfully creepy – and hugely NOW – about this idea of never wanting to miss a single thing ever again; I honestly think this could be a real, saleable product with a few tweaks.
  • Screenspace: A potentially hugely useful tool for those of you developing mobile software – Screenspace offers you an off-the-shelf means to create those nice, shiny CGI videos of phones showing off software that you see on app launch websites, requiring little-to-know animation skills to create something reasonably impressive. If you don’t have an app to launch, you could still amuse yourself by using this to create increasingly elaborate animations telling your colleagues to fcuk off. That’s what I’m going to do once I’ve finished writing this, at least (I’m really not).
  • All of the 80s Tech Company Logos: I don’t really know why this exists, but, well, here we are. As a bonus, this site presents them as an infinitely rolling screen saver should you want to stare catatonically at a selection of brand logos floating past your eyeballs for the next few hours.

brian macdonald

By Brian Mcdonald

HERE, HAVE A TECHNO MIX BY NATY SERES – ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STARTING TO WONDER WHETHER ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE IN THE PUBLIC EYE IS SECRETLY A DREADFUL RACIST, PT.2:

  • Art Deck: Another Kickstarter project which doesn’t make me want to kick things – is crowdfunding getting better? No, of course it isn’t, it’s still awful. Still, this specific idea is a wonderful one – it’s been funded after just a few days, and it’s still got a month to go so I’d imagine you’ll get loads of nice extras and stuff if you bung them a few quid. Art Deck is, as the name suggests, a deck of cards with drawing prompts on them; played with friends, they help create a wonderful-sounding, collaborative/competitive game of…well, no idea really, but it sounds like an odd combination of random doodling, Pictionary and Exquisite Corpse, and the sort of thing that if you have a lovely, friendly, idealised young family of the sort which I secretly imagine exists only in advertising, would be a BRILLIANT way of spending an hour playing together. Exactly the sort of thing which will end up in the RANDOM CREATIVE DRAWER of every single agency in London, but don’t let that put you off.
  • Yore Computer: In the time since writing about Tarot Bot, Rob’s just made ANOTHER one – this Tweets random pages from old computing magazine, which means that its audience is likely to be slightly more limited than some of his other work. Still, if you’re a middle-aged (probably) man then you might find this a comforting shot of nostalgia in your feed.
  • Twitter Screenshots: A VERY SPECIFIC Chrome extension which will add a little screenshot button to Tweets viewed on Twitter dot com, which will enable you to grab a nicely-cropped cap of any individual tweet you want with one click. Particularly useful to those of who like to slag people off on the platform by posting screengrabs of individual tweets rather than having the balls to address people directly (wow, I had no idea that that annoyed me so much until I started typing that sentence – WHO KNEW?).
  • Buff Cat: The owner of this Twitter handle once met a very buff cat. This feed is dedicated to it. It is an EXCELLENT cat, although almost certainly not as good as YOURS.
  • The Fading Battlefields of WW1: A wonderful collection of photographs of World War 1 battlefields as the scars of war fade; these are beautiful.
  • The Video Game History Foundation: It obviously makes total sense that as games mature as a medium / artform so there needs to be an effort to catalogue and assess and taxonomise and offer a critical reflection on their significance, but at the same time it feels REALLY silly thinking of a manual for Sonic 2 being in a museum somewhere. “The heart of the Foundation is its digital library, an online repository of artifacts related to the history of video games and video game culture. The ultimate goal is to create a searchable, organized, always-online archive of verified, high-quality material that is accessible to researchers and historians as a public education resource.” – if you’re interested in games at all in any way, this is a hugely diverting archive of really interesting stuff.
  • Ratio Bot: A bot sharing Tweets with a BAD RATIO. There’s an American skew to many of these, meaning you won’t necessarily understand why they’re problematic, but you’ll get enough of them to make a follow worthwhile.
  • Hmmm: Thanks Ed for drawing this to my attention – Hmmm is my new favourite subReddit, with a very simple premise. “hmmms are textless images that make you think about the context, do a double take, invoke a deeper meaning, or just leave you thinking about how or why they exist” – you just need to click through here and enjoy them.
  • UE Voxel: A Twitter feed of gorgeous, glorious little voxel art pieces. Honestly, I could lose myself in this style of work for days.
  • Chartico: A staggeringly banal but surprisingly useful little webtool which lets you quickly and easily make bar charts. Which, I appreciate, sounds incredibly dull (and it is, fine), but if you’ve ever struggled to make the fcuking axes work properly on an Excel chart then you’ll appreciate the gentle wonder of this (which really is hugely useful, I promise).
  • Become a Novelist: So this is seemingly legit, although it does look a bit too good to be true. De Montford Literature (not, to the best of my knowledge, anything to do with the University – no, it’s not, it’s an offshoot of a venture fund, which is even more baffling) is offering a limited number of salaried positions to people who want to write a book – they will literally pay you to churn out a novel. “De Montfort Literature is offering between 5 and 10 (and later up to 100) places to successful applicants, who will be paid a salary, and later a bonus as a percentage of the revenues from novels published, in return for (the authors) writing their novels.We will provide as much support as you need to be successful in your career. That includes providing professional advice and support from experienced mentors and editors.” There’s a backstory to this – the fund seems to be betting that it can (algorithmically?) determine which novels and authors have the greatest likelihood of commercial success and, I presume, would expect to make returns on its investments on this basis – and I have no guarantees that this isn’t a dark front for something hugely sinister, but, well, WHO CARES??? £24k to write a book! FREE MONEY!!
  • The Forever 21 Slogan Generator: Can someone make one of these for the current generation of adland sloganwriters who keep spaffing out double-figure-IQ tripe like ‘Made with Great’ or ‘Be More Awesome’, please? Thanks. In the meantime, though, this does a reasonable job of skewering a particularly ‘now’ type of copy.
  • Space Type: You didn’t know, did you, when you woke up this morning, that what would give you the most pleasure today would be a small site which lets you create odd little planetoid graphics with orbiting words around it? No, you didn’t, and yet here we are. That was, even by my low standards, a truly appalling description – check out the Insta account associated with this for a better idea of what you can do with this surprisingly awesome design toy.
  • From Scraps: Lydia Ricci makes small sculptures out of scrap materials – paper and card and tape and glue and pencil shavings and that sort of jazz. They are gorgeous – there’s something beautifully fragile and intricate about the style of all these pieces.
  • Local Lingual: A WONDERFUL project, seeking to map different accents and languages across the world. Click on any country, click again, and listen to different voices from different regions; just clicking around the UK this morning has made me SO HAPPY – I’ve just been listening to some kid say “I’m Matty from Wiltshire” on repeat, and by God it’s a Proustian time capsule for me. You can upload your own clips or just listen to those added by others; oh God, I just fell into a hole of comparing Roman and Venetian accents, I’m going to have to move on or I’ll never finish this bastard thing this week. Enjoy this, it’s SUPERB.
  • Animated Knots: Knots, er, animated. Spend the rest of the day using the techniques here outlined to secure a variety of your colleagues’ personal belongings to their chair without them noticing.
  • Collections: A really useful idea, this app, allowing you to sort, annotate, group and tag photos on your phone so as to make them less of a mess than they appear in your camera roll. Useful for creative types, but also for those of you who are finding it increasingly onerous to remember where you saved that sexy clip of your boyfriend ejaculating from all those months ago.
  • Twitter Poems by Max Sparber: Max Sparber is a journalist and author. Every day (seemingly) since February, he’s been posting a poem on Twitter – this is a collection of them. These are by turns funny, angry, glib and sharp, but they’re all rather excellent – you will enjoy, I promise.
  • Kudu Voodoo: “Matt”, I thought to myself this week whilst spelunking for links, “Matt, it’s been TOO LONG since you featured an online store with a terrifyingly diverse selection of synthetic monster cock dildos”. And indeed, I was forced to admit it was true – thank Christ, then, for my discovery of Kudu Voodoo, the best place to buy a 13” silicon dragon dong since Bad Dragon. This is, obviously, sort-of NSFW, although tbh there is very little sexy (to my mind, at least) about such terrifying toys as “Asethia the Whatsamacallit” (no, really) – with that spirit in mind, I strongly encourage you to click through to the full inventory and marvel at the rich, varied tapestry of human sexuality.  
  • Card Games: All of the card games! Playable online! And some other things too!
  • Batlight: Finally in the ‘miscellania’ selection this week, Batlight is an excellent little infinite-runner-type game which will have you cursing roundly at your screen within seconds, but will keep you cursing for hours – it really is VERY very good indeed. Enjoy.

tim easley

By Tim Easley

FINALLY IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, A SUMMERY CLASSIC BY GROOVE ARMADA FROM WAY BACK IN 2014!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

  • Broken Chains: Not actually a Tumblr! Still, this is a wonderful site – it’s a celebration of the last outposts of former chain restaurants in the US, and each post is a potted history of the chain and the individual restaurant in question, along with a review of the food as it is now – whether or not you have any familiarity with US food chains (a subject I’m inexplicably fascinated by), this is a wonderful piece of cultural and social and culinary history.

  • World of Corgi: O RUFF! O RUFF! O RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF!
  • Photographs Rendered in Playdoh: None more Ronseal than this Tumblr; the skill on display by the artist, Eleanor Macnair, is astonishing, and she takes commissions should you wish to have one of your photos immortalised in putty for perpetuity.

 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • The Tower: Andrew O’Hagen’s kilometric look back at Grenfell one year on. This is a very dense, very long, very well-written, tonally questionable piece – the line about Stormzy which you might have seen quoted online over the past few days is such an odd and misjudged take, for example, and there are a lot of people in here from the Council who seem to get a rather easier pass than you might have expected, though of course we must remember that the enquiry is only just getting started – and one which won’t scratch your itch for justice or resolution in any way at all; it’s an oddly weary piece of writing in may respects, which I suppose is oddly apt as we look back twelve months and see how far we haven’t moved.

  • Volume 5: The latest short story by a collective who call themselves Upsidedown Clown, who if you sign up to their mailing list will send you a new piece of original short fiction every month or so. I’ve been subscribed for a year or so now, and the writing is consistently superb – the authors and the subjects and the tone and the style will change, but the stories have to date all been excellent. The latest, Volume 5, is gently supernatural and romantic and sad and just wonderful.
  • Austerity Britain: The New York Times’ view of AUSTERITY BRITAIN, this article from last weekend’s caused its fair share of controversy, not least due to some reporting…inaccuracies about the state of the town of Prescot which, it turns out, is not quite as miserably fcuked as the article makes out. It’s an odd one, this – despite the fact that I personally fundamentally agree with its premise, to whit that the austerity project has resulted in large swathes of the country being fcuked beyond all hope, the tone of it is hyperbolic and frantic and just a bit wrong, really. Still, it’s always interesting to see us as we’re seen from the outside (we look fat, and pasty, and scared, it seems).
  • The Psychology of Japanese Train Stations: All of you working in advermarketingpr and associated industries will doubtless have become sick of hearing anecdotal reference to the Number 10 ‘Nudge Unit’ in recent years, and talk of how simple system changes can effect mass-scale behavioural change; this is a nice antidote to that, profiling the frankly INCREDIBLE ways in which Japanese train stations manipulate passengers in a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. We are AMATEURS at this stuff, I tell you.
  • The Trouble With Philanthropic Billionaires: SUCH a Guardian headline, this one. Obviously billionaires being philanthropic is better than them not being philanthropic, but you know what’s even better than that? That’s right – their participation in a rigorously-enforced system of progressive taxation and subsequent government redistribution of those funds! Or at least that’s what pinko lefties like the author of this piece (and, er, me) want you to believe. This is a decent look at some of the negative side effects of the current trend, visible in particular in the US, for the very, very rich to decide that they know better than the state when it comes to the best way to dispose of lots of money to large-scale benefit (Narrator: They didn’t).
  • Insomnia: A truly gorgeous essay by A L Kennedy, from Granta magazine a few years back. Dedicated to all of the Curios readers who find themselves linkflitting at 3am.
  • The Ethics of Icelandic Fiction: Fascinating look at the practical ethics of writing fiction from life in a country in which everyone is basically related to everyone else, and everyone knows everyone. How do you write thinly-veiled fictional versions of people when, well, literally EVERYONE in the country will know exactly who you’re talking about within a matter of hours? Question for anyone Icelandic who happens to be reading this – do subTweets become a lot harder on VikingTwitter?
  • The Surprising History and Future of Fingerprints: There are several absolutely astonishing facts in this piece, but the absolute best one is that our fingerprints (so the best current theory goes, at least) are formed by the pressure of our fingertips on the inside of the womb during pregnancy. Look at your fingertips – THOSE SHAPES WERE MADE BY THE INSIDE OF YOUR MUM. I tell you, I am SHOOK by this – isn’t nature just bafflingly mental, eh?
  • The Enduring Mythology of the Whizzkid: Almost a companion piece to the Guardian one on billionaires, this discusses why in most cases significant change in large institutions such as Government is most often driven not by shiny, flashy novelty, but instead by deeply boring, small, incremental changes, and how our obsession with the shiny flashy novelty stuff is probably hampering our ability to actually get things done.
  • How Anna Delvey Tricked New York: This is a follow-up of sorts to an article I included in Curios earlier in the year (this one, if you recall) which described how faux-socialite Anna Delvey managed to scam her way into New York’s soignee social scene; this latest one presents a FAR more detailed account of exactly how easy it is to persuade people that you’re a rich, Eurotrash asshole when you go around behaving exactly like a rich, Eurotrash asshole. As someone funnier than me pointed out on Twitter, the film version of this is THE perfect Lindsay Lohan comeback vehicle.
  • What It’s Like When The Musk Mob Is After You: It is, seemingly, almost impossible to be rich and famous and lauded and successful and not a total prick in 2018. It’s not like Musk’s not got previous, but the past seven days, in which he’s slagged off the fourth estate for not being sufficiently hagiographic in its portrayal of him and his company, blithely dismissed a female scientist’s entire field as ‘bs’, written some pretty dogwhistley stuff about THE PEOPLE WHO RUN THE MEDIA and then failed to condemn the toxic bilge-flood of predictable anti-semitism which followed, and encouraged some not insignificant dogpiling, has been a doozy even by his standards. This piece explains what it’s like to be a journalist onto whom Musk sicks the mob – let’s be very clear here, that, regardless of what you might think of Musk, Tesla or the media, acting in a way that encourages your fans and followers to jump on someone online is a spectacularly cnuty thing for anyone to do, and failing to take steps to prevent or mitigate that happening makes you a prick.  Elon Musk is a prick.
  • The History of the Treadmill: This is possibly my favourite new fact of the week – treadmills were originally invented as a punishment for prisoners in 19th century jails, designed to keep them occupied and reduce criminality through good, clean, healthy exercise. Didn’t work, obviously, but this excerpt gives you a flavour of the wonderful things you’ll learn by clicking the link: “But, over time, the device’s purported ability to cure criminality through sweat—never mind the actual work output—was called into question. For instance, a short article called “Prison Electricity” in an 1882 edition of Scientific American called for a more productive approach to treadmilling. “The convicts hated it, and no useful results came of it,” the author writes. The suggestion was for “attaching dynamoelectric machines to the cranks” to “store electrically the energy developed.” It argued that prisons could sell energy, and thus pay for their own upkeep.” Wonderful – send to everyone you know who ‘enjoys’ the gym.
  • Policing GTAV: Weird videogame subcultures are the BEST subcultures. The modding community in GTAV is a varied one, and this piece profiles one of the most charming corners of it – players who’ve spent countless hours modding in vehicles and scenery to allow them to replicate London’s roads, so that they can then spend their time pretending to be British traffic police in-game. You know the stereotype of GTA, right? Killing hookers, running over pedestrians, slightly crap satire, ultra violence? Yeah, well these people are more about the parking infractions and the slow, orderly chasing down of pavement cyclists. God I love people sometimes (mainly when they’re behind computer screens and FAR AWAY, but still).
  • Whatever Happened To Sundried Tomatoes: Remembering the most 1990s of food fads. Is it time for them to come back? I used to make toasties with sun-dried tomatoes at university, which gives you an idea of what an unsufferable ponce I was even then (and of the fact that I was old enough to get a full grant to Uni, as otherwise like fcuk would I have been able to afford them).
  • What Happened In Vegas: Sad, fascinating look at what happened in the aftermath of last year’s shooting in Vegas – you don’t often get told what happens once the cameras move on and the news trucks depart, but this gives a sense of perspective as to how the event played out over the long-term. It’s also interesting as an indicator of the extent to which Parkland bucked the trend – the speed at which the narrative moves on in most other mass-shooting cases is startling when you stop to consider it.
  • Procrastibaking: I am including this article solely so those of you working in planning / trends analysis can steal it as a ‘thing’. You’re welcome.
  • Growing Up With Steve Miller: I’m guessing that, like me and probably most other English people, the only Steve Miller song you know is The Joker (WHY DO THEY CALL YOU MAURICE???); regardless, you don’t need to know anything about Miller to enjoy this honestly heartwarming story about how he took the author under his musical wing when he was in his early teens, and continued to mentor him, gently, even when the prospect of a career in music had faded. This is honestly lovely, and made me very much want to take someone under my wing in this way – then, though, I realised that the only guidance I could possibly offer was ‘finding links’ and that, on balance, no kid needs that.
  • Lily Allen: Allen’s on the comeback trail and the interviews are coming reasonably thick and fast – this one, in Vulture, is a good one, and worth a read. Allen always gives good chat – that’s her ‘thing’, right, all gob and candour? – but she’s also a genuinely interesting figure, and reading interviews with her always takes me back a decade or so to a hot office in Camden where there was always a bag of coke in the breadbin. Ah, memories *pours out a 40 to the IG crew*
  • Porn and Dating and Love: A short, reflective piece by Megan Nolan, on how porn and Tinder are creating a hookup culture devoid of sexual mystery and spontaneity. This is entirely outwith my area of expertise – I have never internet dated, never Tindered, and I barely consume bongo (no, honest! Gah, that’s absolutely one of those things which really doesn’t look true written down) – but Nolan’s writing is as lovely as ever, and her observations of about the tickbox eroticism of the post-redtube era are sadly beautiful.
  • On Roseanne and Political Correctness: Read this, digest it, enjoy it, remember it, and then quote it verbatim at anyone stupid and dreadful enough to complain about the scourge of political correctness. The closing sentence says it all, but, really, the whole piece is superb: “Canceling “Roseanne” is not society regulating “mean” speech; it is us regulating our collective morality, so that we don’t atrophy into a moral vacuum. It is saying no, because we are more than animals.”
  • The Moment Your Life Crashes and Burns: Jill Gallagher writes about a car accident and a divorce and a million and one other things besides.
  • Dirtbag Sappho: I don’t normally include poetry in here, but this, to me, is exceptional. I have no idea who it’s by – the site it’s on is annoyingly vague about authorial identity, but there’s LOADS more excellent stuff on there so have a delve and enjoy.This verse has SO many lines I wish I’d written it’s actually making me angry.
  • Three Lesbian Sex Positions: Finally this week, a short essay which really isn’t about lesbian sex at all (sorry to disappoint), but is one of the warmest pieces of writing about being in love that I’ve read all year. Enjoy it slowly.

mandy barker

By Mandy Barker

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

  1. We kick off this week with ‘The World’s Best Kisser’ by Darwin Deez, which may be the most archly smart video I’ve seen in an age. Code monkeys, you will LOVE this:

 

2) Underworld and Iggy Pop. Tells you all you need to know, really – this is storytelling Iggy, which is my favourite of all the Iggys:

 

3) This is Icepeak – I think they are Russian, and there’s something sort of weirdly Die Antwoord-ish about them (I mean, they are nothing like Die Antwoord, but see if you get what I mean). This is really unsettling and darkfuturedystopiansnowboundweird, and I rather like it:

 

4) This is new, from the twisted animator behind Cool 3d World – it’s for Adult Swim, and it’s called ‘Spurt’, and it’s horrid:

 

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! A 1Xtra Studio 82 set, featuring Curios favourites Manga and Big Zuu, and Eyez who I’ve not featured on here before but who I’m impressed by on this showing. Takes a while to get going, but the skill here in switching beats and flows is amazing and, honestly, the final 3 minutes where they go over the d’n’b beat is incredible (just look at Manga’s face):

 

6) The only Childish Gambino cover I’ve seen or heard of that doesn’t completely miss the point of the original, this is Falz with ‘This Is Nigeria’:

 

7) Finally this week, an animation made in paper cut outs and a one-take mobile phone shot. This is SO INCREDIBLY GOOD, I want this kid to become famous so please share far and wide. ENJOY! HAPPY FRIDAY! HAVE LOVELY WEEKENDS! I HOPE THAT THE WEATHER IS NICE AND THAT YOU GET TO DO THE THINGS YOU LOVE BEST AND THAT YOU ARE AS FREE FROM PAIN AND TORMENT AS IT IS POSSIBLE TO BE IN THIS, THE MOST BEKNIGHTED OF TIMELINES, TAKE CARE, I LOVE YOU, BYEBYE!

