By Ahmad Barber

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

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

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

By Jason Parker

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

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

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

By Kota Yamaji

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

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

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

By Nick Gentry

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

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Gov Bins: Not technically a Tumblr! Still, though, the most Tumblr of websites I’ve seen in an age – this is one man’s project to photograph every single type of council bin in the UK and catalogue them here. WHY??? But then again, why not? I know I say this all the time, but I LOVE stuff like this – well DONE, Harry Trimble!

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

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• America’s Opioid Epidemic: Another week, another exploration of the terrifying scale of America’s skag epidemic. This is a superb piece of journalism, taking a dispassionate look at the drugs; appeal and making an interesting and cogent case for their current popularity being very much a post-internet thing; this passage is, to my mind, almost heartbreakingly sad: “One of the more vivid images that Americans have of drug abuse is of a rat in a cage, tapping a cocaine-infused water bottle again and again until the rodent expires. Years later, as recounted in Johann Hari’s epic history of the drug war, Chasing the Scream, a curious scientist replicated the experiment. But this time he added a control group. In one cage sat a rat and a water dispenser serving diluted morphine. In another cage, with another rat and an identical dispenser, he added something else: wheels to run in, colored balls to play with, lots of food to eat, and other rats for the junkie rodent to play or have sex with. Call it rat park. And the rats in rat park consumed just one-fifth of the morphine water of the rat in the cage.”

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

By Bang Sangho

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Kate Ballis 

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

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

• Facebook & GDPR: Yes, GDPR! Four letters which have inspired millions of words of advermarketingpr clickbait and speculation, but which, judging by much of what I have read, NOONE seems to really understand! This is Facebook’s attempt to give some sort of clarity to exactly what sort of punitively draconian data-protection framework (and wow, let me tell you that writing a phrase like “punitively draconian data-protection framework” really is what gets me going at 652am on a Friday) we’re going to be living under come May, and, as far as I can tell, it seems reasonably clear – basically, if you’re using Custom Audiences based on customer data matching (emails, phone numbers), then it’s your responsibility to ensure that the data you’re using has been collected in line with GDPR guidelines (affirmative consent, etc etc). It’s not interesting, but it’s reasonably clear.

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

By Giovanni Forlino

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

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

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

By Tony Barrera

By Gregory Jacobsen

FIRST UP IN THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS, WHY NOT TRY THIS AMBIENT-Y MIX BY MINOR SCIENCE?

THE SECTION WHICH ONCE AGAIN ADVISES YOU TO LOOK AT AMAZON’S NUMBERS AND THINK ABOUT WHICH OF THE BIG SCIFI CORPORATIONS IS MOST FRIGHTENING OVERALL:

• The Facebook Numbers: Topline, they made another fcuktonne of money. Obviously the big Q4 earnings headline was the drop in time spent on the platform in the US and Canada, which has prompted one or two analysts to write somewhat breathless pieces about how this could be the start of a downward trajectory and all the rest; as previously discussed, after 2016 Curios really doesn’t do predictions any more, but if you look at year-on-year growth in ad revenue Facebook’s doing terrifyingly well, even compared to Google. Which, frankly, is mostly the point – as long as we keep happily telling Facebook everything we do and think and want and do and love, the ad product’s only going to get better; other than the Bezos Meatpuppet, where does the competition come from? Don’t think too hard on that, it’s a MISERABLE line of inquiry for this early on a Sunday.

• Facebook Privacy Principles: In a splendid display of arsecovering, Facebook this  week announced its PRIVACY PRINCIPLES ahead of the introduction of GDPR later on this year (and by the way, as soon as I find a decent guide to the implications thereof I’ll share it, but everything I’ve read so far has been a thinly disguised sales pitch by the sort of people who I imagine wear shiny suits even to bed) – oh, and promised to roll out a PRIVACY CENTRE where users will be able to find all the controls pertaining to their FB privacy settings in one place. The PRIVACY PRINCIPLES themselves are beautiful in their aspirational meaninglessness – ‘We give you control of your privacy!;, they say; ‘We help people understand how their data is used!’; and, most beautifully, ‘You own and can delete your information!’. Well, yes, fine Facebook, that last one is technically true, but it’s equally technically true that anyone can win the Booker if writing in the English language – it’s possible, but it’s fcuking hard and, frankly, most of us won’t bother as it’s simply too much bother (because it’s that that’s stopping me from writing the Booker-winner I just know I’m capable of). No word on what the PRIVACY CENTRE will look like or do, but that’s not really the point of this non-announcement.
• More Local News Coming To FB’s Newsfeed: The sort of thing which will make all the execs at Trinity Mirror whose local offering’s been decimated over the past few years shake their fists at the sky. OBVIOUSLY no detail on how this might work, but there’s potential good news in here for local brands and businesses – a content offering focused on hyperlocal news and community engagement might (a big MIGHT) let you achieve a bit of semi-organic reach in the brave new post-Newsfeedshakeup world (note the ‘semi-’ doing a lot of work in that sentence, though).
• Facebook Lures Game Streamers: Basically I had the link to this earlier in the week and now it’s GONE and I’ve had to hastily Google a half-remembered story and so the explainer link is a bit shonky (THIS, you see, THIS is the high-quality ‘journalism’ that people expect from Curios!), but BASICALLY the nub of this is Facebook wants more videogame streamers to use its platform and is going to improve its monetisation options, etc, in order to do so. I would imagine that if you’re a games company, Facebook will be offering some HEFTY INCENTIVES to get you to do some big streaming promo.
• You Can Now Schedule Instagram Posts: Officially! Through the API! You’ll need to use one of Facebook’s Marketing Partner services such as Hootsuite to do so, but I imagine you all mostly do, so it’s ALL GREAT. Fun game – see how long you can hide this fact from your community managers, purely from a sense of schadenfreude.
• You Can Now Add Carousel Ads To Instagram Stories: I know, I’m excited too! Not just ONE piece of video or imagery as an interstitial between Story elements, but up to THREE! Truly, we live in a golden age in which everything happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds (oh Cunegonde!).
• Twitter Now Offering ‘Sponsored Moments’ Ad Product: This is quite interesting; it’s a limited offer, but brands can now bid to sponsor Twitter Moments produced by any of 200 of Twitter’s ‘premium publishers’ like Bloomberg – the example given in the piece is Bank of America sponsoring a Twitter Moment by Bloomberg from Davos, to give you an idea of how it works. It makes a lot of sense – why pay to make your own less-good content when you can piggyback on an existing publisher’s which is likely to get more eyeballs than yours – and I found it quite an interesting approach (it’s been a long week).
• Twitter Offers ENTIRE HISTORY OF TWEETS To Developers: I’m going to need to caveat this – there are restrictions, in the sense that it’s free upto 50 API requests per month and then priced on a sliding scale beyond that – but overall it is A Good Thing and has lots of quite interesting implications. If nothing else, you can make some LOVELY and probably quite weird ‘On This Day’-type stuff using this and still sit well below the 50 threshold.
• Snapchat Lenses Studio Challenges: Now that ANYONE can make Snap lenses, Snapchat’s running a monthly contest to reward the best creative made on the platform. A nice idea – good source of inspiration and of talent, potentially.
• Snapchat Opens In-App Merch Store: So you’ll be able to buy, say, a DANCING HOTDOG SOFT TOY, thereby contributing not only to landfill but also to the slow cultural degredation of society. Pretty sure that this stuff will only ship in the US at present, though I confess to not having checked yet – there’s going to be monthly ‘drops’ (ugh fcuk OFF with your SUPREME-aping) of new stuff, but Snap insists that this isn’t intended to be a revenue driver. Between this and the Musk flamethrower thing, though, I do like this trend of people taking VC and shareholder money and going ‘nah, sod it, we’re going to do something SILLY’, although not as much as I’d like it if they did something, y’know, good.
• Google Bulletin: Just a note here, but Google seem to have launched this very quietly in beta; Bulletin is only testing in a couple of US States, but if this is anything to go by then it’s seeing local news as a potential growth area, just like Facebook. Seemingly some sort of citizen journalism service, the big draw here of course is the little line in the blurb about how ‘Bulletins will be discoverable on Google Search’ – worth keeping a small eye on this to see how it goes.
• Digital In 2018 WORLDWIDE: The nice people at We Are Social have, as they do every year, compiled a motherlode of all of the global social media and digital and mobile usage stats you are likely to need, at least for the first few months of the year. Particularly useful if you need some graphics to point at whilst saying “2018, you see, really IS the year of mobile!”. As ever, the section on Asia is sort of mind-boggling.
• Ste Davies’ Guide To The Algorithms: This is a really helpful thing put together by Ste Davies to offer an admittedly-simplified guide to how the algorithms on the various main platforms work, from FB to YT. Obviously a lot of this stuff is simply unknowable (because obviously competitive advantage), but as a primer on how to think about CONTENT AND ENGAGEMENT on each of the big networks this is a really useful starting point.
• All Of The Superbowl Ads: Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve seen a lot less advermarketingprwank analysing the fcuk out of this year’s crop of multimillion dollar exhortations to BUY MORE STUFF; still, if you care about THE PINNACLE OF HUMAN CREATIVITY (cf adverts for fizzy sugarwater and large trucks) then this is a useful collation of all the ads released to date). A friend of mine pointed out that it does rather feel that a few of these are trying to make ‘WASSSSUUUPPPPPP?!’ happen again, or something like it, to which can we all heartily say ‘no’ (seriously, be thankful if you’ve managed to stay blissfully unaware of the bloody ‘Dilly Dilly’ Bud Light thing (although if they don’t now try and make it cross the Atlantic by using Claudio Ranieri in the crossover spot I’ll be VERY disappointed)).
• Places Of Intimacy: Another in the occasional Curios series of ‘really shiny websites which don’t need to be as shiny as they are and which, if I’m honest, don’t quite work, but which I am sort of glad exist anyway’, this is for condom brand ‘Skyn’ and I would imagine that the creative went something like ‘You know what people like doing? Fcuking in hotel rooms (or more accurately, in a stranger’s kitchen courtesy Airbnb)! Let’s make a site celebrating the beauty of fcuking in hotel rooms! Like a sexy Mr & Mrs Smith, with lifestyle photos and smouldering prose!’. Then they actually had to get approval and jump through hoops and the whole idea got squashed to the point where they ended up with this VERY pretty site which, if I didn’t know was to do with condoms to start with, I would have been pretty surprised to learn was all about fcuking. Seriously, if you’re going to do this sort of thing just go full bongo and be done with it. HIRE ME AS A CONSULTANT FOR MORE OF THIS SORT OF KILLER INSIGHT!
• Valentine’s Vaseline: I love this. Vaseline does the ‘personalised tin to give to the person you want to kiss on the Hallmark Holiday’ thing – or at least that’s the ostensible vibe, but OBVIOUSLY they know about the Vaseline usage stereotype and are playing to it. Or, er, am I just projecting really hard here? Hm.

By Atisha Paulson

NEXT UP, KICK RIGHT ON WITH DAVID BYRNE’S SUPERB MIX OF MUSIC FROM ‘SHITHOLE’ NATIONS!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES YOU ALL ENJOYED MATT HANCOCK YESTERDAY BECAUSE IT IS OVER NOW, PT.1:

• Glittering Blue: If you’re feeling a little enervated, a touch frayed, ever so slightly like your face is vibrating and your bones might be starting to shatter from the inside (it was a long January, wasn’t it?) then perhaps take a few moments with this site. Glittering Blue presents a view of the Earth from space, and using real satellite imagery cycles through a 24h day/night cycle over a 12-second period and seriously, I could watch the Earth like this for HOURS. Hours, I tell you. Put it on on a big telly in the office and watch everyone get mesmerised (and then RUN FOR THE HILLS).

• Eristica: Probably the first ‘oh wow, this is really stupid’ thing I’ve seen this year, Eristica is, very simply, a site where you can challenge people to take ‘challenges’ (read: do dares) in exchange for cryptocurrency; they get paid once they’ve uploaded a video matching the challenge specifications as proof of completion. Ok, fine, that isn’t quite live yet but that’s the direction they’re planning on taking it, and let’s take a moment to imagine exactly the sort of quality ‘challenges’ and resulting ‘content’ you get on something like this when we’ve already done suicide-for-clicks in 2018. On the other hand, if you want to win fractions of crypto in exchange for eating, I don’t know, a fistful of thumbtacks or for breaking the world record for cocktail umbrella/urethra interfacing, then BOY are you going to have a good 2018!
• Verena: This is a really good idea, and from what I can tell it’s been really nicely designed. Verena is a safety app developed with the LGBTx community in mind but which I see no reason couldn’t be used by anyone; it’s designed so as to allow users a safe way to record incidences of abuse, find help and assistance and, and this is really clever, to contact a number of approved ‘safe’ contacts from within the app whilst keeping that contact hidden from elsewhere on the phone. Obviously this is not perfect and not a ‘solution’ to anything, but as a tool for potentially making people feel more secure and offering them avenues to reach assistance in the event of any abuse, it is A Good Thing.
• Animated Pixel Gradient Maker: Yes, yes, I know that SOUNDS boring, but click the link! Look what you can make! A lovely, pixellated, left-to-right-colour-shifting-with-foreground-text MASTERPIECE! Just like this one! Look, fine, I like it.
• Mycroft II: Not the first open-source Voice Assistant I’ve seen, but given the inexorable march of MECHA BEZOS to the point of total world domination I thought it apposite to include this one. Mycroft II’s currently seeking funding but is already over the target with three weeks to go; the speaker does, well, all the stuff you’d expect one of these things to do by now, but the software’s open source and rather than using Google for search it uses Duck Duck Go or Wolfram, and it NEVER listens (though I wouldn’t bet on its security being better than the Echo, much as it pains me to say so, so whilst it might not listen I don’t doubt its hackability). Obviously if you aren’t a techy then tbh it’s probably not going to be the device for you (I imagine the onboarding experience for something like this is pretty brutal), but if you like the idea of having a voice-activated butler ‘brain’ in your home but would prefer that not to be contributing to a future in which MECHA BEZOS stares down at us benignly from every wall then give it a go.
• Cryptotulip: You will doubtless have heard a million and one references to the Dutch tulip bubble already in 2018, what with Bitcoin and all – now, the logical conclusion lets you ‘grow’ tulips on the blockchain! This is a similar idea to the Cryptokitties thing which I featured before Christmas, although as far as I can see they’re keen to point out that it’s an art project and the tulips, despite having a nominal cryptovalue, are worthless (although you wait til the web decides that actually no EVERYTHING MUST BE AVAILABLE TO BUY AND SELL and makes a boom market out of the whole thing). It’s silly and pleasing and the tulips are abstract and actually quite cool looking, and frankly this is the first crypto-related thing that hasn’t made me massively roll my eyes this year.
• Mute: One month into the year of our lord two k eighteen and I’ve already seen a spate of commentary about how important it is, yeah, to DECOUPLE from our phones and spend less time on TOXIC SOCIAL APPS and you know what I’ve been saying this for YEARS and noone bloody listened *sulks*. Still, now everyone’s caught up there’s a whole new spate of ‘spend less time staring at idiots you barely know lying about their lives’ apps, of which Mute is one. It lets you block access to certain apps and sites, tracks your phone usage (unlocks, time spent, morning and evening usage) so you can attempt to wean yourself off gradually…I mean, it’s not a bad idea, but might I also suggest that DELETING THE FCUKING APPS is a start? You’re welcome!
• 404 Pin: A lapel badge depicting the universal ‘image not loaded’ symbol which will, in very specific situations, prove a great icebreaker and conversation starter but which will in most other situations ensure you’re treated like the social pariah you know deep down you deserve to be (we can work out the secret handshake or similar gang sign later).
• Keep Yo! Alive: A strange and slightly sad corner of the web here – a Patreon Page which is seeking to attract 5,000 backers to keep novelty app Yo! (you remember Yo!! You had a Yo! Strategy once, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU????)  alive. I’m just leaving this here as a sort of memento mori (mementYO amirite oh god) and as a reminder that this app ACTUALLY RECEIVED FUNDING.
• Flixable: This looks pretty useful – Flixable is a site which lets you know what new stuff is available to view on Netflix on a country-by-country basis. Includes the UK, the US, Finland and several others, and is a slightly less-painful way of checking on what new crap that you would never, ever want to watch they’ve added. “Emo: The Musical”, added to the UK selection just this week? No, of course not.
• 2000 Days On Mars: Amazingly, it’s now been over 2,000 days since the Curiosity Rover touched down on Mars to begin documenting its lonely progress around the Red Planet – this is a very small selection of the nearly-500,000 images it’s so far returned. Disappointingly light on space aliens or the decaying remnants of long-forgotten civilisations, true, but on the plus side it’s basically Wall-E in real life. So much so, in fact, that I just did a tiny bit of a cry whilst looking at a few of these and imagining Curiosity up there all alone, which suggests that I’m possibly reaching *that* point in Friday morning’s fatigue/wordcount graph and should possibly make more tea. Oh, and an interesting contrast here is this selection of photos taken by Cassandra Klos which showcase some of the recent ‘Let’s pretend we’re on Mars’ experiments in astronaut isolation undertaken by space agencies worldwide.
• Financial Classic Films: Do YOU want a collection of 89 videos from THE PAST all about money and financial services and stuff? No, I appreciate you probably don’t, but I found these and they’re cluttering up my linkbox, so here you are. Except these are actually really interesting – they’re all US, as far as I can tell, but they span ‘How The US Financial Institutions Work’ animations from the 50s, videos of smelting dollars, frankly hilarious ‘How To Get An Office Career’ instructionals from five decades ago…there’s loads of great material here if you want to cut some potentially comedic out-of-copyright video, or indeed to study the style and tone of old-style comms. If you want a flavour, try this ‘salesman training’ video from 1948 which is possibly the most soothing thing I have seen in years whilst being, simultaneously, a chilling look at how we’ve ended up here and now (no, really, I’m not exaggerating at all).
• Observable: Observable SAYS it’s a new way to code. As far as I can tell, it’s a pretty regular way to code except for the fact that it renders changes in realtime to allow for easier understanding of what your code is doing and where, but if someone else can explain to me what’s so good about it that would be ace thanks.
• Gone Froggin: A twitter feed presenting ALL your amphibian news and photo and fact requirements in one place. You won’t think you’d been missing out on ‘Frog of the Week’, but let me assure you that you really, really were.

