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

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

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

By Daehyuk Im

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

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

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

By Gherdai Hassell

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

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

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

By Frank Moth

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

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

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

By Kiknavelidze

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

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

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Jason Anderson

NEXT, ENJOY THIS INTENSELY ECLECTIC SELECTION FROM JON AVERILL!

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

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

By Bob Bicknell-Knight

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

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

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

By Tom Hegen

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

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

By Jemma Arts

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right, now on with the webspaff!

By Matthew Grabelsky

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

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

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

By Hans Vandekerckhove

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

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

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

By Katherine Le Hardy

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

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

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

By Mark Powell

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

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

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

By Mi Ki Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Todd Antony

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

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

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

By Echo Morgan

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

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

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

By Nvard Yerkanian

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

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

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

By Steve ESPO Powers

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Sophie Gabrielle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Nick Runge

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

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

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

By Sarah Delaney

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

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

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

By Giuseppe Palmisano

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

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

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

By Lin Yung Cheng

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

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

By Jack Teagle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Thisset

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

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

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

 By Kenneth Pils

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

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

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

By Jack Welpott

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

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

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

 By Arnout van Albada

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Talia Chetrit

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. 

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

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

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

By Guim Tió Zarraluki

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

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

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

By Wonmi Seo

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

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

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

By Yves Tessier

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

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

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

By Thomas Prior

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

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

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

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

By Naudline Pierre

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OH HELLO! I finished a job yesterday and as a result feel GREAT – even better, I seemingly managed to leave without alienating or upsetting anyone, although that will probably change next week when they realise that I have a secret backdoor login to the website and fully intend to go and make subtle but significant alterations to all the staff biographies as soon as they have paid my final invoice (what’s better, do you think? Misspelling everyone’s name by one letter, or giving everyone a 2:2 in Human Anthropology from Sheffield Hallam?).

Anyway, I am on holiday next week and the week afterwards, so this will be the last Curios til 21 June – take this opportunity, then, to writhe luxuriantly in my webspaff, and I’ll see you in a few short weeks, by which point I’m confident we’ll have somehow managed to relieve ourselves of this nationwide politico-cultural paralysis and everything will all be sorted and FINE. Won’t it? CAN SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE EVERYTHING FINE, PLEASE?

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and I am fcuking off now. Bye. 

By Solve Sundsbo

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES, HAVE THIS FRANKLY AMAZING SELECTION OF ‘SONGS OF THE SUMMER’ FROM THE PAST 50 YEARS!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS AT WHICH POINT FACEBOOK IS GOING TO BECOME LIKE SMOKING, SOMETHING WHICH THE KIDS KNOW IS FUNDAMENTALLY BAD FOR YOU BUT WHICH HAS A STRANGE APPEAL REGARDLESS:

• Whatsapp Is Getting Ads: Or at least it is IN THE FUTURE! Yes, that’s right, your messages may be encrypted and secure, but it doesn’t mean Facebook can’t still find a way to monetise them; Whatsapp is set to get a wonderful injection of advertiser cash next year when it starts to offer the ability to run ads in the ‘Status’ bit of the app – although it won’t be of any use or interest if you’re in the UK, seeing as no fcuker has ever used Whatsapp Status over here, ever (honestly, did you even know it was a thing? No, you didn’t, don’t lie). You don’t need to do anything about this now, obviously, but know that you can start to drop this particular nugget of information in meetings so as to look like some sort of crazy digital savant (you won’t look like a savant, fyi; you will instead look like a person who cares TOO MUCH about the minutiae of social media platform changes).
• IGTV Now Supports Landscape Videos: You don’t use IGTV! Noone uses IGTV! Now, though, you can post landscape-format videos on there so you can chuck ALL of your YouTube content onto the Other Platform without even bothering to recut it as vertical! What a time to be alive.
• YouTube Kills Live Subscriber Counts: I presume that you, like me, have spent the vast majority of 2019 glued to the respective subscriber numbers of Pewds and T-Series, slavering rabidly at the upticking counts and screaming with childlike excitement every time the lead changed hands. Weirdly, normal people neither know nor care about any of this stuff, which is probably why YouTube is set to remove the current granularity and realtime subscriber data from channels; this, obviously, is not in any way important news, but it does mean that your ability to run comparisons between your clients’ channels and their competitors will be slightly screwed. You still shouldn’t really care, though, as this is all stupid and pointless and none of it matters.
• LinkedIn Adds Ad Transparency Stuff: This is moderately-interesting (look, it’s a slow news week, I am clutching at straws somewhat here) – LinkedIn has this week announced a Facebook-esque move whereby you’ll n ow be able to see what ads a Page has been running along with a bit of info on targeting and the like; if you’re consumed by the fear that someone else is being better at BUSINESS than you, then you’ll now be able to keep tabs on your competitors LinkedIn ad campaigns with this THRILLING new feature (moderately interesting? I take it all back). “To bring even greater transparency to ads on LinkedIn, we are introducing a new Ads tab on LinkedIn Pages. In this tab, members will be able to view all the Sponsored Content (native ads running in the LinkedIn feed) that advertisers have run on LinkedIn in the past six months. Members can click on the ads, but the advertisers will not be charged for these engagements and the clicks will not impact campaign reporting.” SO MUCH EXCITEMENT! SO MUCH BUSINESS!
• Ofcom’s Online Nation Report: Useful and interesting set of new data from Ofcom, which this week launched its inaugural ‘Online Nation’ report, looking at the digital habits of the UK’s citizens. This is all about attitudes and platforms, so if you want a snapshot of which sites people say they use most often (weirdly, Pr0nhub, Xhamster and Redtube don’t feature anywhere) and what they feel about them, this is GREAT. Interestingly, this suggests that, despite what they might say, kids ARE in fact still using Facebook; they also, according to the data, think that it’s responsible for all the bad things in the world. Anyone would think it’s a perniciously-addictive service which does noone any good at all!
• MyWony: For a variety of reasons – not least my not quite having the figure for it – it is unlikely that I will ever be in the market for a wedding dress; if you, dear reader, are more inclined towards holy matrimony, though, may I present to you this OFFICIALLY WEBCURIOS-ENDORSED wedding dress manufacturer from the Ukraine? I have no idea whether the dresses they peddle are in fact nice, but the fact that they have chosen to create a beautifully-drawn and very stylised webcomicthingy, all about some sort of scifi love affair, to promote their wares makes me love them immoderately regardless of the aesthetic and sartorial quality of their output. GET MARRIED, WEBMONGS, AND INVITE ME TO YOUR WEDDINGS!

By Doug Kim

NEXT, HAVE A PLEASINGLY SUMMERY AND VAGUELY BALEARIC MIX OF LOUNGEY PIANO-HOUSE!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE CURIOS IS A BIT THIN THIS WEEK AND AS SUCH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ANY PAUCITY OF CONTENT IS, FRANKLY, NOT MY FAULT AND IS SIMPLY A RESULT OF OTHER PEOPLE NOT MAKING ENOUGH INTERNET STUFF SO PLEASE PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT YOU LAZY GITS, PT.1:

• The Romanov’s Twilight: I must confess here to be something of a historical dunce, and to the fact that as far as I’m concerned the Romanov’s might well be a brand of fancy chocolates as a storied dynasty. Still, this rather nice website has enlightened me a bit, and I now know that the Romanov’s were Russia’s imperial family who were killed or exiled in the wake of the 1917 revolution. This site presents the history of the family following the survivors’ flight from Russia, with biographies of the major players and various different visualisations of the family’s history; it’s not super-fancy, but the stories here are fascinating. This is made by Tass, fwiw, which when I was doing pseudo-journalism many years ago was by far and away the most exotic of the wire agencies – seriously, you have no idea how exotic and exciting it was to see stuff come in labeled ITAR-TASS, like it was actually news from a foreign galaxy or something.
• Astronaut: Thanks to Nathan Nelson on Twitter, who kindly pointed me at this earlier this week;Astronaut is a lovely site which presents YouTube videos uploaded to the site in the past week with specific filename types (DSC 11200, that sort of thing) and a very low viewcount. It’s not the first site of this ilk I’ve featured, but I don’t think I will ever get bored of the intensely odd and human spectacle of unwatched YouTube vids, uploaded for an unknown and uncaring audience by mystery individuals; honestly, this is SO ART and I could watch it pretty much forever. It is weird and creepy and surreal and just PERFECT and I love it unreservedly.
• The Pudding Wikipedia Popularity Map: Dataviz masters The Pudding return with a lovely coneit – a map of the US, in which all the major towns and cities have been replaced with the name of the person from said town or city who is ‘most Wikipediad’ – that is, “Person/city associations were based on the thousands of “People from X city” pages on Wikipedia. The top person from each city was determined by using median pageviews (with a minimum of 1 year of traffic).” I am VERY KEEN on the idea of this naming convention being adopted more widely; on that basis, I would have grown up in Melinda Messenger, which is absolutely preferable as a concept to having done so in Swindon. Although possibly not to Melinda, on reflection.
• The Labyrinth: Digital artist and Friend of Curios Shardcore has spent much of this week making really disturbing algobongo and sending it to me on Slack, causing me no end of workplace awkwardness (“No, look, it’s not real smut, it’s just what a computer imagines smut to be! What do you mean ‘that doesn’t matter and you’re still fired’?”), but he’s also found the time to put this on his website – a lovely little combination of the Tube map and a brainscan. “This map was generated from real human connectome data captured at CUBRIC. A minute sample of the 100,000 brain connections present in the average human mind was used to create the interconnected rail lines displayed across the representation of the brain here depicted. The London Tube Map is both a classic piece of design and a functional representation used by millions to negotiate the real geography of the city. With a nod to The Great Bear by Simon Patterson, I have assigned stations to locations along the lines = each of these stations representing sets of people and ideas which connect and intersect. This produces a juxtaposition of seemingly different concepts which at first may seem arbitrary, or perhaps even absurd, but which inevitably provoke the intellect to find a connection, perhaps revealing subconscious relationships and bringing them to the surface.” This is very cool, and there are prints available should you fancy buying an ACTUAL ART (I am not taking commission, FYI, but perhaps I ought).
• The New York Public Library Digital Collections: This is WONDERFUL – prints, videos, audio, documents, maps, manuscripts…it feels like this contains everything in the world ever, frankly. This contains over a million things and, to be honest, if you can’t find something you’re interested in here then you may well be dead.
• PokeGAN: What would Pokemon look like if they were imagined by a machine? THEY WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS! These are great, and Pokemon are, it turns out, the perfect dataset to train a GAN on – the weirdly amorphous nature of the pixellated buggers, when seen up-close, means that these imagined variants look pretty much perfectly plausible. The only negative here is that the creator didn’t map these creations to Janelle Shae’s neural net-generated Pokemon names, but you can’t have everything (WHY NOT FFS??).
• RRRRRRRRRR: This is, fine, nothing more exciting than a Russian website featuring photos of people’s pets, but a) LOOK AT ALL THE CRITTERS!; and b) the magic of Google translate renders this into some sort of weird deadpan poetry. Honestly, the copy absolutely makes this – I mean, look: “The hero of this week is the Scottish Fold cat Seva. In life, he is extremely relaxed and, despite his young age, has already managed to change a few names, turn over dozens of glasses of water and become the hero of this police investigation.” Also, there is a cat on here called ‘Serotonin’, which is frankly the best name for a pet I have ever heard.
• Buildbox: This is an interesting game-creation tool; it’s a commercial product, fine, but the feature set looks amazingly rich, and the potential for making rather interesting and involved games with relatively minimal effort seems vast. Check out the demo video on the homepage, which makes it look like you can basically make a BAFTA-winning mobile game in about three clicks; it’s probably marginally more complex than that, fine, but maybe this will be the moment when your untapped creative potential comes gushing out. Maybe.
• Goodbrief: A nice idea for design students or anyone wanting some creative prompts to practice with – Goodbrief is a simple design brief generator, which lets you choose a sector and a type of work, and throws out an imagined brief for a designer to respond to; should you be desperate for a work prompt but not have access to any actual briefs, this is potentially really rather useful – oh, and if you need to come up with tasks for prospective interview candidates, this will basically automate the entire process so that you can go back to playing Minesweeper or browsing overpriced stationery or whatever it in fact is that designers do at work.
• Nod To The Rhythm: Upload any photo you like, tell the website where the eyes and mouth are, and then watch in rapt amazement as it turns said photo into a lightly-animated image, nodding its head and opening its mouth and generally looking all slack-jawed and weird. If you, like me, tend to spend most of your time in an office thinking up ways to make your colleagues feel slightly upset or uncomfortable, you may well appreciate this – why not spend the rest of the day taking all the photos off the ‘staff’ section of your employer’s website and run them through this for the lols? Or alternatively just make one with your own face and spend the rest of the day replying to all emails with a gif of your idiot-looking face, nodding emptily? This is how everyone behaves at work, right?
• Ship Your Enemies GDPR: Do you remember a few years ago when there was that brief craze for silly internet businesses which would send anyone you liked a box full of glitter or horse dung or whatever as an HILARIOUS PRANK? This is like that, except instead of sending someone a box of tiny plastic dust motes you are sending them a data-related legal shakedown! Copy and paste the legal text on the site and send it to whoever you like, to cause them (in theory, at least) a not-insignificant degree of hassle to comply with the request within 30 days; even better, if they fail to meet the deadline they are technically liable for a reasonably-sized fine! Whilst this is obviously an incredibly petty and annoying thing to do, it is also, potentially, very funny indeed, particularly if you know the person whose job it will be to deal with the horror and can picture their look of pained irritation.
• Kite Plans: Many, many years ago I worked for an agency called Idea Generation, where staff were on average about 16 years old and there was always a gramme of coke in the breadbin (trufact!); we did the PR for Amazon, before they were the terrifying everything-peddler they are today, and used to do loads of stories identifying spurious consumer trends based on sales data. Back in the mid-00s, we literally created a publishing phenomenon when we put out a story about The Dangerous Book for Boys being THE hot book of the Summer as parents tried to get their kids to swap their Playstations for conkers – obviously it wasn’t, and obviously parents weren’t trying to do that at all, but in the early days of digital panic it made for a nice feature angle for every single mid-market and broadsheet in the country. Anyway, that’s a really digressive way of introducing this website, which contains literally hundreds of different designs for kites that you can make and which your children will look at dismissively before going back to playing Fortnite instead.
• The Electricity Map: This is a really comprehensive resource showing how various nations get their electricity, where they source it from, and the environmental impact of their power consumption. Honestly more interesting than you’d think, I promise.
• Batch Watermark: Add watermarks to images, in bulk, with a single click. Obviously there are all sorts of useful professional uses for this, but in the main I quite like the idea of adding a totally unnecessary watermark to every single photo I ever take in a massive display of creative hubris.
• Thyself: If you’ve read Web Curios for a while, you may have realised that I have no time or patience for wellness, mindfulness, meditation or any such stuff – it’s not that I don’t think these things can be useful for others, to be clear, it’s more that I am incredibly superficial and shallow and I don’t have enough internal life to warrant that degree of introspection and analysis. If you’re a little less two-dimensional than me, though, you may like the idea of Thyself, a Chrome plugin which will periodically ask you how you’re feeling and asks you to respond with an emoji, letting you track your moods and feelings in simple, visual fashion. To be clear, this won’t make you happier, but it may allow you to define with greater precision the exact flavour of existential malaise you’re afflicted with.

By Andy Rementer

NEXT UP, TRY THIS VERY RELAXED AND LOW-KEY MIX BY ARON MCFAUL!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS LIKE CURIOS IS A BIT THIN THIS WEEK AND AS SUCH WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE BUT WHICH WOULD ALSO LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT ANY PAUCITY OF CONTENT IS, FRANKLY, NOT MY FAULT AND IS SIMPLY A RESULT OF OTHER PEOPLE NOT MAKING ENOUGH INTERNET STUFF SO PLEASE PULL YOUR FCUKING FINGERS OUT YOU LAZY GITS, PT.2:

• Chaos Burst Effects: For several years now there has been a general uptick in recognition and acceptance of Dungeons & Dragons as something that’s, you know, sort of ok. Whereas when I was growing up the mere suggestion that you might like to pretend to be a wizard in your spare time was a one-way ticket to a land of chinese burns and social ostracism, nowadays it’s COOL and socially acceptable to claim nerdery, and the weird escapism of sitting around a table with a bunch of people rolling dice and pretending that you are Tharg, Scion of Thargandia is vaguely aspirational. How the everliving fcuk has this happened? Anyway, this is a genuinely wonderful list of 1000 randomised status effects for roleplaying games, the idea being that Dungeon Masters can call on this sheet if they want to add a little bit of leftfield excitement to a play session – these are all things that can happen to magic users as a random consequence of casting spells. Regardless of whether or not you have ever played or have any interest in D&D, this is WONDERFUL – the imagination here is masterful, and there’s something lovely about imaging the odd directions that some of these could take a story – honestly, “Caster appears 50% fatter than they are in reality” would be a JOY to play with.
• BFF: A project by artist Shaun Feeney, which is best explained by the artist themselves: “The BFF project consists of 127 drawings combining the faces of friends. Inspired by my two-year experience working as a forensic artist, I drew the faces of 64 pairs of combined friends. I then drew a series of composites of the composites, until finally arriving at one drawing emergent from all 128 faces.” This is eerie and uncanny and sort of wonderful, and the resulting images are very, very strange and utterly compelling.
• Dirty Car Art: Artwork drawn into the filth of long-parked vehicles by Scott Wade, who is apparently very famous – he’s been on telly in over 20 countries, the website excitedly exclaims! – but has previously escaped my attention. It’s fair to say that nothing on this site matches the genuine brilliance of “I wish my girl/boyfriend was as dirty as this!”, but credit to Scott for trying (I jest, obviously ,this is all quite amazing and the sort of thing you can probably steal for a pitch if you’re feeling lazy and unimaginative).
• Muzli: A truly horrible name for an otherwise excellent little site – Muzli is a sort of visual inspiration search engine thingy, which throws out solely visual responses to any prompt you care to give it, and which is excellent from the point of view of creating mood boards and the like. The really clever thing is that it works with all sorts of quite niche terms – so you can input a pantone code, for example, and it will pull images containing that tone, or a school of design if you want a certain stylistic layer over all the results. I mean, this probably still isn’t as good as Google Images, but it’s good to have competition.
• Some Excellent Deepfakes: You might have seen the cliip of comedian Bill Hader ‘doing’ Arnold Schwarzenegger on late night TV in the US, rendered as a realtime deepfake – this is the YouTube channel of the tech crew who did the stunt, and there are half a dozen vids on there at the time of writing demonstrating quite how good the current state-of-the-art deepfake landscape is. It’s still not totally convincing, but it’s also significantly less horrifying and weird than it was a year ago, meaning at the present rate of improvement I’ll be able to bring you a totally convincing representation of me lifting the Europa League trophy by approximately Christmas.
• Bitlisten: This is the sound of all the world’s Bitcoin transactions as they happen; you can change the tones being used, and with the right combination of settings and a few tweaks of the volume you can basically ASMR yourself thanks to a bunch of idiots gambling on made-up non-money.
• Swit: There’s an interesting mini-ecosystem in terms of websites and apps at the moment, featuring products and services that exist solely to help people make better Stories – this is another of that ilk, an app which you can use to create small animations detailing your travels so as, presumably, to offer you bookend-type content with which to frame your EXCITING TRAVEL STORIES featuring you in a pool with some inflatable flamingos (FFS SUSAN THAT IS SO 2018). Nothing about this is particularly interesting per se, but if you’re after something which will temporarily make your Story stand out from that of every other plastic-lipped nonentity out there, this might be of use.
• Variable Fonts: Literally that! Discover and download variable fonts! “This site’s goal is to help designers and developers become more familiar with OpenType variable fonts in a way that isn’t overwhelming, while also providing straightforward info upfront about the font projects, who made them, and where to find more info or get the fonts to use.” Fine, it’s not exactly exciting but it might be useful to some of you. SEE, I DO CARE.
• Update Faker: This is VERY basic and won’t fool anyone with an IQ in treble-figures; however, you probably work in an office, meaning that there will be multiple people in your current field of vision who don’t reach that low bar and who will be RIPE for pranking. This site presents a variety of fake system update options which you can set running to baffle and confuse your idiot colleagues – actually, now I think of it, this is too good to waste on other people; why not set it running on YOUR computer, tell someone that it’s doing system updates and then fcuk off to the pub while you ‘wait for the IT to sort itself out’? I am a genius. DO THIS.
• Goat LARP: For those of you who have actually managed to achieve sexual congress with a consenting human partner and probably aren’t aware of these things, LARPing means Live Action Role-Playing – that is, doing role-playing in costume, with props. In the main, this seems to involve the sort of people who would have been Goths or Emos a few years ago twatting each other with blunt halberds before going on to bore each other to death over seven gallons of real ale, but occasionally the world of LARPing gets marginally more interesting – as it does here, with this event which is inviting people to come along to an event a fortnight on Saturday where they will be running a roleplay event specifically for some goats. No, I have no idea how that will work, or indeed what the goats are expected to get out of the experience, but should you be in the vicinity of Redding, Connecticut on June 15th then I would strongly advise that you pop down and check this out.
• The Satellite Map: ALL OF THE SATELLITES IN SPACE, ON A MAP! It’s amazing quite how many there are circling the equator; can the satellites see each other, do you think, or does the vastness of space mean that they’re forever orbiting in practical isolation?
• The Stick: If you’re a CREATOR (sorry) or just someone who quite likes making films on their phone, this could be a total godsend. The Stick is a very clever-looking peripheral for phones, consisting of a magnetic patch that you affix to the back of the device, and a massively versatile attachment that you can stick to the magnet and which can act as a stand or a fastener to attach your phone to your hand, your bike, or whatever else. As a means of securing the phone for filming in motion, this looks hugely useful, and in general the device looks like a genuinely good idea – it’s ‘coming soon’, apparently, and you can sign up for updates should you be so inclined.
• Blot: This is an interesting idea. “Blot is a blogging platform with no interface. Blot turns a folder into a blog. Drag-and-drop files inside to publish them. Organize your files in a way that suits you.” Basically this is a super-simple no-code publishing system – while it might not be hugely sophisticated, there’s a lot of potential here and the templates you can use are surprisingly flexible. The aesthetic is always going to be a bit ‘white space lifestyle kinfolk’, fine, but this is squarely aimed at the digihipster demographic and so that’s probably what you’re after anyway.
• Character Design References: The most incredible animation and cartooning resource I have ever seen. Honestly, this is the MOTHERLODE if you’re interested in cartoons, graphic novels, animation and the like.
• 2D Doom: So as I said in the upfront, this is a slightly reduced Curios this week (I blame America being on a long weekend, the selfish, lazy fcuks) – by way of recompense, though, have this WONDERFUL side-scrolling shootyjumpyplatformer, effectively taking some of the elements of Doom – Doomguy, hell, cacodemons, the chainsaw – and transposing them into a Commander Keen-style 90s shareware clone. Honestly, this is ACE and will happily keep you going til hometime.