 

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Webcurios 11/05/18

Reading Time: 30 minutes

I went to the seaside last weekend. It was LOVELY, apart from the racist graffiti (residents of Broadstairs – you’re right, it is OK to be white, and literally NOONE is attempting to tell you otherwise! I promise! Also, looking around, I’m not 100% convinced that it’s you who need to worry about being unwelcome) and the seemingly endless seas of undulating pinked flesh peeking between poorly-inked expanses of stretched tattoo. Oh England, how you sparkle in the sunshine! We’re…we’re a really ugly people, aren’t we?

Anyway, said long weekend meant that, I tell you, it was a STRUGGLE to drag together enough quality content for this week’s newsletter; fortunately though, the web has once again provided, meaning I get to present you with a metaphorical tray laden with equally metaphorical digital delicacies – look at my happy, hopeful countenance as I hold up my findings for you to peruse and appreciate! You couldn’t not read Web Curios, could you? It would be like kicking a spaniel in the face – you’re not that sort of person. I know you’re not. So, come on, get stuck in, there’s 8,000 words and several hundred links to get through, and one of us wants to get to the pub sooner rather than later. INGEST MY LINKSOUP! TAKE ME INSIDE YOU! THIS IS WEB CURIOS!

[Oh, and in a slight departure from the norm – sorry – I am also going to take this opportunity to plug the forthcoming London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), which starts in a few weeks’ time and with which I am involved to a tiny degree. The lineup is honestly amazing, takes place at venues across the city, and features performers and playwrites from all over the world, performing pieces that have never been shown in London – do take a look. If nothing else, you really ought to check out the thing with the pigeons, which will be MENTAL]  

robin de puy

By Robin De Puy 

LET’S KICK THINGS OFF WITH ANOTHER LOVELY EPISODE OF ‘INTERNATIONAL AIRSPACE’, THE ECLECTIC AND WONDERFUL LONDON FIELDS RADIO SHOW!

THE SECTION WHICH VERY MUCH ENJOYED THE GOOGLE PEOPLE’S ABILITY TO KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE WHILST BASICALLY SAYING “ALL THIS TECH WE’VE BEEN PEDDLING’S A BIT ISOLATING, ISN’T IT? HERE’S SOME MORE TECH WE’VE INVENTED TO SOLVE THIS; OH AND BY THE WAY BY USING IT YOU’LL BE POWERING THE FUTURE AI SUPERBRAIN WHICH WILL ONE DAY TAKE OVER THE WORLD, BUT DON’T WORRY ABOUT THAT NOW”:

  • A List Of All The Google Announcements: Well, at least the day one announcements; they are ALL HERE. It’s mostly AI stuff, in the main, and not that much of relevance to advermarketingpr drones at this stage; you’ll have seen and heard the spectacular Duplex (and if you haven’t listened to the demo you really ought to; it’s spectacular and incredibly creepy),  but there’s also an update to Maps which introduces a whole load of new features to direct you to exactly the same places as everyone else (the future market for intensely-curated off-grid experiences is going to boom – one of the perks of being very rich in the next 50 years is going to be not having to rub shoulders with the algorithmically-led underclasses, like now but even moreso), and a bunch of AI photoretouching stuff. My FAVOURITE bit, though, is the fabulously disingenuous Google Wellbeing project – a raft of updates to Android OS and YT and other bits and bobs, all designed to stop us wasting so much of our PRECIOUS LIVES as a result of technology…through the use of more technology! Leaving aside that small point, or indeed the irony of a company whose billions and business model are built on people spending as much time as possible online telling people to, er, spend less time online, the very SMARTEST bit of all this is that Google’s new tools to help you stare at your phone less are ALSO, coincidentally, tools which help it keep its massive AI projects developing at superspeed and superscale. As our search data and browsing habits become less financially important than what we can do to train neural nets and hasten the development of AI-led product suites, so Google gently, almost imperceptibly, begins to nudge us in the direction of just that, as though we were just some sort of 7billion-strong horde of bovine plodders, waiting to be manipulated into action by profit-motivated supercorporations (as IF!). You sort of have to admire them, really. Sort of.
  • Google’s Doing Ad Transparency Too!: These are ALL THE RAGE (and, er, not currently doing anything worthwhile, if the current Irish furore is anything to go by), and this is Google’s stab at protecting THE INTEGRITY OF DEMOCRACY – to whit: “We’ll now require additional verification for anyone who wants to purchase an election ad on Google in the U.S. and require that advertisers confirm they are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, as required by law. That means advertisers will have to provide a government-issued ID and other key information. To help people better understand who is paying for an election ad, we’re also requiring that ads incorporate a clear disclosure of who is paying for it…This summer, we’ll also release a new Transparency Report specifically focused on election ads. This Report will describe who ​is ​buying ​election-related ​ads ​on ​our ​platforms ​and ​how ​much ​money ​is being spent. We’re also building a searchable library for election ads, where anyone can find election ads purchased on Google and who paid for them.”
  • Useful New Tools For Facebook Lives: If you’re a large-scale publisher – say, the BBC or similar – the inability to cross-post Lives to multiple owned Pages simultaneously has long been a right pain. NO LONGER! There’s some other stuff in here too but it’s too technical for me to care about and so, as if by magic, I don’t!
  • Facebook Launching Its Own Bitmoji Clone: I never really understood the appeal of Bitmoji as I am a funless husk of a man, but recently my friend Luke discovered them and now occasionally communicates via images of him dressed as a very gay unicorn and I’m slightly converted as a result. Anyway, Facebook is launching its own version at some point in the future and there’s probably going to be the opportunity to give them branded clothes or something, because OF COURSE THERE FCUKING IS.
  • Facebook Launches Political Ad Authorisation Process: This is a necessary step in the right direction; if I understand it correctly, any organisation wanting to advertise on national-level trigger issues (abortion, gun control, the environment, etc) will be required to undergo some degree of registration / approval from Facebook before being able to do so. Imperfect, fine, but if this leads to a situation which makes it easier to discover who’s behind which adverts – not just the Page name, but an actual, named individual or organisation – then it is A Good Thing.
  • Facebook Is Doing Something Blockchain-y: Hang on, maybe this means it’s not all utter rubbish peddled by chancers to the credulous! Although there’s no actual detail on exactly what they’ll be doing, so perhaps don’t ICO yourself just yet. Although speaking of ICOs, I would p1ss myself were Marty to suddenly pivot to blockchain.  
  • Better Messaging For Businesses on Instagram: “Starting today, businesses will have a better way to manage their messages. Now you’ll see important new customer messages in your main Direct inbox, instead of in the pending folder. You can also star and filter your conversations to come back to messages you want to follow up on. Additionally, in the coming weeks we’ll begin testing quick replies so that you can easily respond to common questions.” Good, isn’t it? ISN’T IT??? Ingrates.
  • You Will Apparently Soon Be Able To Add Music To Insta Stories: This will only make them worse, I can confidently predict.
  • Insta Stories Adds Emoji Slider Poll: Whilst this sort of boils my p1ss rather – I mean, emojis and a simple engagement-bait mechanic? Be still my throbbing spleen! – I reckon this is going to be HUGELY popular and overused by brands to the point of complete oversaturation within a matter of weeks; it’s a content unit for stories that let’s anyone insert a sliding scale poll, with SUPER HAPPY and SUPER NOT HAPPY emoji at either end, to let your braindead content-tappers inform you as to whether they feel (IDIOT’S FAVOURITE) CRYING WITH LAUGHTER or only SCEPTICAL HAND ON CHIN about, I don’t know, your latest abortion of a fast food meal deal or Kylie Jenner’s perineum or somesuch. DRIVE ENGAGEMENT BUILD LOYALTY DESTROY OUR ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING OTHER THAN TAP AND SWIPE LIKE THE PASSIVE, IDIOT MEDIA JUNKIES WE ALL ALREADY ARE!
  • A Massive List Of Useful Digital PR Tools: Worth a look and possibly a bookmark, this – a whole bunch of online tools and services, from planning to monitoring to analysis to editing…some are free and some are not (I would complain about this not being clear, but to complain about anything here seems cnutily churlish in the extreme in the face of  the fact that someone bothered to compile this at all, so I shan’t), but it’s a really useful resource and memory-jogger; there were several really useful things on here that I had totally forgotten about.
  • Nike React Runners: I look at this, and I see an advermarketingpr industry that has reached the very end when it comes to superficially interactive product websites. Seriously, take this – you click through, you choose from a few variables describing what Nike React trainers feel like (on which point, if I know what they feel like, these brand new shiny trainers, wouldn’t that imply that I already own some and might not be in the market for some more?), like maybe feathers or, er, basketballs; you then choose a running style that most closely matches yours; you then pick a colourway… And THEN, you lucky, lucky Nike fan, you get presented with…er…a slightly odd, jauntily-running avatar comprised of those elements you initially said the shoes felt like, running in the style you picked, in your colours of choice. You can name it! You can share it! WHY WOULD I BOTHER! It’s neither cool enough nor fun enough to bother with, and feels very much like an agency recycling an old idea for the bucketload of Nike cash being dangled at them to increase engagement with the brand or whatever. I mean, if you want to create a spastically-running…thing…made out of feathers and basketballs and call it ‘MONGO’ then this might be the missing piece in the otherwise-complete jigsaw of your happiness, but in that case I’d perhaps suggest you might have other issues that need looking at.
  • The Searchable GDPR Text: If you’re the sort of company likely to have BIG GDPR ISSUES and you’re only just getting round to thinking about it now then, well, AHAHAHAHAHAHA YOU POOR BASTARDS. Nonetheless, this is the text of the legislation, made all friendly and searchable and designed to let you easily search it for the bits that might apply to you; might be useful as you scramble to make sure that your professional and (I hope) hugely metaphorical arse is covered from all conceivable angles.
  • When The Internet Is Down: You may remember back in February I featured a magazine based on the same idea as this site, which was only viewable / readable when the device on which you were trying to access it was offline; you may also recall I suggested that KitKat rip it off any pay me (or, more fairly, Chris Bolin who’s the brains behind it) some royalties. They didn’t, but French agency BETC (whose work I’ve featured before this year, I think) did, in service of a French broadband provider Bouyges Telecom; it’s really nicely done, damn them, and a really nice plug for their client’s internet offering. Kudos to them, though less kudos for not crediting what was very clearly the original inspiration.

meo xian quiy

By Meo Xian Qui

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THE BRAND NEW(ISH) JON HOPKINS ALBUM ON SPOTIFY?

THE SECTION WHICH JUST DREW ALBANIA IN AN OFFICE EUROVISION SWEEPSTAKE BUT DOESN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE SONGS TO DETERMINE WHETHER THAT’S TWO QUID WASTED, PT.1:

  • Google Tour Creator: Another one in the seemingly endless series of WEBTOOLS IN THE MODERN WORLD which you will initially look at and think “oh, how cool!” and then, if you’re anything like me, then go on to remember all the various other companies that used to offer services like this and which will now go out of business because of Google. Although then you’ll probably remember that they were all a bit crap, and that this isn’t really enough to build an entire business on, and in fact maybe it’s all just BUSINESS DARWINISM and you ought to get on with describing exactly what it is that this thing does before you lose everyone just a few lines in STOP IT MATT. Ahem. Google Tour Creator is a neat GoogleToy which lets you create lightly interactive (effectively annotated) 360 panoramic views of anywhere you like, which will exist on  their own URL and can be embedded wherever you like online. There are some VERY tedious examples on the site, but you could theoretically do some quite nice stuff here (and, if not, you can undertake minor acts of corporate terrorism by hiding rude annotations in parts of the photo you don’t think anyone will look. DO IT!
  • The Ononeon: A website presenting headlines from the real world in the style of The Onion – all the news that, when read cold, sounds too preposterous to be true – but in fact is! Today’s “this would be funny were it not such a giddy combination of terrifying and depressing” smorgasbord includes gems such as “Republican who claims Holocaust was orchestrated by Gay Nazis wins enough support for Massachusetts Governor primary.” (TRUE STORY!) and “World of Warcraft Currency Is Now Worth 7 Times as Much as Venezuela’s Cash” (ALSO TRUE STORY!); is this website amusing? I don’t know, I’ll let you know when I stop gawping in horrified wonder at quite how odd everything is.
  • The Emoji Scavenger Hunt: Another Google toy! Open this on your phone and MARVEL as it fires up a game which presents you with a series of emoji and then asks you to find stuff with your phone’s camera which represents said emoji – when I tried it it asked me for computer monitors, mugs, that sort of thing, but I rather hope it occasionally throws in curveballs like aubergines and horses. Don’t, as ever with these things, think too hard about the reason this exists, which yet again is to train the Google AI Brain to better recognise stuff so as to better be able to rule the world in the future. Let’s be clear – this is a front for a very, very menial image recognition task that you’d pay
  • Art For Global Goals: This REALLY annoyed me, so I’m going to briefly share that annoyance with you. “After years of effort”, the website portentously intones on loading, “The United Nations agreed on 17 global goals for a better world by 2030”; you, the user, expect that maybe you’ll, I don’t know, go on to learn something about these global goals and how you might be able to help achieve them. BUT NO! Instead you’re taken to a SUPER-SHINY, almost fashion house-esque, site which is seemingly designed to showcase a series of paintings made by artchild Leon Löwentraut, each representing a different one of the aforementioned global goals. Now, I don’t doubt that the UN is better versed in the general improvement of global circumstances than I, and that Leon’s motives in collaborating on this are pure (though I also note that not all the proceeds from the sales of the works here referred to will go to charity, which, well), but there are things about this that really seem, well, just a bit stupid really. The UI gimmick is that users make ‘virtual brushstrokes’ on the site to unlock bits of content, and that the combined brushstrokes taken by all visitors to the site will be compiled into an artwork by Löwentraut on the project’s completion; the instruction to the user, though, to ‘Brush through and erase the 17 issues that lay at the heart of these goals’ is, well, nonsensical and pretty fcuking stupid. Is this a better idea than creating a website which actually, you know, told people about practical things they could do to help achieve the UN’s global goals? No, no it is not. Still, REALLY shiny website.
  • Fanbits: MORE BLOCKCHAIN! Fanbits is a weird concept which lets creators make collectible digital artworks or artefacts, in limited series, with this limited edition status ENCODED ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! (it sort of feels like I need the caps to capture THE BREATHLESS EXCITEMENT OF THE BLOCKCHAIN but I promise I will stop now as it’s irritating me too). It uses Ethereum, and there’s a secondary market for trading in these limited edition things, and I suppose that there’s some comfort in knowing that your limited edition sketch of an anthropomorphised raccoon twink wearing a ball gag and a slightly trepidatious expression really is only one of three ever to exist, but, well, take a look at the work. Hm.
  • Evil Corp: A new project by Alfie Dennen, who long-time readers might remember was behind the lovely Bus Tops project back in 2012; this is a soon-to-be-Kickstarted boardgame in which you get to play as one of the giant tech behemoths of the strangely familiar parallel future in which the game is set? Want to enslave the entirety of Northern England to act as packers for your giant network of fulfilment centres? Want to colonise Mars, take all your rich friends with you and then strip-mine the Earth for resources so you can live the Playboy lifestyle your bullied-at-school past feels you somehow deserve? Want to run your very own Big Blue Misery Factory? This will be RIGHT up your street, in that case. Obviously all similarities to current titans of business are entirely coincidental. Obviously.
  • Google Pose Detection: Tech demo of the pose detection API – let it access your webcam, then step back and make some shapes and watch, impressed, as the software tracks your full-body movements. Then take a moment to think back a decade ago to Kinect and how mental it is that you can now do the same stuff in-browser, and then think a bit further and think about all the potential implications of combining this tech with, I don’t know, the fact that the UK is the most surveilled country in the world and that we are VERY SCARED of terrorists and this could be used for all sorts of incredibly impressive but also hugely intrusive body language monitoring systems using the CCTV network and, well, it all gets quite dystopian quite fast (your internal monologue might take you somewhere different and better; I rather hope it does for your sake).
  • Fantasmo: Or, ‘the decentralised 3d map of the world’, which sounds a lot more impressive frankly. Fantasmo is a company looking to aggregate data on a building/street level as to the physical layout of our world, and to create a universal standard for the manner in which that data is encoded and made available, so as to allow for better, more uniform AR app development amongst other things. It’s a really smart idea, and if you’re interested in doing anything serious in the AR space this is probably worth taking a closer look at.
  • Resistancehole: The Onion’s spin-off, Clickhole, has created this WONDERFUL site parodying the anti-Trump movement online; I clicked this this week and whilst initially I found it, predictably, very funny indeed (sample headline: “Game Over, Drumpf! This Intrepid ‘New York Times’ Reporter Just Has Two Seasons Left Of ‘The Wire’ And Then He’ll Be Free To Blow The Lid Off The Russia Investigation!”), it’s almost too on the nose in its parody of the idiocy of the online war on Trump and the slightly pathetic, overhopeful futility of much of it. Then, though, I learned that it was the companion to Patriothole which does exactly the same but for the other side, and felt marginally better about the fact that everyone is an idiot and both sides are depressing as hell!
  • Very Legit: I have no idea why you would want to use this, but Very Legit is a url-masker which makes entirely benign links look like they are freighted with malware. Like this, for example: extremely.absolutely.completely.verylegit.link/x_2BxLDwFBjCi-*;paypal=402free)java0day!!creditcard.json.sh Although, if you’re meant to be delivering a web project and, well, haven’t quite finished it yet, firing one of these to your client on Friday afternoon will mean that they’ll be too scared to click on it and you can buy yourself an extra few days. Bonus points for lulling friends and colleagues into a false sense of security with this over the next few weeks and then BANG going straight into a Goatse when they’re all relaxed and pliable.
  • Yoti: In the wake of the past month’s absolute sh1tshow around Windrush and immigration in general, the prospect of ID cards has begun to be whispered about in political and commentariat circles (it’s weird how we’ve collectively blanked the memory of how much money we wasted on the abortive project to institute a national identity scheme in the early-00s; I do occasionally wonder how different certain things would be had that gone through); Yoti is a scheme designed to allow for persistent, verifiable online identities, and according to a piece I read this week is already being used in a small number of towns in the UK to help with simple things such as age verification in pubs, bars, bookies and the like. The tech seems smart, but obviously things like this depend entirely on the takeup – the trialing is a good sign, though, and the idea of a universal digital ID is something I personally think is a smart idea (whilst obviously acknowledging that there are others for whom that might well be more…problematic). Worth watching, this.
  • The Covers of Daniel Gil: 938 book covers designed by Daniel Gil; you may not know the name, but you’ll almost certainly recognise some of the designs in this Flickr set, particularly if you were anything like me and spent much of your life from about 11 onwards searching through people’s bookshelves for titles with interesting covers and which might contain a sniff of smut.
  • Giant Cat Instagram: An Instagram feed sharing photos in which a Godzilla-sized kitten wreaks HAVOC. Weirdly, if you go far enough back in time it becomes quite a lot of 3d renders of cars and some Gundam models, but I do hope the ‘pivot to giant kitties’ shift is a permanent one. O MAOW! (come on, Saz, you can finish this one)
  • Travel on Paper: An online shop selling a truly glorious selection of travel posters from around the world; even if you’re not in the market for a poster, it’s worth having a browse through the designs; many of these are just beautiful.
  • The Hero Arm: I know I complain about it most of the time, but occasionally living in the future really is quite remarkable. The Hero Arm is a product being sold by a company called Open Bionics, and is designed to be a lightweight, affordable, cool-looking prosthetic for kids with below-elbow upper arm differences; it looks ACE, and were I a kid with arm issues I would absolutely kill for one of these. Not quite as fancy as James Young’s, but not a bad halfway house. I LOVE the fact that these are now a direct-to-consumer product.
  • Pointless Wooden Bananas: The best waste of time you will see all week, I promise.
  • The List of Lists of Lists: Another in the occasional series of ‘brilliantly niche Wikipedia Pages’, this is a list of all the lists of lists which exist on the site. You’ll look at that description and you’ll think ‘ffs Matt you’re just phoning this stuff in, aren’t you, what happened to the artisanally-curated hand-picked greatness we’ve come to, well, not expect exactly but at least occasionally hope for?’ and then you’ll wake up five minutes later having fallen down a wormhole through ‘lists of characters in Neighbours’ to a detailed biography of Stefan Dennis. You wait.
  • Elon Musk Text Replacement: Are you as bored as I am of hearing Elon Musk’s every single utterance fawned over by fedora-wearing online inadequates? No, you’re probably not, but I spend more time online than you do. Anyway, this is a Chrome extension which replaces Musk’s name with “Grimes’ boyfriend”, which I hope for Grimes’ sake is a gag which is going to be out of date very soon indeed (lest we forget).
  • Slow Heavy Metal Music Playing: A Facebook Page dedicated to the single but oddly amusing observation that every single video clip or photo can be improved by the addition of the caption “Slow heavy metal music playing”. It’s true, see for yourselves.
  • Did Thanos Kill Me?: Well, did he?
  • Record Label Logos: Do you want an exhaustive collection of record label logos from the past century, listed alphabetically? No, you probably don’t, and yet I proffer it to you with the beseeching eyes of a loyal gun dog. APPRECIATE MY OFFERINGS, MASTER.