By David Lyle

By Brock Davis

FIRST UP MUSICALLY, HERE’S A SPOTIFY LIST OF THE FALL’S INSANELY HUGE BACK CATALOGUE COMPILED BY MARTIN BELAM TO MARK MES’ PASSING!

THE SECTION WHICH FEELS A BIT CNUT-ISH RAILING AGAINST ‘STORIES’ AS A UBIQUITOUS FORMAT BUT IS NONETHELSS SITTING HERE RIGHT UP UNTIL THE POINT WHEREBY THE WAVES START LAPPING AT ITS CHIN:

• Facebook To Let Users Determine Which Publishers Are ‘Trusted’: Who is the best arbiter of which sources are to be trusted and which aren’t? Why, we are! We, the fans! We, the people who are responsible in the past year alone for a raft of stories peddled by such creditable fonts as libtardcucknews.com insinuating that our elites are cannibal paedophiles attaining widespread credibility! To quote Zuckerberg, Facebook “will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source. The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly. (We eliminate from the sample those who aren’t familiar with a source, so the output is a ratio of those who trust the source to those who are familiar with it.) This update will not change the amount of news you see on Facebook. It will only shift the balance of news you see towards sources that are determined to be trusted by the community.” In fact, it’s also going to be taking into account the proximity of a news source to a reader, as well as the extent to which readers consider sources to be ‘informative’. You can all go and read REAMS about this elsewhere, but fwiw I’m not entirely convinced that this sledgehammer-like blunt instrument is going to make even the slightest of dents in the misinformation nut (you like that metaphor? No, it was awful, wasn’t it? Sorry).
• Facebook To Add More Privacy Tools for Users: No word on what exactly these might be, but this is all wrapped up in the coming rollout of GDPR (have YOU ensured you’re compliant? Do YOU have any idea what any of it means? Eh? Oh) – one would imagine that the ‘Privacy Centre’ referred to by Sandberg in this interview will be a further, more detailed way for users to opt out of some Facebook advertising, but we’ll have to wait and see. Exciting!
• Facebook Watch Party: Do you remember how nice it was, in THE PAST, when we all used to cluster around the tiny 13” black and white analogue television wearing deelyboppers and munched on cardboard readymeals and laughed together at Ted Rogers and a man in a dustbin costume? When we all used to have real conversations like a real family, before The Screens came and RUINED IT ALL? Well fear not, because Mark’s going to bring the good times back! Not Ted Rogers, sadly (hypercontemporary reference to a literally 35 year old TV series, there, nice one), but instead the wonderful communal feeling of staring at an ENTERTAINMENT all together! A feature coming to Facebook Groups ‘over time’, currently being tested, “In a Watch Party, members of a Group can watch videos together in the same space at the same time — videos are chosen by the Group admins and moderators, and can be any public videos on Facebook (live or recorded).” Superb for fan groups, wonderful for fan service, great for advertisers (and further evidence that Group-level advertising is very much on its way).
• Facebook Kinect: Remember Microsoft – you know, the full-body-tracking cameras which let you use your arms and legs as game controllers and which noone ever really used because it didn’t quite work properly? Well Facebook is working on the same tech; this is a series of patents filed by The People Who Own Our Future which will eventually enable Facebook to do full-body movement tracking, in preparation for the moment when we step inside the doors of the Big Blue Misery Factory for the last time and become one with Mark in glorious, forever symbiosis. Pray soon come! Oh,. and seeing as we’re doing the tech stuff here, Facebook also this week announced that its image recognition tech is going open source. It’s name? The not-in-any-way sinister DETECTRON! As Ben points out, it’s…it’s a bit sinister, isn’t it?
• Facebook Small Business Training: I’m including this mainly as this is the sort of killer give-and-take which I always find so bleakly amusing about Facebook. Not a fortnight after killing organic reach for brands and business Pages FOREVER (because really), Facebook’s going in hard on how VITAL it feels it is for small business and committing to offer over 1million such small businesses assistance and training on using digital skills to develop their prospects (BUY MORE ADS!). In fairness there’s a lot of stuff in here about assisting disadvantaged groups and teaching broader skills than just navigating FB Business Manager, but it does still feel a little like being offered a sweet by someone who’s just shaken you down for all your change and who, you can tell by the look in their eye, is likely to keep coming round and shaking you down over and over again until one of us dies (and they look a lot healthier than we do).
• How FB Changes MAY Affect Publishers: Take a pinch of salt along with this piece – not least as it’s increasingly clear that Facebook’s own engineers don’t actually quite know how all this stuff’s going to work yet and are just scrabbling to keep up with Zuckerberg’s godlike pronouncements – but it’s an interesting look at how the algorithm changes may affect publishers, particularly in the UK. The short answer, according to this analysis at least, is that Pages whose articles see a higher degree of peer-to-peer sharing will do fine, whereas those whose reach is predicated largely on posts from dedicated Publisher Pages will find that reach being chopped off at the knee. Really, though, NOONE KNOWS.
• You Can Now Use Gif Stickers On Your Insta Stories: You will get so fcuking sick of this over the next few weeks, I promise you.
• Insta Testing Text-based Stories: Text! On gradient-shaded backgrounds! In Stories! Can you tell I don’t care? Actually this is a useful and smart addition and will make the ‘storytelling’ (ugh) feature better and more flexible, but you’ll have to wait for it. WAIT!
• Twitter Working On Its Own Version Of Stories: OF COURSE IT IS. OF COURSE IT FCUKING IS. This is just rumour, but, well, FFS.
• You Can Now Link To Snapchat Stories: This has been trailed previously, and is now HERE! You can now get a url to link directly to a Snapchat story from elsewhere – these currently only play nicely with Twitter, where a linked Story will play in-feed; elsewhere it’ll just be a link which takes you to the Story on Snap – and it could, potentially, bring the platform to a whole new audience (who will look at it and go ‘Oh, look, it’s like an Insta Story! They copied Insta! Weird’, in all likelihood). I am yet to see any of these in the wild, so do let me know if you spot one please thanks.
• Snap App Install Ads Now Come With Deep Links: I can’t be bothered to paraphrase this, sorry – this means Snap ads will now have the ability to “drive traffic to a specific section by targeting users who have already downloaded and opened an app. For example, a mobile game developer might want to target players once they hit a specific level in the game, or a retailer could spotlight a product page that a user added to a shopping cart but didn’t buy.” GOOD NEWS!
• Camera Roll Photos On Snap No Longer Have White Borders: Making it even easier for you to create masterpiece stories from all your great CONTENT, or, alternatively, letting to craft and even more meticulously fictional version of YOUR BEST LIFE (I fcuking hate that phrase, by the way, with a burning passion) to fool everyone you’re not in fact a lonely empty sad mess like the rest of us.
• Ueno Careers: Digital agencies – or, in fact, all agencies, let’s be fair – often have a section on their website where they attempt to convey a sense of their kooky, playful personality, and the reason why they, in contrast to all the other employers out there, are fun-packed hotbeds of creativity and not, at all, sweatshops run by sadists, staffed by idiots and controlled by the idiot whims of insanely demanding clients who have had agency support for so long that they’ve lost the ability to do anything other than move numbers around on a spreadsheet and demand lavish lunches on the agency dime. Credit to Ueno, who’ve made the best example of this I’ve ever seen – this site lets you ‘meet’ some of the staff in a delightful little 3d environment; the writing’s honestly brilliant and the whole thing’s a pleasure to play with. Although if they were this knowingly arch at all times you’d probably be ready to rip your skin off after about three months, on reflection.

By Natasha Wilson

By Alessandro Sicioldr

SHALL WE START WITH THE LATEST IMPERICA MIX? YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH FIRMLY BELIEVES THAT THE ONLY POSSIBLE MOTIVATION FOR THE LAUNCH OF FACEBOOK KIDS IS TO FACILITATE BETTER INTERGENERATIONAL COMMUNICATION, HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST SOME SORT OF FILTHY PECUNIARY MOTIVE YOU DREADFUL CYNIC:

• Facebook (Well, Messenger) Kids: In a year characterised by bad news, or at the very least news which has us peering round the corner of the future rather nervously, uncertain of what this presages, this feels like a fitting addition – AND LO, IT CAME TO PASS THAT ZUCKERBERG REALISED THAT ONBOARDING WAS GOING TO HAVE TO START EARLIER IF THE ASSIMILATION PROJECT WAS TO SUCCEED! Look, this actually seems reasonably benign, ostensibly; it’s a Messenger app, kids can only chat with parentally approved contacts, there won’t be any ads…considering, though, that Facebook’s raison d’etre as a business is to collect as much data as possible about its users to be able to then serve them adverts based on those perceived interests, it’s hardly a stretch to see exactly the sort of competitive advantage the company could develop if, say, it was able to start building a picture of people’s likes, dislikes and general personality from the age of, say, 6 by, for example,building profiles on them based on conversations they have on a messaging platform. Hypothetically, of course.
• You Can Now Livestream or Video Chat From Within Messenger Games: This is a VERY niche interest post, being as it will mean something only to those of you involved in developing games for Messenger; still, interesting to see whether there’s any Twitch-style breakout streaming community which develops from this.
• Facebook Year in Review!: I’m sure you’ve already been served dozens of these bastard things already this week, but if for some reason it’s not quite yet hit normie-land then ENJOY the oppotunity to have a selection of entirely unconnected things you might have done on The Network presented back to you with some animation, music and an unjustified air of coherence. Given the fact that I post almost nothing on Facebook other than a link to this each week (my ‘friends’ are so lucky), my version of this was basically just a succession of slightly *odd* artworks; it’s reminded me to apologise for including that painting of the tongue with all the nails through it a few weeks’ back, as it just gave me a right scare. Sorry!
• Insta Adds Highlights & Archives To Stories: Instagram’s now letting users compile their stories into ‘Highlights’ packages: “Stories Highlights appear in a new section on your profile below your bio. To create a highlight, tap the “New” circle at the far left. From there, you can choose any stories from your archive, select a cover for your highlight and give it a name. Once you’re done, your highlight will appear as a circle on your profile that plays as a stand-alone story when someone taps it. Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them, and you can have as many highlights as you’d like. To edit or remove a highlight, just tap and hold that highlight on your profile.” Effectively this is being positioned as a personal ‘trailer’ for users – the blurb talks about it letting you show off ‘all sides of your personality’, so basically this is your SIZZLE REEL FOR LIFE. Jesus. Oh, and you can now save your Stories FOREVER. Which is nice.
• Instagram Testing Standalone New Messenger Platform: STOP IT! STOP CREATING NEW, UNNECESSARY PLATFORMS FOR PEOPLE TO COMMUNICATE ON! Fine, they’re only testing it, but if you want to imagine how incredibly annoying this is going to get take a moment to imagine communicating with someone when each message bounces between a different platform – SMS to Messenger to Snap to Email to Slack to Skype to FB post to Whatsapp to Insta Messenger to OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP. Although as a trolling tactic that’s a superb one, might start doing it on reflection.
• Insta Launches Animal Protection Warnings: This is interesting, though. As of the now(ish), when users search Insta for particular terms or hashtags which the platform thinks might be associated with animal welfare issues or illegal trade, it’ll flash up a warning telling them that there may be exploitative content under that search. Generally a good thing, I think, although it’ll be interesting to see whether this presages a swathe of these things for various different types of, er, problematic content.
• Imgur Adds New Features: Apologies for the Mashable article here; although, on the upside it did teach me that Imgur is pronounced Image-ur which momentarily stunned me. Anyway, the image sharing platform has rolled out a host of updates, including a newsfeed for users and the ability to post videos – what it terms ‘snacks’, which rather than just being looping gifs are instead pausable, rewindable and all that jazz. No followers on Imgur, interestingly, just an algorithm to punt stuff at you and the ability to direct said algorithm through tags, etc. If you’re a brand with decent photo assets and the time to bother, might be worth considering chucking some stuff on there and having a play imho.
• Google Adds Celebrity Selfie Answers: A question – when you are after a nugget of information about your favourite famous, would you like to a) have that information delivered to you quickly and efficiently, in a medium which allows for the fastest assimilation of the desired knowledge; or b) instead have that information delivered to you in a slightly self-indulgent piece to camera by said famous? None of you said the latter, did you? No, you didn’t, and yet here we are. Only in the US so far, but doubtless will be rolled out all over the place; if you’re a brand, this is the time to think about updating any contracts with famouses to ensure they are wearing YOUR logos when they shoot their version of these. God, that was literally the first thing that sprang to mind – BRAND EQUITY. I disgust myself, I am sorry.
• YouTube Rewind 2017: The year in YouTube. If you’re <25, you might be able to make more sense of this than I did. See how many utterly generic floppy-haired smilers YOU can recognise!
• YouTube Ad of the Year: Do you care about this year’s adverts so much that you want to spend an hour sitting through all these to pick your favourites? No, I didn’t imagine that you did. Still, there’s a selection of what YouTube’s deemed ‘the best creative’ in here, sorted into variou bafflingly-named categories – what the everliving fcuk does ‘Puts Stars In Your Eyes’ mean as a category? What might an ad that ‘Knows Know Limits’ look like? Interestingly it’s only the final category that collects ADS FOR JUSTICE AND A BETTER WORLD, which is odd considering that’s apparently the only thing does any more.
• The Pantone Colour of the Year: Purple. It’s purple. For the LOLs, can any of you who work in design please insist on using ONLY Pantone 18-3838 in your work today, regardless of brief or brand? Oh, come on, LIVE A LITTLE.