By Arduino Catanfora

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES, WHY NOT CHECK OUT THIS EXCELLENT AND ECLECTIC SELECTION BY RAKALE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Second Beat Songs: Only one Tumblr this week, but it’s a GOOD ONE – Second Beat Songs collects versions of popular tracks, tweaked so that every second beat is removed. This is HORRIBLE but also strangely compelling; listening to these is a little like the audio equivalent of being on a slightly unpleasant comedown, with everything feeling a little too twitchy and jagged – seriously, click the link and listen to the MC Hammer track near the top, you will TOTALLY get what I mean.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ochre Jelly: Excellent LEGO kits. No, really, these are amazing.
• Lakin Ogunbanwo: A Nigerian photographer, whose work is SUPER stylised and FASHION; this is excellent, and the visual style here is wonderfully distinctive.
• Duda Lozano: A tattoo artist who does THE most incredible work; their pieces look like embroidered badges, complete with hanging threads, and the general effect is utterly mindbending.
• Cheap Old Houses: I imagine that quite a number of you spend your weeks living in your metropolitan rabbit hutches, dreaming of the possibility of a bucolic existence pursuing simple pleasures and maybe getting down to some good DIY to reconnect you with REAL VALUES and stuff; if so, this is basically pr0nography for you – Cheap Old Houses offers a seemingly endless stream of large, mainly quite fcuked rural properties across the US, all available for what appear to be preposterously low prices. Obviously what the account doesn’t tell you is how many people have been murdered in each property, or the skunk smell that haunts every single nook and cranny, but if you can ignore the practical realities then this is a whole load of morning commute dreamfodder.
• Tower Block 1: Thanks Gill for sending me this – the Insta feed of KLF legend Jimmy Cauty’s latest project, which sees him building a concrete tower block because ART.
• Nice Threads Mate: And thanks Dora for this, the Insta feed of an excellent-if-hipster embroidery shop; I would quite happily have their stitched representation of Pizza Hut ads on my wall, should anyone want to gift me such a thing.
• Naturally Jo: Vegan food art by a 17 year old kid – this is, honestly, remarkably well-done, and their eye is quite superb.
• Jonny Seven: I don’t really want to explain this too much. It’s…odd. Click and follow, and apologies in advance for the funny dreams.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Vs Fox: Ordinarily I wouldn’t link to something as US-parochial as a screed about fake news in the US, but the overall point here is germane whichever side of the Atlantic you happen to be on. Taking as its prompt the slowed-down video of Nancy Pelosi that did the rounds last week, the piece addresses the odd dichotomy of our current moral panic around truth and misdirection in news, and makes the excellent, true point that, whilst we might get all frothy-mouthed about Facebook and the evils of fakery, the real problem here with the quality of discourse is the traditional media. It’s a US article, so Fox is the main target, but you could equally rewrite this from the UK perspective and insert the tabs or the Mail and come to the same conclusion. I don’t mean to defend Facebook – really, I don’t – but this keeps coming back to the fact that IT IS JUST A TOOL AND WE ARE IN FACT THE PROBLEM.
• Inside MeWe: MeWe is one of the many alternanetworks, established a few years back but growing in popularity amongst fringe communities who are increasingly steering away from the mainstream networks as a result of what they perceive to be the bias they show against right-wing views; it’s not quite Gab, but it’s vaguely on the same sort of spectrum. This is an interesting look at what happens to a network when there isn’t any control or moderation, where (practically) anything goes, and where the self-declaredly disenfranchised congregate – it may not surprise you to learn that it’s not very nice.
• Post-Mutti: A fascinating look at the end of Angela Merkel’s reign in Germany, and how history will assess her near-15 year stint in charge of the Reich. It’s possibly a result of quite how insular and self-absorbed the UK has been over the past three years that one of my favourite parts of this piece is that it doesn’t mention us at all – this is a picture of global politics that focuses on the big picture and the power players, and we don’t even merit a cursory nod in passing. The overriding theme of the piece is sadness; sadness at Merkel’s lack of an obvious positive legacy, at a world which is more fractured and confused than when she took office in the early 00s, and sadness at her status as perhaps the last Big Beast of global politics – aside, of course, from Vlad, who the article sniffily notes doesn’t really count because ‘noone trusts or believes him’.
• The Pentagon’s Race Against Deep Fakes: This is an excellent explainer from CNN about what Deep Fakes are, how they are made, and what is being, and can be, done to find and identify them; if you want a simple, clear explanation of the technology and what it can be used for, this is an excellent starter.
• There Is Too Much Stuff: On the strange choice-paralysis caused by the seemingly-infinite array of products available at the click of a mouse thanks to Amazon, Wish, and all the other peddlers of disposable tat sending shipping containers criss-crossing our seaways and making a mockery of the current trend towards environmentalism (you want to help the environment? Really help it? STOP CONSUMING SO MUCH STUFF, THEN. What’s that? It’s inconvenient and you really like all the stuff? Oh, ok, fine). This is an interesting look at a slightly surreal feature of modernity – to whit, the trend towards single-offering retailers as a reaction to the fact that there is no way of choosing between the seemingly-identical procession of 300 different variants on a single product you’ll find on Amazon. There’s quite a lot of intellectual meat in here if you can be bothered to dig for it, in terms of retail and consumption trends.
• The Ukrainian President’s Inaugural Speech: You are probably aware that the Ukraine recently elected a comedian as their President – a man with no political experience whatsoever, other than his leading role in a long-running sitcom about an ordinary bloke who becomes President of the Ukraine. His appointment, weirdly, has generated less interested than I might have expected – are we now completely inured to the idea of hideously-unsuitable TV candidates attaining high office? How quickly we become jaded! – but this transcript of his inaugural speech is worth a read; I honestly thought this was a spoof or parody at first, but research suggests this really is the verbatim text and, well, CRIKEY. This is in many respects a very good speech – and I imagine delivered by a skilled performer it landed very well indeed – but crikey does it also feel exactly like a script from a TV show. This is going to be very, very interesting to watch.
• I Lied On Twitter: Did you see that Twitter thread last week in which the author told a long, rip-roaring tale of a road trip he took as a young man which involved him inadvertently stealing a brick of heroin from the notorious MS-13 gang? If so, you might not have seen this follow-up in which the thread’s author admitted to making the whole thing up for the numbers, and in the vague hope that someone might give himn a screenwriting contract. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see someone try and roll back from a myth they’ve created; on the other, part of me does wonder whether the whole thing was planned to garner additional attention and highlight the man behind the story so as to better his hopes of getting that writer’s room gig.
• The Brilliance of Da Vinci: A lovely biographical essay on Leonardo Da Vinci, which does a superb job of not only telling his life story, insofar as its possible to do so, but also contextualises the importance of his work in modernity; it’s fascinating to see how much of his theorising is directly relevant to today’s art and science; the interview with the heart surgeon, in which he speaks of the direct impact that studying Leonardo’s anatomical sketches has had on the manner he approaches his work in the theatre, is fascinating.
• 94 Awesome Women: A selection of 94 profiles of awesome women, featured on the website of The Gentlewoman – these range from Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Adele to Sanda Oh to Tavi Gevinson, these are GREAT and, if you’ll excuse the term, not a little inspiring.
• Bullet Comments: I think I’ve mentioned bullet comments on here before, but in case you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a particular feature of the Asian web whereby videos will often have playback comments overlaid on them, in the manner of a track on Soundcloud – so anyone can leave a comment at any point in the video, which will then flash up on playback along with all the others that have been posted. Does that make sense? It’s quite hard to tell. Anyway, the article does a far better job of explaining the idea than I can – I think this sounds like a fascinating feature, and I wonder whether it would catch on in the West; perhaps there’s something in Asiatic characters that makes the experience less unpleasant than it would be with Western letters cluttering up the screen. Regardless, I would like someone to hack this together for YouTube, please, just because.
• Trump’s Wikipedia Page: A look at what it’s like nehind the scenes on Trump’s Wikipedia page, talking to the editors who have made it their job to ensure that the entry for the most divisive President in US history (that feels like a true statement, even if I must confess that I’m not wholly confident in my knowledge of Andrew Jackson’s approval ratings) remains unsullied by trolls and partisanship. This isn’t really about Trump at all; instead it’s about the slightly odd and obsessional Wikipedian community, and how it self-regulates remarkably at scale.
• First You Make Maps: This is BEAUTIFUL and fascinating, on the history of cartography – you may not think that you want to read several thousand words all about the different ways in which people have made maps over the past 1000 years, but I promise you that this is ace and you will love it.
• I M Pei: The obituary of modernist architect I M Pei, the Chinese-American whose work defined much of large-scale corporate space worldwide, and whose buildings you have definitely seen even if you don’t know they’re by him. This is, to my mind at least, a quite startlingly brutal post-mortem takedown of the man’s work – I know that this style of architecture is far from fashionable at the moment, but I thought that this line in particularly was something of a low blow: “The only thing that kept Pei from becoming one of the immortals was his paucity of artistic talent.” – I mean, WOW.
• This Is An Ad Targeted At Millennials: From McSweeney’s. If you work in advermarketingpr – ha, of COURSE you do! – then this will make you cringe in horrified recognition.
• Meet Curvy Wife Guy: You may recall Robbie Tripp from his brief moment of internet notoriety a few years back, when he went viral based on an Insta photo of his wife in which he waxed lyrical about how much he loved her and her ‘ample curves’ (there’s no way of writing stuff like this without sounding like you’re writing something for the Sun, turns out); this is an interview with the pair of them, as Tripp launches his first single, a sort of internet-era Sir Mixalot, but VERY white and full of messages about body positivity and how it’s good to be thicc (sic). It’s more interesting than you’d expect, not least because the interviewer does a reasonable job of questioning the extent to which Tripp’s performative uxoriousness is genuine or simply a timely grift to exploit the recent trend towards fat acceptance. Regardless, the song is absolute garbage and you will be humming it for weeks.
• U Ok Hun?: This is WONDERFUL – an analysis and appreciation of the word, and indeed the very concept of, ‘hun’. From Gemma Collins to Natalie Cassidy, this is an exhaustive investigation into what ‘hun’ means, how it straddles gay male and ‘basic’ culture, and how it’s basically the ur-expression of that very British feeling of being ruinously hungover, watching terrible Sunday television with The Fear and eating Dairylea Dunkers in your pants.
• Incel Plastic Surgery: This piece did the rouns this week; the main thrust of commentary on it seems to have been that it’s an excellent and sensitive portrait of incel culture, and the strange form of mental illness that causes young men to contemplate significant surgery to up their value on the sexual marketplace. That’s certainly true, but there were a couple of other things that I found more interesting; the first, the reaction of the cosmetic surgeon to being told that he was effectively a God to all these sad, lonely, bitter young men; and the second, the slightly uncomfortable feeling that, whilst this is all obviously horrible and sad, it’s also not a million miles away from the way in which consumer culture has made women feel for much of the late 20th/early-21st Century.
• The Invisible City Beneath Paris: Finally this week, a truly wonderful piece of writing about going on an explore in the subterranean tunnel network beneath Paris. This NEEDS to be a film or documentary – it’s supremely cinematic, the writing is sublime, and there are some beautiful lines throughout. “All cities are additions to a landscape that require subtraction from elsewhere” is one that particularly struck me but, honestly, almost every line here is a joy.