brian donnelly

By Brian Donnelly

NOW HAVE THE MAP-BASED MUSIC OF SIGUR ROS TO ACCOMPANY THE NEXT LINKSELECTION!

 

THE SECTION WHICH JUST DREW ALBANIA IN AN OFFICE EUROVISION SWEEPSTAKE BUT DOESN’T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THE SONGS TO DETERMINE WHETHER THAT’S TWO QUID WASTED, PT.1:

  • Visual Memoranda: This is a quite remarkable collection of superbly-designed IBM posters from the late 20th Century, accompanying the exhibition of the same name currently taking place at Auburn University in the US. “As a creative extension of Rand’s influence, designers White, Anderson, and Bluhm developed posters as a platform for elevating internal communications and initiatives within the company. While daily tasks for corporate graphic designers often included layout work on newsletters, binders, symbols, booklets, and brochures, the visually clear, single-message format of the poster offered a unique creative outlet and latitude for experimentation.” Seriously, the work collected here is remarkable.
  • All We’d Ever Need Is One Another: I confess to really not understanding the title of this AT ALL, but maybe it will mean more to you. Nonetheless, this is a rather cool art project which generates images using two flat-bed scanners and no human input whatsoever: “The installation self-generates images using two flatbed scanners laying on their side, with scanning surfaces pointing at one another. A computer script creates automatic mouse movements, randomizing the settings of the proprietary scanning software interface, and beginning a scanning process. Each newly created image is then analyzed by a series of deep-learning algorithms trained on a database of contemporary artworks in economic and institutional circulation. When an image matches an existing artwork beyond an 83% match, it uploads it to this website and a twitter account.” The resulting works are surprisingly strong imho; you can follow the project on Twitter or Insta if you fancy some machine-imagined arts in your feed.
  • Impact JS: I was talking to a friend last night about how incredible it is that kids have access to the most incredible suite of creative tools, largely for free, with which to explore the limits of their interests and abilities (and, lest you think that sounds uncharacteristically Pollyannish and hopeful, how this meant that he and I would be on the employment scrapheap within 10y unless we bucked our ideas up); this is yet another in said suite. Impact is a set of tools for people wanting to build games in HTML, for playing in-browser and across devices; I obviously have no aptitude for this sort of thing so can’t comment on ease-of-use or similar questions, but if you or one of your family shows interest and inclination in this direction then I think it looks like a hugely powerful and fun thing to play with.
  • A Thread of Chinese Nicknames for NBA Players: You need know nothing about either China or basketball to enjoy this Twitter thread, in which Nick Kapur unpacks the meaning behind the nicknames Chinese fans give to their NBA idols. SO GOOD – the way you get an insight into the complexity and humour of the Chinese language is superb, and everyone ought to aspire to a nickname like the one given to Steph Curry (seriously, it’s amazing).
  • Dangerous Roads: Mt friend Paul once went to Peru and sent me a great email about his trip along the reassuringly-named ROAD OF DEATH (he subsequently got malaria and spent a bunch of time in hospital; he’s got poor holiday luck, Paul); this site collects some of the best examples of other ROADS OF DEATH from around the world, which you can use as a guide as to where not to go on a camper van holiday this Summer.
  • Botchain: Bots…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! (sorry) WHY DOES THIS NEED TO EXIST? “The $50B industry of autonomous bots lacks the universal standards or protocols of every other major software industry. There is also no verifiable visibility into bot decisions and actions. These conditions limit growth and presents significant compliance risks for corporations” – well, yes, fine, but there is still literally nothing about this project which suggests to me that the FCUKING BLOCKCHAIN is the necessary or desired solution. Also, as an aside, you might want to go about building a universally-accepted definition of ‘bot’ while you’re at it.
  • Joseph’s Machines: Joseph has been making Rube Goldberg machines for years. This is his YouTube channel – MARVEL at his ingenuity.
  • Drawn To Sex: A GOOD KICKSTARTER! Praise be! I think I’ve featured Drawn To Sex’s comics before on here, but if you’re not familiar they are cute, funny, instructional guides to fcuking and how to go about it in a way that’s fun for you and whoever you’re doing it with. This Kickstarter’s raising money to compile a selection of strips and some new material into a physical sex-ed book aimed at teaching kids the basics; given the fact that the scholastic system in this country seems persistently unwilling to engage with the need to give kids alternative ways to learn about sex than furtively watching hentai clips and extreme pegging on xhamster, this seems an eminently sensible idea.
  • The Emoji Aquarium: A Twitter account which Tweets emoji images of randomly-generated aquariums every few hours. It only does one thing, fine, but given it’s Twitter and that one thing isn’t, say, getting into fights with people every three minutes or being an actual Nazi then maybe we should cut it some slack.
  • The Escher Archive: Oh this is wonderful! A superb digitised archive of every stoned 16 year old’s favourite artist MC Escher; there are only 87 pieces, but it’s nice to be reminded of what an exceptional draughtsman he was, aside from his ability to fcuk with your head something chronic.
  • The NASA Intelligence Tests: Have you had a pretty good week? Are you feeling, you know, reasonably good, reasonably pleased with yourself, pretty chipper? Do you think you’re pretty smart, most of the time? Well have a play around with these and watch all that misplaced self-confidence vanish within seconds as you realise that you are NOT special in the slightest. These are tests used in the 1950s by NASA to assess potential space programme inductees; I feel HUGELY inadequate now.
  • Jeff Rothstein: Rothstein took amazing photographs of New York in the 60s and 70s; his website archives some of his work, and is worth a lengthy browse.
  • The Great American Read: A list of the 100 most popular (? the selection process is a touch oblique, if I’m honest) novels produced by the US; if you’re looking for some inspiration for the Summer’s attempt to stop the slow atrophying of your brain through novels then this might be of use.
  • Awful Taste, Great Execution: I don’t want to explain this subreddit any more than I absolutely have to. Imagine something very, very wrong, but done very, very well – yes, exactly, that. You will LOVE this, I promise you, but it might make you feel a touch…odd.
  • We Are NY Indie Booksellers: Superb photoproject documenting New York’s independent bookshops and the people who sell in them. I would like to see this for London, please, while we still have some indie booksellers left.
  • Out of Office: Internet Oddity Sadeagle has the best email address in the world, but also the worst email address in the world, meaning he gets a lot of email from strangers who really hope he’s something he’s (almost certainly) not. He has now published an overpriced coffee-table book collecting some of these emails with accompanying photos. He occasionally sends me some of these and, well, they are QUITE the thing. Click the link – I promise, it is worth it.
  • 300 Super Nintendo Game Logos: I have no idea why these are here collected, but I am very glad they are. SUCH nostagiafeels!
  • Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #1: This is called Tix Tax and it’s noughts and crosses, played against strangers online, but as part of a larger, 3×3 noughts and crosses metagame. Look, click the link and watch the tutorial, it will make sense.
  • Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #2: This one is called Face Out and, honestly, I don’t want to tell you too much about it; it’s part Breakout Clone, part surrealist parable…”You are taken on the journey of a faceless man, cursed to lose his face in exchange for keeping his life. After living for years, unable to speak and trapped behind a mask, you are now looking to lift the curse. This will force you on a journey through the land of the dead – a journey to find the person who forced you to live like life, and taking them on.” Try it, it’s ACE.
  • Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #3: Roulette Knight was made as part of the latest Ludum Dare game jam, as part of the challenge to combine two utterly incompatible game genres – in this case, RPG and Russian Roulette. It really oughtn’t work, but it’s surprisingly fun and tense and compelling. You might need to fiddle around to get a hang of the mechanics – they’re not as clearly explained as they might have been – but once you get into the rhythm this is an EXCELLENT timesink.
  • Friday Afternoon Timewasting Game #4: This is called ‘Sort Your Life Out’, and it’s a piece of interactive fiction which made me smile and think and very much remember what it’s like to be a teenager, hashing out BIG LIFE DECISIONS in someone’s room over a cup of tea and a spliff. Was that better than doing it over nine pints? It probably was, wasn’t it?

 

johan barrios

By Johann Barrios

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE THIS FABULOUS COLLECTION OF GREAT SLEAZY AUDIO FROM CLASSIC BONGO!

THE (FLEA) CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS (SERIOUSLY, ONLY ONE THIS WEEK? PULL YOUR FINGERS OUT, FACELESS CREATORS OF THINGS THAT I LIFT FOR THIS NEWSLETTER!):

  • In Progress Pokemon: “In-Progress Pokemon explores how Pokemon might look if they physically transitioned from one evolutionary stage to another.” Yeah, fine, so there’s only one Tumblr but it’s a fcuking doozy.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye: This was everywhere last weekend, and with good reason; if you’ve not read it, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on West’s co-option by, and co-signing of, ‘The Intellectual Dark Web’(more on which later) and associated right wing fcukery is a brilliant piece of writing, on black cultural identity and the power and responsibility of role models. Wonderful prose, and if you haven’t read it already then you really must.

  • I Am A Data Factory: Nicholas Carr writes on data and social media and us, and posits that rather than being mined for data by companies such as Facebook we are instead all taking on, willingly for the most part, roles of data factories – that is, our data is not being extracted with no labour on our part, that the data so valued is only accessible as a result of our ‘labour’ (should you be willing to consider clicking and ‘liking’ to be ‘labour’, which you might admittedly consider a stretch), and that as such this should change the manner in which we think about this, its value and its use. Smart.
  • Pirate Radio on YouTube: I’ve featured a few 24h streaming YouTube radio stations on here in the past year or so, but honestly had no idea it was such a widespread phenomenon or indeed that it was possible to make £5k a month on ad revenues from a stream which basically runs itself. What’s also interesting is the different cultural role these serve when compared to ‘traditional’ pirate radio as you might imagine it; rather than existing to allow cultural and musical expression which doesn’t otherwise find an outlet, this is morelike aural chewing gum to accompany adderall-fueled study sessions. Which is…bleak, frankly.
  • What Are Stories?: The first sensible / serious take on the idea of ‘stories’ as a content phenomenon, why they’re so popular and what their rise means in a broader cultural sense. Which, yes, sounds a little bit overblown, but consider the incredible rise in popularity of this specific content format as communications medium; when you factor in Snap, Insta, FB, Messenger and the other clone types, you’re looking at nearly a billion people communicating in a clearly-defined and identifiable format that simply didn’t exist a few short years ago – it’s quite phenomenal. Anyway, this Atlantic piece is clever, and this quote rather sums it up: “Stories is not a technology, nor is it a feature. It is a media format, or even a genre, in the way that a magazine or a murder mystery or a 30-minute television program is.”
  • My Quest To Meet The Boss: A wonderful account of Toniann Fenandez’ quest to meet and interact with Bruce Springsteen, taking her to New Jersey and a Springsteen gig, and rendering her very poor in the process. Partly about the Boss, partly about Jersey, and partly about the author herself, this is a great piece of travel writing – there’s the same sort of deep sense of affection for place coming through here that resonates through all of Springsteen’s songs.
  • The Tech Homes of Smart Obsessives: I know for a fact that there are a lot of middle-aged men who read Curios (HELLO, MIDDLE-AGED MEN! It’s lovely to have you here, make yourselves comfortable); this is for them. This piece interviews three people who have taken the whole smart home thing and run with it – I have to say, much as I want no truck with an internet-connected home and little as I care about having a 900-inch plasma 4k flatscreen thingy on my wall, some of this stuff sounds quite fun, in a sci-fi, star trek sort of way. I’m curious, though – would going to someone’s house after a date to find that he (again, I know that I’m succumbing to stereotype here, but this is a pretty blokey thing, right?) had automatically dimming lights and could activate his stereo by clicking his fingers make you think “wow, what a suave guy!” or “christ alive, it’s like train sets but more expensive”? Just wondering.
  • Direct To Consumer Selling: See, the actual title is about startups vying to become the next Warby Parker, but I don’t know how many of you know what Warby Parker is (if you don’t, it’s a US eyewear retailer which famously disrupted the glasses market over there by selling straight to buyers online and cutting out the cost of retail space); anyway, this is a really interesting piece looking at the economics and challenges of launching a direct-to-consume business, as has become the trend for everything from slippers to mattresses to razors to, inexplicably, pants. You get the feeling that there are going to be a lot of failed businesses based on this model in a few years.
  • Amazon’s Fake Review Problem: You will be shocked – SHOCKED, I TELL YOU – to discover that there are some Amazon reviews that are not the fact the sincere opinion of discerning consumers, but that are instead paid for by the item vendors themselves in order to gull customers into thinking that the products in question are actually any good. I KNOW! The scale of this is crazy, though, as is the impact it can have on sellers who choose not to undertake this sort of scamming. The best part, though? The blithe conclusion that, really, there’s not much Amazon can do about it!
  • How Chain Restaurant Menus Are Made: Fascinating look at how mass-catering works at scale, and how menus for your favourite chain outlet, whether Nando’s or Pizza Express or Wagamama or whatever, are dreamed up by highly-paid consultants looking to exploit psychological triggers and HOOK YOU INTO THE BUFFET. Honestly, I would kill to do this sort of job – how does one get into it?
  • How Free Speech Warriors Mainstreamed White Supremacists: Or, “the uncomfortable congruence between the ‘intellectual dark web’ [SUCH a laughable title!] and some actual nazis”, this piece looks at the rise of the ‘free speech at all costs’ movement and how it’s being Trojan Horsed by some particularly unpleasant people with some particularly unpleasant views. “There is a magnitude of difference between protecting an individual’s legal right to free speech and taking the further step of uncritically promoting white-supremacist propaganda in mainstream platforms.” – well, quite.
  • Dining at the New Noma: Noma reopened in Copenhagen earlier this year, in a new purpose-built venue in crusty paradise Christiania; this NYT piece is an excellent writeup of the experience for those of us who are perhaps less likely to attend. Focusing on the experience as a whole rather than just the food, this is a lovely piece of writing, gently humorous, about the otherworldly nature of proper ‘temples of food’; as ever with pieces about Redzepi’s food, there’s a lot of this that sounds ‘interesting’ rather than ‘christ alive I want that in my face right now’, but I would sell a kidney to visit this place. Any takers?
  • Skateboarders in La Paz: Not much in the way of writing here, but the photos in this essay are WONDERFUL.
  • The Atlantic’s Editorial Meeting: This is possibly a *bit* niche, but I found it fascinating; this is the transcript of a recent editorial meeting at The Atlantic, in which editor Jeff Goldberg and Ta-Nehisi Coates do a Q&A session with staff about their recent decision to hire, and then fire, right-wing columnist Kevin Williamson. You don’t need to know that much about the specifics of the case or why Williamson was fired (a lot of that comes out in the piece); I’m presenting this more as a really interesting look at how liberals are struggling to reconcile the need for plurality of voice and expression with the increasing demand from their readers for demonstrable, performative wokeness, and the internal contradictions that this exposes. This is VERY long, but it’s full of all sorts of interesting and revealing nuggets about current trends in liberal media thinking.
  • Why Good People Turn Bad Online: Or, “The Science of Trolls”; this is a look at what the factors are that contribute to the breakdown of civilising norms in online communities, with a dash of prisoners’ dilemma-style behavioural experiment science thrown in. The stuff in here about using bots in a closed social environment as disruptors to improve problem-solving and discourse was honestly fascinating, and something I had never considered before.
  • Meet Lil Tay: Do you remember Danielle Bregoli, aka the Cash Me Ousside, How ‘Bout Dat girl? No, of course you don’t, because you have better things to spend your mental juice on. I don’t, though, so stuff like that STICKS. Anyway, Lil Tay is the latest young woman to understand the incredible celebrity potential in being an extremely ghetto white chick, swearing for views on Insta.  The story – this nine year old kid is becoming a minor online celebrity for basically just having what I believe the kids call MAD BEEF with everyone and pretending to be a rapper – is bleak but familiar; the degree to which a baffling network of adults appear to be setting this up to make money out of the kid, is pretty spectacularly dreadful. Read this and then maybe go and hug your children and take them to the park (or if you’re childless like me, work out which of your godchildren is most ripe for similar exploitation).
  • Modern Life Is Rubbish: Brilliant music journalism as ever by The Quietus – you can fund them here, if you want, they deserve it – looking back at Blur’s Modern Life Is Rubbish at a quarter-Century’s distance with a critical eye. The album’s lauded by many as Blur’s best, but Luke Turner’s retrospective focuses instead on the particularly plastic nostalgia that the band was mining even then in their gimlet-eyed pursuit of commercial success; there are some lovely old Albarn quotes in there which make you realise that Ed Sheeran wasn’t the first artist to be quietly, shrewdly cynical about finding and relentlessly exploiting a niche.
  • How To Be Jamie Lee Curtis: An archive piece, originally appearing in US Magazine in 1985, this profile of Jamie Lee Curtis is just superb. The writing is brilliant, and the whole framing of the piece is just *chef’s kiss*.
  • How Should We Talk To Alexa Around Our Kids: A conversation between the author and some parents, with occasional interruptions by Alexa herself, about how we might want to think about the manner in which we communicate with virtual assistants around our children. We’ve seen the questions addressed before, ish, but the angle here’s an interesting one and I like the format of the piece.
  • The Roaring Girls of Queer London: This gave me SO MUCH JOY this week, not least because it taught me the word ‘fricatrice’ (which means exactly what you think it means). This is an extract from Peter Ackroyd’s (forthcoming?) Queer City, his history of Gay London, and tells of how the love between women was accepted or reviled according to the age. There are some CRACKING stories in here, as well as some excellent bits of knowledge; I am forever grateful to learn that dildoes used to be known as ‘shuttlecocks’ in the 16th/17thC, for example, and I imagine you now are too.
  • The Rise of Juul: The vaping craze sweeping US high schools and college campuses (and possibly here too – has it crossed over yet as a brand?); the fascinating thing about this is that it’s presented with all the furtive awe of an addition to something serious whereas in fact this is just a bunch of kids huffing watermelon-flavour nicotine water; that said, it’s interesting to consider the opportunities for the creation of new BIG TOBACCO-style brand monopolies as we get a whole new generation hooked on a ‘healthy’ version of nicotine. I have to say, though, for someone who pointedly smoked filterless Gauloises all the way through interrailing at 16 (I was an insufferable ponce then, too; very little changes), this all seems, well, a bit silly.
  • When Milky Got His Money: This…this is AMAZING. Meet ‘Milky’, a bit of a bogan but generally a pretty sound fella. Milky was in dire straits financially, when he one day discovered that the bank had seemingly extended his overdraft facility to…infinity. What did Milky do? What would YOU do? This is SO beautifully told, and does a lovely job of conveying the slightly vacant nature of its protagonist, blithely going along for the ride and enjoying himself very much along the way. It does, in very Australian fashion, slightly gloss over the seedier aspects of this – the coke, say, or the slightly staggering detail that he once hired a WHOLE BROTHEL FOR HIMSELF FOR A FEW DAYS (the archetypal example of one’s eyes being bigger than one’s…er…stomach, I’d guess), but the payoff is honestly heartwarming – the film of this will be GREAT.
  • People Are Starving: Finally this week, the best piece of writing I have read in the past month or so; Suzanne Rivecca, on womanhood and femininity and identity and food and weight and self and growing up and regressing and so much else. This almost made me angry it was that good (it’s SO UNFAIR how other people can be so talented) – enjoy it, it’s a great read.