By Iggy Smalls

NEXT, TRY THIS FUTURE SOUNDS MIX BY DOBBY WHICH IS VERY GOOD INDEED!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT OF ALL THE ODD THINGS ABOUT THIS WEEK, AND THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW, THIS ‘EXPLANATION’ OF THE JERUSALEM THING MAY WELL BE THE ODDEST, PT.1:

• 2017, Wrapped: You’ve probably all done this by now, but in case you’ve somehow missed the procession of preening narcissists wanging on about all the music THEY have been listening to all year and all the cool bands THEY like or how, oh, gosh, just how completely embarassing THEIR taste is, you must think I’m *awful*!, then this is your chance to join them! Spotify’s annual datacruncher tells you what music you listened to most this year, which tracks, genres and artists, and creates a nice little image for social sharing purposes. Which is nice, great, fine, but there’s something really quite horridly bleak about their dead-eyed insistence on referring to music as ‘content’ throughout. “OH I LOVE THIS CONTENT!” shout the excitable teens, holding aloft their devices to Shazam the CONTENT in exchange for ADDITIONAL BRANDED CONTENT from the MILLENNIAL-FRIENDLY BRAND PARTNER. I don’t understand the future at all, it makes me sad.
• Access Mars With Google: You want to drive the Mars Rover around, exploring the Red Planet and learning about all the cool and exciting stuff it saw up there and seeing whether or not you can be the one to spot the signs of alien civilisation which MUST be up there? OF COURSE YOU DO! This is honestly amazing, seriously – you can sit on a bus to Norwood Junction and explore the surface of another planet on a small piece of glass and plastic. I don’t undestand the future at all, it’s amazing.
• Whamageddon: This is basically The Game (HA!), festive edition – the challenge of Whamageddon is to go as long as possible through the festive season without knowingly hearing ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! I think this gets properly hard around a week out, but give it a go. Sadly the fact that I go to Italy in a couple of weeks makes it impossible for me to win at this – Italian TV around Christmas is even worse than normal, and one of its idiosyncracies is that seemingly every single ad and tv show uses Last Christmas as a festive soundtrack, often, for added pleasure, a version which is being ‘sung’ by an Italian whose grasp of English is largely based on perceived phonetics and so whose warbling can be pretty faithfully transcribed as being along the lines of “Lass kriesmas, you gayv mi yo art, thee verry necks day, yu giveet ayway” (try it, seriously, it’s surprisingly fun).
• Cool Box Art: A Twitter account sharing examples of, er, cool videogame box art. Aside from the art, some of the titles on display are amazing – I am fairly certain that a game with the working title: “Gunthro and the Epic Blunder” would be unlikely to get greenlit in 2017.
• Tweetreality: Twitter is, it’s fair to say, a vile, noisy, horrible mess. What would make it better? I know! How about viewing it through an interface that presented Tweets popping up in front of your eyes like millions of little bubbles of horror, all arranged by where in the world they were Tweeted from? No, I know, it sounds ghastly. Still, as a proof-of-concept, Tweetreality’s obviously a smart bit of coding and will no doubt do the developer’s career no end of good; seriously, though, we probably ought to burn the code to make sure it can never become a mainstream reality. If you want to imagine what a proper dose of futureinformationmadness might feel like, download this and have a play (iOS only, I’m afraid).
• Amazon Pet Profiles: I don’t think that these are live in the UK yet, more’s the pity; shoppers in the US, though, concerned that their pets are feeling somehow excluded from the relentless march of Jeff Bezos into every single corner of their waking and sleeping existences, can now create user profiles on Amazon for their pets. No, no, you’re entirely right, there is no conceivable reason why anyone would want to do this (oh, ok, fine, there are discounts on petfood orders and the nebulous promise of vouchers and deals), but this is where we are.  What’s that, Jeff? You don’t know enough about my household and our hopes, dreams, fears, wants and lusts? No problem, MINE MY PETS FOR ADVERTISER-FRIENDLY DATAPOINTS, JEFF! COME INTO MY LIFE JEFF! I ACCEPT YOUR BODY AND BLOOD AS THE EUCHARIST OF MY MODERN RELIGION, JEFF. Hang on, I’ve gone wrong here haven’t I? Sorry.
• Photos of the Year 2017: The Atlantic, doing their thing. Man, it has been a BLEAK 12 months. 
• Cheerfriend: This is, I think, a really nice idea with lots of potential other applications. Cheerfriend is designed for people running marathons and the like; it’s an app which they download onto their phone and which lets their friends send them messages of support through the Cheerfriend website which they can hear through their headphones as they run. Which is obviously HUGELY open to abuse – it would be sort of darkly funny to send random messages shouting things like “GOD LOOK OUT!” – there’s all sorts of places you can go with this idea; for a start you could use this tech to power a sort of Challenge Anneka, with teams of people guiding runners around a city, say. Actually that’s a really good idea, I’m going to use that.
• Top9: Your top nine Insta photos of 2017, based on how much ENGAGEMENT they got, presented in a pretty grid and available to buy as prints and stuff. Web Curios takes no responsibility for any emotional distress caused by all your top photos featuring your ex.
• Mayku Formbox: Remember when 3d printing was going to be the future, and when we were all going to have little makerbots in our houses churning out replacement plug fittings and model railway parts and stuff? God, those were happier times, weren’t they? Now we’ve all realised the limitations, though, the world has slightly moved on – this is an interesting addition to the maker movement which looks like it has rather a lot of potential. You sort of have to watch the video to really get it, but basically this is a little piece of kit which uses vacuum to create instant, incredibly accurate moulds of, well, anything at all. Presuming you’re making stuff which can be moulded, this could be transformative; certainly from the point of view of the ability to quickly knock out bespoke pieces it’s a potential godsend.
• Beloved Recluse: A little bot churning out tiny lines of algogenerated ‘poetry’ and oh me oh my this is lovely.
• 3d Printing Wifi: Ok, this is included not because it is ‘fun’ but because it’s honestly genius and the potential to do really fun stuff with the idea is honestly huge. It’s a research paper from the University of Washington whose authors have managed to 3d print objects which can connect to WiFi networks (the plastic in the 3d printer’s mixed with metals/minerals, is the upshot, but, er, there’s a lot more science in here than that which I simply don’t understand at all) – which, as they explain, can mean “buttons, smart sliders and physical knobs that wirelessly control music volume and lights as well as smart bottles that can sense liquid flow and send data to nearby RF devices, without batteries or electronics.” Seriously, just think of the possibilities here – even if only for stupid, pointless, advermarketingpr stunts.
• Social Justice Kittens 2018: This year’s iteration of Liartown’s Social Justice Kittens calendar once again features a selection of adorable cats, each of whom is presented with a quote along the lines of “Persistent disagreement is the height of harassment”. As a bonus, this year it also includes social justice puppies who are taking sincere and accountable stock of their actions and who ADMIT THEIR FAULTS. You know someone who will find this hilarious, and you will also know someone who will find this annoying and actually quite problematic if you stop to think about it. Both those people are annoying and probably sort-of dicks, so send this link to both of them. Actually, here’s an idea – a calendar of cat images which can be personalised with whatever copy the buyer chooses, printed on demand – actually, I reckon that would work; Saz, get mong on it asap please thanks. 

By Wayne Sorce

NEXT UP, TRY THIS WHICH I THINK MAY WELL BE THE MOST PREPOSTERIOUS SELECTION OF MASHUPS I HAVE EVER HEARD!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT OF ALL THE ODD THINGS ABOUT THIS WEEK, AND THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW, THIS ‘EXPLANATION’ OF THE JERUSALEM THING MAY WELL BE THE ODDEST, PT.2:

• View From 30k: This might be my favourite high-concept Insta account of the year. View from 30k presents abstract depictions of runways at airports as seen from above; so just lines. Black lines on a grey background. These are ACE, seriously.
• The Good News Podcast: Accompanied with my standard “I don’t really listen to podcastzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz NOONE CARES WHAT YOU LIKE OR DON’T LIKE MATT, FFS” disclaimer, this is MORE CONTENT by Cards Against Humanity (yes, I know, it’s marketing, sorry) – the idea being that it’s a podcast about nice stuff in an era full of awful stuff. Might be good, might not be, but it’s a nice idea and I know how much you all LOVE podcasts (as an aside, fair play to CAH for really putting the money into this content marketing stuff).
• The History Chicks: Another podcast! Thematic consistency! Sequential links! Occasionally the random way in which I throw links into the GDoc during the week throws up unexpected curatorial coherence, such as now when I link to two podcasts in a row. The History Chicks is all about women from history, whether fictional or factual,. It was recommended to me by someone (who exactly I forget; sorry, someone), and the archive looks DEEP -the latest one’s nearly two hours on Coco Chanel, which for some of you will be absolute catnip.
• Jam: This is interesting – Jam’s basically an online learning course academy thing for kids, where they can take a variety of video-led courses on a range of topics (music, coding, craft, art, etc) guided by their teacher and with the option to get one-on-one support via video link with a mentor…the courses cost, though, and it’s not exactly easy to see on the site how much they go for, so caveat emptor and all that, but a cursory glance through the available modules makes this look like quite a useful service for young and old kids.
• Marginalia Paraphernalia: Who doesn’t love marginalia, the weird doodlings of bored monks in the margins of illuminated manuscripts? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! This Kickstarter will, if funded, offer backers small lapel badges of selected doodles, meaning that YOU could be the proud owner of a small pin featuring a nun picking penises from a tree – trust me, you WANT this.
• Vlipsy: Like Giphy, but for clips from shows (basically); Vlipsy (that NAME, though) is set up to be a repository for quickly and easily finding short clips of TV shows, animations; rather than gifs, these are standard videos which can be paused, fast forwarded, etc. They’re actively soliciting CONTENT PARTNERS, so for publishers this might be a useful way of packaging up content in bitesize fashion. Might, I said.
• What We Hated In 2017: The clever people at Pudding, undisputed kings of the ‘fun, pop culture dataviz blogpost’ in 2017, present an overview of what people (well, Americans) hated in 2017, broken down by age and location. Mainly interesting from a dataviz point of view; I particularly enjoyed the graphs showing how hate levels for different things change over time (older people tend to like numbers more than younger people, whilst the popularity of ‘butt selfies’ is apparently consistent regardless of age, which is nice to know).
• The Neil Young Archives: How much Neil Young do you want in your life? Do you want ALL the Neil Young? You do, don’t you, I can tell. Here, in exchange for just an email address, you can basically wallow in Neil Young’s sweat, musically speaking – this is an insanely comprehensive site, and whilst I’m normally not a fan of a skeuomorphic UX I also quite like the filing cabinet interface. Man, Mr Young is PROLIFIC.
• Milkfloat Corner: Sometimes the web is an awful place – argumentative, shouty, confrontational, violent, cruel, venal and stupid. Occasionally, though, one stumbles across oases of purity amongst the blasted desert of horrors, and one pauses to breathe a lungful of clean, sweet, goodness before once again donning the gasmask and heading out again into the wasteland. Milkfloat Corner is one such oasis, a site seemingly in abeyance, which celebrates milk floats – no more, no less. Want to know about different float models? Course you do! If you are having a bad day, or at the very least a ‘difficult’ and hungover one, read the FAQ Page and feel better about EVERYTHING. It’s like a cup of very milky warm tea and a Nice biscuit.
• Missing Fabrics: It’s ANOTHER one! Actually I have a vague idea that quite a few of you knit and do craft stuff, so this link may in fact serve a purpose beyond whimsy, but read this and fall in love: “Imagine you are in the middle of a project and suddenly realize you don’t have enough fabric to finish! Or you have your next quilt all planned and are anxious to start, but you can’t find one of the fabrics! What do you do? How would you like to have quilters and fabric shop owners THE WORLD OVER looking for your fabric for you? Instead of just a handful of people you now have thousands looking! Mind boggling idea isn’t it?” HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE SOMEONE SO HAPPY ABOUT THE MERE CONCEPT OF THE INTERNET?
• Defunctland: You may never have realised that the one thing missing from your life was a regular video series exploring abandoned and defunct amusement parks and talking about the rides, the themes and the special attractions there, but that is in fact exactly what you need to complete your existence. Don’t fight it.
• Butterfly: This is crazy, and as far as I can tell it’s not a hoax or a spoof – launching next year, this is an ultrasound scanner which works by being plugged into your phone and which displays the readings on your device’s screen. This is truly transformative if it works as advertised, although it will also lead to a trend of pregnant people carrying one of these around and aggressively foisting LIVE UTERUSWATCH on anyone who’ll bear to listen (no, no, not ALL pregnant people, obviously, but I bet you can all think of someone who’d do that, don’t lie).  
• What’s Your Tech Generation?: Nice interactive by the Washington Post – tell if your year of birth and it will alter the piece to reflect the sorts of things you’ll have found familiar whilst growing up with tech. Also contains some EXCELLENT ‘this is how long it took to do stuff in 1994’ which I suggest you share with your kids if you want some easy, stereotypical ‘Mum/Dad, the past was RUBBISH!’ eyerolling lols.
• 10×17: Another seasonal link returning from last year, 10×17 (you will doubtless recall) is the annual thing whereby a bunch of artists (26, to be precise) design covers for their 10 favourite records of the year, counting down from #10 to #1 each day. Beautiful designs, and it’s really interesting to see, where there are overlaps in thh selections, how different artists have responded to different musicians’ works. Oh, and the site’s nicely designed too, and you can stream the records – basically this is just great, enjoy it.
• Toy Town: Do you remember the Medieval Cities Generator? OF COURSE YOU DO! I know you remember all the links I post here, and that some of you – the most dedicated, the ones who really ‘get’ what I’m trying to do here, yeah? – keep detailed ledgers of them with notes about how they made you FEEL. Anyway, this is like the medieval cities generator except it creates them in 3d and lets you (sort of) wander round them. Look, I like it ok?
• Paper Signals: Another very, very fun little Google project, this is a site which gives you instructions on how to build your very own papercraft IoT toy – from a little cardboard arrow which changes which direction it’s pointing in depending on the current valuation of Bitcoin, say, to an umbrella which furls and unfurls dependent on the likelihood of rain, this is such a lovely thing to play with as an introduction to connectivity and electronics. If you’re a certain type of family/person, this is absolutely going to be your Christmas project.
• Dear Cat Callers: Hugely depressing Insta of the week! This is an account run by a woman in the US, who decided that for a month she’d take a selfie with all the men who catcalled her as she walked around. The idea is obviously to demonstrate the prevalence of the behaviour, and also, I imagine, to confront the guys with the reality of what it is they’re doing, how it might make someone feel, etc – what’s most striking about the images is, well, how incredibly pleased with themselves the men look, like they can’t imagine why anyone might have a problem (“it;s just a compliment, sweetheart!”) FFS, GUYS!
• Rogue Puzzles: Last up this week, a series of ASCII-rogue games which, if that means anything to you, really are rather nicely done; pleasingly oblique, these reward a bit of thinking. ENJOY THEM.