By Shawn Huckins

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is an absolute BANGER of a tune – ‘Nails, Hair, Hips, Teeth’, by Todrick, by far and away the fiercest, queerest piece of pop you’ll hear all week:

2) This is called ‘Mapping’, it’s by Shortly, and it is SO LOVELY; the video’s rather beautiful too:

3) WHAT a voice this woman has. The song’s called ‘Keep The Change’, and the artist is called Mattiel and I think they ought to be more famous than they are. SUCH a good song:

4) I suppose it was only a matter of time til someone did an ASMR pop song – and lo! It came to pass that that someone was Charlotte Adigery – this is actually a lot better than it has any right to be, the triggers work a treat, and it’s oddly reminiscent of ‘Underwater Love’ by Smoke City from back in the 90s. It’s called ‘Cursed and Cussed’ – give it a try:

5) This is the new song from Why?, one of my favourite bands in the world. It’s called “I may come out a broken yolk, I may come out on saddle”, which is the exact sort of pretentious twaddle I adore them for:

6) Last up this week, it’s Poppy! HELLO POPPY! This is called ‘Scary Mask’ and, frankly, it’s horrible and unsettling! ENJOY AND THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK AND FOR A FORTNIGHT IN FACT WHAT WITH ME GOING ON HOLIDAY NEXT WEEK FOR A LITTLE BIT SO BYE TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND THE INTERNET WHILE I AM AWAY AND KNOW THAT I WILL BE THINKING OF YOU EVERY SINGLE DAY AND HOPING THAT YOU ARE WELL AND HAPPY PLEASE TRY NOT TO WORK TOO HARD AND I WILL BE BACK BEFORE YOU KONW IT I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU!:

 HELLO! NORMAL SERVICE IS ONCE AGAIN RESUMED!

That’s right, it’s ME! Not the algoversion – honest – but the REAL BOY, all flesh and sebum and mucus. ISN’T IT NICE TO HAVE ME BACK?

The website should have been fixed, the mailer software should be working…all that remains is for me to finish penning this desultory excuse for an intro and hit ‘publish’ and ALL WILL BE AS IT EVER WAS! 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you have no idea how good it feels to get all these links out of my head. 

By Brooke DiDonato

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS, WHY NOT GIVE THE FRANKLY LUDICROUS VOCAL RANGE OF DIAMANDA GALAS A GO?

THE SECTION WHICH HAS REALISED AT THE POINT OF HAVING TO WRITE UP A COUPLE OF FAIRLY GIRTHY WEEKS OF NEWS ABOUT S*C**L M*D** THAT IT REALLY COULD NOT GIVE LESS OF AN IOTA OF A FCUK ABOUT ANY OF THIS STUFF AT ALL, AND WHICH LOOKS FORWARD TO THE POINT IN TIME WHERE IT CAN STOP HAVING THE WORD ‘DIGITAL’ IN ITS JOB TITLE AND INSTEAD PERHAPS PIVOT TO ORNITHOLOGY OR SOMETHING SIMILARLY PLEASANT AND BUCOLIC:

• All The Things FB Announced at F8: Or at least most of the things, from Day 1 (Day 2 was the boring, techy bit which, trust me, you really don’t need to know about at all). SO MANY THINGS! Group video watching via Messenger! A boost to Groups within the platform! A slight redesign to pivot away from the hateful blue (don’t worry, Mark, Facebook will always be the Big Blue Misery Factory in my mind!)! The ability for ‘influencers’ to shill directly from their Insta feeds! SO MANY THINGS! Read the list of updates and digest them for your next client meeting, but, equally, know that these developments are all just pipeline stuff at the moment and won’t impact your actual job for a few months yet so, well, who cares?! Honestly, the main stuff here is that Groups continue to become more important, that FB’s AR product is getting pretty good, and the ‘shop through Insta’ stuff – everything else is of fairly minimal interest to advermarketingprdrones such as yourselves, so relax about it and think about something more fun instead. Look – here’s some analysis by someone who is FAR more interested in this stuff than I am, read this and feel smarter.
• FB Changes Video Prioritisation in Newsfeed: Not, of course, that Newsfeed really matters any more, but wevs. This is a series of slight tweaks to the algo which mean that FB will now start to prioritise longer-form (3m-ish) video, and specifically longer form video with significant repeat viewership and at least 1m+ of view completion. The platform subsequently clarified that there was obviously still a place for shortform, but that it was working to prioritse longer original content as that, apparently. Is what people want. IS IT THOUGH? IS IT? Somehow I am doubtful. Still, if at some point in the past few years you or your clients have done a PIVOT TO VIDEO…well, congratulations! The rules have ONCE AGAIN CHANGED! This probably won’t affect most of you, but know that your 10-15s repurposed TV spot is going to do even less well without ad spend than it did last week. GREAT!
• FB Adds Small Business Features: Both of these things are genuinely useful and smart – one feature offers small businesses assistance with ad targeting, automating the majority of the ad setup process to make it super-simple to run promos to benefit your business, assisted by Facebook’s own pseudo-AI (not in fact AI), whilst the other lets businesses add a ‘book appointment’ button to their FB/Insta profiles for in-app scheduling and visit booking (oh, and there’s some stuff in there about a boost to the rudimentary in=-app video editing features too). This is, obviously, totally sensible, and exactly the sort of thing you ought to cite the next time someone asks ‘Why do people still use Facebook if it’s so evil?’ – BECAUSE IT WORKS, DAMMIT.
• A Slight Tweak To FB’s Policies on Promoting Crypto: Not, obviously, that any of YOU fine folk peddle that sort of made-up snake oil, oh no no no. “While we will still require people to apply to run ads promoting cryptocurrency, starting today, we will narrow this policy to no longer require pre-approval for ads related to blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency.” See? You can now flog empty promises and lies with total abandon – THANKS, FACEBOOK!
• FB Launches New Anti-Misinformation Measures: Whilst I’m obviously in no way averse to giving Facebook a regular kicking every week, it seems only fair to acknowledge when it does something that seems…sort-of good. So it is with this series of updates, designed to once more attempt plug the hole in the infodyke with Mr Z’s pudgy digital thumb (wow, that really didn’t work as an analogy, did it? Sorry!) – this is a series of tweaks that FB hopes will prevent individuals, Pages and, newly, Groups, from sharing content that has been proven to be false, with measures including alerts for Group admins when previously-debunked content is shared in their community, and the depreciation of links to sites that get loads of traffic from FB but none from outside it. These are all sensible, reasonable steps, and none of them will make a blind bit of difference – still, thanks for trying to cram that massive, amorphous genie back into the stinking bottle of meths from whence it came!
• You Can Now Add Images, Videos of Gifs to ReTweets: YES THANKYOU GOD MORE WITLESS MEME-BASED ‘CONTENT’ TO ‘ENJOY’!
• Snap Launches Premium Ad Platform: Brands can now pay Snap (what are presumably) significant amounts of money to guarantee that their ad inventory gets shown on ‘premium’ Snapchat ‘Shows’ – effectively it’s the digital equivalent of a guaranteed ad buy in, say, Corrie’s ad break. Why you’d want to spend this much cash on inventory on a platform that is dying is, well, beyond me, but it’s your clients’ budget, do with it what you will.
• Snapchat Launches Bitmoji Games: Oh, look, I simply can’t pretend to care about this – here: “Today Snapchat announced its new Bitmoji for Games SDK that will let hand-selected partners integrate 3D Bitmoji as a replacement for their character skins. With support for Unity, Unreal and the Play Canvas engine behind Snap’s new Bitmoji Party game inside Snapchat, the SDK should make it easy for developers to pipe in life-like avatars that give people a stronger emotional connection to the game.” Happy?
• All Of The Google I/O2019 Updates: I know that it’s fashionable to hate Google – and for quite a few good reasons – and that the whole ‘don’t be evil’ schtick is now risible and quaint in light of the digitally-ushered in horrorshow that is modernity, but I still genuinely believe that it (or more accurately Alphabet) is still one of the most exciting things in the world, ever. I mean, LOOK at this suite of things that they announced this week – almost none of them have a direct advermarketingpr angle, but if you can read through this list and not get a slight frisson of ‘wow, the future is basically indistinguishable from magic, isn’t it?’ then frankly you may as well be dead. INSTANT ON THE FLY VIDEO CAPTIONING AND TRANSLATION WITH NO INTERNET CONNECTION! AR DIRECTIONS! ALL THE AR STUFF! Oh, and the ability to automatically delete – and keep deleting – your data history with Google, which is basically just sort of A Good Thing and which makes Facebook’s promise to introduce a ‘delete your history’ button (made a year ago and on which there is still no update, fwiw) look like the sort of empty, cosmetic piece of Zuckerbergian PR cuntery that it in fact was.
• Spotify Launching Voice-Enabled Ads: Would you like to hear an ad on Spotify that would offer you EXCITING ADDITIONAL CONTENT if only you interacted with it vocally? No, of course you wouldn’t – who in their right mind is ever going to listen to an advert for some crap and be moved to spontaneously exhort it to offer them even MORE interruptive content? NO FCUKER, that’s who! This is ‘Insert Biscuit For Content’ again, isn’t it? Christ, WILL WE NEVER LEARN??
• Beat These Insights: Thanks to Paddy Collins for including this in his missive a couple of weeks back – this is a genuinely wonderful resource compiled by Sweathead and presenting a collection of INSIGHTS from various campaigns, showing how the insight informed the creative and how it can act as a jumping off point for a whole campaign. If you need to train people on ‘what the fcuk is an ‘insight’, anyway?’ (which, even though you may not think you do, you probably do) then this is, honestly, GOLDEN – so much interesting and useful stuff in here, I promise you.
• Tinder Launching Festival Mode: I’m including this mainly as it seems like SUCH a bad idea. Do you want to find an unwashed, comedowny stranger to ‘enjoy’ a few minutes of stinky, unwashed, enforcedly-flaccid intimacy with? No, of course you don’t, are you mad?
• Gucci’s Spring Kids Collection: Look, I know this is the third of these Gucci sites I’ve put in Curios, but, honestly, HOW CAN I NOT?! In common with their general digital aesthetic, this is another simple, bold site with the confidence to present nothing other than beautifully-designed and shot lifestyle imagery on the page – no text, no instructions, just the confidence that visitors will know what to do. Honestly, the strength of the aesthetic across all of the brand’s digital work at the moment is astonishing – the chutzpah to take this minimalist approach and run with it across everything is hugely impressive, and I’m saying this as someone who, honestly, would rather eat their own face than EVER work in or with a fashion house. So, so good.

By Truf Creative

NEXT, HAVE THIS AWESOME SPOTIFY PLAYLIST COMPILED BY THE SUPER-TALENTED TRACEY THORNE!

THE SECTION WHICH WISHES THERE WERE ANYTHING AS GOOD IN THIS WEEK’S LINKS AS THE ‘CHEETAH EROTICISER’ INVENTED BY ALGOMATT LAST WEEK, PT.1:

• The Taxonomy of Reddit Bongo: Ordinarily I tend to leave the more filth-focused links to the end, but I sometimes worry that the less hardy Curios readers – you know who you are, you skimmers, you incompletists – will miss them as a result, and this, I promise you, is too good to miss. Welcome to ‘The Tree of Reddit Sex Life’, where data scientist Piotr Migdal has gone through all the bongo subReddits they could find and produced this wonderful taxonomical guide to them, showing you all the different ones that exist within various categories – honestly, this is SO fascinating, providing as it does not only an easily-browsed (yes, and clickable, you PERVERTS) list of all the filth, but also an at-a-glance primer as to which sorts of taxonomical categories are most popular. WHY IS IMAGINARY NON-HUMAN FCUKING THE MOST POPULAR GENERAL CATEGORY?!?!? Honestly, I know I’ve touched on this before in here, but do you think that maybe there might be some sort of correlation between ‘young people are fcuking less than ever before’ and ‘people are increasingly masturbating to images of cartoon cars being fcuked by other cartoon cars’? I think there might be, you know. Seriously, this is SO interesting and not a little weird, making it PERFECT Curios-fodder – enjoy! Oh, this is also largely SFW (apart from the text, fine) as long as you don’t click on any of the subReddits in question, so you can totally waste timeAmagining exactly what the contents of /r/titler is.
• Talk To Transformer: So last week’s experiment with AlgoCurios went well – aside from all the people who emailed me to tell me how much they preferred AlgoMatt to me (know that it HURTS) – but I can’t stress enough how incredibly upsetting I still find it to have my style so easily replicable by a not-particularly-smart machine. The OpenAI textwrangling kit that underpinned AlgoCurios is now available as an open experiment for anyone to play with, courtesy of this site – feed in a gobbet of text, and it will attempt to carry on the sentence in suitable fashion. It’s imperfect, and the output is only ever at best about 80% sensical, but as another reminder of quite how close we are to legitimately convincing AI text it’s hugely impressive.
• A Song of Ice and Data: ARE YOU WATCHING IT? IS IT GOOD? WAS IT WORTH THE 300-ODD HOURS YOU’VE POURED INTO IT SO FAR? Honestly, I’m not being a prick about this – whilst I’ve never seen GoT I don’t begrudge anyone their enjoyment of it – but I can’t imagine investing so much of my life in, well, anything (my girlfriend is SUCH a lucky woman). Still, if you have invested all that time and you REALLY CARE about speculating over what’s going to happen next, you may enjoy this official companion site to the final series, which looks at the probabilities of all the remaining characters making it to the end and…er…winning the throne? Is that how it works? Regardless, this is a nice piece of promo work, even if I don’t really understand anything about it at all.
• Weird Cuts: I read a novel this week in which one of the protagonists worked in AR – this one, in fact; not 100% successful, but some beautiful sentences – and another character upbraided them for what they termed the ‘privatisation of public space’ delivered by digital overlays; an interesting observation which sprung to mind when I saw this new Google toy yesterday. Weird Cuts is an AR experiment which basically lets anyone with a reasonably new-model Android phone make arty AR collages, taking textures from the world around you and creating and placing cut-out shapes using those textures all overlaid on the real world to create new sort of cut-and-paste sculptures out of them. It’s quite hard to explain, but the video on the download link is helpfully explanatory – whilst I know that using this is basically just helping Google to work out how people like to play, and effectively just feeding the databeast, I can’t really mind too much when the results are this fun and playful.
• SHE: Or ‘Search Human Equaliser’ (no, I know it doesn’t work, but it’s a nice idea so I will forgive them the shoehorned acronym) – this is a Chrome extension that looks to redress the inherent gender biases that search encompasses by ensuring that Google throws up a more equal mix of men and women in its results. This is a really clever project, and the sort of thing I imagine that at least three of you will kick yourselves for not thinking of first, as this is EXACTLY the sort of crap that would win you a Lion if you did it for Dove. Here’s the blurb: “Only 10% of search results for “CEO” depict women, despite women comprising 28% of the occupation. Search any common job and when women appear, they are lower in the results than men 60% of the time. When you search “great hair” or “perfect hair,” the results prioritize white women with sleek locks. Our search engine algorithms are capturing our stereotypes and serving them back to us in the form of biased results. With biases like these, it’s no surprise that women are almost three times as likely to say that their gender made their job success more difficult.” Really, really smart.
• Boomy: I’ve been saying for years now that digital music toys are getting so good that we’re only a few years away from literally anyone with a phone and 4g being able to produce Neptunes-level beats with a buttonpress – well, we’re practically there thanks to Boomy (fine, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but still). This is basically an AI-driven music generator – you pick the parameters of the track you want to generate and it will, with a bit of thought, spit out an algogenerated track; you keep the good ones to train the machine whilst discarding the ones you dislike, and the idea is that after a few hundred iterations of the process you’ll basically have something that would get 1million+ views on YouTube. I confess to only having gone through about a dozen training rounds, but even through those I could see the compositions getting tighter and more directional; this really is incredibly impressive.
• Pranko: This is not big or clever, but if you’re a certain type of person then it will be funny. Pranko sells fake product boxes – so you buy a fake box into which you put your ACTUAL gift to the recipient, meaning you get to enjoy the HILARIOUS moment at which they unwrap your gift to discover a box of, say, fart-filtering underpants! SO FUNNY! Seriously, though, there is almost certainly one person in your family who would find this the funniest thing ever. I’m not judging you, or them. Promise.
• Foundit: This is such a clever little idea – enter your personal details (name, phone number, address) and this site will generate a QR code that you can print and attach to anything you like, the idea being that if you lose said thing the person who finds it can scan the code and find your details so that they can contact you to return your possession. Of course, this depends on them a) knowing what a QR code is; b) bothering to scan it, or indeed knowing how to; and c) getting in touch with you to return your stuff; also, there’s nothing here that couldn’t equally be achieved by just dyno-labelling your mobile number to everything you own, but, er, DIGITAL! Fine, I have managed to convince myself over the course of writing this that it is in fact not a good idea at all. HAPPY NOW? FFS.
• Powerwashing Pr0n: A subReddit dedicated to the slightly odd but very satisfying phenomenon of videos of stuff being cleaned through the application of high-pressure water jets. You may not think this is your sort of thing, but I promise you that it almost certainly is.
• Women NYC: This is such an interesting civic initiative. Women NYC is a programme of activity by the City of New York designed, in its words, to “make sure that New York City remains the greatest place in the world for women to prosper.” This site collects information on all the various initiatives that have been birthed through the programme, from tech training to investment programmes to childcare support initiatives – it’s quite amazing to see how much practical difference can be made with this sort of prolonged focus at a citywide level. Is there something similar in London? It feels like there isn’t, but that there ought to be.
• Remove Recommends: This is SUCH a useful Chrome extension; if you have kids, I’d recommend installing this on all your home devices asap. It’s a simple programme that does one main thing, namely removing the ‘Recommended’ sidebar from YouTube and therefore limiting the likelihood that anyone innocently watching ASMR slime videos will find themselves down a Kekistani flat earth rabbithole within 7 minutes of logging on. It won’t stop your kids from watching Logan Paul, fine, but it might stop them ending up watching Mike Cernovitz as a result.
• YT To Insta: Seeing as we’re doing YouTube stuff, here’s a site that lets you easily plug in any YT url and take a 60s or shorter clip of it to post directly to Insta as native video. Obviously this is a copyright horrorshow but, well, who cares? I would imagine that this will be shut down sooner rather than later, but while it’s up this is a hugely useful toy.
• I Want To Apologise: An EXCELLENT subReddit where users share clips of AI from videogames going very, very wrong indeed to largely comedic effect. Fine, you’ll probably need a slight gamers’ affinity to get the most out of this, but if you enjoy watching in-game bloopers (and WHO DOESN’T, eh kids?) then you’ll like this a lot.
• The BBC Script Library: This may well be old news, but I only discovered it the other day and was floored by the amount of great stuff in here. Turns out the BBC website houses a whole bunch of original scripts for old episodes of some classic shows, from radio, TV and film and cutting across comedy, drama and kids’ programming. If you have any interest at all in writing for stage or screen or radio this is an absolute GOLDMINE – honestly, there is SO MUCH in here, and so many all-time classics. Look, they’ve even got the script for an episode of Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps – HOW CAN YOU NOT BE INSPIRED?!?
• Archipelago: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is made by my friend James, and I haven’t in fact listened to it because I don’t do podcasts. Still, James is a very clever man and an excellent journalist, and this – his exploration of culture, arts and society in his adopted country of Denmark – is almost certainly excellent. Give it a try if you’re after a bit of Scandiness.
• Bokeh: This will almost certainly come to nothing, but I admire their chutzpah if nothing else. Bokeh is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter – it’s halfway there with a month to go, so it might meet its target – to create an Instagram-alternative app, designed to be a slightly less horrid, vacuous and ad-laden mess. “Bokeh will be ad-free, have a chronological timeline, and will be private by default. That means that all accounts will start off as private. Public accounts will have an RSS feed, will have the option to cross-post to other social networks, and will support custom domains. All accounts will have an indie web compatible export so you can self-host if you want to. People won’t be able to find you by name, but will instead need to know your username to find you. Bokeh will never display publicly who follows you or who you follow. If someone has requested to follow you 3 times and you’ve declined, the app will prompt you to block them.” Does this sound like your thing? Chuck them a few quid, in that case.
• Voice Flow: This is a really interesting and quite slick service which I’m not 100% certain is really necessary. Voice Flow lets anyone make simple apps for Google Home or Amazon Echo, with a really intuitive interface to manage all the branching interactions – crucially, it’s all done visually meaning you can be a total no-code twat like me and still cobble together something halfway useful. The main issue with this, obviously, is that there is no evidence at all that anyone is in fact using their home assistant for anything other than, er, listening to music and setting timers, meaning the likelihood of anyone ever actually using your beautifully-constructed Alexa Therapist app is next to none. Still, it’s a really nicely-designed tool, so there’s that.
• Gentle Giants: Every now and again on Curios I like to remind readers of the existence of Ling’s Cars, still the best site on the internet bar none – in Gentle Giants, I have discovered a company whose approach to design and branding is very much attuned with Ling’s and WOW do I love it. Gentle Giants is a pet rescue and rehoming service that also makes and sells its own dogfood, it’s based in California, it’s run by Burt Ward who played Robin in the orginal Batman TV series from the 60s and OH MY GOD THE DESIGN OF THIS! Honestly, I can’t encourage you to click this enough – I’d also recommend investigating the website VERY THOROUGHLY, as you really don’t want to miss all the joyous surprises buried therein – seriously, don’t stop searching through it til you discover the dogfood packshots as the packaging is HALLUCINATORILY brilliant.
• 2269: I love this idea so, so much – this is a Kickstarter project raising funds for a run of posters, each of which promotes an INCREDIBLE party happening in 2269 – the high concept here being ‘Can the designers of this poster will an amazing future party into being simply through the medium of design?’. The project’s been fully funded with three weeks to go, so one would hope this means that 2269 will indeed witness the greatest party ever – honestly, this is so WONDERFULLY silly that it might be my favourite idea of the year so far.
• CSSFx: A bunch of really cute CSS effects, all with ‘click to copy’ functionality for easy webdev use. These are very nice indeed.
• Gifts Created for You: An Etsy store, presenting a series of novelty mugs with some quite bafflingly-spec;ific professions on them. Do you know any hacks? If so, they would LOVE a mug reading, inexplicably, “WARNING: To avoid injury, don’t tell me how to do my job as a journalist”. This is a perfect sweetspot of algogenerated oddness.
• Yesterdayvision: Do YOU have a spare £2500 burning a hole in your pocket? Would you like to spend it on a reconditioned oldschool TV, packaged in lovely wooden casing and very much of the Scandi retro design school, which comes packed with a Raspberry PI and emulator software and controllers and which you can use to play basically any old games system you fancy? No, I can’t imagine you do – YOU NEED TO BUY THE CHILDREN NEW SCHOOL SHOES, ALAN, WE CAN’T AFFORD THIS SILLY, CHILDISH CRAP ANY MORE.
• Project 562: This is a lovely photoographic project, aiming to document each of the 562 distinct Native American tribes with living members across the US. The photos and stories on the site are gorgeous, and speak to the incredible breadth and diversity of the native community (not to mention the degree to which Native peoples have been repeatedly and comprehensively screwed by US administrations for centuries).
• Heer: My lovely friend Matteo emailed me last week and told me he’s getting married, which is VERY exciting – COMPLIMENTI, MATTEO, NON MORIRAI PIU SOLO!! He also told me about this project, which, fine, is by his fiancee, but which I would have included anyway as it’s such a clever idea and a wonderful piece of design. Heer is a piece of street furniture designed to provide nursing women with a comforrtable, discreet place to breastfeed in public. Honestly, this is SO smart and the sort of thing that any female-friendly public space ought to consider installing asap – the benches are available to order, should you be so inclined.

By Ben Zank

NEXT, ENJOY THIS PLAYLIST COMPILED BY FRIEND-OF-CURIOS MARCUS JOHN HENRY BROWN AND WHICH ACTS AS A SORT-OF COMPANION SOUNDTRACK TO THE FINAL PART OF HIS ‘THE PASSING’ TRILOGY!

THE SECTION WHICH WISHES THERE WERE ANYTHING AS GOOD IN THIS WEEK’S LINKS AS THE ‘CHEETAH EROTICISER’ INVENTED BY ALGOMATT LAST WEEK, PT.2:

• Zuckerberg Smile: A little site which lets you adjust a slider to change the degree to which Mark Zuckerberg is smiling – from ‘no smile at all’ to ‘tight-lipped rictus simulacrum of human emotion’. Utterly pointless, but I rather like the idea of communicating with your colleagues solely via the medium of Inscrutable Zuck for the remainder of the day.
• BotJungle: GLORIOUSLY pointless, this – a Twitter account which involves a microphone, some audiotranscription software and the jungle of Borneo and which posts its interpretation of what the jungle is ‘saying’ every now and again. It’s irregular – the account only posts when there’s been enough noise that the software can parse as ‘speech’, which happens roughtly every 24h or so – and nonsensical, but also, to my mind, absolutely pure art.
• Two Names: This rather blows my mind, though I’m sure there’s just some fairly robust maths behind it rather than voodoo or magic or whatnot. This is a small, simple webtoy which lets you put in two names (or indeed any words) and creates a 3d visualisation of both whereby shifting perspective enables you to see one word or the other formed in a 3d arrangement of dots. Which, now I read that back, is almost ENTIRELY nonsensical – look, click the link, it will make sense I promise. Also, you can export the results as a 3d models should you want to commission some sort of perspex paperwhite combining your name with that of your wife/mistress/cat – what’s not to love?
• The Measure of Things: I once worked with a lovely man called Rex Osborn – a long-term Labour party stalwart who worked with John Smith back in the day, lived in a student flatshare with David Aaronovitch and Peter Mandelson (just imagine) and once explained to me that the reason he was OK with New Labour was that, in his words, “I used to be a Trot, Matt, but then I realised I was being a cnut so I stopped” – who pointed out to me that areas of geography are almost always referred to in relation to the size of Wales when on the news. Honestly, listen out for it – you’ll be amazed how often it crops up as a comparator. Anyway, this is a website that lets you type in any quantity of anything at all and will spit out a whole bunch of slightly ridiculous measurements to which you can compare your figure to. Why say ‘5 Tonnes’ when you can instead say ‘about ⅘ of the weight of an adult male elephant’? Well quite.
• Public Note: I love stuff like this. Public Note is a seemingly totally-pointless website which lets anyone create a permanent, editable entry about whatever they like. Type in anything you want – either it will throw up someone else’s annotation for you to read or edit, or it will come up blank, leaving you free to write the canonical entry for the thing of your choosing. I have claimed ‘web curios’ – feel free to find and create your own odd, hidden, tiny truths.
• The 2019 Big Picture Content Winners: WONDERFUL wildlife photography from the past 12 months. These are, as per, utterly astonishing – it’s worth clicking through into each individual category, as there are some stunning shots hidden there.
• Neck Check: Ah, here’s a lovely piece of 21C kiddie-dystopia for you! Are you worried that your kids are spending too much time staring at tiny screens and that their posture is suffering as a result? Well why not install Neck Check, a ‘fun’ ‘game’ (it is neither of those things) which tracks your kids posture in relation to their device and stops the thing working if it thinks that they’re staring down too much. To quote, “Once activated, the app runs in the background. When the phone is tilted at a dangerous degree, a friendly reminder takes over the screen. The only way to resume activity is to hold the phone at a proper angle. The app is password protected just in case your child tries to turn it off. So, as long as they keep it upright, their posture will be alright!” Want to devolve even the most basic of parental responsibilities to a fcuking machine? GREAT!
• The Fortnite API: You want the Fortnite API? GREAT HERE IT IS! No idea what you might do with it, but there’s almost certainly some sort of bullsh1t data-based integration with Spotify or something that you can hack together to link playlist generation to kill rate or something, should you be inclined to hack around with it.
• Library Extension: This is a really clever and useful little Chrome/Firefox plugin, which lets you quickly and easily check if the book you’re looking at online is available to rent at your local library, if it’s currently on loan, when it’s due back, etc. Simple, clever use of open data, and a gentle reminder that libraries are ACE and a hugely underrated resource in 2019.
• My Famicase Exhibition 2019: I can’t recall if I’ve featured this in Curios in previous years; regardless, this is this year’s edition of the My Famicase competition, where designers mock up Super Nintendo cartridges for imagined games, The artwork and design here are lovely, but the appeal for me comes in the slightly ridiculous nature of the imagined titles. Who wouldn’t want to play “Fish Dreams: You’re a lonely salmon with BIG DREAMS!”? NO FCUKER, that’s who!
• The Lasters: ANOTHER project by someone I sort-of know (sorry, I promise next week’s Curios will be less appallingly nepotistic) – again, though, I would totally include this even if I didn’t. Fred Deakin is a genuinely lovely and interesting man – he was part of Lemon Jelly, and Airside Studios, which if you’re a 90s/00s hipstercunt you will remember as being VERY COOL back in the day. He’s just finished a new record, which is an excellent ambient-y beatsy sci-fi concept album called The Lasters, which is funding on Kickstarter – it’s met its target with a month to go, but I’d still recommend you backing it as the finished product looks like being awesome in terms of design and production, not to mention the fact that the music (which I’ve been lucky enough to hear) is honestly wonderful.
• Climate Dreams: A fascinating project, collecting and documenting people’s dreams about climate change. “I am a writer and a psychotherapist interested in gathering, organizing, archiving – and eventually writing about – our collective dreams about climate breakdown”, says the site’s creator – the idea being that over time, perhaps patterns and insights will emerge shedding some light on the collective species-wide psychological response to the slowly-creeping planetary collapse we’re currently contributing to.
• The Alien Anniversary Shorts: It’s the 40th anniversary of Alien, and, to celebrate, a whole bunch of new short films have been commissioned by…er…someone, taking a fresh look at the Alien universe and spinning off some interesting and enticing new angles through a series of 10ish minute movies. I haven’t watched all of them, fine, but the two I did see are both excellent and smarter than this sort of thing often tends to be.
• Jumbo: This is a potentially useful app – Jumbo is designed to be a one-stop-shop for in-app privacy settings, designed to integrate with all your socials and let you manage all the various privacy options for each within one simple, easy-to-use interface. If you’re concerned that kids or less-digitally literate family members maybe aren’t as genned-up on this sort of thing as you’d like, this could be a really useful way of helping them manage their personal account privacy.
• Bitty: You know how AMAZING (not amazing) it is when you’re on public transport and your whole journey is soundtracked by some twat’s tinny music or film dialogue or whatever? Don’t you sometimes wish there was something you could do to trump their annoying behaviour with some even more annoying behaviour of your own? No, you probably don’t, as that would be sociopathic in the extreme – nonetheless, should you ever want to absolutely WIN the bus audio smackdown, may I suggest putting some money behind this Kickstarter which will provide you with a pocket-size drum machine with MASSIVE SPEAKERS, meaning that you can absolutely RUIN the top deck with your own home-produced beats busting out at nosebleed volume, much to the delight of the assembled other passengers. This actually looks very cool – please, though, don’t use it on the bus.
• Missing Numbers: One for the datawonks amongst you – “Missing Numbers is about the data that the government should collect and measure in the UK, but doesn’t”, and looks at questions including “Which policy areas in the UK are well-served by current reported data and statistics, and which are lacking? Which industries are required to report data about their treatment of consumers, and impact on society, and which aren’t? How does the UK’s Office for National Statistics choose what to include in its official statistics? And what are the big areas that it’s missing?” Interesting and useful.
• Gacha: The first in a reasonably big selection of games this week – Gacha simulates the experience of those ‘win a random present in a plastic ball’-dispensary toys that you see in slightly retro arcades. Except digitally, and with a really weird but very clear sense of slight melancholia. The art style is just *lovely*.
• The Lady’s Book of Decency: A short piece of interactive fiction, involving courtly intrigue and lycanthropy. This is BRILLIANT and really worth repeated playthroughs; the writing is very, very sharp, and the light RPG-style elements work wonderfully.
• Utsvulten: I don’t really want to explain this too much – just play. Feed yourself. Feed your companion. You can eat EVERYTHING – just see what happens…
• Proxx: Ignore the name – this is Minesweeper, in-browser, with slightly prettified graphics. I spent about an hour playing this while I was at ‘work’ yesterday – SORRY, PAYMASTERS!! – and I can confirm that it is as great as the original ever was.
• The Interlude: Oh, this is SUPERB – so clever, and so well-designed. I don’t want to spoil this by explaining top much – just know that you play this through a virtual old-school Nokia interface, and the weird distancing that provides makes the whole storyline that you play through all the more perfectly unsettling as a result.
• Minecraft: THIS IS ACTUAL MINECRAFT, PLAYABLE IN YOUR BROWSER! Ok, fine, it’s the very first iteration, meaning there’s no actual crafting and what you can do is pretty minimal, but it’s still hugely soothing to just potter about in bucolic blocky splendour, and if you’re a MILLENNIAL then there will probably be all sorts of nostalgiafeels engendered by even a cursory exploration of this. Amazing to see what Chrome can support these days, aside from anything else. ENJOY!

By Harriet Lyall

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE THIS SUPERB PLAYLIST OF GRIME BANGERS!