marta syrko

By Martya Syrko

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

  1. We’ll kick off with This Is America, because if you haven’t watched it then you should, now, and if you have then you might want to watch it again.

 

(oh, and if you would like a close reading of it, though I agree that playing ‘Ready Player One’ with stuff like this and trying to spot all the cultural allusions seems to slightly miss the bigger picture, this Twitter thread is good, as is this piece)

 

 

2) This is called Girls on TV and it’s by Laura Jean, and I LOVE IT. It is a wonderful piece of storytelling and reminds me a bit of Suzanne Vega fwiw. Honestly, this is gorgeous:

 

 

3) This is a CRACKING video. The song’s a big old camp slab of disco house; it’s called ‘Don’t You Know I’m In A Band?’, and it parodies exactly the sort of thing you’d imagine it parodies – this is by Confidence Man:

 

 

4) This is slightly terrifying car-based industrial noise-type father/daughter pairing ‘YEAH YOU’ – it’s…honestly, it’s sort of horrible, but compellingly so. ‘Enjoy’!

 

(oh, and this interview with them’s worth a read if you’re interested in the ‘why?’)

 

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is the recent Fire in the Booth by Kojey Radical and it is very good indeed:

 

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! Very different, this, but I’ve liked George the Poet for ages now, and this acoustic version of Follow The Leader with Maverick Sabre is a really beautiful stripped-down take on the track:

 

7) NON-UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Blueprint, with the first single of his forthcoming new album – it’s going to be excellent, as is this. It’s called ‘Hoop Dreamin’’:

 

8) Last up, possibly my favourite song of the year so far. This is called ‘Where Did Your Truth Go?”, it’s by Girl Skin, Foster James and it reminds me of Mazzy Star and Avi Buffalo and it is SO lovely and perfect for a warm summer’s afternoon. ENJOY THE MUSIC AND ENJOY WHAT I HOPE IS A SUNSHINEY WEEKEND THANKYOU FOR READING I LOVE YOU AND I WANT ONLY WHAT IS BEST FOR YOU TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND SEE YOU SOON BYE!:

 

Webcurios 04/05/18

Reading Time: 10 minutes

HELLO AGAIN EVERYONE! After a brief hiatus born of my having the selfish temerity to step away from the web for a long weekend – did you take care of it? is it ok? I worry, you know – Web Curios is back, ready to almost immediately clock off again as we look forward to celebrating the May Bank Holiday in inimitable British style. 

So, as you purchase your nitrous ampoules and get the pingers in, as you bulk-buy batch-crafted artisanal gin to mix into poorly-conceived mix-and-match cocktails, as you stake out your place on the nearest patch of beturded scrubland with your disposable barbecue and Tesco Finest snorkers and pray God that the rain stays away, let me ease you into the weekend with another selection of the very finest, the very best, the…well, not technically the freshest as a few of these have been hanging about since last week, but they’re still ACE, obviously…the…the…most links anywhere on the internet! Consider clicking on every link and reading every word a sort of intellectual pre-penance, a bit like taking confession before you go out and do a murder – there is so much assorted smart and interesting and brilliant (all the work of people who aren’t me, to be clear) in Curios this week that upon finishing it you will have EARNED the right to spend the next 72 sandblasting your frontal lobes with whatever combination of uppers and downers you choose. 

Once again, then, take a deep breath, take my hand, and proceed to DIVE INTO THE TELEPORTATION POOLS OF MY MIND as I take you on a meandering journey through a bunch of utterly unconnected websites all strung together with the mucus-like glue of my prose. I’m glad it’s back, youy’re largely indifferent, but, regardless, THIS IS WEB CURIOS!

CESS

By CESS

LET’S KICK THIS OFF IN FINE STYLE WITH A TRULY SUPERB MIX OF HIPHOP WHICH WAS SENT TO ME BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE (THANKS SCOTT)!

THE SECTION WHICH APPRECIATES YOU MIGHT HAVE SEEN MUCH OF THE BELOW ALREADY GIVEN THE FORTNIGHT’S HIATUS BUT WHICH HOPES NONETHELESS THAT THE THIN VENEER OF ‘INSIGHT’ GIVES YOU REASON TO AT LEAST SKIM IT FOR OTHERWISE ALL MY WORK IS FOR NAUGHT AND YOU WOULDN’T WANT THAT NOW WOULD YOU?

  • Facebook’s Earnings: Oh look, MORE MONEY! MORE USERS! Like some sort of poorly-conceived hoover/hydra hybrid, you cut off one head and the others just keep on hoovering up the pennies – in this case, whilst Facebook might be reaching peak, Insta and Messenger and WhatsApp are all still growing vertiginously and, per the earnings call, are being looked at in terms of increased monetisation (you didn’t REALLY believe WhatsApp was going to stay ad-free forever, did you? Did you?). Interesting side note from the earnings call (despite Facebook’s recent insistence that its entire raison d’etre was the fostering of community and not (heaven forfend, no siree!) the collection of the greatest collection of information about human interest and behaviour that has ever existed, to be used for monetisation purposes how and whenever possible): there were somewhere in the region of 10 mentions of the term ‘community’ on the call with analysts, whereas there were over 40 of the term ‘ad’ or ‘advert’. Draw whatever conclusions you feel most appropriate here.
  • ALL OF THE THINGS AT F8!: And lo, it came to pass that once again the world’s media gathered in San Francisco’s environs to once again congregate within the hallowed halls of Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory to clap like seals at the GLORIOUS FUTUREANNOUNCEMENTS! And what were they this year? Well, there were LOTS (but mostly of limited interest, at least immediately, to advermarketingprdrones) – here is the full list from Day 1, and here is the full list from Day 2; and here is the Techcrunch aggregation of all of the stories from the event. For me, the big stuff is the ‘Clear History’ option for users, which enables people to effectively scrub Facebook’s profile of their browsing history – there’s no indication of how this is going to affect targeting options, and it’s not going to be live in the wild for a few months yet, but it’s a sensible move from a user (and PR, obvs) perspective. Other than this, the integration of apps into Stories on Insta and FB is a big deal – you can see by how excited people are getting about being able to inflict their musical tastes on their stalkers thanks to Spotify integration, for example – and something that, for appropriate brands, is a huge opportunity for expanding reach (oh, and the quote in here about them actively seeking to monetise stories with ADS is unsurprising but worth noting); equally, the additional expansion of AR for brands into Instagram and Messenger, along with the improved tracking tech they’ve announced, is big news (POOR THE SNAPCHAT), although it’s seemingly still going to be locked to those with all of the ad monies, at least for now. Oh, and there’s going to be dating, to keep the middle-aged locked into the platform forever, through the first marital slump, the affairs and the comfortable descent into the swinging and poly scene (that’s what everyone does in middle-age, right? That’s why all poly people you ever see on telly are so, well, unappealing, right?), but that’s of no interest to YOU, you virile young folk.
  • FB Introducing New Video Ad Formats: Pre-roll, basically, which they’ve been touting for months but which seems now to be A Thing (in the US, at least, and only through Facebook Watch rather than in Newsfeed), these excitingly “also included a new feature called “preview trailers,” ads to promote Watch shows and other videos that can take viewers to the full-length program.” Excuse me while I take a moment for the tumescence to subside.
  • New Tools for Facebook Fundraisers: Of course, sometimes Facebook does things that it’s hard to frame as anything other than A Good Thing, no matter how hard I try (and God knows, I tried) – this allows for matched donations, creates a whole new raft of categories for ‘personal fundraising’, and eliminates Facebook fees for said personal fundraising projects. As per, these are starting in the US and then rolling out globally, but it makes Facebook an (even more) obvious choice as a place to raise money (although I find the growing concept of personal fundraising incredibly depressing, given it feels like a direct consequence of the sorts of services / assistance that people might once have reasonably expected to receive from, I don’t know, the state, or third sector organisations which no longer exist as a result of several years of swingeing cutsohgodnopleasenotthepoliticsmakeitstop) (oh, good, see, I did manage to find a negative take, well done ME!).
  • Marginally Better Video Retention Metrics for Page Admins: Thrill-a-minute stuff, this, isn’t it?
  • Facebook Is Fighting Fake News By Making It Smaller: This is, I promise, not a joke or an Onion headline.
  • What Does Facebook Know About Me: This Q&A, part of FB’s ‘Hard Questions’ series (see Curios passim – and also this one, which is honestly interesting regarding what it does and doesn’t allow on the platform), is actually a pretty decent rundown of what information Facebook holds about its users and how that information is then used, but contains this absolute ZINGER which I must quickly draw to your attention. ““Q: If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product? A: No. Our product is social media – the ability to connect with the people that matter to you, wherever they are in the world. It’s the same with a free search engine, website or newspaper. The core product is reading the news or finding information – and the ads exist to fund that experience.” WELL GOLLY GOSH, MARK! Given, though, that social media is necessarily constructed solely of content produced by us, its users, it is surely massively disingenuous to suggest that, given we are the ‘information experience’ the company purports to sell, that the product is not EXACTLY what fcuking are, you appalling obfuscatory fcukers.
  • Insta Launching Native Payments: Well this is big, and snuck in somewhat unnanounced overnight – Instagram users in the US and the UK, at least some of them, are being offered the opportunity to input their credit card details so as to allow native payments through the platform, which is obviously HUGE from a retail point of view. No indication at all as to how the experience will work for users, and seemingly no retailers have yet been offered the opportunity to let users check out through Insta, but it’s a matter of DAYS, surely. Are you excited? I’m excited (I’m not excited).
  • Download All The Stuff Insta Knows About You: IT IS OWNED BY FACEBOOK IT IS JUST AS SHADY FFS DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND YOU MOUTH-BREATHING IDIOTS?
  • Twitter Results: These were widely hailed by analysts as A Good Thing for Twitter overall, and the toplines are positive – ad revenues are up 21% Q on Q (although contrast that with Facebook’s terrifying performance and you start to see that this is all pretty relative), and DAUs is up 10%…but equally, this is the third consecutive quarter in which that DAU uplift has shrunk, which isn’t a fantastic trend. I’m as bearish as ever on Twitter’s market prospects, though continue to find it impossible to conceive of a better solution for communicating at speed and scale (which perhaps speaks to my own paucity of imagination rather than to anything big about Twitter itself).
  • Twitter Announces New Sponsored Content Formats: Buried within this rather tedious announcement about some new TV partnerships or somesuch is the SEISMIC REVEAL that “Twitter is also announcing new ad programs. There are Creator Originals, a set of scripted series from influencers who will be paired up with sponsored brands. And there’s a new Live Brand Studio — as the name suggests, it’s a team that works with marketers to create live video.” I confess to not having even bothered to look for additional information on these, as if you have the sort of budgets to be thinking of this sort of crap then you almost certainly have a Twitter rep already attempting to flog you it, but I hope that by acknowledging my professional inadequacy here I will go some way towards mitigating it. Have I? IS IT ALL OK?
  • Snapchat Results: We’re not going to dwell on these, but TechCrunch’s piece is a reasonable overview of why the numbers are…not good (and further clues were found in the F8 stuff from Day 2 in which they announced that Insta and WhatsApp’s Story mechanics were being used 2x and 3x as often as Snap’s original version).
  • Snapchat Launches Snappables: Presumably because ‘slightly janky AR games’ didn’t fit with the brand. Snappables are a series of interactive lenses, which allow users to play a series of simple games controlled using the same AR interface that puts dog ears on your head to hilarious effect no stop it I am crying it’s LIKE YOU ARE A DOG rofl. So you can bop your head up and down to do virtual keepy-ups, say, or contort your mouth to catch floating emoji poos, or whatever (I am guessing as to some of these, you may be able to tell). At the moment these are being built in-house and rolled out weekly, but they would BITE YOUR HAND OFF if you are a brand that wants to spend 6 figures (I’d guess minimum spend on one of these at the outset would be no less than $250k) on making a themed game where you have to, say, chomp as many Whoppers as you can in a minute (£10 says that literal idea, or a close variant on it by one of the fast food peddlers, is one of the first three branded versions). This feels very much like an excellent way for digital studios with some AR chops to make some quick and dirty cash for what will basically end up being fancy shovelware – God, it’s like 2010 and Facebook apps all over again!
  • Snapchat Testing Unskippable Ads: Only in its – largely execrable – commissioned shows, mind (seriously, have you ever tried watching any of Snapchat’s original content? I know I am pretty far away from the target audience here, but, honestly, I’d almost rather watch Zoella) – beautifully, the report (apologies for the Mashable link, btw) refers to these unskippable 6-second spots as ‘Commercials’, as though Snap has invented something SHINY and NEW and REVOLUTIONARY. The future is the past all over again but with a greater degree of jaded ennui, I am discovering.
  • Snap Launches Spectacles 2.0: Because it’s nearly Summer (ha!) and you might be in the market for a new pair of shades with which to record all of the sunburn and vomit and rejection. It’s not exactly clear what differentiates these from v1.0, other than the fact that they are on mass-sale and that they have some new colourways, but if YOU want to film slightly motion sickness-inducing facevideo then go for your life.
  • All Of The Snapchat Ad Formats: A really useful rundown by Business Insider (again, sorry) – exactly the sort of thing that all platforms should have readily accessible as an explainer and yet weirdly don’t seem to have in place at all.
  • Alexa Will Now Remember: Well, soon – and in the US only, but if you do stuff around recipes for Amazon’s Domestic Surveillance Hub (or Echo, as it’s more commonly referred to) then you ought to be aware of the imminent introduction of a degree of persistence in the device’s memory; users will be able to tell Alexa to ‘remember’ information (in the example they suggest birthdays, but one could equally use ‘my favourite Divinyls song’ or ‘the podcast that makes the red mist recede’); the applications for this for Echo app developers are obviously really big, not least for the creation of games – you could reasonably imagine scripting an audio-RPG which allowed for persistent and interactive inventory management, for example (Jesus, that’s where my brain decided to go first with that? SO DEPRESSING).
  • Google Surveys: Josh, who knows everything about surveys and data, tells me that Google have been punting this to research agencies for a while now, but the fact it’s now available for anyone to use is a NEW THING! Using Google Surveys, anyone with a Google account can set up a reasonable (if, as professional datawonks would scream, VERY unsophisticated and statistically problematic) series of surveys using all the question types you might expect, targeted (roughly) by region (broad geography-level rather than anything so useful as postcode) and age (standard demographic brackets) – you pay per response, with the cost depending on all the usual factors like complexity and the like. Costs seemingly start at £0.08 per respondent, which seems like a pretty good deal as long as you don’t worry about fancy stuff like weighting and the like.
  • Ofcom Media Use Data: The latest data dump from Ofcom, telling us all what we already know – to whit, we are all staring at our phones all the time. Nothing hugely surprising, but useful to bookmark for the next time you need to persuade a client that no, really, it is important that they have a mobile-friendly website (you scoff, but I get paid to deal with some SPECIAL PEOPLE). Oh, and the other main takeaway is the first real acknowledgement in these sort of stats that the vast majority of web users are simply not intellectually capable of understanding some of the complex issues which underpin online information flows, or indeed bereft of the critical thinking faculties required to make sense of, well, most things on the internet. Which is simultaneously true and incredibly depressing.
  • The Strategic Planners’ Presentation Template: Obviously YOU are all far too sophisticated and professionally advanced to have need of this sort of thing, but on the offchance that you know someone who might benefit from this sort of guided instruction then SHARE WIDELY. It’s old, but it’s still useful.
  • The Humanity Test: Simple, clever, and riffs on the Captcha ‘are you human?’ tests in an interesting way – smart, by the UN.
  • Invisible Friends: Last up in the tedious-but-necessary section about WORK is this excellent idea by Australian charity MPAN (Missing Persons Advocacy Network) which uses Facebook’s otherwise creepy-as facial recognition feature to help find missing antipodeans – by adding profiles connected to these missing individuals as ‘friends’, Australian FB users can, simply by using the platform as normal, help identify them. Every time anyone gets tagged in a photo, it also alerts their friends that they have been tagged – meaning that if anyone gets tagged in a picture featuring these missing people, the profile owner (in this case, the charity) will get an alert, and a clue as to where the missing person in question was, when, and who with. Simple, smart and for a good cause, this ought to win awards.