By Sebastien Zanella

FINALLY IN THE MUSICAL SELECTIONS, SOUNDTRACK THE LONGREADS WITH THE SUPERB MAVIS STAPLES!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• The Page 99 Test: Not in fact a Tumblr! Look, if you lot won’t keep making Tumblrs then I’m just going to have to get a bit lax on the category distinctions, deal with it. Anyway, this is quite an interesting little site; from what I can tell, it’s a bunch of authors/academics presenting page 99 of their works as an argument as to why anyone might theoretically want to read them; the site as a whole presents a really broad range of topics and arguments in a way that honestly does make you think “actually, I wouldn’t mind knowing more about that” and which might be useful if you’re looking for heavyweight reading material to ignore while you get drunk this Christmas.
• Eat More Bikes: A comic! On Tumblr! Whodathunkit? This is quite funny, in a very ‘black and white line drawn comic on Tumblr’ sort of way.
• Effect Pedal: A Tumblr devoted to, er, guitar effects pedals. Look, SOMEONE might care.
• Sound Designer Jeans: Look, this is mostly just a pretty standard Tumblr so I’m linking to a specific post which links to a selection of this person’s remixes. These are…dear God, I didn’t know sound could *do*that to a person. I can absolutely guarantee to you that the track right a the top of the page is one of the most upsetting things you will ever have heard, ever. Go on, click the link and press play. Go on. *waits* SEE? I TOLD YOU.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• The Best Online Essays of 2017: Not according to me, you understand, but according to whoever Ted Gioia is; I haven’t, I confess, read all of these, but I recognise enough of the titles here to be reasonably confident in Mr Gioia’s taste; as you limp towards the end of the working year, these are a good resource for the ‘things I can do at work which aren’t work but which involve me reading and so which I can probably just about pass off as ‘research’ or similar’ (as an aside, back in the day when I had to do timesheets I used to regularly fill entire days with ‘general internet research’ under ‘non-billable’ – amazingly, this was considered a reasonable use of my time. No wonder the economy’s going to tits).
• Airport Novella: Brilliantly silly idea which also doubles up as a sort of proper literary art project; this is an actual, ‘proper’ 40-page novella in PDF form, made up solely of excerpts from the sort of novels sold at airports – you know, the ones in which the author’s name is embossed on the front in such a way to present their surname in the manner of the giant, looming letters from the 80s AIDS adverts. Includes contributions from Brown, Childs, Crichton and the rest, and is sort of weirdly good in a nonsensical and obviously very bad way.
• The Year in Band Names: An annual Web Curios favourite, this is the AV Club’s yearly rundown of the best new band names they stumbled across over the past 12 months. There is SO MUCH GOLD in here, but let me pick out a few favourites – The Vaticunts, Marijuana Deathsquads and Coach, I’m Gay, I SALUTE YOU!
• Damien Hirst: As Hirst’s Biennale show, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, wraps up, this interview with him covers the money, the work and again the money; it’s one of the more sympathetic interviews with Hirst I’ve read, though the degree of ‘sympathy’ will probably depend on your reaction to the sales figures being dropped throughout. The show, I’ll say again, is one of the most astounding, vulgar, huge, brash, shouty and fun things I saw all year; wherever it ends up (it’s going to be the Middle East, isn’t it?), do try and get to see it.
• The Best Books of 2017: There were loads of these I could have included, but NPR’s is the most wide-ranging, the interface is nice, you can filter by interest or theme, and there are just SO MANY to choose from. This list (and, er, some money) is all you need to cocoon yourself away from your family for the festive period.
• 52 Things I Learned In 2017: Another returning Christmas favourite, this is the fourth year that Tom Whitwell’s written one of these lists; again, it’s fascinating as a general ‘where are we now / where are we going?’ overview, and also in a ‘wow, there are whole sentences on here which 12 months ago would have made no sense at all, doesn’t the world move fa…oh, there it goes!’ way. My personal favourite? ”For 11,111 yuan (£1,250), you can buy a lifetime’s supply of alcohol: 12 bottles of baijiu — a potent grain spirit — delivered to you every month for the rest of your life.” GREAT!
• Raising A Teenage Daughter: This is an interesting and well-written piece, but the reason for including it is the way in which the design of the Page informs the way the reader experiences the story; the piece is written by journalist Elisabeth Weil, but is peppered with her daughter’s annotations, giving her perspective on her mother’s account.  It’s simple (and the interface could be handled more elegantly, if I’m really going to be a dick about it), but it completely changes the way in which you read the piece. Such a wonderful conceit, this is going to become quite the thing as a mechanic (at least I think it is).
• Meeting Ursula K Le Guin: As a small child I devoured Ursula K Le Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ stories; they had an atmosphere that was totally unique, part celtic, part middle-eastern, slow and cold and austere and just beautiful, and I’ve loved Le Guin’s writing ever since. Well into her 80s now, this interview with her is wide-ranging and intelligent; what’s striking is what a strong voice she remains into her dotage (you wouldn’t mess, basically). The paragraph about why ‘progress’ as an idea is a harmful one is just one case in point; do read this, she’s wonderful.
• On Interactive Fiction: This year’s Interactive Fiction Contest (see Curios passim) produced the largest number of entries of any year to date; this piece looks at the growth of the genre and some of the reasons why it’s growing as a medium. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to merge IF and journalistic techniques which we’ll see being explored in the coming year or so – the Teen Daughter piece above’s got elements of IF in the way it presents the UI, for example – which is rather exciting from the point of view of STORYTELLING (sorry).
• Genetically Engineering Yourself: You may recall the subject of this piece from a previous Curios, in which I featured a longread about him giving himself a fecal transplant (it was memorable). Josiah Zayner believes we should all be free to mess with ourselves however we like, and by way of demonstration regularly does stuff like, I don’t know, shove a syringe full of strange DNA into his thigh to see what happens (the answer usually seems to be “Hm, not sure, let’s wait a few years and see”). The piece is a fascinating look at the weird, fringe world of bodyhacking – you may finish it with a strange compulsion to REWORK YOUR WETWARE (they actually talk like that, these people), so take care.
• Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains: An explainer on how it all works, so you’ll be able to get through the inevitable, interminable Christmas conversations with your nan about ‘blockcoins’. It’s a bit maths-y, but in general it’s one of the friendlier explainers I’ve read; it won’t, though, make you feel any less bitterly angry about that one bloke you know who bought 10 for ‘a laugh’ 5 years ago and is now planning early retirement. As an aside, can anyone – anyone, please, this really is a serious question – explain to me what makes Bitcoin a ‘currency’ rather than a ‘good’? Please?
• Metal Machine Music: Lou Reid’s famously-unlistenable noise album gets a reappraisal by Pitchfork (they love it! Who saw that coming?!); this is less a review, though, than a history of the record and Reid, and is actually a really good piece of writing about the man and the influence that Metal Machine Music had. Go on, try listening to it while you read. Go on. Enjoying that? You’re  not, are you?
• The World Facebook Created: A really good article, this, looking at the responsibilities Facebook could be seen to have in a world in which, for some, it *is* the internet. This touches on freedom of speech issues, political power as exercised in the second and third world through the platform, and how Facebook to date has continually failed to acknowledge the immense power it wields as a platform. You think the most recent round of elections worldwide were interesting from the point of view of Facebook’s role? Wait til India’s next proper elections, that’ll be MENTAL.
• Selling Cat Blindfolds: Another Facebook piece, this looks at how Facebook’s automatic inventory ads – the ones that retailers can use to automatically generate carousel ads of shoppable products within FB, with Facebook determining which products are shown to whom based on interest affinity, etc – have had the unforeseen consequence of flooding much of America’s Facebook feed with ads for bizarre, pointless products from massive US retailer Wish – oh algorithms, how do we love thee? More than we understand thee, at least. Thanks to the polymathic Jay Owens for the tip here.
• Parliament is Falling Down: As the Parliamentary Estate prepares to decide which contractor gets the multi-million gig to refurb the House, this Guardian piece slips beneath the exterior to peruse the piping (and the damp, and the rats) under the impressive veneer. I love the Houses of Parliament – if you’ve never visited, you really must – but even when I was working there 15 years ago it was very creaky and the toilets, as noted in the piece, were pretty feral in nature; christ alone knows what another nearly two-decades of wear and tear will have done to the place. Anyway, this is far more interesting than anything about building conservation ought to be.
• The Lonely Deaths of Japan: Not ashamed to say I did a RIGHT weep when reading this; Japan’s ageing population is not a new story, and nor is the loneliness that afflicts the elderly in modern society, but the portraits of the individuals in this essay, particularly the guy going to the little concert and standing facing the wall to experience the music, just broke me.
• The Problem with Muzak: A brilliant critical essay about Spotify and how they own music, probably forever (yes, ok, hyperbole, but), this is a brilliant look at the company from the tech to the business model, as well as how its rise has changed the way in which we consume music, and in turn how that has changed what is sold to us, and how that has in turn changed what artists make. Really, really good, this.
• Why Dating an Entrepreneur is Different: Finally this week, the most amazing man – I mean that in the very literal sense – you will meet all month (no matter HOW bad your office party is/was); meet Tim Denning, a man for whom the word ‘prick’ really isn’t a strong enough epithet, a man who I am pretty certain doesn’t just ‘do’ things, he ‘crushes’ them; he doesn’t complete tasks, he ‘kills’ them. Tim wants to tell you about all the ways in which entrepreneurs are special and brilliant and, fundamentally, better than you, and why as a result you ought to take extra special care to understand and nurture your ENTREPRENEURIAL UNICORN. I can’t stress enough what an incredible journey this article is – you can quote almost all of it for comic effect. Look! “It’s a philosophy of always pushing the boundaries, and not accepting what we’re told just because everyone else accepted the same answer. It’s our rebel nature coming alive for the greater good. Deep down we’re lions ready to pounce on our prey.” See? Tim, on the offchance you google yourself – I am pretty sure you do, you know – Tim Denning, PLEASE, TIM, I KNOW YOU ARE UNHAPPY BUT THIS IS NOT GOING TO HELP YOU, TIM.

By Gil Rigoulet

By Trey Ratcliffe

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

• First up, this is called ‘Transient’ and it’s basically weather, but LOOK AT THE LIGHTNING! This is glorious:

2) This is called ‘Retrospect’ by The Vistas, and it reminds me an awful lot of The Strokes for some reason, or at least it did yesterday and now I’m not so sure – anyway, it’s GOOD GUITAR POP:

3) This short is called HB – it’s a minute long, and it’s very good indeed. No spoilers, just watch:

4) N*E*R*D are, to me at least, inexplicably famous and long-lived; they always struck me as startlingly dull, but then I’m just a cloth-eared idiot. Anyway, their latest track’s called ‘1000’ and it’s actually pretty decent and the video is pretty much the most ‘oh, look, that was 2017, great, everything’s terrible’ piece you could imagine. Enjoy!

5) This is by Oy, it’s called ‘Full of Love’ and this video is just WONDERFUL:

6) Finally this week, this one’s called The Rager by Kyle Craft – it’s got some cracking lyrics, and it stayed with me longer than I expected it to after first listen. ENJOY BYE BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK FOR THE FINAL CURIOS OF 2018 BYE BYE BYE BYE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH BYE!:

By Alberto Sughi

LET’S START THE MIXES WITH THE LATEST ONE BY THE LOVELY MAN BEHIND IMPERICA WHICH THIS WEEK IS PARTICULARLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WANTS TO FIND THE PERSON BEHIND THE TOMATO WEBSITE AND THANK THEM FOR THEIR MAD CHUTZPAH:

• Collaborative Facebook Stories for Groups and Events: Shy of changing the colour of the website’s favicon to a ghostly yellow, there’s not a whole load more Facebook could do to demonstrate to Snap that it’s…er…aggressively targeting it as a business (I mean, look at the state of this, the shameless, thieving wrong’uns!). The latest ‘what, you do this too? What a coincidence, we came up with this entirely independently!’ feature update from Facebook comes in the form of this, which will  mean that ‘users of Facebook Groups and Events will be able to contribute to a Facebook Story visible to the rest of the members and moderated by the admins.’I think you could actually have some fairly fun experimental stuff come out of this, not least due to the oftentimes disparate composition of the larger Facebook groups – on the other hand, though, just imagine the sort of ‘content’ that the collective ID of the ‘banter’ groups would put together (on which note, I just plugged ‘banter’ into FB search and wow, Brexit really DID happen didn’t it).
• Invoice with PayPal Through Facebook Messenger: Look, this isn’t worth me wasting prose on: “PayPal and Facebook are expanding their integrations today with the launch of an extension for Messenger that allows PayPal sellers to invoice buyers directly through private messaging…The new PayPal chat extension allows a seller to create and send their invoice without leaving the their conversation, so the buyer can act on it immediately. To use the extension, sellers open the extension tray in Messenger, select PayPal, then create a simple invoice by filling in details like item name, description, price and quantity. The invoice can also include a photo.” US-only as yet, but expect this to eventually roll out everywhere, in another move designed to ensure that all of your online interactions have that slightly queasy Facebook-blue tinge in the short to medium term future.
• Send Hi-Res Photos in Messenger: Literally just this. No significant brand application that I can think of, but, you know, if you want to set your Messenger bot up to send pointlessly hi-res photos of, I don’t know, biscuits, then now you can. Great!
• Russian Transparency!: Everything we think nowadays is determined by a shadowy politburo cabal running a sweatshop office of MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA MANIPULATORS out of Vladivostock. IT IS, I TELL YOU! In a move towards combating this worrying trend, Facebook’s set to tell people how many of the Pages they follow on FB and Insta were set up by Russia’s (in)famous Internet Research Agency (see Curios passim on this one); which is great and all, but also pretty disingenuous when you think about how Facebook works; visibility and reach are a factor of likes, shares, etc, when it comes to this sort of stuff, meaning most people who saw FAKE NEWS PROPAGANDA from these Pages won’t have had to follow them to ‘enjoy’ their lies. Still, it’s a start.
• Facebook Trust Indicators: As part of its efforts to stop us being gulled by online shysters, Facebook’s also introducing what it’s calling ‘Trust Indicators’, whereby publishers on the platform can autosubmit a bunch of information about themselves: “Publishers may now be able to upload links to additional information through their Brand Asset Library under their Page Publishing Tools — including information on their ethics policy, corrections policy, fact-checking policy, ownership structure, and masthead.” This information will now be available to users curious to see more information about the newspeddler showing up in their feed – let’s not think too hard about the degree of critical thinking and curiosity which is required of the general public for this to actually make a meaningful difference to anything, or indeed the utility of a system which allows anyone to upload their own affidavits as to their journalistic and professional integrity. TRUST! TRUST FACEBOOK! TRUST IN MARK!
• Join Friends’ Livestreams On Insta: To quote: “When watching a friend’s live video, simply tap the “Request” button in the comments section. You’ll see a confirmation that your friend has accepted your request, and you’ll have a moment to prepare. Once you’re live, the screen will split in half so you can hang out live with your friend. You can leave your friend’s live video at any time, making it easy to join for a quick hello or a longer chat.” There’s almost certainly some GREAT fan service stuff that famouses and brand ambassadors can do with this; just, er, take care as to who you let join you.
• Snap Adds Context Cards to Lenses & Filters: This is 10 days old, apologies; seriously, though, there’s only one of me and there are a LOT of tedious s*c**l m*d** updates. Anyway, advertisers purchasing sponsored lenses or filters on Snap will now be able to add context cards – the feature that lets you swipe up from within a Snap to take you to a specific destination url – for no extra cost, meaning you’ll now have at least an outside chance of demonstrating why it was vitally important to spend a few hundred grand on a piece of software that allows people to, say, make their faces look like a friendly poo.
• YT Updates Policy On Weird Kids’ Content: A reaction to the recent furore about algorithmically-generated videos of Peppa Pig making like Princess Bathory (a story which, weirdly, was mentioned in Private Eye twice before making it to the mainstream) – only of interest if you’re one of the BAD PEOPLE making ad money out of poorly-rendered CGI depictions of Elsa from Frozen doing ice docking or something.
• I Am Reindeer: A nice initiative, running for another 5 days at the time of writing, seeking nominations for female creatives who are, to quote them, ‘bringing the magic’ (no, me neither); there will be nine winners, so if you know someone who’s, er, a brilliant female creative, why not nominate them and make their Christmas? GO ON.
• Duroc Tomatoes: Long-term readers may be aware that I have a very sizeable soft spot for ridiculously overengineered websites for ostensibly tedious industries; this may well be the ur-example of these. Duroc, I learned this week, is the largest supplier of ‘snacking tomatoes’ (no, me neither) to the UK and a few other European countries; what would you imagine the website of a major tomato supplier to be like? Would you imagine it to have MUSIC and FLASH-LIKE ANIMATIONS and a ridiculously colourful aesthetic that reminds me of the set of Playdays? NO YOU WOULD NOT, and yet here we are. This is just SO wonderfully, riotously overengineered, and makes me wonder whether they needed to dispose of some budget at the end of the year, or whether the CEO’s nephew had just completed a course in creative webdesign or something. Wonderful and hugely pleasing.
• The Bureau Agency: Look, I know that it’s easy for me to sit here in my ivory tower (cold kitchen) and throw barbed criticisms at everyone, I know this. “It’s easy for you”, THEY say (the identity of ‘THEY’ is as yet as undetermined, but imagine them as a seething mass of babbling flesh sitting just outside my window), “you just SIT there and CARP and WHINE and MOCK. Why don’t YOU try making something you miserable, destructive failure?” (there is a small extent to which I accept that ‘THEY’ may be an extension of my ID). Which is all well and good, but then I see stuff like this – the website for what, as far as I can tell, is an actual agency, asking for actual cashmoney for actual work, and which, from the Adam Curtis-style portentous video to the laughably-written copy, seems like the entry point for some sort of weird, comms-themed ARG – and I can’t help myself. WHO ARE YOU, THE BUREAU AGENCY? Interestingly they have culled a lot of the copy since I first found this earlier in the week, suggesting that whoever’s behind it has at least a small degree of self-awareness about how ridiculous the whole presentation is – if you’re reading this, though, let me just point out that the punctuation is still a complete joke. You’re welcome!

By Alma Haser

NEXT UP, THIS PROJECT MASHING UP JAY-Z WITH DJ PREMIER – IT’S EXCELLENT, SO ENJOY!

THE SECTION WHICH HAD A WONDERFULLY BIZARRE EXCHANGE ON TWITTER LAST NIGHT AND IS RATHER ENJOYING THE CLIMBDOWN FROM THE OTHER PARTY THIS MORNING, PT.1

• Just Type Stuff: This is what the web is for – not the bringing together of disparate peoples and viewpoints, not the sharing of ideas and feelings and knowledge and words and music and and and – no, it’s for this, a website which lets you type stuff into your browser and see it pop up in a little virtual world. I first saw this as part of the ‘Now Play This’ exhibition at Somerset House earlier this year, but it’s now available to all; TRY THIS IT IS ACE. Seriously, click the link, type stuff, hit return, see what happens. It’s GREAT, and you will derive more pleasure than you’d expect from creating a tiny virtual universe populated by floating cows and umbrellas and dogs and stuff (no, I know you don’t understand, but JUST CLICK THE LINK).

• For Hims: 2017’s seemingly endless list of ‘X as a subscription service’ offerings continues apace with For Hims (no, I don’t know why they’ve chosen to pluralise ‘him’ and I really wish they hadn’t) which lets you subscribe to monthly deliveries of, er, haircare products and erectile dysfunction medication. It’s just such a weird combination of things – “Hm, I wonder whether there’s anywhere that will send me new hairwax each month so I don’t have to remember to buy it OH and while I’m here I’ll have some Cialis, yes, don’t mind if I do”.
• Black Girl In A Big Dress: It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed a webseries as much as this one – High Maintenance, in case you’re asking – but this is BRILLIANT. Black Girl In A Big Dress is a webseries about a black woman who’s also a Victorian cosplayer and no wait come back it’s good honest. Fourth wall-breaking and funny, this is excellent even if you don’t know anything about cosplay fandom (do any of you know about cosplay fandom? I have my doubts to be honest).
• The Hotstepper: This is SO silly, and really rather fun. The Hotstepper is an app which provides users with directions to any location they desire, given to them through an AR layer of, er, a fat bloke in his pants walking ahead of them to guide them to their destination. Leaving aside the impracticality of needing to stare through your phone to see the route you’re meant to take, who DOESN’T want to be guided through life by a virtual bear wearing Kanye shades and some fetching blue briefs? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! ETA until KFC rip this off for a Colonel Finder app? Approximately a month, I reckon.
• A Foreigner’s Guide to the Polish Alphabet: When I was a kid and growing up in Swindon – have I mentioned I grew up in Swindon? Ghastly place, don’t visit – I went to school with LOADS of Polish people, meaning I acquired the largely useless ability to spell surnames like Maskelaniac and Wolosczinski without pause for thought, and learned early on that shouting ‘Curva’ at your mate’s mum when she turned up to pick them up from infants was, on balance, an error. Had I had access to this beautiful website (seamless segue there, right?) I might have been motivated to learn words other than ‘poo’, ‘grapefruit’ and ‘apple’ in the language – this is a gorgeous piece if webwork which explains to English speakers how the Polish alphabet works; what the letters are, how they are pronounced, etc. SO well designed and really far prettier and more interesting than it has a right to be.
• Pupsocks: Have you always wanted a pair of socks emblazoned with the face of your fur baby (STOP IT, SAZ!)? Of course you haven’t, you’re not an idiot – that said, though, you might know someone whose life wouldn’t be complete without the addition of a pair of socks featuring their pet’s countenance all over them. This site lets you choose the socks, choose the colour, and then upload a photo of your cat, dog or budgie’s (or indeed any other animal – they appear to have a reasonably broad church) face which will be plastered all over said socks for you to sport with pride. I don’t think that there’s anything likely to say ‘no, please, I want to spend the rest of my life alone’ quite like socks with photos of your dog on them, but maybe that’s just me.
• Postcards for Progress: A nice little project by Faris & Rosie where you or anyone else can submit designs for postcards which will in the next week or so be made available for anyone to buy, with all proceeds going to social justice charities. Why not participate? WHY NOT, EH?
• Murder Data: We all LOVE data, don’t we? WE DO! Although occasionally data can be incredibly creepy and upsetting, as in the case of this website which aggregates publicly available information about murders in the US; to quote, “The Murder Accountability Project is a nonprofit group organized in 2015 and dedicated to educate Americans on the importance of accurately accounting for unsolved homicides within the United States. We seek to obtain information from federal, state and local governments about unsolved homicides and to publish this information. The Project’s Board of Directors is composed of retired law enforcement investigators, investigative journalists, criminologists and other experts on various aspects of homicide.” There is a LOT of murder in here – depending on what you’re into (please don’t be into murder) there’s almost certainly some really interesting things you can do with this dataset.
• Snatch: This week’s BIG HYPE APP comes in the form of Snatch, which is an AR treasure hunt – using the app, you stare through your phone’s screen to find virtual packages which you need to collect and protect from other competitors; basically it’s some sort of Pokemon Go variant where other people can nick the Pokemon off you, but with the added incentive of REAL PRIZES; if users manage to keep hold of a box for 6 hours, they win its contents IN REAL LIFE. Worth a play while the userbase is still relatively small and you might have a chance of actually winning something and before the game is ruined by teenagers virtually shanking each other for McDonald’s vouchers or something.
• Artland: The art world has long been ripe for DIGITAL DISRUPTION but for one reason or another there’s not been anything I’ve seen which has really taken off in the rather stuffy world of the gallerinas. I can’t see this changing matters, but it’s an interesting idea; artland allows galleries to create profiles and upload works, making them browsable and for sale through the app; punters can browse, chat about works, make enquiries and buy through the interface. I guess the problem here is that art is, for the most part, not exactly a regular purchase and so the user retention for stuff like this is pretty diabolical, but if you fancy doing a bit of arty window shopping this might be a fun download for you.
• The Balanced Transportation Analyser: This is, it’s fair to say, a niche ‘interest’ link, but I’m including it in here as it’s such a wonderful example of OCD-level obsession and DEEP KNOWLEDGE that it’s worth highlighting. The Balanced Transportation Analyser is “an intricate spreadsheet model that ties together every facet of passenger transport in New York City including transit, auto and taxi. The model makes it possible to measure the effects of changes in auto tolls, transit fares and other policy levels on traffic levels, travel speeds, time spent traveling, agency revenues, emissions and other “externalities.” It contains “pre-packaged” traffic-pricing scenarios which you may modify to test your own what-if scenarios. The BTA thereby offers a transparent and straightforward tool for transport policy-makers and advocates to test the impacts of tolls and other policy traffic pricing proposals.” Yes, fine, it doesn’t SOUND interesting (and isn’t, really, if I’m honest), but it’s worth quickly downloading the document just to see what TRUE Excel madness looks like. WHY IS ALL THIS IN A SPREADSHEET?
• Novation Launchpad: Another in the list of seemingly-endless synthtoys available on the web – this one’s rather a lot of fun, and in the 20 minutes I spent dicking around with it the other day I managed to make myself believe I was a hitherto-unacknowledged musical genius and for that reason alone I will love it forever. Seriously, it’s seemingly impossible to make something that doesn’t sound ace.
• With Jack: This is a really smart idea; With Jack is a bespoke insurance provider designed specifically for ‘freelance creatives’ designed to help with those occasions when your LOVELY LOVELY CLIENTS decide for whatever reason that they can just ignore your payment terms completely and leave you scrabbling down the back of the sofa for pennies with which to buy baked beans (LOVELY LOVELY CLIENTS!). I can’t vouch for the quality or flexibility of the policies, but if ‘freelance creative’ sounds like you then this could be worth a look.
• The NYC Taxi Drivers Calendar 2018: SEXY CABBIES! Has anyone done a DEEPLY SATIRICAL Uber version of this yet? Good, it wouldn’t be funny.
• Snide Octopus: An Instagram account which posts book spines with ‘humorous’ captions; the inverted commas there are because the gags are pretty hit and miss, but there’s something cute about the setup and, you know, I’m a fairly indiscriminate bibliophile.
• Snips: Snips is voice assistant software for those who, er, fancy the idea of building their own voice assistant but who don’t want to be in hock to Google or Amazon for the pleasure. This is a really smart looking service which effectively operates in a similar way to those ‘look, we’ll help you build a messenger bot!’ services which sprang up about 9-12 months ago – anyone can tinker with it, and the resulting assistants are all deployed locally meaning you don’t have to deal with the slightly creepy ‘WHY IS AMAZON SPYING ON ME ALL THE TIME?’ side-issue that Alexa gives you. If you’re in any way interested in hacking together your own voice-activated butler then this is for you.
• MagShuffle: This is such a nice idea, but the man who runs Cureditor; MagShuffle is a subscription service which, for £100 a year, let’s you subscribe to over 150 magazines, allowing you to choose a different one each month should you so desire. Obviously there’s a paralysis of choice issue here – there are TOO MANY MAGAZINES on the shelves, as my mate Paul once complained back in the late 90s – but this is a great gift idea.
• The Bowie Broadcasts: This is admittedly a branded promo for Sonos and so should be Up There, but it’s actually really good and so am granting it the status of ACTUAL CONTENT; this is a series of shows recorded in the past few weeks an exploring the musical and artistic legacy of David Bowie, as discussed by musicians like Thurston Moore, Neneh Cherry and more. Really interesting and there’s some great music in these.
• At The Museum: This is a great idea imho; At The Museum is a video series by MoMA in NYC, showing the behind-the-scenes world of running a major international arts institution. Yes, ok, it doesn’t SOUND like a lot of fun, but it’s got the same sort of interesting fly-on-the-wall vibe of good reality TV, and if you’ve any interest in the mechanics of the art world, or if you know someone who’s interested in a career in the sector, this is properly fascinating.
• Jilly Ballistic: Cut-out street art from the New York subway. The style here is wonderful.
• Mattia Passarini: Is it me, or are Italians weirdly overrepresented in the world of photography? And if that is true, why is it that my status as a half-wop appears to have granted me no special skills in that arena at all? These are the questions that keep me up at night. Mattia Passarini photographs remote peoples around the world, and his Insta feed is a wonderful window into distant lands;  the portraits here are just beautiful.

By James Marshall

NEXT UP, THE VERY GOOD NEW MIXTAPE BY PROSAICALLY-NAMED RAPPER MICK JENKINS!