THERE SIMPLY WEREN’T ANY INTERESTING TUMBLRS TO FEATURE THIS WEEK, MEANING THE CIRCUS IS OUT OF TOWN!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ard Bakery: Fashion designer-turned-baker, based in London – this is their Insta feed and MAN are these some beautiful and pleasingly-geometric cakes.
• Resting Stitch-Face: Moderately hipster-ish needlework, available to buy. They take commissions too, should you wish to buy, I don’t know, a piece depicting your face alongside the caption “I AM TIRED OF YOUR SH1T, SUSAN” (I have no idea where this came from but now I want that VERY THING).
• Burratagram: The best – alright, the only – mozzarella-focused Instagram account I have ever seen.
• Emilia Cocking: Emilia is, I think, a designer – I came across her Insta feed as a result of seeing some 3d renders she’s recently made inspired by the upholstery of the London underground, but her whole feed is generally a delight, with a nice mix of lofi photos and some really rather cool CG/design work.
• Grade A TikToks: Excellent TikToks, ripped for the ‘gram.
• Genetic Portraits: A fascinating art project, creating composite images of family members with a partcular physical resemblance to each other. These are quite remarkable, and will make you want to try this out with your own relatives.
• Eva Stories: This is quite remarkable – the story of the Holocaust, as told through the imagined eyes of a young girl on Instagram. Obviously you have to buy into the premise – what if Insta was around in the 30s – but the production and storytelling here is top-notch. It’s been interesting seeing critiques of this suggesting it’s somehow trivialising the horror; I personally think it’s a really sensitively-handled piece of work and an excellent educational tool, but see what you think.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• It’s Time To Break Up Facebook: …says one of Facebook’s founders! Whilst it’s obviously easy to be slightly cynical about one of the people who’s become unconscionably rich as a result of Facebook now calling for the platform’s DANGEROUS MONOPOLISTIC POWER to be somehow curbed, and whilst the piece by Chris Hughes doesn’t make any startlingly new observations, it’s a pretty good precis of the current majority thinking about FB; to whit, it’s simply not healthy for one company to have this much influence over the nature and context of human communication. The anecdote about Zuckerbverg’s unilateral decisions around the Rohingya genocide was particularly striking – whilst you sort of get that he was probably ‘right’, you also very much feel that he never ought to have been in that position in the first place.
• Beyond The Duck Houses: As another week passes in UK politics and the quality and tenor of debate becomes ever worse, and the opinion of the political classes amongst the lumpenproletariat falls ever lower, this is an interesting reminder of the extent to which the MP’s expenses scandal of a decade ago has shaped and characterised our attitude towards our elected representatives. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the current trend towards abhorrent, dehmanusing abuse delivered to politicians and public figures isn’t in some way a result to the gleeful bashing they all took way back then for having the temerity to do exactly as they’d been told all along, or indeed that all this isn’t exactly helping them do their jobs. After all, “the more we cut our MPs down to size, the less able they are to subject the forces of capital to meaningful oversight and represent our interests at a high level. Public figures become mere private individuals, with their pints of milk and their loo roll.”
• A Lovely Interactive Version of the Trolley Problem: Everyone’s favourite moral philosophical conundrum, as popularised by The Good Place, presented as a beautifully-slick interactive explainer which takes you through various permutations and lets you pick how many tiny, pixellated people you want to murder with your ambulant deathwagon.
• The Airbnb Death of Barcelona: I’ve not been to Barcelona for a few years so haven’t witnessed the anti-Airbnb sentiment there first hand, but visiting Lisbon last year it was very clear quite how much locals were starting to resent the (as they see it) parasite landlords gutting the city for actual residents and packaging it up as bite-sized lifestyle capsules for the affluent weekender crowd. This article examines some of the reasons at the heart of the increasing global backlash against the Airbnbification of cities – I find the arguments here about the way in which airbnb neighbourhoods fundamentally alter the associated urban character of adjacent areas fascinating, in a general sort of ‘chaos theory knockon effect’-type way.
• Why GenZ Loves Closed Captioning: I have no idea whether this is in fact a thing – young people, please tell me, is this a thing? – but, presuming that it is on the basis of this one article, there is DEFINITELY a clever-ish type of advermarketingpr thingy that you can sell to a client off the back of this ‘insight’ (not in fact an insight).
• How ‘Debate’ Works in 2019: This is ostensibly a profile of the right wing ‘Turning Point’ group’s tour of US colleges, but is more interesting if seen as a general primer to the way in which ‘debate’ works in this, what feels like the millionth year of the ongoing culture wars. It’s very good at pinpointing the exact characteristics of faux-discussion, both online and offline; a seeming reliance on ‘facts’, an eagerness to be seen be ‘debating’, and the absence of any sort of actual ‘debate’ in favour pf participants on both sides flinging out assertions and numbers to the frenzied clapping of their seal-like peanut gallery of supporters. This isn’t, to be clear, something exclusively of the right – the left is as bad (spend a day digging around Labour Twitter and oh me oh my do you see some wonderful examples of this), and it’s more a function of the fact that everything is judged by ‘likes’ these days (literally and figuratively) leading to empty performative shouting rather than actual oppositional discourse.
• Does AI Have A Dirty Mind?: I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit this week looking at pictures of cocks as imagined by Shardcore’s computer – I would link to them here, but, well, they’re not quite ready – rest assured, though, that they are VERY meaty and not a little misshapen. Anyway, this is an entertaining exploration of how and why AIs get confused about what is and isn’t NSFW content – the article contains a few fruity images (although obviously within an entirely academic context, so it’s probably FINE), so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
• Therapy in Fortnite: I love these stories about how people are bending Fortnite to their own ends, creating and endlessly flexible virtual world to use however they choose – it’s starting to look to me like the sort of exciting virtual community space that Second Life was always to weirdly geeky and complicated to become. This piece looks at the young women who are offering their services as ‘chatting companions’ – to an extent, light-touch therapists – to other players, charging by the hour to play in squads and voicechat about anything and everything. Fascinating, if you choose to ignore the slightly bleak truth underpinning it (to whit: lonely kids are paying money to talk to girls over the internet).
• Kickstarter Turns 10: I think Kickstarter’s been one of the more quietly influential developments for properly creative [people online, not least as it helped cement the idea that no matter how niche or peculiar, your art may well find a small but sufficient audience. This article looks back at its early days, its development and some of its greatest hits – man, we have backed some ODD TAT as a species, eh?
• How Technology Could Revolutionise Refugee Resettlement: Literally that – this is a fascinating piece about how analysis of large amounts of historical data about refugee resettlement, integration success and other factors can be used to make better decisions about where to home people fleeing violence or persecution. It’s nice to occasionally read a tech story that’s generally positive – and it’s even nicer to read something where the people involved are using tech to help augment and improve human decision making rather than instead taking it as an opportunity to remove the human element altogether.
• When Did Pop Culture Become Homework?: I promise you, you will absolutely FEEL this essay, even if you’re a GoT/Avengers/Line of Duty/Whateverthefuckelse Stan – this is an excellent and true series of reflections on the extent to which popular culture has come to effectively define and dominate the shared global conversation, and the extent to which that means that its consumption is now a base-level requirement of speaking the lingua franca. So, so good, this.
• Avengers and the ‘Content’ Endgame: Consider this one a companion piece to the above – all about how the preposterous success of the Avengers franchise basically means that everything from hereon in is CONTENT, and the multistrand narrative universe is here to stay, and everything that will ever get made from a cinematic standpoint from hereon in will only in part exist as a standalone artistic work, because the post-facto dissection and debate and discussion of its every single frame and second is in and of itself conceived of as an integral constituent part of the work itself and OH GOD THIS IS ALL SO TIRING.
• The Bear and the AntiVaxxer: This is about a hoax protest march, but it’s about so much more besides – this is honestly one of the stranger ‘wow, people on the internet are WEIRD, eh?’ stories I’ve read in a while, and one of the better evocations of exactly how hard it is to have any grasp on what, or who, is really real here in the year of our lord two thousand and nineteen.
• A Conspiracy to Kill IE6: A properly odd little story, this, about how the team behind YouTube basically banded together to effectively kill Internet Explorer 6 because, put simply, they couldn’t be arsed making their work compatible with what they saw as a terminally janky and outdated piece of software. I showed this to Internet Oddity Sadeagle, who used to work at Google, and he said it seems legit, so, well, it’s TRUE!
• An Oral History of Amazon Prime: You might not think that a corporate history of ‘How Amazon Invented Prime’ would be interesting, but you’d be wrong, honest. This is a fascinating look at how the company made the whole idea of Prime happen in next to no time at all, and how absolutely transformative it’s been as a concept to both the company and also consumers’ ideas of customer service and payment structures. To be clear, I dislike Amazon hugely as a company – that said, stuff like this makes it perfectly clear why MechaBezos is going to be rulling the world in a few short years and there’s NOTHING we can do about it.
• 20 Years of All Star: Celebrating two decades of the only Smash Mouth song anyone knows – this is charming, and you will leave it feeling much more positive both about the song and the band. The details in there about them knowing that they had an absolute, 24-Carat hit on their hands and being uncertain as to whether they wanted all the attention that would come with it is a really interesting one to me – would you take the money and the fame and the immortality in exchange for knowing that you will always and forever be associated with this single thing, and that nothing you will ever create will ever have the same impact?
• Chasing The Aurora: A piece about trying to see the Northern Lights, but also about the very idea of the Northern Lights as something less to be seen or experienced than documented for the ‘gram. Lovely travel writing with a slight side of wistfulness for a pre-Insta world in which you just experienced things directly rather than through a series of performative filters (GOD I AM A GRUMPY OLD MAN SORRY EVERYONE).
• Angelica Huston: By far and away the best celebrity interview I have read all year, this – honestly, everything in it is glorious. This line. My days: “I was young. My back was like liquid amber.” WHAT a woman – this is joyous (and contains great oldschool Hollywood anecdote to boot).
• Meaw Wolf: I’ve featured pieces about bonkers US art collective Meow Wolf in here before, but this is the first proper profile of the group I’ve seen – honestly, I can’t tell you quite how much I want to visit one of their installations. There’s lots to unpack in here – their influence over some of the prevailing aesthetics of the Instagram era, the idea of participatory play being the dominant performative trend of the 21C, the tension between their genesis as outsider creatives and their current status as mainstream darlings…generally fascinating stuff.
• Entering the Sublime: An interview with Hilary Hahn, who I learned through this piece is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary violinists. In common with all profiles of preturnaturally-gifted people, the whole piece has a slightly otherworldly air to it – reading people this talented describe how they think and how they do is always slightly discombobulating, like they’re using words that you understand but in ways that you don’t quite get. Honestly, the way she talks about classical music here is just glorious – the closest I’ve gotten to understanding how a synaesthete might feel. Ooh, and on that last point, this is FASCINATING if you’re into synaesthesia as a concept.
• Punch Line: Remembering a suicide. This is BEAUTIFUL writing, though obviously heartbreaking.
• My Cousin Tried To Kill Me: This week’s last longread is a masterful piece of writing – clear-eyed and dispassionate and horrifying and brilliant, on masculinity and male violence and role models and the things we turn a blind eye to because we want to believe things that aren’t quite true. I read this last night and found my knuckles involuntarily tightening at points through it, which may not sound like an endorsement but I promise really is.

By Luigi Ghirri

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is by Dude York – the song is called ‘Falling’ and I fcuking ADORE it. A perfect slice of pop-punk, this; so, so good:

2) I love Japanese noisepunk outfit Otoboke Beaver. This is called “Don’t Light My Fire” – turn it up LOUD:

3) SUPERB indiepoprock next from Mal Blume – this is called “I Don’t Want To” and this is another GREAT Summer track that if I had a car I would totally blare out of the windows whilst trying and failing to look cool at traffic lights:

4) This is genuinely great – no idea at all how to describe it, but it’s maybe a bit like a sort of early Chemical Brothers album track, perhaps? Anyway, it’s by Nathan Micay and it’s called ‘Ecstasy Is On Maple Mountain’ and it’s a cracking tune:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is Manga and Murkage Dave with “Men Are Trash” – this is very sharp and very, very funny; awesome video too:

6) Last up this week, this is by Palehound and it’s called ‘Worthy’ and it’s a lovely song to see you into what will hopefully be a lovely weekend and now I’m off so BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE AND BE SURE TO BE KIND TO EACH OTHER AND PERHAPS SMILE AT STRANGERS (BUT NOT IN A CREEPY WAY) AND MAYBE DO SOMETHING NICE FOR SOMEONE WHO’S NOT EXPECTING IT AND GENERALLY WHY NOT TRY AND MAKE THE WORLD MARGINALLY MORE CHEERFUL OVER THE NEXT WEEK OR SO BECAUSE, WELL, WHY NOT? I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!