Alice Gregory

By Dina Litovsky


Webcurios 02/03/18

Reading Time: 28 minutes

I AM SO CHAPPED! SO CHAPPED!

I appreciate that it’s pretty low down on the list of legitimate reasons to moan, but seriously, you really don’t want to see my smile right now (plus ca change, eh?) (SO MUCH BLOOD!).

Have you been toboganning? Have you thrown a snowball? Have you, at the very least, drawn something puerile on someone’s car windscreen? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR??? (to those of you reading this outside of the United Kingdom, we’ve had some weather). 

Anyway, whilst it may be COLD outside, in here, crammed in with all the internet, it’s all cosy and not a little close. Snuggle up, warms yourselves on this week’s BONFIRE OF THE LINKS, and watch the flames – see what shapes you can scry, what terrible futures are presaged, what dreadful auguries of the future coalesce. EVERYTHING IS AWFUL AND NOTHING IS GOING TO BE OK – it’s WEB CURIOS!

ahmad barber

By Ahmad Barber

AS IS NOW TRADITION, LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST IMPERICA MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SORT OF QUIETLY IMPRESSED WITH TWITTER’S ‘NO, LOOK, YOU LOT JUST SORT IT OUT’ APPROACH TO FIXING ITSELF:

  • Facebook Jobs Rolls Out To 40 Countries: Are YOU a recruiter? Would YOU like to be able to spend more time ‘doing your job’ whilst on Facebook with all your friends rather than on LinkedIn with all the boring people? Well HUZZAH! Facebook’s jobs listing service, having been live in the US for a bit, is now extending to a whole bunch of other territories including the UK – Business Pages can now create job listings, in much the same manner as you can on LinkedIn, with users able to browse jobs in Marketplace. No clarity as to whether you’ll be able to advertise positions, but, well, it’s a monetisation opportunity so let’s take a moment to consider the likelihood. I’d imagine this is going to skew local – remember, Facebook’s all about YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY in 2k18 – but I don’t doubt there are some incredibly creative applications to which you can put this from an advermarketinprcampaign point of view also. Time before a Facebook reboot of THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD tactic goes viral?
  • No More Facebook Explore: Do you remember a few months ago when Facebook experimented with splitting the Newsfeed into ‘Friends’ and ‘Everything else’ in a few territories, and people went momentarily apoplectic with fear and uncertainty? I really hope not, it’s a pointless thing to have your headmeat filled with. Anyway, don’t worry – they’re discontinuing the experiment, although given the fact that they gave organic reach a final, crippling kick in the face back at the beginning of the year this is potentially sort of a moot point anyway.
  • You Will Eventually Be Able To Make Phonecalls Through Instagram: I. Don’t. Care.
  • YouTube Live Gets Improved Replays, Etc: It was something of a surprise to me that YouTube didn’t already do synced commentary when replaying a Live, but apparently it didn’t – now, though, if you re-watch a YouTube Live broadcast you’ll be able to see all the lovely, hateful comments played back to you as though in realtime. Which is, er, well, horrible really, but what can you do? There’s automatic captioning being introduced too, for English broadcasts, as well as location tagging for Live broadcasts and the extension of Super Chat (where commenters can pay to have comments featured right in the broadcaster’s eyeline) feature and OH IT’S ALL TOO MUCH.
  • Twitter Health Metrics: You sort of have to admire this, in a weird way. Yesterday Jack takes to Twitter and posts a bunch of slightly apologetic, mea culpa-ish messages about how talking is GREAT and isn’t Twitter GREAT for that but, er, all the hate and the Nazis are a bit rubbish, aren’t they and, well, does anyone have any ideas to make it a bit less awful sometimes because, frankly, they’re all out of them?
    This by way of announcement of a call for submissions to find “outside experts to help us identify how we measure the health of Twitter, keep us accountable to share our progress with the world and establish a way forward for the long-term.” So, to be clear, they are going to pay what will probably be an awful lot of money to an organisation or organisations who can help them measure exactly how much of a burning cesspit of anger their platform is, and then maybe have some thoughts as to what to do about it. I do love this approach by founders – “sorry I invented something with the foreseeable but unintended consequence of murdering babies; anyone got any ideas about how I put that genie back in the bottle again?”
  • You Can Now Bookmark Tweets For Later: So now you can keep your favourites for expressing TRUE APPRECIATION for someone’s Tweets. Which is nice.
  • Google Hangouts Chat Rolls Out For All: This is basically Google’s version of Slack; it’s now widely available, and is an interesting alternative for those who find Slack an horrific, confusing mess; it probably won’t be any less horrific and confusing, in all honesty, but it will integrate really nicely with GDocs, Calendar and the rest. If you’re business uses GSuite tools, this is probably worth a look.
  • The Inclusive Internet: A whole bunch of NEW DATA from Facebook about online connectivity worldwide – doesn’t say anything hugely surprising, but if you ever need a bunch of numbers about how fast or otherwise internet connections are in French Guyana or Burundi or wherever, this might be of use.
  • DIY Toolkits: This is an interesting (look, right, it’s not really interesting – it’s just potentially a bit workuseful. I feel I need to be honest with you about this sort of thing) set of planning and thinking tools, showing a whole host of models and processes for interrogating business problems; it describes itself as being for ‘Development’, but generally any sort of consultancy-types might find stuff in here which you might find useful. Some of it will obviously be beneath you – I know how sophisticated you planners are – but it’s worth having a dig through if you’re bored of always using the same bullsh1t processes to screw money out of idiots.
  • Ouigo Pinball: I have a very strong memory of having featured this before, but a cursory trawl of the archives has thrown up nothing and, frankly, it’s enough fun that I really don’t care. This is a site promoting French tourism or something – who cares about that, though, it’s PINBALL! An excellent, really beautifully-designed pinball table, in pastel colours, with the Eiffel Tower and all sorts of other French stuff on it! This is honestly GREAT, although it is very, very obviously a game of pinball and as such slightly harder to pass off as ‘work’ than is ideal. Still, it’s a noble way to get that first verbal warning of 2018.

jason parker

By Jason Parker

NEXT, A CORKING SELECTION OF TRACKS PUT TOGETHER EXPERTLY BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY SUGGEST THAT NOW MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO DONATE TO ONE OF THESE HOMELESSNESS CHARITIES IF YOU CAN SPARE A FEW QUID, Pt.1:

  • Six Degrees of Wikipedia: I had no idea when I found this earlier in the week that its existence would perturb so many people. “YOU ARE RUINING A MUCH-LOVED INTERNET PARLOUR GAME!”, said, er, well, about two people actually, but still. Is ‘how can you get from x to y on Wikipedia in the fewest steps?’ such a popular thing? Anyway, sorry, but the ineluctable march of progress continues in typically relentless fashion – this has now been AUTOMATED. Plug in any two concepts, and this marvellous site will show you all the different ways in which you can get from one to the other, jumping from Wikipedia entry to Wikipedia entry; there might be some serious applications for this (in fact I’m sure there are), but the obvious use is for COMEDY PURPOSES. Look! You can get from ‘David Icke’ to ‘Truth’ in three steps! LOL! You can get from ‘Donald Trump’ to ‘Armageddon’ in TWO STEPS! Lo…oh.
  • Vero: I didn’t want to feature this, but completeness demands it. So Vero, you doubtless know, is a ‘new’ (not new, been around for a few years) social network which is basically visuals-heavy like Insta and which is meant to be for films and music and photos and stuff. The gimmicks are a) the feed is in chronological order rather than algoderived; b) you can assign degrees of closeness to everyone you’re connected to, in the manner of G+’s ‘circles’ (no, of course you don’t remember), from ‘friend’ to ‘follower’; c) the app pulls in rich media from links, making the feed a RIOT OF MULTIMEDIA; and d) it’s buggy as fcuk, barely works, has nothing interesting on there at all, and is seemingly full of dreadful advermarketingtech early adopter types (er, like me. Dear God, self-awareness is horrid). Oh, and it’s super-rich founder is apparently an unpleasant human being to boot. Look, you don’t need a Vero strategy (please God don’t let this sentence come back and bite me) – ignore and move on!
  • Sheldon County: This is HUGELY interesting. Sheldon County is – or is going to be; it’s going to launch next year, this is just the sort of prototypical example – a generative podcast, which (and this is a bit hard to explain, so bear with me) will effectively create a potentially infinite series of imaginary places, characters, etc, each unique to an individual listener’s experience, which will become the setting and characters for a series of podcasts which will be generated procedurally. This is creator James Ryan’s explanation: “Sheldon County is more specifically a collection of podcasts, each of which is procedurally generated to recount the events of a particular instance of a simulated American county…the idea is that each listener will claim a particular random seed, which allows them to claim a particular simulated universe, which means the characters and stories in their county will be unique, and uniquely theirs”. Click the link and listen to the example – THAT HAS BEEN CREATED AUTOMATICALLY! Imagine having your very own imaginary town about which you can hear stories that noone else will ever hear – SO exciting. As well as being a decent premise for some sort of Twilight Zone-esque Truman Show ripoff, now I come to think of it. This is really, really exciting (no, I promise you, it is).
  • The Ring In AR: AR, we all know, isn’t as good as we would like it to be. Fine. Now watch this video and think long and hard about exactly how good you want it to get. This scared the bejesus out of me, and I’ve not even seen The Ring – another of those examples which will open up a whole slew of creative applications for the tech here.
  • JQBX: There may be loads of these out there, but this is the first I’ve seen; JQBX (sorry, but I didn’t name it) is an app through which multiple users can simultaneously listen to the same Spotify audio, with shared controls, the ability to cue up tracks, upvote and downvote other people’s selections and chat. I mean, you don’t need anotrher fcuking place to type inanities to your friends, but at least this one means you can all listen to the same track while you do so.
  • Cocaine and Rhinestones: How can you not love a podcast with that title? Country music gets a bad rep – although to be fair much of it is godawful – and its fans are often treated with slight suspicion in the UK, where the genre doesn’t really, well, fit. Do you remember the slightly odd linedancing craze of the late 90s, that which sort of begat Steps? Do you remember how weird it was having couples from, say, Basingstoke wearing tasseled cowboy boots and pearl-button shirts whilst doing a poorly-coordinated do-si-do to a 140bpm Rednex remix? I bet it went hand in hand with swinging. Anyway, sorry, that was a digression – this is a podcast about the history of Country & Western music in the 20th Century, and primarily the people who made it – I broke my ‘I don’t really bother with podcasts’ rule to listen to one of these out of curiosity and MAN the stories. Guns and crime and drugs and sex and lust and murder and barbecue, basically. Really interesting, even if you, like me, couldn’t give an H for the music.
  • Moxie The Cat: This is, I’m pretty sure, SERIOUSLY OCCULT. I mean, it’s just an 8-bit gif of a cat with slightly mystical music, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some NEW WITCHES behind this.
  • Birth Becomes Her: It’s that time of the year again when we celebrate the miracle of childbirth via the medium of really, really intimate photos of the whole experience. WOW. WOW. There’s no (well, not much) blood on show, and these are all really superb photos, but it’s all, well, quite intense. All of you reading this who’ve had kids, WELL DONE, it looks absolutely terrifying if I’m honest with you. SO MUCH MUCUS AND UMBILICUS IN THIS ONE.
  • Little Moving Things: This is either cute or infuriatingly whimsical – your mileage may vary. This Insta account presents photos of small vehicles – cars, planes, trucks, bikes, etc – along with a small slightly anthropomorphised story from said vehicle about what it is. If you like, er, small moving things this might well be up your street – it’s a bit sickly for my tastes, though.
  • Secret 7s: I do love this project. Once again, Secret 7s is ON – the gimmick, if you aren’t aware of it, is as follows: “Secret 7” takes 7 tracks from 7 of the best-known musicians around and presses each one 100 times to 7” vinyl. We then invite creatives from around the world to interpret the tracks in their own style for every 7”. 700 unique sleeves are exhibited before going on sale on a first come, first served basis priced at £50 each. You don’t know who created the sleeve, or even which song it’s for, until you have parted with your cash – the secret lies within.” Artists are invited to submit designs – I have one of these from 2013 knocking around somewhere, and they are lovely objects. Also worth keeping an eye on when the exhibition of the eventual covers is on, as that’s always a really interesting show.
  • One Hour One Life: This is SUCH an interesting concept. A game – which requires a download, be aware – based around the concept of life; each player is born into an infant’s body in the gameworld, and over the course of the titular hour will grow to adulthood, then old age, before eventually dying. In that hour, you will share the world with other players, who will have to look after you when you’re an infant and to whom you’ll have to extend the courtesy as they are born and age. A hugely innovative multiplayer mechanic, this, and whilst there are ‘issues’ with the presentation (it’s entirely heteronormative, for a start), the idea of a persistent, collaborative, co-operative world experienced in one-hour bursts is SO clever. Watch the trailer on the homepage –  it’s fascinating.
  • Canada Modern: You want an archive of 20th Century Canadian graphic design? YES YOU DO! “Canada Modern is a physical and digital archive of Canadian graphic design, with modernism central to its glowing heart.” It is! Lovely archive of modernist design, this.
  • Lent Madness: How’s your fasting and abstinence going? Good, I’m glad, KEEP IT UP. Seeing as it’s Lent, why not spend a little while getting involved in LENT MADNESS! Lent Madness began in 2010 as the brainchild of the Rev. Tim Schenck. In seeking a fun, engaging way for people to learn about the men and women comprising the Church’s Calendar of Saints. The format is straightforward: 32 saints are placed into a tournament-like single elimination bracket. Each pairing remains open for a set period of time and people vote for their favorite saint. 16 saints make it to the Round of the Saintly Sixteen; eight advance to the Round of the Elate Eight; four make it to the Faithful Four; two to the Championship; and the winner is awarded the coveted Golden Halo. The first round consists of basic biographical information about each of the 32 saints. Things get a bit more interesting in the subsequent rounds as we offer quotes and quirks, explore legends, and even move into the area of saintly kitsch.” SAINTLY KITSCH! I don’t know about you, but I live for saintly kitsch! I don’t mean to be snarky, honest – this is actually rather interesting (this may be my Catholic upbringing talking, I concede).
  • David Lynch Teaches Typing: You are unlikely to learn much actual typing with this tutorial, but it is an excellent little narrative game and LYNCHIAN EXPERIENCE, with all sorts of nice Easter Eggs for fans of the weirdo and his works. Seeing as we’re on Lynch, if you’ve not read it before DFW’s profile of the Director, in which he totally fails to actually interview him in the classic Sinatra style, is GOLDEN, not least for the very open and bitter hatred of Balthazar Getty.
  • Pullstring: This is a potentially really useful service, which effectively seeks to provide easy-to-use frameworks for developing your own voice assistant software for Amazon Echo, Google Home or whichever other platform you fancy. It’s ‘thing’ is a simplified GUI to help you build the thing, and a promise that NO CODING IS REQUIRED. In theory this could be hugely useful, although the pricing structure is somewhat opaque. Still, worth a look if you fancy playing around with this but are a useless non-coding throwback – seriously, what is the point of you?
  • Jellykey: This site is written in what can charitably described as ‘cheerfully crap’ English which makes it look possibly more scammy than I think it is – as far as I can tell, it’s entirely legitimate and sells custom-made 3d model…things which you can stick over the keys on your desktop keyboard. Want to replace Num Lock and the other ones you never use with a bunch of Hello Kitty faces? Want a beautifully-sculpted resin mountainside instead of an escape key? Of course you do! Treat yourself! For maybe one of you, this will be VERY appealing indeed; no idea what the rest of you will make of it, mind.
  • Piccolo Labs: Voice assistants are SO YESTERDAY! The future is going to be all about VISUAL ASSISTANTS – that is, home surveillance systems which track your location, movement and gestures to enable you to do things like turn on lights by pointing at them, or opening the curtains with a Force-style sweeping hand gesture. No doubt that this is HUGELY future, although obvious concerns maintain about security as with any IoT stuff – if you want a scifi home, though, this is probably de rigeur. This is very much in Alpha, although apparently they will be selling 20 of the kits to LUCKY PEOPLE later this year based on a ballot. One important caveat, though – I don’t care how cool you think you look, you will inevitably come across as something of a prick the first time you do the whole ‘sexy slow hand gesture to lower the lights’ thing.
  • Hugh Cards: This is a quite amazing archive of art drawn on the back of found business cards by, er, Hugh – his style’s reminiscent of another cartoonist whose name momentarily escapes me, but the sheer volume of these is staggering (as is the consistently high quality). It’s, er, a touch obsessional, perhaps, but there’s some really great work in here – examples from 2017 onwards are available to buy if one takes your fancy.
  • All The Hokusai: A salutary reminder that there was more to Hokusai than The Great Wave, this is an archive of scans of over 1400 of his works spanning his whole career. Fascinating, not least to see the extent to which some of his compositional techniques and quirks have become appropriated into artistic canon; influential doesn’t even begin to cover it.
  • Shusaku1977: Insta feed by Japanese graphic designer Shusaku Takaoka which combines stills from film with drawings, whether from art or cartoons or whatever – from vitruvian man to Snow White, the combinations here are really impressive and technically perfect.
  • Future Fonts: A marketplace for fonts! Designers can display their prototypes or works in progress, and anyone can bid to buy them; effectively like a Kickstarter for fonts, ish. There’s some really good, and really interesting, work featured on here, have a browse.
  • Garlicoin: On the one hand, this is a garlic-themed cryptocurrency because LOL isn’t this whole cryptocurrency bubble thing funny! On the other hand, this is a garlic-themed cryptocurrency which is according to its supposed market value already has a total worth of over $1million. I don’t understand anything any more – perhaps more worryingly, it would appear that literally noone else does either.
  • The Shaolin Sound Chamber: Thanks to Ged for pointing this my way – this is a collection of samples from kung fu movies which you can either play in-browser or download for your own pleasure and edification. Suggest keeping this open on your phone and using it as a soundboard next time you’re in a meeting or on a conference call.

kota yamaji

By Kota Yamaji

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY TWO HOURS OF DERRICK MAY MIXING HOUSE?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO GENTLY SUGGEST THAT NOW MIGHT BE A GOOD TIME TO DONATE TO ONE OF THESE HOMELESSNESS CHARITIES IF YOU CAN SPARE A FEW QUID, Pt.2:

  • The MIT Centre for Advanced Visual Studies: “Welcome to the online repository of MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) Special Collection, part of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) Archives and Special Collections”, says the blurb, “The CAVS Special Collection documents a nearly 45 year history of collaborative and time-based productions generated by the tenure of over 200 internationally recognized artist-fellows. This digitized, “virtual museum” includes images, publications, posters, documents, portfolios, videos and other materials of historic importance documenting the process of creating art-science-technology projects at CAVS. This site presents experimental ways in which to explore collection materials.” Yes, fine, whatever, JUST LOOK AT THE MENTAL SCROLLING HERE! This is a total mess from a UX/UI point of view, but the parallax or whatever it is that they’ve used is honestly insane – I am in awe.
  • Dogs In Food: An Instagram feed of dogs photoshopped into foods.
  • Taste of Streep: An Instagram feed of Meryl Streep photoshopped into foods. Whoever decided not to call this ‘Streep Food’ wants a dry slap.
  • Van Secrets: Is ‘Van Living’ still trendy and aspirational, or have we all switched opinions now and decided that in fact living out of a VW camper would be cramped, smelly and – this week at least – incredibly fcuking cold and miserable? Whatever, if you’re still of the belief that all that’s standing between you and happiness is some espadrilles, some sort of tribal tattoo, slightly matted incipient dreads, a van and a driving license, this site will be PERFECT for you – it’s a map listing free van parking spots around the globe (but mainly Europe) with details about facilities, local regulations, all that sort of thing. JACK IN YOUR JOB AS CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND GO AND LIVE IN A VAN ON THE WEST COAST OF PORTUGAL GO ON YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.
  • 3 Word Weather: This is an adorable project by the Met Office, not least because the interface is so nicely done. Anyone can contribute – just tweet a description of the weather where you are in three words, with the hashtag #3wordweather; the site will aggregate all the descriptions and map them across the UK, the idea being that this can also be used to gauge the accuracy of forecasting – does lived experience (or at least reported experience) bear out the predictions? Unsurprisingly, the map is pretty uniform right now – shout out Lincoln, which forewent the third word in favour of the simple ‘Cold. Grey.’ – but it’s still fun to explore, and the way the annotations move dynamically as you zoom is really rather lovely.
  • Mentour 360: This, for the dozen or so of you who probably really wanted to be pilots when you were little kids, is rather cool – Mentour is a company which specialises in creating VR training models for flying planes, offering you an interactive 360 cockpit view and the opportunity to experience what it’s like to fcuk around with a throttle and flick all those exciting switches. There is an app to download through which you can access all the content, and there’s a load of pilot-y stuff to enjoy if you like the idea of dressing up in a shirt with epaulettes, wearing a hat and exuding a slightly patrician air of superiority.
  • Dissent Pooh: Not a rebellious bowel movement (sorry), but instead a Twitter account presenting Winnie the Pooh as an anti-Xi Jinping dissident. Thanks to Curios’ Man In China Alex Wilson for this, as well as for the explanation as to why it is a thing. Funny even without the slightly terrifying geopolitics which accompanies it (funnier, in fact, if you don’t consider the fact that Xi Jinping may be in power FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER).
  • Witeboard: A collaborative whiteboard – draw something, it creates a unique url which you can share with anyone else; it also allows for simultaneous multi-user input. Potentially a useful creative platform, but also the sort of thing which you could usefully use to take the measure of the office’s collective ID this afternoon – why not send an all-company email with the link and just watch what develops? THIS IS A GREAT IDEA, PLEASE DO IT.
  • Stamp Yo Face: This is obviously a terrible and narcissistic thing if you do it for yourself, but an EXCELLENT and very fun thing if you use someone else’s countenance. Provide them with a picture and they will create a physical stamp of that picture to use – so you can stamp documents with your own face, or, more comedically, anyone else’s. HOW MUCH FUN would it be to go on a merciless campaign of face-graffiti-ing, slapping an unwitting mate’s gormless inky fizzog across London billboards and posters? It would be lots, is the answer. If you’re a boss, why not pick one employee to be the face of ‘Approved’ and another to be the face of ‘Denied’ and get two stamps ordered as such – I mean, there’s probably an industrial tribunal waiting to happen there, but it would definitely be at least momentarily amusing.
  • The Best Free Software: This is SO USEFUL – bookmark it now. A Reddit thread where users were invited to list the best free software they know – being Reddit, the breadth of stuff here is VAST, and it’s all been nicely categorised up top for ease of use. Some of the stuff’s obvious, fine, but there are some hugely useful links in here.
  • Sycamore Giant: This is just perfect. “For the next 52 weeks, from the same angle, I’m going to take 3 photos of this glorious Sycamore in a daft attempt to capture something of its wonder.” Nature in (very slow) action.
  • Realistic Scenery: Statistically-speaking, it’s sort-of likely that at least one of you is a model railway enthusiast – possibly you’re a long-term reader and have been waiting YEARS for me to feature something which panders to your TINY LOCOMOTIVE FETISH. Well HAPPY DAYS! This is a whole YouTube channel in which…some bloke makes incredibly detailed, hugely skilled tiny dioramas for his model railways. The skill and technique is really impressive, and whilst I personally have very little interest in TINY LOCOMOTIVES I did fall into a complete ASMR hole when I found this, so there’s something for (almost) everyone.
  • The Scottish National Galleries Archive: LOTS of art from Scotland’s museums here to explore and enjoy. So, er, explore and enjoy.
  • Micah Lexier: An Instagram feed of pleasing found objects – “images, numbers, letters, shapes, diagrams, double-page spreads, packaging, stuff on the street, hands holding things”. Simple and very soothing, though I couldn’t exactly tell you why.
  • Webcomic Name Mashup: Create your own, randomly remixed version of ‘Webcomic Name’ – you know, the brightly-coloured three-panel one, where every strip ends with a character saying ‘Oh No’. You can make some beautifully surreal stuff with this – the format lends itself wonderfully to this randomness; I mean, I just loaded it up and it spat this out at me, which gives you a decent idea of how it works.
  • Buttrcup: What are we all these days? Well, yes, STORYTELLERS, obvs, but also CREATORS! We all CREATE! And why ought we not be able to monetise this creation? WHY, I ASK YOU??? Of course, some of us are more easily able to create than others, but we do have a wonderfully democratic means of making stuff at our disposal – our phones and our nudity! Anyone can MONETISE THEIR NOODZ! Or at least they could if certain PESKY platforms weren’t so down on that idea – enter Buttrcup, which provides a platform for anyone to upload naked pictures of themselves and then charge people to look at / download them. Which, if you fancy making a living as a static camwhore, may not be a bad idea. Alternatively, it’s ushering us into an era where people are reduced to doing softcore bongo piecework to pay for bread; YOU decide which particular version of this you want to believe!
  • Castle of the Winds: Timewasting browser game of the week #1! This is Castle of the Wind, which is a VERY old RPG originally on Mac and which you can now play in-browser. It’s obviously a bit crap, but in a fun way – and if you’re my age or older, you’ll get some sharp little nostalgiapangs from it.
  • Jelly Mario: Timewasting browser game of the week #2! This is Mario, except Mario is made of jelly – more of a physics experiment rather than a game per se, it’s still fun to mess around with. Move offscreen to the right when the title screen appears to commence.
  • Jehovah’s Witness: Games-as-vehicle-for-personal-memoir are underused imho, particularly with the plethora of lightweight game creation engines now out there and available for free. This is a really interesting – and really very bleak, at heart – exploration by one former Witness about the life of a child amongst the Watchtower-peddlers; it’s short and simple but it packs something of an emotional punch and will make you very glad that the maker isn’t in that world anymore.
  • Songbird Symphony: Timewasting browser game of the week #3! Songbird Symphony is simply GREAT. Play this. If you remember New Zealand Story from the early 90s on the Amiga or ST then this will ring all sorts of aesthetic bells, but it’s MUCH smarter than that – really, I can’t stress enough how good this little platformer is; from the audio to the art style, an absolute delight.

nick gentry

By Nick Gentry

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS OLD-BUT-GOOD SELECTION OF JAPANESE LOUNGE TRACKS!

 

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Gov Bins: Not technically a Tumblr! Still, though, the most Tumblr of websites I’ve seen in an age – this is one man’s project to photograph every single type of council bin in the UK and catalogue them here. WHY??? But then again, why not? I know I say this all the time, but I LOVE stuff like this – well DONE, Harry Trimble!
  • Un Gif Dans Ta Geule: Truly superb cinemagraph-style gifs, of a sort you don’t see so many of these days – these are ace.
  • Konczakowski: Slightly terrifying zooming recursive gifs which, if you stare too long, may well hypopotise you into doing something awful (I have no proof of this, it’s just a feeling).
  • RAL7016: “A collection of architects greys (RAL7016) in and around the city. Architects grey has become the default finish for many architectural ‘final touches’ – exterior panelling, doors, windows, signs, planters as well as huge swathes of hoardings all around the city are painted in the same RAL colour. For me it has become a symbol that the developers have or are moving in. It’s quite a nice colour, it gets around decision making, doesn’t put people off – it’s neutral and inoffensive, saleable – magnolia. I imagine an entire city, finished in the same RAL colour.” So there. Thanks, Dan, for the tip.
  • She F Eld: Sheffield, in a Tumblr. SUCH CONCRETE!
  • Atomovision: A Tumblr of funny, creative stuff made by Michael M (no further name data available). This is dark and amusing and clever – lots of really good stuff in here.
  • Reklame In Der DDR: Old pre-1989 German design, adverts and the like. Stylish.
  • Marshall Manson: Marshall used to run Ogilvy in London, but now he’s going on a tour of the Southern States to eat BBQ and other fine things; he’ll be writing up his musings on the food and culture he finds on this Tumblr. Marshall knows his meats, and writes passionately about food – worth bookmarking, this one, if you’re into your eats.
  • Me Vs An Post: One man, messing with the Irish postal service one parcel or letter at a time. This is wonderful and quite, quite mad, but very funny indeed.

 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

  • America’s Opioid Epidemic: Another week, another exploration of the terrifying scale of America’s skag epidemic. This is a superb piece of journalism, taking a dispassionate look at the drugs; appeal and making an interesting and cogent case for their current popularity being very much a post-internet thing; this passage is, to my mind, almost heartbreakingly sad: “One of the more vivid images that Americans have of drug abuse is of a rat in a cage, tapping a cocaine-infused water bottle again and again until the rodent expires. Years later, as recounted in Johann Hari’s epic history of the drug war, Chasing the Scream, a curious scientist replicated the experiment. But this time he added a control group. In one cage sat a rat and a water dispenser serving diluted morphine. In another cage, with another rat and an identical dispenser, he added something else: wheels to run in, colored balls to play with, lots of food to eat, and other rats for the junkie rodent to play or have sex with. Call it rat park. And the rats in rat park consumed just one-fifth of the morphine water of the rat in the cage.”
  • The Worst Roommate Ever: Genuinely unsettling account of the life of Jamison Bachman, who for several decades led an itinerant existence wandering around the US and making a series of housemates’ lives a living hell – this starts odd and then gets VERY odd and quite dark and doesn’t really let up. You will be disinclined to find a flatmate off Craigslist after this, put it that way.
  • The Lonely Life of a Professional YouTuber: If you’ve got an adolescent at home whose main ambition in life is to join the shiny, floppy-haired ranks of your Zoellas or Alfies or, heaven forfend, Jake’n’Logans, make them take 15 minutes to read this honest account of the life of mid-level YouTuber WillNE. Having become famous for breaking the Blackpool Grime scene a few years back, Will now makes a living YouTubing full time – this paints a sobering picture of how incredibly lonely and what insane work it is to churn out this stuff on the regular. Obviously there’s a tier above this where it all becomes gravy again – I am reliably informed, for example, that Zoella only works one day a week (to the point where she literally will not answer emails outside of that allotted time) – but for the strugglers and the stragglers this is basically a 12h a day gig and you are ALWAYS on. It sounds awful, frankly. Go and work in comms instea…oh, no, that’s awful too, hang on.
  • Whatever Happened To Brendan Fraser: US GQ really is doing some of the best interview/profile pieces going at the moment; this one, presenting Brendan Fraser as he reenters the public eye after about a decade-long hiatus, is as ever a sympathetic portrait of its subject but one which reveals a few interesting details about the Hollywood machine and about how much action movies fcuk a body up (on which note, after reading this I am even more convinced that Tom Cruise is not a real man and is instead a cyborg replica of himself – I mean, there’s no WAY that that man has human knees at the age of 50+ with all that rooftop gallivanting.
  • Hawaii’s Outlaw Hippies: In a remote part of a Hawaiian national park, a bunch of people have been squatting for years – depending on your perspective, either living free off the land, or alternatively messing with an ecosystem and generally being a pain in the arse. This piece follows a reporter embedding with the community for a bit – in the main, I came away from this piece bemoaning the fact that none of the people who tend to hang out in island paradise situations like this are ever the sort of people I would want to share an island paradise situation with.
  • The Hollywood Pay Gap: A fascinating piece on how exactly pay in Hollywood works – what’s basics, what’s added on, and exactly what sorts of fabulous sums are involved. It goes some way to explaining – not, to be clear, justifying – some of the reasons behind differential pay in Tinseltown, but the main point of interest to me here is the sums involved. HOW MUCH did Jim Carrey get for The Cable Guy? FFS.
  • How To Bake A Pie In Prison: This is such a beautiful piece of writing. May Eaton, who spent time as writer in residence at a male prison, recounts the relationship that the prisoners had with food, and how they managed to prepare meals and treats and hooch from the barest of ingredients. It’s a warm and affectionate and superbly-written essay and I promise you it will prove warming on a chilly day.
  • How To Scam Spotify: This is SO clever and I wish I had thought of it, and by the end of this you will too. I presume that this loophole has been closed, although now I think about it I’m not 100% certain as to how you’d go about preventing people from repeating the trick – tell you what, you give it a go and I’ll take a 15% cut for ‘creative consultancy’, ok? Good.
  • My Life As A Woman With Colourblindness: I confess that prior to reading this piece I had no idea that it was possible for women to be colourblind, which shows how much I know. This is a really interesting exploration of the particular issues that a woman faces when unable to determine whether something is read or green – as you’d imagine, makeup presents its own particular set of difficulties, and not wanting a man’s standard getout of ‘Oh, I’ll just make my whole wardrobe monochrome so it doesn’t really matter’ also presents the odd sartorial problem.
  • Why Lisa Simpson Matters: You may not think we need ANOTHING thinkpiece about the Simpsons, all these decades on, but you’d be wrong; this is a great essay examining the character, her development, her place in the American (and Western) psyche, her role as a champion of effort over adversity…smart cultural criticism, with the added bonus of featuring a lot of interview material with the voice of Lisa, Yeardley Smith, who apparently just talks like that and who I learned is currently voicing a True Crime podcast called ‘Small Town Dicks’ which means that, if you like, you can hear Lisa Simpson talking about some pretty grisly murders (you SICKO).
  • Big In Russia: The slightly strange world of smalltime US rappers who are inexplicably making it big in Russia. There’s an interesting line in here about the sort of cultural parallels between the bleakness of rural Russia and the hopelessness of smalltown America which seems rather apt; also, there’s some pretty curious niche hiphop in here also.
  • What Is The Perfect Colour Worth?: A profile of the people at Pantone, who determine the world’s palette on a yearly basis. In part hugely interesting and impressive; simultaneously, though, it’s obviously all quite a lot of colossal bullsh1t, as noted by the end-quote in which a senior Pantone person describes the annual selection of THE PANTONE SHADE OF THE YEAR as, basically, a load of bollocks. I’d be really interested to see a piece like this looking at how chromatic aesthetics have changed (if at all) in a post-screen world, in case anyone’s after writing one.
  • Rethink Your Commute: Profiling the DIGITAL NOMADS, 30- and 40-something people who travel to the second world (not always, but mostly) to work remotely in shared living and coworking spaces, mostly doing app/web design or general, non-specific consultancy. I’ve always been interested by this – it’s the sort of thing I could theoretically do, just about – but this piece makes it sound endlessly unappealing. The people profiled mostly seem like dicks, there’s a fairly high degree of cultural parasitism implied here, and, I don’t know, the prospect of spending my life, albeit in a nicer environment, surrounded by the sort of people you meet at Ko Pha-ngang fills me with pretty existential dread.
  • A Complete History of Happy Slapping: Crikey, this feels like even longer than 15 years ago. Were you ever happy slapped? No, because turns out it wasn’t ever really a thing, it was just a classic case of tabloid hysteria bolstered by a healthy dollop of new tech confusion. Still, take a moment to flash back to the good old days when you could let anyone film anything they wanted on their phones because the resulting footage would be so incredibly pixellated that it looked like genitalia in Japanese bongo and you wouldn’t have anywhere to put it online anyway. BETTER TIMES.
  • Inside the OED: WONDERFUL piece looking at the OED in 2018 – how it maintains relevance and utility in the post-internet age, and what its role is evolving into. As a piece on etymology and the history – and indeed custodianship – of language, this is fascinating. Also, I would absolutely LOVE my job to involve spending 6 months researching and summarising the history of the verb ‘to go’ (obviously I would be bored senseless within two days, I know this, but it’s the sort of person I want to be).
  • Mr Grizzly: Before the web, there was a documentary called Mr Grizzly about an eccentric American inventor who’d built a home-made anti-bear suit and wanted to test it out by being attacked by a Grizzly. It never quite happened, but the inventor attained a moderate degree of celebrity in the aftermath of the film’s opening – this is what happened to him afterwards. Very sad, in all honesty, but it’s a sympathetic portrait of a man who you get the impression isn’t all that sympathetic in actuality.
  • We’ve Always Hated Girls Online: Remembering online bullying back before it was even a thing, and how even then it was women who got it in the neck. This is part memory-essay about the old time web, pre-Geocities even, and part sad examination of what it is about online culture that has always seemed to make it a more unpleasant experience for women than men.
  • Why This Week Was Great: A few thousand words by Golby about why snow is wonderful, even in London, even when you’re a grown-up (but not, to repeat, if you’re homeless). Characteristically good writing, the bastard.
  • In Search of Warriors: This is a truly AWESOME photo essay, in which the photographer Frederic Lagrange and writer Kim Frank travel to Mongolia and document their experience. The images are WONDERFUL – honestly, I can’t recommend this enough, it’s a wonderful collection of pictures. My favourite part of this is the skin of the subjects – you can feel the wind off the steppes taking off a few layers of epidermis as you scroll.
  • Fish Jokes: Finally this week, a stylish and clever and neat and pointed piece of fiction, Me Too-ish in inspiration, about a woman and her boss and their emails. This is very, very accomplished indeed – enjoy.

sangho bang

By Bang Sangho

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

  1. First up, a short film adaptation of the artvideogame Papers Please, which explores issues of agency and acceptance by putting you in the guise of a border guard, granting or denying ingress to migrants attempting to enter. This is EXCELLENT:

 

2) I’ve long been a fan of the supremely talented mathematician, musician and YouTuber Vi Hart – this is her latest video, in which she plays piano and sings three pianos simultaneously in 360 audiovisual splendour. This is obviously a stitched vid – noone can actually play three pianos, or at least I don’t think they can, though Nils Frahm definitely did two last weekend – and there’s actually some mathematical theory underpinning it, but it’s also a quite simply lovely piece of music, and it really fits with the weather:

 

3) Aidan Moffat was once part of Arab Strap, but has since carved out a very successful solo career for himself. This is his latest, with RM Hubbert, and in common with all the songs this week it is just PERFECT for a snowy winter’s day. It’s called ‘Cockrow’:

 

4) This is called ‘Second Hand Lovers’ – the conceit of the video is that the protagonist is haunted by the ghosts of all his former partners, who have to come to terms with his new girlfriend. The premise is nicely handled, and this is beautifully shot throughout; it’s by Oren Lavie:

 

5) Next, another small, slightly sad, very beautiful song – this is called ‘Secret for the Mad’ and it’s by Dodie, and again the vocal makes me think of snow. Lovely video, too:

 

6) This is creepy and wrong and horrid and BRILLIANT. It’s called ‘Fest’, and it made me feel ODD:

 

7) Next, a bit of jazz (slightly mediocre jazz to my mind, but) with a SUPERB video – enjoy the CG here, this is called ‘Nebula’:

 

8) Finally this week, my favourite video by a mile This is GLORIOUS – drawing over video isn’t new, fine, but the style here is SO GOOD. Enjoy it – the song’s rather wonderful too, it’s called ‘I Was In New York’ by The Shy Kids. HAPPY FRIDAY I HOPE YOU AREN’T TOO COLD WHY NOT GIVE SOMEONE A HUG AND WARM UP BUT MAKE SURE TO ASK THEM FIRST AS CONSENT IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF GOOD HUGGING OK GOOD BYE I LOVE YOU SEE YOU SOON BYE!