THE SECTION WHICH HAD A WONDERFULLY BIZARRE EXCHANGE ON TWITTER LAST NIGHT AND IS RATHER ENJOYING THE CLIMBDOWN FROM THE OTHER PARTY THIS MORNING, PT.2:

• Death Mask: I LOVE THIS. Death Mask is a little AR project which uses facial recognition and analysis to project the likely expected life expectancy of anyone you look at over their heads; effectively letting you place a small hourglass over everyone, counting down the grains til their inevitable demise. Sadly this is just a video demonstrating the concept, but I really want this as an app so can someone sort this out please? Thanks!
• Erase All Kittens: If this week’s budget taught us anything, other than the fact that politicians should be banned from making gags at the despatch box, it’s that we’re all economically screwed and the future is bleak – THANKS EVERYONE! To that end, why not back this Kickstarter which is raising funds for a ‘teach girls to code’ game –  if you’re going to be unemployed, cold and hungry in your dotage, you might as well take steps to help ensure your daughters can support you.
• Flexbot: Noone really ever talks about Amazon Flex – the bit of Amazon which lets anyone earn money from the company by acting as a courier for Prime, etc, by bidding for jobs to deliver stuff from fulfilment centres. It’s weirdly under the radar considering how many people apparently earn money through it, and it’s an interesting window into everyone’s gig economy future where we can only sustain ourselves by bidding on menial jobs at increasingly low rates and working 19 hour days helping to sustain the lifestyles of the 1%. Flexbot is a joke robot – or IS IT? – which lets Amazon Flex users game the job response system by mechanically tapping your phone’s screen faster than humanly possible, thereby allowing you, in theory, to accept jobs faster than your competitors and WIN AT LIFE. Take a moment to think about how depressing this is – go on, think about it. THIS IS THE FUTURE WE ARE BUILDING.
• Somnox: Another Kickstarter, this one funded to the tune of £110k and rising, for a ‘sleep robot’; basically a small electronic lump covered in fabric which sits in bed with you and, through ‘breathing regulation, sounds, and affection’ improves your sleep. AFFECTION? IT’S A JACK-RUSSELL SIZED LUMP OF PLASTIC, FFS! It’s unsurprisingly light on detail about how it will actually achieve this improvement in your sleep patterns, but don’t let that stop you promising to drop £450 on a MAGIC SLEEP BOX.
• The Icicle Atlas: More information about icicles, their shape and their formation than you could ever have dreamed of. I’ve spent far, far too much time in bad corners of the web, it turns out, as all I can think of when I look at these is that they look like a festive page of the Bad Dragon site.
• The Pano Awards: There is seemingly no area of photography so specific and niche that it can’t have its own awards ceremony – here, then, is this year’s crop of entries into the Panoramic Photo Awards! Some of these are great, in fairness, and there’s a particular effect you get from a panoramic cityscape which I rather love.
• Tifo: Covering similar ground to the equally excellent Mundial magazine, Tifo is a new website presenting erudite, intelligent writing about football. You want to read 4,000 words about why Gaizka Mendieta was awesome? No, me neither, but there’s plenty of other stuff on there too should you like to.
• Ginger: As we all move to a point whereby we accept that life is hard and horrible and, frankly, not really very good for our mental health, so we progress to a situation whereby every single one of us is in some sort of therapy for something. As more of us realise that it’s good to talk about stuff, so more services will spring up seeking to exploit that realisation for commercial gain. Oh HI, Ginger! This is an app which offers access to VIRTUAL THERAPISTS, with text and video consultations available as part of a series of monthly packages at varying price points – just take a moment and go and have a look at the costs there. $130 a month to TEXT someone? WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK?! This isn’t, I’m aware, a novel observation, but the exacerbation of the mental health divide between rich and poor I can see coming down the track is a pretty ugly looking juggernaut (almost as ugly as that mixed metaphor, turns out).
• Celebrity Apology Generator: Stormzy won the apology game forever this week, but this is a fun little toy which churns out ‘I’m not really sorry about all the stuff you’re claiming I did’ statements for you to enjoy. What’s depressing is quite how well this manages to nail the tone and content of so many of the non-apologies we’ve seen over the past few months.
• Let’s Robot: I feel like this is the future of something, but I have no idea for the life of me of what. Let’s Robot is a site which collects internet connected robots, all fitted with cameras and all controllable by THE CROWD via the browser – so you can, should you so desire, navigate an ACTUAL ROBOT around someone else’s apartment whilst chatting to other robot navigation enthusiasts. Per the recent Reddit game with the robot trying to escape from the rooms, there’s potentially quite a fun BRAND THING you could do with this type of tech. Also, I have just spend 5 minutes watching one of these things navigate someone’s living room, which is testament either to how wall-eyed with fatigue I am or how STRANGELY COMPELLING this is.
• Geofind YouTube Videos: Lets you search for videos on YouTube based on the geography from which they were uploaded. A bit janky as these sorts of hacks often are, but it’s an interesting way of finding…odd stuff. Have a play.
• RePhotos: This is a lovely site, collecting photos which show off the changing landscape of a scene over time – you know, the ones with those little left-right sliders allowing you to switch between old photo and new photo on a whim. There are thousands on here from all over the world and as such this is a pleasing historical timesink.
• Artlexa Chung: An excellent single-gag Insta account which picks out images from artworks throughout history which seem to be wearing the same outfits as Alexa Chung, who if you take this to its logical conclusion is EITHER mining the entire history of Western art for her lookbook or is instead a time travelling muse from another dimension – YOU DECIDE!
• FlirtAR: What would you get if you crossed Pokemon Go! with Tinder? A lifetime of solitude, for one, but also FlirtAR – a dating app which for no discernible purpose or benefit whatsoever creates an AR layer of the standard dating experience, letting you see where potential dates are on a map and, seemingly, HUNT THEM DOWN through your phone. This is never going to catch on, but can one of you please download it and give it a try, just to see exactly how bad it is?
• Clara: I once spent a summer in a windowless room, working for Nationwide Building Society. They couldn’t afford voice-recognition call-routing software in the mid-90s, so instead hired me and two other poor fcukers to sit wearing headphones, listening to calls coming in, hearing people say ‘one’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ after a series of menu prompts, and then pressing the appropriate button whilst the customer was fooled into believing that there was some high-tech magic at play. It’s rare that you can *actually* define a job as ‘kafkaesque’, but I think that counts. This isn’t quite on the same level, but it’s chillingly bleak nonetheless; Clara is an AI Assistant that, er, isn’t in fact AI at all – instead, it’s powered by faceless, nameless ACTUAL PEOPLE doing all the heavy lifting in the background. Seemingly designed for people who want a PA but without the tedious ‘interacting with an actual person and treating them like a human being’ elements thereof, this is one of the bleakest ‘oh hi, future of employment!’ things I’ve seen in an age.
• Elastic Man: PLAY WITH THE STRETCHY FACE! I think this has something to do with Rick & Morty, but don’t let that put you off, it is a FUN TOY.
• Virtual Self: Finally in this week’s collection of poorly-curated ephemera, Virtual Self is, as far as I can tell and according to Friend of Curios Shardcore, “a massively over-engineered site for some truly terrible techno” but it is ALSO a very weird collection of strange pseudo-spiritual ramblings and…Oh, God, look, just click around and see where it takes you. Wait til you find the forum, though – why are there so many postings? Who made them? WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN? Quite possibly an elaborate ARG for a firm of monumental masons for all I know.

By Kelly Reemtsen

LAST MIX OF THE WEEK IS THIS CHIPTUNE EXTRAVAGANZA BY CHIP TANAKA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Nope, Not Arabic: A Tumblr collecting instances of script being used in ads and marketing which is meant to look like Arabic but which, well, isn’t.

• Hipster Merkel: I LOVE THIS! Mutti as hipster icon, bless her.
• Clozzed: “Between fashion and photography, the project initiated by Teddy Delcroix offers a walk from shadows to light through a nocturnal window shopping, costing nothing more than our viewing pleasure. Randomly upon a reflection of an inanimate mannequin or a neon light still on, the sleeping city dares to dream.” No, I don;t know either, but the photography on here is pretty slick.
• Adam Hillman: Adam Hillman arranges objects in geometric patterns and photographs them. These are some of those photographs.
• A Mini A Day: A new photo of some cool miniature stuff each day, which if you’re into doll’s houses and stuff – you weirdo – you will very much enjoy.
• Gurafiku: A Tumblr collecting examples of Japanese graphic design, “seeking to lift the barrier of language, and present the graphic design of Japan to an international audience.” There’s some really beautiful stuff in here.
• Glichykitty: The work of CGI artist and animator Ben Vedrenne.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Being a Woman Online: Long, involved, depressing and important research by Amnesty, which examines the sort of abuse which women receive online every day across the world. One in four has received threats of physical or sexual assault, which number is even more depressing for being entirely unsurprising in scale.
• The Grooming of Emo: I’m too old to have been into classic period emo – MCR were just a little late for me, though I’m sure I’d have been sawing away at my wrists through the tears had I been a few years younger – but this piece, about the particular idea of gender relations encapsulated by the genre and what impact it might have had on teens growing up in the mid-00s and the way in which they think about sex and relationships and the like, is very interesting. Prompted a conversation with some friends about ‘music we liked as teens the lyrics of which are, on reflection, a touch ‘problematic’’, which reminded me of this stone cold classic by Adorable whose lyrics are an absolute horrorshow. Still, hell of a bassline.
• The Land of Vendettas: In the week in which the Bosnian-Serb conflict was back in the news (and in which I was reminded of what a spectacularly awful war it was, and just how cravenly the West, for the most part, failed to deal with it), this piece – about blood feuds in Albania, centuries old familial conflicts dragging for generations and the price paid for grudges that never die – feels particularly apposite. Superbly written, too – there’s a line in here about how Central Europe looks quite a lot like a fcuked version of Central America which is *such* a good observation.
• Amazon’s Last Mile: Seeing as I mentioned it up there, here’s a piece about Amazong Flex, how it works and how it’s yet another step towards the eventual, inevitable future point where we are all so fcuked, employmentwise, that we’re forced to monetise every single moment of our waking lives in service to Google, Amazon or Facebook. Very interesting as a ‘future of the labour market’ piece as well as another ‘oh, Christ, Amazon have won the next 100 years’ warning.
• An Orgy of Killing: Let the title be a clue to you that this superb longread from the Guardian is not a cheering piece. This looks at what’s happened in Mosul after the Iraqi army had purportedly driven off IS/Daesh – unsurprisingly, turns out that even the good guys are bad guys, war is horrid and, as is our wont, we’ve left an almighty mess in someone else’s back yard the fallout from which is liable to continue sending geopolitical shockwaves into the future for years to come. WELL DONE US. Really superb war writing, this, if somewhat novelistic in execution.
• Prisoner To Violence: A US prison inmate, serving time for second degree murder, tells of his part in a prison yard fight. Spare, sparse prose, the author’s got real talent.
• The Serial Killer Detector: Isn’t big data GREAT? There’s nothing it can’t fix! Obviously that’s rubbish, but it’s always fascinating to see the areas to which people are attempting to apply data science and how it’s working out, not least here, where it’s being used to analyse available US data on murders and to try and tease out patterns to solve previously insurmountable cases. Hugely interesting.
• The Zombie Diseases of Climate Change: Scary things I hadn’t even begun to think of before this week, part x of an almost infinite series – did you know that. as Global Warming continues apace and the polar icecaps melt, there is all sorts of weird and unknown bacteria which has been stuck in permafrost since the dawn of time which is slowly becoming uncovered and reintroduced to the environment? No, I didn’t either til I read this and now I am genuinely concerned that we’re all going to be wiped out by a 10,000 year old strain of mumps from Greenland.
• The Professional D&D Master: I was never quite geeky enough for D&D as a kid (no really), but I get the impression I would rather have enjoyed it; after all, it’s basically someone telling you a story for several hours which is RIGHT up my street. This piece is about Timm Woods, who’s apparently the only professional Dungeon Master working in NYC in 2017 – you book him and he will come and run a campaign for you to your specifications, which sounds SO much fun. I think there’s something in this – take away the LOTR fantasy gubbins and you’re left with bespoke interactive fiction with some rough rulesets, which I reckon there’s a market for outside of basement-dwelling neckbeards (yes, I know, but come on).
• The Most Hated Poet In Portland: You might have seen the Tweet that this piece was inspired by; a series of photos of poems posted to Instagram, each accompanied by artfully scattered fags, each seemingly the product of an edgy, tortured soul (stroke fcukboi), accompanied by some fairly damning commentary about the author’s likely personality and style. It went EVERYWHERE, and as it did it picked up more and more hate and snark and commentary…and this is an interview with that poet, who, poor bugger, seems utterly bemused by the whole thing. The author of the piece is a woman who joined the initial pileon, and her reflection on why she did and what it made her feel is an interesting thread running through this.
• Promethea Unbound: This is LONG, but it’s worth every minute it will take you to read – it’s fascinating and bleak and shocking and hopeful and you will be rooting for the titular heroine all the way through.
• Prozac Culture: Finally in this week’s longreads, a beautiful essay from Granta about the author’s longstanding relationship with his depression and the drugs he’s used to treat it. Not only superbly written, but a wonderful time capsule to the past couple of decades and our changing attitudes to depression and how Prozac – and, specifically, the marketing of it – altered them forever.

By Kate Bellm

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. First up, this is by Smerz and it’s called ‘Half Life’ and I have no idea what one might call this genre of music but it is ace and makes me feel very old (and like I might want to do some K and fall asleep under a pile of coats at a stranger’s house party, weirdly enough):

2) Korean hiphop corner! I’ve featured her here before, but this is the new one from Yaeji which is not only excellent but also reminds me weirdly of the Smerz track above so, you know, SEAMLESS SEGUE here. It’s called ‘Raingurl’:

3) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! This is the best Fire in the Booth I’ve heard in an age. Rapman, who I first featured on here *checks* 2014, gets his opportunity on Charlie’ Sloth’s show and he uses it to show off his exceptional storytelling skills. Listen to this one properly, it’s worth it (and enjoy Sloth’s massively tone-deaf use of his soundboard at the end):

4) UK HIPHOP CORNER, PT.2! Harry Shotta released a new mixtape last week; this is his latest video which is much slower and more chilled than the usual 100mph jump-up stuff but no less good – this is called ‘Changes’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.3! This is Manga St Hilare with ‘Far Away’. Turn this up LOUD, it is best enjoyed at high volume:

6) Finally this week, you remember Prism and that brief vogue for making music videos using it’s style transfer imagefiddling? Well this is like that, but better – and the song’s by David Lynch, apparently. ENJOY I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER AND DON’T BUY TOO MUCH TAT! BYE!

By Jake Wood Evans

LET’S START THINGS OFF WITH THE LATEST IMPERICA MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH PROMISES TO RUSH THROUGH ALL THE STUFF ABOUT FACEBOOK, ETC, AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE AND GET TO THE ‘GOOD’ BITS WITH A MINIMUM OF PAIN AND FUSS AND WHINGING:

(NB – there is no discussion anywhere in Curios this week of the Christmas advert season, largely because it would not be possible for me to give less of a fcuk about it).

• Another Tweak To Newsfeed: You know what? THEY’RE BRINGING BACK ORGANIC REACH! Ahahahahaha only kidding, this is another ‘we’re tweaking Newsfeed to make sure YOU see more stuff YOU care about!’ update, which, as per, promises to prioritise content from those people you like, love and hatestalk whilst keeping the chaff out of your eyeline. The main notable update here is a degrading of ‘person you know commented or liked on article link or content X’, meaning baiting people into commenting on stuff for REACH isn’t going to fly so well any more. Facebook is usually pretty circumspect about how these updates fcuk brands, so it’s interesting to see the coda to this post read: “The impact of these changes on your page’s distribution will vary considerably depending on the composition of your audience and your posting activity. In some cases, post reach and referral traffic could potentially decline.” So, er BUY MORE ADS, YEAH?

• The Facebook Creator App: JUST LAUNCHED, this, on iOS only (Android ‘coming soon’); this is an app which offers a suite of tools (video editing, etc etc) designed specifically to assist people who CREATE on the Facebook platform. So expect to see slightly shinier and more impressive but just as moronic videos coming to your feed SOON – Kelco, in the unlikely event you’re reading this, GET ON IT, SON #YKTA.
• Embed Messenger On 3rd Party Sites: So this is a COMING SOON thing, and there’s actually not that much official news about it out there (that links to a Tweet, which is useless but there was NOTHING ELSE) other than this Marketing Week piece, but the upshot is that FB is going to allow brands to embed Messenger onto their sites to provide a SEAMLESS MULTI-PLATFORM CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE or somesuch horror. It’s a good and useful idea, obviously, but does nothing to dampen the realisation that all that we’re going to see over the course of the next decade is the inexorable, grinding march towards Facebook’s total ubiquity (oh, ok, fine, and Google and Amazon too).
• Ads in Facebook Messenger Now Available to More Advertisers: Sponsored Messages – that is, the ability to send in-Messenger ads to users who’ve previously interacted with your Page on Messenger – are now being made available to  ‘wider range’ of advertisers. Which is lovely.
• Send Money In Messenger: Launched in the UK the other week – I’ve not used it yet, despite having had cause to, as the person I needed to send money to isn’t on Facebook; Paul, I admire your stance but you really messed with my ‘reasearch’ there, fyi – this is a peer-to-peer payments mechanism for individual users to transfer money between each other. Were I the sort of person who sells drugs on the internet, which I am most definitely not, I would look at this and think ‘hm, there’s probably some reasonably useful functionality here which I could exploit’.
• Auto-split Testing Coming to FB: Really useful features, these – coming, er, ‘soon’ to Ad Manager is the ability to run parallel creatives and optimise ad buy based on which is performing better – to quote, ““When setting up a split test, you can choose to isolate a specific creative variable or test multiple creative variables. For example, you can test short videos vs. longer videos, compare headlines and calls to action and learn whether animations perform better than static images. As you continue to experiment and learn, creative split testing can help you identify best practices specific to your business to improve long-term campaign performance.” Which is useful.
• FB Launching Auto-Optimizing Ad Spend: The one good thing about Facebook’s continuing mission to turn every single person on the planet into an advertiser – PROMOTE YOUR CONTENT! – is that it will hopefully put an end to the parasitism of the media buyers. In this announcement, Facebook hammers another nail into the increasingly porcupine-like coffin of the ad-buying industry; rolling out ‘soon’, this new feature will basically let users allocate total spend to an ad set; Facebook will automatically direct funds from your budget to the best-performing ad units within a set. Useful and helpful and really bad news if your job involves managing someone else’s ad spend.
• Better Video Insights for FB: Look, I can’t be bothered – I’ve had to do 700 words on Facebook already and it’s only 7:21, so you can understand my reticence. Here: “[this update] will give publishers and creators more information about the top Pages that are re-sharing their videos. Available to all Pages globally, Highlighted Shares showcases the top five Pages that have re-shared a video, ranked by views. The video publisher will also be able to see associated insights from re-sharers, like post engagement and average watch time.” Exciting, isn’t it? No, no it’s not.
• Better International Targeting Tools: A few tweaks to existing features rather than wholesale updates, the interesting ones here are multi-country lookalike audiences, letting advertisers create lookalike audiences across multiple territories, and the ability to target users in cities – or combinations of cities across territories – above a certain size, making it much easier to do a lazy blanket FB campaign at ‘urban dwellers’ in any country on Earth.
• Updates To Travel Ads on FB: I don’t care.
• Some Update To Ads On Instant Articles: I don’t care.
• Instagram Lets You Upload Older Photos To Stories: Useful for those trapped in the Sisyphean grind of DAILY VIDEO CONTENT CREATION, but, again, I don’t care.
• Insta Trialling Letting Users Follow Hashtags: Still only a theoretical feature at the time of writing, this is, as far as I can tell, actually a potentially useful feature for brands and the sort of thing that if you’re an agency you can probably parlay into a few grand’s speculative ‘hashtag research’ work in advance of its rollout. For normal people, though, I imagine it’ll just be a way of getting all those thirsty pics into your feed with a little less hassle.
• Instagram Expands Branded Content Tool: You remember that Insta feature they introduced a few months back whereby selected ‘influencers’ were able to tag brands in their posts so as to officially denote that they were being paid to shill? Well it’s being expanded to MORE INFLUENCERS! You may notice from my tone that I don’t care about this either.
• Twitter Promote Goes LIVE!: So this is the thing they announced in August which lets Twitter users pay $99 a month to promote ‘some’ of their Tweets – it’s now live in the UK, but I direct you to my assessment of it from when it was launched which I reckon is still pretty much accurate: “Twitter’s ability to ignore repeated requests for change from its users on issues like harrassment whilst simultaneously continuing to iterate other bits of the platform in ways which literally noone requested or wanted is quite impressive, really. Witness this, a new ad product which, er, LITERALLY NOONE DESIRES, which will let users pay a flat rate of $99 a month (yes, US-only at the moment) to promote…er…some of their posts (you don’t get to choose which) to EITHER a rough geographical area OR an even rougher ‘interest group’. Interest categories, beautifully, include ‘Life Stages’ and ‘Hobbies and Interests’. I WOULD LIKE TO TARGET PEOPLE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN HOBBIES, TWITTER. NO, ALL HOBBIES ARE LARGELY THE SAME, THAT’S FINE, THANKS, HERE’S $1200 PER ANNUM. I mean, really, this is SO POINTLESS, especially given that promoting individual Tweets takes about 5 minutes and lets you at least do targeting by geography AND multiple interest categories. Rubbish.” So there.
• Longer Twitter Usernames: Oh, and 280 characters, obvs, but you know that already. Anyway, the moment for brands to be able to do something fun and interesting and praiseworthy with the long name thing has probably passed, but completeness demands I include this one. So here it is.
• Twitter Testing OFFICIAL ‘Thread’-type Functionality: Testing, but still. WHO WANTS THIS? No, me neither.
• Snpachat Launches Tracking Pixel: Watching industry analysts tear poor old Snap a new one these past few weeks has been a bit dispiriting; give it a chance, eh lads? The numbers weren’t great the other week, and the proposed ‘redesign’ allegedly coming down the line doesn’t smack of a product that quite knows what it is, but still. One of the other announcements Snap made in the wake of the quarterlies was that it is going to introduce a Snap Pixel to allow for better conversion tracking and, eventually, remarketing. Just a brief reminder that this was exactly the sort of tech that lovely Evan Spiegel described as ‘creepy’ and ‘really annoying’ in an interview in 2015. Oh Evan!
• Snapchat Rolls Out Audience Manager 2.0: Basically better self-serve ad buying tools on Snap, which is useful. The filter bidding based on demographic data in particular is a useful addition, imho.
• Travel Oregon: The first of several links which I am late to as a result of having the temerity to take a day off last week and which as a result some or all of you may have seen in Whatley’s RIVAL Friday newsletter (if you’re in the market for another one, his is shorter and less angry, much like James himself). Anyway, this is a website for Travel Oregon designed to promote the hipster state to outsiders, and all built in the style of fanously brutal survivalist sim Oregon Trail. Really nicely done, and, whilst niche, the hipster retroism of the site and the game it references is probably a pretty decent fit for the sort of coffee-obsessive dullards who might want to visit.
• Gift Gucci: I’m throwing this in at the end here because it is perhaps my FAVOURITE piece of overblown retail webwork of the year. Click it, go on. LOOK IT IS RENDERED ENTIRELY IN HAND-PAINTED ART! LOOK AT THE POINTLESS ANIMATIONS! Seriously, this is SO luxe that it’s aimed at people who have the luxury of being able to do their online shopping on a platform which makes it near impossible to work out what it is that you might in fact be being sold. Everything on here takes you through to a shopping portal on the actual Gucci website, but if you can tell what all the pictures actually refer to then you’re a savvier shopper than I am. Please, can someone take it to the next logical level and commission a website where the UI is sculpted entirely from several tonnes of carrara marble? Great!

By Julie Cockburn

By Chai Jinchen

LET’S START WITH THIS WEEK’S EXCELLENT IMPERICA MIX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THEY OUGHT TO RENAME FACEBOOK STORIES ‘FETCH’ AND BE DONE WITH IT (YES, THAT IS A MEAN GIRLS GAG – WHO EVER SAID THAT CURIOS DIDN’T SURF THE VERY EDGE OF THE CULTURAL ZEITGEIST, EH?):

• Facebook To Apparently Allow Crossposting of Stories Between Insta and FB: Erm, I’ve sort of told you everything there is to know here with that headline – such elegance! Such economy of style! – but in the interests of giving you VALUE I guess I can slap some proseflesh on the tired old bones of the story. Hm. What to say? Presuming this does end up happening – and Facebook seem intent on trying to MAKE people do stories on the platform – there’s no reason at all why you, brand person, wouldn’t cross-post stuff, is there, when Stories inevitably opens up to Pages? I mean, potentially bigger numbers! Ugh, look, this is all I’ve got here – ONWARDS!

• Facebook Adding Annoying Colour Status Options To Comments: This is significant for several reasons: 1) It means that you can begin to undertake some subtle-ish trolling of your acquaintances by colour-coding your replies to them based on how much they are annoying you; why not set up your own personal colour code of disapproval and see if anyone cracks it? “Matt, why are your replies to me always in that particular shade of brown?”; 2) You could, if you were a community manager-type person, use this as quite a nice way of simply triaging posts on your Page by using different colours to flag replies as needing different types of follow-up action; 3) You could EVEN decide that it was part of your CHEERY BRAND PERSONA to emote using colours! (please, please noone do that); 4) Facebook is, if it’s not careful, going to end up like some sort of hideous, MySpace-esque design mess.
• Facebook Testing ‘Things In Common’ Feature: I can think of literally no brand relevance to this whatsoever, not even from an advertising point of view, but Facebook’s apparently testing the ability to see what you have ‘in common’ with friends-of-friends on the platform, which sort of feeds into…
• Facebook Could Be Doing Tinder: Let’s be clear – I think this would be RUINOUS. Really, really ruinous. Can you imagine if Tinder’s ‘swipe left, swipe right, flirt harmlessly, send a cockpick’ mechanic was ported largely wholesale to the world’s largest social platform? If everyone suddenly acquired the ability to cruise through their friends-of-friends list, seeking ‘connections’? Divorce lawyers, this one’s for YOU! I mean, it’s not exactly the same, and it’s only testing in a small number of areas, but you can see where this one’s going, can’t you?
• Facebook Looking To Open Office in Shanghai: Because even if you can’t technically use the platform in China, they sure as hell want to buy adverts to target us with.
• WhatsApp for Business Is Coming: At some unspecified point in the future, at least. There’s going to be a two-tier solution, one for smaller businesses which will be free (or at least so it appears now), and then another ‘enterprise level’ (I hate that term – so grandiose!) solution (is it a solution if it’s not technically solving a problem that anyone’s ever identified?) for larger-scale businesses; the deal is that this will give verified profiles enabling confident commercial interactions on the platform, though no word as yet to what else the feature set will include. It’s a very closed pilot programme at the moment, though you can apply for more information here should you be the right sort of international business behemoth.
• LinkedIn Launches Audience Network: You know how on Facebook you can buy ads which will use FB targeting to appear on third-party sites? Yes, well, that, but using LinkedIn instead. Given the fact that, despite a series of articles of late suggesting LinkedIn is a GROWING COMMUNITY and stuff, and that people actually spend time on there, I am pretty convinced that no actual human beings – recruiters obviously don’t count – really use it at all, this is a useful way of using the platform’s admittedly excellent targeting options to reach people on sites they might conceivably want to visit.
• The Amazon Advertising Pitch Deck: Stuff that I think is going to happen next year but which (see Curios passim) I am absolutely not, categorically, making a prediction about, oh no siree – Amazon will in a few years’ time be one of the largest digital ad platforms in the world. Take a look at this 16 slide presentation where they discuss their ad offering, targeting options and the like, and then tell me that they aren’t going to be getting a significant chunk of Stumpy Marty’s cash in the future. Aside from anything else, the ability to target users on the basis of stuff they have actually done is hugely powerful. More’s the pity.
• China Internet Report 2017: A slightly Meeker-esque presentation – in aesthetics rather than length, thank Christ – about the current state of digital behaviour behind the great firewall. Interesting and useful, and as ever with this stuff made me do a slight double-take and think ‘man, they really have a…different concept as to what is acceptable or healthy levels of screentime, eh?’ If you’re vaguely of the belief that the future is largely going to be won online, this set of statistics suggests very clearly that there is only likely to be one winner, based on actual behaviour.
• A N Other Social Media Image Size Cheatsheet: Because these things are always useful, and this is reasonably up-to-date I think (though it doesn’t include the circular profile pics on Twitter so, you know, FIE ON THEM). Horrible format, though, for which I apologise on its creators behalf.
• Volcan: There are certain categories of corporate website which are always, always ridiculous. Car sites – PREPOSTEROUS! Film sites – WHY??? Perfume sites – LIKE DANCING ABOUT ARCHTECTURE! My favourite, though, tend to be websites for high-end booze, not least because of the wondrous way they attempt to convey the very essence of the concept of ‘premium’ (mediocre) through VERY SHINY WEBWORK and appallingly-conceived prose. So when I first came across this, a site for some tequila brand or another, I was tempted to dismiss it as just another vanity project. And yet, and yet, this is actually rather good. Fine, the interface is a touch overblown, and the language and imagery is as silly as ever, but it also gives you a genuinely interesting insight into the manner in which tequila is produced, the photography is lovely, you can actually learn stuff, and I found myself spending 5 minutes on there actually reading and watching bits and pieces about the history of the drink. This is, honestly, really rather good I think. Fcuk knows if it will persuade anyone to buy violently expensive firewater, mind.
• One Four Nine: This is interesting – I think it’s been produced solely as a calling card/promo for this digital agency, which is a pretty bold move imho. It’s a nice piece of work – you’re asked to investigate a car accident, syncing your phone to the site to use it to investigate ‘clues’ with the standard mechanics – swipes, etc – and a few newer ones (the way the torch bit works is very nicely done imho). I won’t spoil the REVEAL for you (it’s not that interesting imho) but it’s worth taking the time (about five minutes) to play through it as it’s generally pretty slick. I do, though, think we’ve possibly reached the end of the ‘sync phone to site’ mechanic – there’s simply not that much you can do with it, turns out. Go on someone, prove me wrong here.
• We Fail: I have a strange feeling I might have featured a version of this site before, but no matter – this is ACE and is by far and away the best agency website I’ve seen in ages, not least because it is actually funny. Go, look and be jealous.