 

Webcurios 23/02/18

Reading Time: 26 minutes

Even by the standards of a pretty fcuking febrile 2018, this one’s been a doozy. Things I have seen or heard about this week, and this is just a small selection – teachers should have guns, we’re letting Assad getting away with (lots of murder), Jezzus is a spy, Jezzus isn’t a spy, Darpa want to weaponise sea creatures, you can now buy a dildo which will order you a pizza, sex robots.

Jesus, the sex robots. I have to have a phonecall about them now, as it happens, so I’ll leave you here with this week’s hand-selected cornucopia of links, spilling ripely into your lap, pregnant with promise. Or at least you presume it’s promise; then again, that swelling could be gases released by decay. Only one way to tell – BITE IN! Enjoy your latest tasty mouthful of Curios – IT’S LOVELY TO SEE YOU AGAIN!

kate ballis

By Kate Ballis 

THIS WEEK’S IMPERICA MIX IS A CRACKER, PLEASE ENJOY IT!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T THINK THAT THE FACT A KARDASHIAN CAN TANK A STOCK IS NECESSARILY A POSITIVE REFLECTION OF WHERE WE’RE AT AS A SOCIETY:

  • Facebook & GDPR: Yes, GDPR! Four letters which have inspired millions of words of advermarketingpr clickbait and speculation, but which, judging by much of what I have read, NOONE seems to really understand! This is Facebook’s attempt to give some sort of clarity to exactly what sort of punitively draconian data-protection framework (and wow, let me tell you that writing a phrase like “punitively draconian data-protection framework” really is what gets me going at 652am on a Friday) we’re going to be living under come May, and, as far as I can tell, it seems reasonably clear – basically, if you’re using Custom Audiences based on customer data matching (emails, phone numbers), then it’s your responsibility to ensure that the data you’re using has been collected in line with GDPR guidelines (affirmative consent, etc etc). It’s not interesting, but it’s reasonably clear.
  • Making FB Ad Metrics Clearer (Again): Another update to Facebook’s reporting metrics, mainly making EVEN CLEARER when they’re basically just guessing about the numbers they’re reporting to you, and getting rid of some metrics that noone likes or understands (‘social reach’, for example). Which is fine, but I do rather feel like each of these updates is a small but solid admission that their metrics have been a bit shonky for a while.
  • Add People To In-Progress Calls In Messenger: What’s even worse than someone trying to do a video call with you? Perhaps being added to someone else’s video call in progress and having to deal with multiple bobbing heads on a screen meaning you have even less of an idea on where to focus so as to avoid looking like a boss-eyed weirdo (am I the only person who’s really self-conscious about this? I am, aren’t I? Balls), which is now what FB Messenger users can do. No brand applications that I can think of, thanks Christ.
  • 3d Posts on FB: This is interesting – I’d missed this initially, but apparently Facebook ‘recently’ added the ability to upload 3d models as posts, which users can interact with in newsfeed (moving them around, zooming, etc); this has now been updated to include more, better filetypes. If you’re shilling anything that involves CG renders this is probably very helpful – expect to see this being used by film and game studios rather a lot. Oh, and you can now do this on Wikipedia too, which is nice.
  • Twitter Clamps Down On Automation and Multi-Posting: As someone else (EDIT: That someone else was Rob Blackie) pointed out, BAD NEWS for those kids up at Social Chain. This update to Twitter is designed to go some small way to stamping out bot networks which amplify content by posting the same stuff from multiple accounts; as of the now, Twitter’s API won’t let content be posted simultaneously to multiple accounts owned by the same user. This is mainly for developers, alerting to stuff they will no longer be able to get their apps to do with the platform, but it’s worth knowing. Not, of course, that you are doing any of this stuff. Definitely not. Especially not you, Social Chain.
  • Free Snap Ads!: You’re not going to make up that billion by giving this stuff away, Snap! In a slightly beggy move, Snapchat’s offering anyone who’s currently doing digital advertising (and can prove it with receipts) but who hasn’t yet spent any ad dollars on Snapchat ad credit on the platform. Not sure exactly how much, but I think I read that it was $500 or thereabouts. Which isn’t bad, and frankly is possibly worth exploring if only to use the budget to mess with your local population of teenagers.
  • You Can Add Gif Stickers To Snaps Now!: The other thing that happened overnight was that the makeup brand Maybelline asked its followers on Twitter (in a sadly now-deleted Tweet) whether it should stay on Snap or switch wholesale to Insta Stories; 81% of the few thousand people who responded suggested Snap was OVER. Now, it’s not statistically significant, and kids are fickle, but, well, it doesn’t look fantastic. Still, Gif stickers (just like Insta)!
  • Amazon Testing On-Site Publisher Content: Perhaps leavening the joylessly-efficient process of buying things on Amazon, the platform’s testing the ability for publishers to host content on the platform; the idea being that it’ll effectively act as an in-Amazon affiliate linking service. So you might get a whole bunch of magazine content about, say, gardening, on the site’s, er, gardening section, whose feature on the best secateurs would enable readers to click through and buy said secateurs from Amazon and take a small fee. Everybody wins! Oh, apart from small shops, they don’t win at all.
  • Audible Produces Plays Now: This is included mainly as an illustration of how odd business is in 2018. It now makes sense for Audible – Amazon’s audiobook platform – to pay to stage plays in the real world so it can then own the audio rights to said plays and make them available for users to listen to. So now Amazon isn’t just going to own retail (and food, and maybe telly, and publishing, and web hosting), it’s going to own ‘theatre’ too. Great!
  • Most Innovative Companies 2018: Fast Company’s annual list of the businesses which are CRUSHING IT or whatever the idiotically macho phrase of the moment is to denote corporate excellence. A touch on the breathlessly hagiographic side for my tastes, this stuff, but if you care about BUSINESS then you might care about this. You know what, I really hate ‘business’, it’s NO FUN.
  • Investing for People: I rather like the gimmick of this site, which is for an ethical investment fund. It’s not hugely complicated, but it sets a user up to ‘get’ the proposition in a rather elegant way – take a look, it takes 2 minutes.
  • The Department of New Realities: It’s lazy and inaccurate to make gags about digital in Amsterdam being done through a haze of weed and mushrooms – there are some excellent agencies in and in-house teams in the city, and there is also my friend Fat Bob – but then you see websites like this and you think ‘Hm, though, sometimes those lazy stereotypes are based in reality after all’. The Department of New Realities is an offshoot of W+K Amsterdam which does…oh, Christ knows, but they list everything from 3d modeling to theatrics on the site, so let’s just call it ‘transmedia’ (without really knowing what that means any more) and be done with it. Anyway, the aesthetic of this is basically ‘abstract 3d CGI art from the mid-90s, but in monochrome’, and I rather love it.
  • Monkeys and Brand Loyalty: I don’t want to spoil this, but I really can’t encourage you to click on this enough. I promise you it will become your new favourite research paper. Bonus points to anyone who uses this in meetings with planners in order to undermine all their insights in favour of a blanket ‘just get a goodlooking model’ approach.

giovanni forlino

By Giovanni Forlino

NEXT, JESSICA HOOPER’S FEBRUARY MIX WHICH FEATURES A WONDERFUL SELECTION OF DIFFERENT VOICES (AND SOME PRINCE)!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS TEACHERS PROBABLY DON’T GET PAID ENOUGH TO MARK HOMEWORK *AND* LEARN HOW TO FIRE OFF PRECISION ROUNDS IN INTENSELY HIGH-PRESSURE CIRCUMSTANCES, ON BALANCE, PT.1:

  • Bad News: You might have heard about this; developed by Dutch organisation DROG, Bad News is a ‘game’ in which you can enjoy the illicit and evil thrill of spreading FAKE NEWS and disinformation to manipulate people and, eventually, THE WORLD! It’s very light on actual ‘game’ elements – it’s effectively a linear narrative that plays out with some light personalisation options – but I like the style of it and the aesthetic’s pleasingly Teletext-y, and it does a reasonable if necessarily simplistic job of demonstrating how disinformation functions online.
  • Molly: Not the incredibly irritating EDM scene term for MDMA, but instead a slightly creepy virtual doppelganger service which basically promises to use your existing social feeds to power a bot which will undertake the tedious busywork of actually talking to people online. Basically pitched at the sort of dreadful Garyvee types who infest the business world, all motivational coaches and artfully-spaced LinkedIn updates, to enable them to automate the tedious process of interacting with their followers and dispensing fresh nuggets of cliche, day after day. It’s very much in beta, and I’m a touch sceptical as to how the ‘bots’ will work in practice, and obviously it sounds awful, but there’s a scifi short in here about the ethics of creating a limited bot version of oneself which slightly tickles me.
  • Skeleton Helmets: I have completely failed to watch any of the gravity games, to my shame, but WHO KNEW that the helmets of all the people doing the Skeleton were so wonderful? The eagle one could only be more American if said eagle had a rifle coming out of its face.
  • Apply To Date: You people out there on the frontline of dating, how is it for you? Are you still doing the apps? Is Tinder over? Are you toying with the idea of going back to a simpler time when you’d just go and sit in a bar with a hopeful expression on your face and a vague belief that someday someone will just find you? Perhaps Apply to Date is your new jam! I think this has the potential to get quite big, actually, and there’s DEFINITELY a TV format in this – basically the site lets you make one of those godawful ‘Hi, I’m fcuking GREAT, you might be lucky enough to taste my mucus one day!’ pages which occasionally crop up online, and then lets you sift through all the (doubtless voluminous) applications to choose a WINNER. Come on, this sounds fun – it’s unclear to me at this point whether people choosing which applicants to take on are able to set humiliating and overtly-biological challenges to potential suitors, but if not that’s a feature I’d like added in v2.0, please.
  • Bitcoin Regret: Imagine if you’d invested $20 in bitcoin 4 years ago – IMAGINE!!! Well, imagine no longer – Bitcoin Regret lets you select an amount and an investment time before calculating exactly how many Ferraris you could now buy based on the current valuation. $500 in 2010? $57million in 2018. I mean, I don’t know what I’d do with $57million – something akin to Leaving Las Vegas, quite possibly – but it’s a faintly mind-boggling potential return there.
  • A Silent Place: To quote, “A SILENT PLACE IS A PICTOGRAPHIC ORACLE CONSISTING OF ROCK DRAWINGS FROM THE UTAH DESERT. EACH DRAWING APPEARS FOR 227 SECONDS AND REAPPEARS 227 MINUTES LATER IN A CYCLE THAT CONTINUES INDEFINITELY.” So, basically, it is ART. One of an increasing number of digital projects which really make me want to have a large wall-mounted telly to display them on, which is so desperately banal and middle-aged that I may cry.
  • The Portrait Project: Following the unveiling of the portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama in the past few weeks, this project is now seeking submissions for portraits of the sitting President – until March 2, they are seeking works which portray Donald Trump; these will be compiled into a shortlist and then put to the public vote, with the work deemed by US, THE INTERNET, to be the best of all being used on posters and mugs and suchlike, to be sold for charity. GO! MAKE ARTS! The only stipulated direction, other than size, is no nudes, which is probably for the best. 
  • Where Is The Tesla Roadster?: It is in space, where we would probably all rather be right now. You can use this website to track its progress, should you so desire. TAKE ME WITH YOU, STARMAN.
  • View Image: Google Chrome recently removed the ‘View Image’ button when perusing pictures on image search, in a move designed to make it marginally harder for you to nick other people’s pictures of the web; this Chrome extension brings that function back, meaning you can go back to blithely ignoring copyright just like you’ve always done!
  • Gilmar Photos: There are two slightly separate reasons for posting this; the first is that this Insta account often posts rather interesting explanations of how the photographer achieved a particular shot, in a nice ‘lifting the veil’ sort of exposition of how staged so much photography is; the second is that the general aesthetic of the account can best be described as ‘incredibly cheesy Braziliant catalogue shoot’, and it brings me quite a lot of joy.
  • Airbnb PLUS: Airbnb but MORE EXPENSIVE! Mr & Mrs Smith, but with even more filament lightbulbs! Airbnb’s newly-announced luxury strand of the service basically guarantees you swankier places to stay with fancier STUFF on the walls and a better level of customer service support. Which is nice and all, but a slightly depressing reminder of the incredibly differentiated service levels which will become the norm across ostensibly ‘open’ platforms based on how much users can afford to stump up. All customers are equal, etc etc.
  • Them Types: Contemporary typefaces! Collected! In one place! Lots of typefaces! Not much else!  Pleasingly, each typeface is credited to its designer and links back to them, which is a nice touch.
  • This Fangirl: An Instagram account sharing football-related photos from a female fan’s perspective – this is GREAT, and it’s really nice to see a slightly different gaze being applied to the game.
  • Anchor: It feels a little like ‘I have a podcast’ is the 2018 equivalent of 1997’s ‘Yeah, I’m a DJ’; whilst I’m starting to think we might possibly be approaching peak ‘young people breathlessly talking over each other about feelings’ (might be the most gammon thing I’ve ever typed, that), we continue to see services making it ever easier to produce your very own weekly show about, y’know, LIFE and how FUNNY it is. Anchor has been around for a bit, but this week sort of relaunched to be a one-stop-shop free podcast recording and distribution app. Which sounds quite useful, if you’re into that sort of thing. Personally speaking, I quite like the idea of very small-scale podcasts created for tiny, niche audiences – why not make a podcast just for your family? Actually, making a regular podcast for your parents or grandparents telling them about what you’re up to and reassuring them you’re ok may in fact be the cutest idea I have ever had and I might have to do a small bit of a cry as a result, hold on.
  • Sip: Horribly-named new app by Product Hunt which effectively presents you with a daily digest of COOL NEW STUFF FROM THE WORLD OF TECH. Which, frankly, could be done perfectly well through a newsletter and which I am suspicious of as a result – also, it basically uses the now-inescapable Stories format which makes me inherently prejudiced against it.
  • Roma: I know I bang on about THE PACE OF CHANGE and being scared of the future and stuff, to the point of ennui, but it’s worth occasionally pointing out that I have been doing this in various forms for nearly 8 years now and, whereas back in the day I’d maybe see a couple of things a month which could reasonably be described as ‘straight out of a Gibson novel’, it’s now literally on a daily basis. Witness this, certainly one of the more future things in here this week, which is a system combining VR and 3d printing; Roma is a prototypical sculpting / building system, whereby a user models in a 3d virtual environment wearing goggles and said model is near-simultaneously moulded by a 3d printer. Sculpting something in VR which is automatically built out of what is basically thin air (I know it’s obviously not thin air, but come on) – THIS IS PRACTICALLY WITCHCRAFT.
  • Games for Friends: A rather nice site which presents a selection of recent videogames recommended for people who don’t actually like videogames very much, or are perhaps confused about what they are in 2018; all the titles here presented are non-violent, and require a minimum of familiarity with standard gaming conventions (movement, controls, etc), meaning anyone can in theory enjoy them, regardless of their familiarity with the medium. A really nice piece of curation, and a rather good resource if you’re looking for a way to introduce a friend, partner or family member to gaming in a gentle way.
  • NYC Drone Film Festival: Or rather, the Instagram account of the NYC Drone Film Festival, which takes place next weekend. This is just shedloads of really good drone shots, as you’d expect; check this one out for an example, it’s really very good indeed.
  • Level Glasses: You know what would make glasses LOADS BETTER? If they were also fitness trackers, said literally noone ever. And yet nonetheless these exist – some reasonably banal looking generically smart frames, which track how many steps you’ve taken. JUST LIKE YOUR WATCH. OR YOUR FITNESS BAND. OR YOUR SHOES. Still, if you want to add another device to the arsenal of products which exist to remind you of your own inevitable mortality then this will doubtless delight you.
  • Melt All The Guns: Writer, comic book artist, magazine editor and generally nice man James McMahon has a shop on Etsy where he’s selling small anti-gun badges; proceeds go in part to the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and the designs are very cool, so WHY NOT EH?

tony barrera

By Tony Barrera


“>NEXT UP, A REALLY LOVELY MIX BY THOMAS SPOONER WHO USED TO LIVE OPPOSITE ME WHEN I WAS A LITTLE KID AND WHO’S GROWN UP TO BE A VERY NICE MAN WITH GOOD TASTE IN MUSIC!

 

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS TEACHERS PROBABLY DON’T GET PAID ENOUGH TO MARK HOMEWORK *AND* LEARN HOW TO FIRE OFF PRECISION ROUNDS IN INTENSELY HIGH-PRESSURE CIRCUMSTANCES, ON BALANCE, PT.2:

  • Real Life Charts: Michelle Rial is a designer from San Francisco, and this is her Instagram account where she posts brilliant and funny graphs, all about, y’know, LIFE and stuff. So relatable! It’s quite difficult to describe this positively – I think it’s really good, but at the same time all the terms I want to use to describe it are generally the sort of words which generally make me want to gouge out my eyes. Still, click and enjoy.

  • Historic Maps of London: Oh this is SUPERB! 50+ historic maps of London, ranging from old depictions of the tube to a ‘Hyde Park Glove Map’, designed to be worn by ladies with questionable orientation skills taking a gentle constitutional. Cartography enthusiasts (you crazy guys!) will adore this.
  • Bump: The cooler kids among you – or the mindless Supreme zombies, either/or – may well know about this, but it was new to me. Bump is basically Wavey Garms as an app – it’s a streetwear buying and selling community, with marketplace and chat functionality, working with Paypal to manage transactions and provide payment security. Wonderfully, there’s an additional market where people basically offer themselves up to stand in line in Covent Garden or wherever to catch the latest drop – they queue so you don’t have to, and you don’t even have to know them or talk to them! Is this ok?
  • List of Oreo Varieties: There are a LOT Of different types of Oreo, turns out.
  • The Institute of Gremlins 2 Studies: Not a film that tends to get a lot of critical discourse around it, Gremlins 2, but in case you ever wondered about the Derridan implications of the Flasher Gremlin then you’re in for a treat.
  • And Flowers: Thanks to Dan Green for pointing this out to me;  have you ever wondered what a florist would be like if you made it a lot less like a florist and a lot more like a cross between SuperSuper Magazine circa 2006, and everyone who’s ever lived in New Cross? It would be like this! Honestly rather lovely, despite being so hip it can barely see over its own pelvis.
  • Public Office: The website of artist and maker Jonathan Levine, an Australian who makes the most incredible designs from cardboard – mechanical, architectural, fantastical, I would love to see this stuff animated in stop-motion.
  • The Mercury Jacket: What could POSSIBLY go wrong with a jacket which has a built-in heating element and thermostat, controllable (OF COURSE!) by your phone? Why not be one of the thousands of curious folk to back this Kickstarter and find out! Yes, it’s another entry in the now-kilometric list of ‘internet connected stuff on Kickstarter which doesn’t really need to be internet connected and which I’m reasonably sure isn’t going to be as good as it looks in prototype!’ Here it is, then, the “Mercury Intelligent Heated Jacket — outerwear that’s voice controlled, built for anything, automatically heats to the right temperature, and learns your behavior to get better over time.” Yes, that’s right, voice controlled: “ALEXA WARM UP MY JACKET PLEASE” – who, WHO, is ever going to want to say that? “Alan, you’re sweating like a horse, what’s wrong?” “My phone ran out of batteries and now my jacket won’t let my body temperature fall below 101 degrees”. Oh, and OF COURSE it has ‘AI’ so it can ‘learn your preferences’. I mean, the possibilities are ENDLESS. Go on, buy one, let me know how you get on.
  • Making Art With Alexa: Turning a pair of voice assistants into an interpretation of Alvin Lucier’s 1969 audio artwork “I am sitting in a room”. Peak Web Curios here, by Henry Cook.
  • Not Quite Bronwyn: I don’t know who Bronwyn is, but I like the fact that she has an Insta account showing exactly how Starbucks mangle her name each morning.  
  • Make Your Own Alexa-Controlled Toilet: Have you ever wanted to defecate and then walk away from the toilet, regally declaring “Alexa, eliminate my waste!” to trigger an automatic flush? No, no of course you haven’t. Still, this is a detailed set of instructions as to how you can turn your ordinary, banal toilet into an EXCITING, FUTURE CRAPHOUSE!
  • The Material Properties Database: Occasionally I come across something online which is so tedious that I figure it has to be incredibly useful to someone – so it is with The Material Properties Database, which lists the physical properties of loads of construction materials, should you ever need to know exactly what type of plastic you might want to build, I don’t know, a giant garden dinosaur out of. You might read this now and scoff but JUST YOU WAIT until someone’s asking you whether they ought to use Polynenzamidole or Epoxy to secure the camera to the drone mounts. Or, er, something.
  • Beecosystem: You get the impression that perhaps the name came first here. Beecosystem (ok, it is a great name) is a slightly mad-looking concept which effectively offers buyers the opportunity to have an attractively designed, modular, display-quality beehive, er, in their house. It’s certainly a feature, but I confess to not being entirely comfortable with the idea of having MILLIONS OF FCUKING BEES in my house. “Yeah, so I’ll be home by about 8, want me to swing by th- Clare? What’s that sound? CLARE OH GOD NO THE BEES ARE LOOSE GOD CLARE SAVE YOURSELF” I mean, that’s what’s going to happen, isn’t it? It’s not like you’ve not been warned. Still, they look quite cool.
  • The Swiss Transit System: A live map of all the trains on the Swiss rail network, moving in beautifully precise and well-oiled ballet across the territory. Wonderfully, soothingly dull.
  • The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: Everyone hates Powerpoint. Everyone is dreadful at it. Although possibly noone is quite as bad at it as the US Military, as evidenced by this absolute goldmine of bizarre and increasingly surreal documents – the diagrams! The language! The seemingly uncritical devotion to clipart? Imagine having one of these ‘presented’ at you by a screaming man in fatigues – horrid, isn’t it? This one’s especially for any designers out there who will have a conniption at the complete absence of any sort of unifying aesthetic here.
  • Celebrity Tattoos: A slightly-too-obsessive database of famouses and their tatts from around the world, with accompanying picture galleries, which is perfect when you just absolutely have to know about what ink DJ Lethal out of Limp Bizkit has (he has a House of Pain tattoo, tatt fact fans!).
  • Pommerman: A robot competition! Pommerman is an international AI challenge, in which developers are invited to create code which can successfully compete in a multiplayer game of (pseudo-)bomberman. If you’re interested in coding and botbuilding and suchlike, this could be a fun pastime. Alternatively, just go and play Bomberman.
  • Crying in Public: I am not 100% certain where the ‘crying in New York’ meme/trope came from, but it’s very much a ‘thing’. Crying In Public is a map of New York onto which people have tagged their stories of public emotion in the city – mostly sad, but more generally just beautifully human. A special credit to the person who’s posted a story about being lifted off a man’s lap whilst having sex with them by a bouncer and still not getting kicked out of the venue, which is a pretty impressive feat. This is a very sticky site, and one you can get lost in – I would like, OBVIOUSLY, for someone to replicate this for London please.
  • Popcorn TV: This is a PERFECT Friday afternoon piece of webdistraction, and very nicely made with it; it’s a fairly standard ‘how many of these TV shows can you identify?’ game, but the graphics are nice and there’s lots of bonus content and you can also do it in French so, frankly, what MORE do you want? Jesus.
  • Robot Mind Meld: This is rather fun and pretty impressive. The site presents you with a bot opponent; you both start with a work, pulled out of the ether by the bot and from wherever you keep your word stocks by you, and then try and iteratively arrive at matching words by trying to find a common term between the two. Fcuk, that makes NO SENSE, does it? Even by my standards, that’s some POOR EXPOSITION, sorry. Look, just try it, it’s fun.
  • Pornceptual: “Pornceptual presents pornography as queer, diverse and inclusive. We aim to prove that pornography can be respectful, intimate and artistic, while questioning usual pornographic labels. “Can art succeed where porn fails – to actually turn us on?”” More ‘interesting’ than titillating, to my mind at least, but this is a fascinating site at the fringes of sex, art and bongo; obviously it’s not that safe for work, but the photography’s honestly really very cool and not actually all that bongo-ish, so I reckon HR will be fine with it. Seriously, I’ve cleared it with them, promise.
  • Battleships: Finally this week, this is basically Battleships crossed with Sudoku and it made me feel REALLY thick and so I’m inflicting it on you in the hope that you’ll fail as spectacularly to solve these as I did.

Mike Campau 02

By Mike Campau

THE FINAL MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS LOFI BEAUTY FROM AKIRA WHICH WILL BE PERFECT FOR THE LONGREADS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

  • Walls and Portals: You may not think you want to look through a series of photos of walls and portals, but you do.

  • Colourful Gradients: A different colour gradient, automatically generated by a computer, posted every 30 minutes. Really, really pleasing (and would actually make a far better Insta account than a Tumblr if I’m honest).
  • Mapstalgia: Videogame maps drawn from memory. This is great – obviously a love of games helps, but I like the interesting interpretations of space different people have, evident from the way they attempt to draw these worlds.
  • Shell Make The Future: This is in here SOLELY to showcase the quite remarkably soulless corporate music promo that Jennifer Hudson, Pixie Lott, Luan Santana, Yemi Alade and Monali Thakur all got roped into doing, all in the service of greenwashing Shell a bit. Scroll down, you’ll find it, it’s AMAZING. Have any of you actually knowingly heard a Pixie Lott song? As with the Saturdays, quite a large part of me believes she exists solely to give the appalling gossip pages in the Metro a blonde person to feature.

 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

  • Fcuk You, I Like Guns: We’ve not been short on opinion pieces following last week’s tediously predictable school/gun event, but this is the only one I’ve read I thought essential; written by a former member of the US Military, it calmly and cogently lays out the reasons why there is no reason whatsoever to allow civilians access to military-grade weaponry. My personal favourite point is the one directed to all the people who use ‘the need to form militias against corrupt government’ as a reason for their semi-erotic attachment to automatic weaponry, which basically just says “MATE THE GOVERNMENT HAS FCUKING TANKS AND HELICOPTERS, YOUR AR15 WOULDN’T HELP”.
  • Trending on Social is Worthless: A smart essay on why it might be better were social platforms to abandon the concept of ‘trending’ entirely, given the complete lack of any sort of agreed methodology or indeed transparency around how each platform’s selections work. When outlined like that, it does make quite a lot of sense – you wouldn’t necessarily give much credence to someone who was constantly shouting “LOOK AT THIS IT IS AN IMPORTANT THING” but who then was incapable or unwilling of explaining exactly why said thing was in fact important.
  • The Good Room: This is a long and digressive but fascinating essay in which designer Frank Chimero writes about the importance of free public spaces in the physical realm as areas for human interaction and growth, and draws parallels to their importance – and, crucially, their decreasing accessibility – in the virtual. “Remember: the web is a marketplace and a commonwealth, so we have both commerce and culture; it’s just that the non-commercial bits of the web get more difficult to see in comparison to the outsized presence of the commercial web and all that caters to it. It’s a visibility problem that’s an inadvertent consequence of values. The commercial parts become more self-contained and link inside themselves to keep you around—after a while, you’re looping around their cul-de-sac because attention is money on the web. Non-commercial sites link out and will let you go, which immediately puts them at a disadvantage for mindshare.”
  • Absurdist Dialogues with Siri: This perhaps slightly snobbishly alarmist, but I’m broadly in agreement with the author’s premise – to whit, that the simplified and transactional nature of the language we are developing to deal with voice assistants is moving us ineluctably to a point where we see and use language in purely functional fashion. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Siri’s going to, y’know, KILL POETRY, but it’s an interesting line of thought.
  • Casapound and Italian Neofascism: You may or may not know that Italy goes to the polls again in March, affording the Italian people yet another opportunity to make themselves a European laughing stock by once again doing exactly what increasingly-Piltdown-Man-looking Uncle Silvio – he’s back! He never really went away! Truly, it’s amazing the degree of rehabilitation that can be achieved when you own all the telly and some of the newspapers! – tells them to. Except this time there’s a lovely hard-right component to the election, comprised of Forza Nuova and Casa Pound, the subject of this excellent article which traces the history of Italy’s fascist movement since World War II. My mum says this is borne out of Italy never really having engaged in any critical analysis of its past relationship with extremism, which seems legit given my grandfather would proudly walk around in the 1980s and 90s happily saying he was a fascist and Mussolini was a bit ace, and everyone basically just thought he was a bit of a lad (to be clear, Web Curios is very much an antifascist publication and my granddad, god rest Nonno’s immortal soul, would have very much disapproved).
  • Building All The Live Shows: From the same sort of ballpark as that piece about doing the audio for the Superbowl halftime show which I posted a few weeks back, this is about the company which designs, builds and manages the sets when people like U2 or Gaga go on tour. This sounds SO incredibly stressful – the various points in the piece where they basically acknowledge that, say, Bono, will literally just sketch something on a napkin and say “This, but flying and with laser rockets on” and then swan off, and you just have to make that happen, make me sweat nervously. I remember once meeting the bloke who managed the stage settings for the 2012 opening and closing ceremonies at my friend Paul’s wedding, who told me that his first meeting with Annie Lennox about her performance involved him sitting largely in silence with a cup of tea at her house, while she expanded an artistic concept which was basically ‘giant skeletal ghost ship’ and he thought, repeatedly, “I have literally no fcuking idea how to do that, Annie”.
  • I Can Text A Poo, But Not My Name: A hugely interesting piece about the historic systems of cultural dominance and oppression which are being accidentally extended into digital life through unquestioning UX and UI design; the piece’s title is referring to the fact that whilst Unicode is really good at adding new emoji, it’s less good at expanding charactersets to support languages in the second and third world, for example.
  • I Dated Bad Men Until A Bad Man Became President: This is a nicely written personal essay by Sarah Sweeney about her experiences dating fuckbois and wastemen and how the election of exactly that sort of person to the Presidency convinced her not to anymore.
  • Your Cortex Contains 17billion Computers: Web Curios once again dips an ignorant toe into the murky (to me) wonders of neuroscience, a subject despite having had lots of really smart people patiently and kindly explain it to me, and in which I am genuinely interested, I simply cannot ever hold onto information about. Perhaps this essay will remedy that – it’s a really interesting and reasonably easy to parse examination of how exactly the brain relates to the concept of computational networks, and quite how much more complicated it is. Also contains some excellent images of dendritic networks which are always a pleasure to see.
  • All The Art In Bojack Horseman: “Yes, Matt, we know you don’t really watch telly, there is no need to tediously announce this fact whenever discussing something televisual, we know you haven’t seen it”. Good, now we’ve got that out of the way, this is a brilliant look at all of the parody artworks featured in miserable alcoholic horse lolfest Bojack Horseman. I love this sort of thing – just look at the amount of art history nerdery that’s contained here, purely as extraneous detail, it’s wonderful.
  • //medium.com/@dethtron5000/the-marvel-movie-graph-5-years-later-7334a6a01398″>The Marvel Movie Universe Graphs: Someone has poured a frankly baffling amount of time and energy into mapping the interrelationships between all the different bits of the Marvel Movie Universe. If you care about that sort of thing this will ENTHRALL you.
  • Thunderdome: Oh WOW. When I was a callow 15 year old youth and shipped off to international school, I lived in my first year with a Spanish guy called Javier who’d previously lived in Brussels and whose CD collection included a few compilations of quite frankly terrifying high-tempo hardcore music under the name THUNDERDOME (my favourite of these opened with staccato gunshots and air raid sirens and then a massive Teutonic voice SCREAMING “FCUK PARIS! FCUK LONDON! FCUK MILAN! THIS IS THUNDERDOME!!!!”, at which point it all went a bit 240bpm for about three hours). Anyway, this is an incredibly comprehensive look at the culture around the Thunderdome parties, and the Northern European hardcore scene as a whole – even if this was never your vibe, check out the photos and click on a few of the links to some of the music; it’s…jesus, it’s horrible, can you imagine the amount of speed you’d need to be on?
  • On Colorism: I had absolutely no idea that Colorism was even a thing until a couple of years ago when I worked on the BBC’s Black and British season and lots of the people I worked with educated me. This is a decent primer on the issue, and quotes Emma Dabiri who I have met a few times and is a frighteningly smart person on issues of race, society and representation.
  • Let’s Talk About Waveforms: Just a GORGEOUS interactive, explaining what waveforms are, what they do and how they work. Beautiful design and a wonderful example of how UX/UI can make a huge difference in communicating tricky concepts.
  • The WeWork Manifesto: Wonderful, haughtily scathing critique of co-working phenomenon We Work, which, not content with attempting to convince us that work really ought to be our entire life and that we MUST BE FRIENDS with our colleagues, wants to start building that brand loyalty even earlier with the launch this September of its first for-profit school, WeGrow. To give you a feel for the tone of the piece, and the insane hubris of the project, enjoy this beautifully cutting excerpt: “Though Ms. Neumann has no background in education (on the website, she describes herself as “an avid student of life” and says her “superpower” is “intuition”), she has applied for accreditation from the state, has hired a team of career educators and is accepting applications for the coming school year. Tuition for toddlers: $36,000 a year.”
  • Opioid America: Not the first photo essay on the US opioid crisis I’ve featured, but this one by Time is full of bleakly brilliant pictures of an epidemic which continues to seemingly be utterly ignored by lawmakers.
  • Northwest Passages: “For the past seven years, [Jessica] Dimmock has been photographing and filming older trans women in the Pacific Northwest. Dimmock is careful to explain that the situations are, well, complicated: some of her subjects don’t consider themselves to be trans because, as Dimmock explains, it was not an identity that they felt free to totally embrace. “They’ve been trapped in a timeline and a situation at home that has made it impossible for them,” says Dimmock. “But everyone I photographed is on the spectrum of having a full female identity. There are women inside all of these people.” The series of photographs below, taken in late 2017, returns the women to what Dimmock calls “these hidden and secretive spaces.”” These are superb.
  • Can Free Speech Survive The Internet?: That is, in an era in which all (fine, not quite all, but) speech is infinitely recordable and recoverable, can we still be said to have ‘free’ speech (free qua unguarded)? Let’s just say the outlook doesn’t look fantastic. A lightly philosophical exploration by Thomas R Wells.
  • The Great Stink: This is a long and wide-ranging essay by Laurie Pennie, touching on the need for men to take on the emotional burden of the Me Too movement and to, you know, not just sit around feeling scared and a bit vulnerable about it. “Suck it up and let go. Let go of your resentment at women’s lack of patience, let go of your wounded pride, let go of your useless shame, and let go of the idea of being a “good guy.” “Good” is not a thing you are, it’s a thing you do, or don’t do. The world is not neatly divided into good and bad men.” I know Pennie’s often divisive, but she gives good essay and this is a cracking piece of writing / thinking.
  • Mother of Invention: A short scifi story by Nnedi Okorafor, set in future Nigeria. It’s one of a series being published in Slate around how technology is set to change our lives, themed around various prompts – this one’s on the theme of ‘Home’, and it’s so refreshing to read an African female voice in scifi; the framing and the ideas feel fresher than the majority of gunmental-grey futurescapes you often get fed.
  • Derangements: This is a remarkable piece of writing, and I promise it will surprise you in ways you weren’t necessarily expecting. Beau Freedlander talks about his practise of ‘radical fasting’, and how that intersects with his manic/bipolar issues; it is VERY honest, whilst simultaneously giving me quite a lot of unreliable narrator vibes. I couldn’t tell you exactly why, but this *really* got to me this week and has been rattling around in my head for a few days. Give it a go.
  • My First Year Sober: Finally this week, a comic strip by Edith Zimmerman whose words I have recommended to you before when she wrote at The Hairpin. This is a beautiful, sweet, and in-no-way preachy sequential art account of her experience of her first year sober; regardless of your relationship with booze, this is a glorious piece of work.

butch locsin 10

By Butch Locsin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

 

  1. First up, this is 90 seconds of PURE satisfaction. Marbles plus magnets plus rube goldberg = HEAVEN:

2) Next, this is ‘Dolly Said No To Elvis’, a bluesy song about how Dolly Parton refused Elvis the right to cover one of her tracks. The video is ACE and reminds me very much of the classic stop-motion accompaniment to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. Enjoy:

3) I think a few of you are going to rather enjoy this. The Cellblock song from Chicago, reinterpreted to refer to the oh-so-modern phenomenon of mansplaining – The Cellblock Mansplaingo:

4) This is called ‘Interference Pattern’ by Loud Neighbour – the slightly dopplering drums go perfectly with the black and white visuals, and generally I can just sort of stare and listen to this on an infinite loop. GOOD TECHNO:

5) This is ‘Simple Love’ by Manifest and it is SUPERB and the video is absolutely gorgeous. Put this full-screen and enjoy:

6) This is…unsettling:

7) Dinosaur! This is a film by Nathan, who’s a small boy, and his Dad, who’s an animator. It is SO CHARMING – I would watch something longer in this style, but equally appreciate it’s ripe to be ruined by some advercunt:

8) Finally this week, the best-named band I’ve featured in Curios for an age. Say hello to Hardcore Anal Hydrogen – this is their…er…challenging track ‘Jean Pierre’ – I LOVE THIS VIDEO SO MUCH. And, as this is the end, I love YOU! Really! THANKS FOR READING THANKS FOR SUBSCRIBING THANKS FOR NOT LEAVING ME ALL ALONE HERE I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND NOTHING BAD HAPPENS TO YOU AND YOURS BYE BYE BYE!

 

 

 

 

 

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