By Lola Rose Thompson

NEXT UP IN THE MIXES, THE LATEST SELECTION FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT HUH MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THAT WOMAN WHO WENT ON THAT DATE IN BRISTOL IS FEELING A LITTLE, WELL, AWKWARD ABOUT HER ANONYMOUS FAME, PT.1:

• Hogwarts: Yes, fine, Harry Potter is not a new or current thing, and neither is official fan-swamp Pottermore, but this but is so FIE ON YOU, DOUBTERS! This is a just-released new bit of the site which lets you zoom around a 3d model of Hogwarts school and explore the courtyards and towers and stuff, all rendered rather nicely in…er…webgl? Christ knows. Anyhow, you can explore and find 100 bits of Potter Lore around the place, and it’s generally quite a nice, relaxing way to spend a few minutes if you’d like to temporarily forget about the fact that Brexit is a shambles, the planet hates us and we are now all living in a semi-permanent state of twitching anxiety.
• Makesum: Lorem Ipsum is not, in and of itself, an interesting or funny thing – not even if you’re a web designer, and especially not if you’ve ever committed the cardinal sin of using a novelty version about bacon or cats – but this site rather marvellously breaks that rule. Makeum lets anyone create their own Lorem Ipsum copy, from whatever corpus of words they feed it, and then share their creations with the world. So, for example, witness the ‘Remoaner’ Ipsum, or perhaps the Potter Ipsum – the real joy, though, comes with the possibility of being able to cobble together your own. Why not do one which carefully and forensically dissects the personality flaws of your client, and see if they notice? Or perhaps use this as an opportunity to articulate the exact nature of the fear and dread you feel upon waking every morning? The possibilities are VAST, and anyone who does web design should, I think, take this opportunity to make their own and cast it into the world. GO!
• The Dark Crystal Design Contest: This is GREAT, and if you’re the sort of person who can, er, design the sort of weird little creature which you think would fit seamlessly into Jim Henson’s Creature Shop’s forthcoming reboot of The Dark Crystal. If I weren’t such an unimaginative artistic failure I would totally do this – here’s the brief, in case you need tempting: “This small, woodland creature must be a brand new concept – it cannot be a variation of an existing species, e.g., Skeksis, Mystic, Podling. All ideas are welcome, as long as they feel true to the world of The Dark Crystal, without being a variation of an existing Brian Froud drawing. Please include at least a front and side view of your new creature. In addition, please provide a paragraph of 50–100 words about your new creature, including a name, brief back story and characteristics of the creature. Your submission should include one or more still images submitted as JPGs or PNGs. Pencil drawings, paintings, digital drawings, digital paintings, and digital models are all acceptable, however the final submission must be as JPG or PNG files.” GO!
• Realtime WWII: A Twitter account which is Tweeting (for the second time) the entire history of WWII in realtime. Fascinating stuff, and a nice reminder that bad things happened in history too, so, you know, it could be worse! Here’s hoping that there’s not some unpleasant nuclear synchronicity a little further down the line, though, eh?
• Alejandro Santillana: Instagram account of Texan naturalist who posts pretty incredible close-up shots of various insects, turning his feed into a parade of beautiful, iridescent…things (look, I’m no entomologist – “What are you?”, I hear you cry, as I sink my head into my hands and quietly whimper “i don’t know anymore”) which will provide a pleasing counterpoint to all the pictures of your boring friends’ boring coffees and lifestyle shots and selfies and STOP PRETENDING YOU HAVE AN AESTHETIC YOU BASIC FCUK ahem sorry this is why I don’t use Instagram.
• Elemental Haiku: I adore this. A periodic table whose gimmick is that each element has a haiku written for it, this is not only a cute/silly gimmick but the author, one Mary Soon Lee, is a genuinely talented writer; some of these are truly beautiful, and all of them relate directly to the element in question. I mean, look at this one, for little-heralded metal Germanium: “Do you miss it still / The semiconductor crown / That Silicon stole?” Come on, that is gorgeous. I would like to see haiku collections for everything – can someone do something like this for emoji, please? Ooh, crowdsource it! Here’s my entry for the poo “Ubiquitous turd / Inanely happy, smiling / Will someone please flush?” See, it’s a GREAT idea.
• Tokyo Pics: Photos of Tokyo are ten a penny, fine, particularly that classic Harujuku/neon cyberpunk aesthetic, but this collection, by Lukasz Palka, is a nice contrast to those; whilst there’s inevitably some neon, the focus on the city’s grubbier rooftops and fire escapes and ventilation ducts gives a wonderfully future-urban grubbiness to the whole place.
• The Arsenal Innovation Lab: Were I the sort of tedious prick who goes on Twitter making references to ‘yer da’ and ‘yer boyfriend’, I would probably open this with some sort of bantz about how ‘yer da’ thinks this is something to do with, I don’t know, cloning Alexis Sanchez. I am not, though, that sort of tedious prick (you can speculate as to exactly which genre I am, I won’t mind), so I’ll spare you the sub-Soccer AM riffing here. This is, instead, an interesting project from Arsenal Football Club who are looking for startups and small businesses to help the club innovate – from ticketing to merch sales to matchday experiences, businesses can pitch their ideas and effectively end up as part of the Arsenal incubator (they don’t call it that, but it’s effectively what it is) and potentially get investment from the club into their idea. There’s probably a gag in here somewhere about how inevitably the startups it focuses on will be front-end heavy, leaving a gaping hole where the actual heavy lifting and, you know, REAL STUFF ought to go, but I simply don’t care enough about football to try and make it so feel free to imagine your own and then post a ‘yer da’ gag about it online, you twat.
• A Road Trip: Totally pointless, but lovely, this site stitches together photos from Google Street View to present a journey of hundreds of miles from LA to SF. I find this hugely soothing, helped by the soundtrack, but I would love to be able to set it to my own music, syncing the tempo of the video to whatever’s playing; it would make a wonderful ‘thing to have on as a pseudo artwork while music’s playing’ wossname.
• Better History: Not, sadly, a service to rewrite actual history; instead, this is a boring-but-useful Chrome extension which basically makes your browsing history usable. Giving it a helpfully clear interface, this will let you easily flick through history from various days, search within your history, group your history by time spend on site, delete individual domains from your entire history, etc etc etc. Basically if you spend as much time as I do wandering around the web, this is invaluable; similarly, if you keep on forgetting to activate Incognito mode when browsing Xhamster. I am not judging, honest.
• The Inspection Chamber: Not actually a thing itself – more the announcement of a thing – but it’s still rather cool. Remember a few months back when I featured the Dunkirk interactive story on Amazon Echo? No? FFS, what’s WRONG with you? Why don’t you keep a lightly-annotated copy of every Curios ever in your head like I do? What? Because you fill all that brainspace with love and friendship and family and real, lived experiences rather than the hollow, unfulfilling simulacra of ‘life’ presented onscreen? Yeah, well, WEVS. Anyway, the lovely BBC (full disclosure: the lovely BBC are paying some of my wages at the moment, but I would love them regardless) are making an interactive radio play story thingy using Echo, which will let users ‘interact’ with it in specific ways to affect the story (sort-of). Details are sketchy at the moment, though someone I spoke to yesterday who’d played it said it was quite Hitchhikers in its vibe, which is imho A Good Thing.
• Typo/graphic Posters: A wonderful collection of typographic posters, basically: “typo/graphic posters is a platform for inspiration and promotion of good design through the poster culture. We focus exclusively on typographical and graphical posters, those that challenge type, colors and shapes to express a message.It is a curated gallery with a graphic design point of view. each poster is reviewed to meet a standard in visual qualities and functional efforts.” Gorgeous, searchable, vast library of wonderful design work.
• Flag of Mars: I had no idea whatsoever that a flag for Mars had already been designed – it had, though, by one Pascal Lee. The premise of this site is that Pascal’s design could do with a bit of a revamp, and so the site owner is proposing this (you’ll have to click on the link to get what ‘this’ is, obvs), a lovely little chevron-based number which I look forward to your descendants saluting every morning as they gaze at the inky blackness of space through the reinforced crystalline surface of the Terrordome and wonder what it must have been like to breathe air and taste potatoes and stuff.

By Emil Meltmoth

NEXT UP, WHY NOT ENJOY A LIVE SET FROM ERIC HARARY FROM A FEW WEEKS AGO IN BROOKLYN FOR A HOUR’S TECHNO FIX?

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER THAT WOMAN WHO WENT ON THAT DATE IN BRISTOL IS FEELING A LITTLE, WELL, AWKWARD ABOUT HER ANONYMOUS FAME, PT.2:

• Waddle: Not by any means an entirely new idea, this, but potentially useful to some of you, Waddle is an app which is designed for parents to share photos of their kids and general family life with people without clogging up FB or Insta with a bunch of cute-but-frankly-samey snaps of their DD or DS (I still speak Mumsnet, even 6 long years on from the Summer of Pampers). It also allows users to order framed prints of any of the snaps on demand, which is a smart monetisation model and which I can imagine lots of grandparents getting no little joy out of.
• My Morning Routine: I honestly had no clue that this was a thing, until it was tweeted by the legendary Dave Knockles tweeted about it, inspired by this Tweet which you’ve probably seen. Anyway, My Morning Routine is a wonderful collection of ‘inspirational’ posts by people who feel the need to share exactly how well-optimised their lives are for success by demonstrating their SUPER-EFFICIENT ‘hacks’ (I swear, it’s getting to the point where I have a strong and increasingly uncontrollable urge to maim anyone who uses ‘hack’ in the context of ‘small tweak to habit or lifestyle designed to magically enhance productivity’) for living a better morning life. Whether it’s a fitness routine which begins at 5am every day, incorporating a chia seed smoothie and some pilates, or whether it’s some sort of appalling ‘I do three hours of writing as soon as I rise from my pit’ (I mean, I actually do that once a week, but for me it’s very much the mental equivalent of defecation – which, I imagine, has become pretty apparent over the years), you will find a whole array of things to hate in here. Enjoy!
• Star Wars Fitness: The best possible way to absolutely obviate any small increases in your attractiveness accrued from your gym and fitness regimen, guaranteed.
• We Are All The Same: If you’ve spent any time at all on the web in the past few decades – and if you’re reading this, I’m going to confidently predict that you have a bit – you’ll be familiar with the work of Hans Eijkelboom who for the past 20-odd years has been taking pictures designed to illustrate the sartorial conformity most of us unwittingly engage in. Eijkelboom’s ‘thing’ is that he takes photos of people from one location over the course of an hour and then pulls together collections of those who are dressed in similar manner from the resulting photos, illustrating just how, well, sartorially unimaginative most of us are. This is a lovely collection of some of his work, and will either make you feel pleasingly anonymous or desperately miserable about how, actually, we’re really not special or unique at all. Except you. You’re special.
• Virtual LAX: Proof that there is nothing so ostensibly boring that someone on the web won’t manage to turn it into ‘entertainment’, this is a 24h live simulation of air traffic going in and out of LAX. At the time of typing it’s pretty quiet what with it being the middle of the night, but by the time you receive this HOT CONTENT right in your inboxes it should be warming up nicely. I say ‘warming up’ – what you’ll see is some planes landing and taking off, all soundtracked with the actual audio of air traffic control from the towers. This is all being streamed on Google’s Twitch competitor, and the chat window is so charmingly polite that it makes for quite a pleasingly niche community – DON’T RUIN IT PLEASE.
• The Arcade Sofa: Have you ever wanted to own anarticle of furniture, custom-designed to look not unlike an original Street Fighter II arcade cabinet? No, of course you haven’t, and yet here we are. This French site is flogging a quite staggering number of variations on this particular theme, from SFII and King of Fighters, to a Hello Kitty-themed version (no, you can’t have one) and one which, bafflingly, comes emblazoned with the legend ‘Pussy Wagon’, which may well be one of the greatest prophylactics ever devised. Prices on application, but I imagine there’s at least one of you who will covet one of these things like little else on earth.
• Movie Heds: Headlines on newspapers from films, posted on this Twitter account. Remind yourself of some GREAT ones – Back to the Future, obviously, but also more obscure gems such as “PENGUIN FORGIVES PARENTS” and “TOON KILLS MAN!”. Pointlessly lovely, as all the best things are.
• Six Word Memoirs: This has been going for nearly a decade, apparently – without delving in too deep (because I am lazy, tbqhwy), I think it’s a US schools initiative to encourage creative writing and storytelling which has since expanded. Leaving aside the Hemingway cliche, there are some really wonderful, poignant little pieces of writing on there, not least the more recent examples of people sharing their six-word stories about their experiences in the US as immigrants – particularly poignant this week given that man’s latest piece of racism.
• A Whole Bunch of Photos of Burning Man 2017: Because every year I feel compelled to post a selection of these, and every year (look! I’m going to do it again!) I am seemingly compelled to write something like ‘Burning Man looks like it would be fun were it not for the dreadful people’. So it goes. The sculpture here displayed is quite fantastic, mind, regardless of your opinion of the annual JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY for the tech community – I really would like it, though, if next year they banned anyone from doing / wearing anything that was a Mad Max ripoff because FFS guys can we not just stop doing this aesthetic now please?
• Entertainment Memorabilia Auction: As alluded to in last week’s intro, we’re only a few short weeks away from the arrival of THE CHRISTMAS NARRATIVE, where floggers of tat line up to whip us into a purchasing frenzy as we join the annual game of ‘anchor our lives in meaning through conspicuous consumption’. If you have a bunch of geeks in your life who you feel compelled to buy gifts for, you could do worse than checking out this forthcoming auction, taking place in late-September in London, of film props and memorabilia – there’s some GREAT stuff in here for the right customers, including prosthetics from 28 Days Later (why not make YOUR sexplay incredibly, worryingly sinister!) and the tshirt which Frost war in Aliens (“Peace Through Superior Firepower”) and, oh, LOADS of stuff, some of it almost even affordable. I’m not suggesting AT ALL that any of you ought to reward me for all the hard graft I put into Curios, oh no siree, but if anyone fancied getting me this then that would be lovely thanks.
• A-Z Wallpaper: Now that the London A-Z has been rendered largely redundant, the company that makes it has had to diversify – DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN GET MAP WALLPAPER FROM THEM???? This is so exciting – you can get different cities, fine, but I want London all over my walls.
• Clipart Bot: A Twitter bot which intermittently posts examples of clipart from 1994, when the world was a simpler place and you could get away with illustrating everything in greyscale and noone cared that you couldn’t use photoshop or code or edit video and oh god let me go back. These are quite remarkably ugly, and I would like you all to consider reintroducing them to internal documents as of the now.
• Archive Team: You’re all obviously aware of the Internet Archive Project, but this is the lesser-known Archive Team, which works to preserve some of the more obscure corners of digital culture for posterity. There’s detail here about their current and future projects, and how to get involved, but also a whole load of reminders about now-mothballed corners of the internet, the small communities they want to trap in amber and preserve. I don’t think we should underestimate the sociological importance of this sort of stuff – I don’t care how ostensibly meaningless much of the material they’re seeking to preserve is, it’s all species-DNA to a degree and as such deserves saving imho. Even the Miis.
• Zcomx: An incredble resource of free, open-source webcomics, from stuff you’ll never have heard of to some pretty famous artists – to quote, “zco.mx is a curated not-for-profit comic-sharing website for self-publishing cartoonists and their readers. The site brings cartoonists together to build and share an audience, and readers can contribute money directly to cartoonists for works they enjoy. zco.mx offers a platform where self-publishing cartoonists can make their material available to readers with a simple-to-use user interface and where books can be uploaded within minutes.” It’s a great idea and a wonderful service, and if you want to spend the rest of the day reading indie comics then, well, go right the fcuk ahead.
• Sukii The Adventure Cat: I got a complaint last week that there was a distinct lack of feline content in Curios, and so, just for you, comes the most beautiful cat in the world. No, really. Don’t say I never do anything for you.
• Clara Terne: Sticking with Instagram, this is the feed of digital artist Clara Terne who makes strange, slightly-weirdly-organic-looking 3d CG sculptures, some animated, which I am very much a fan of.
• Click this: And then make your own and send it to people (turn your sound up please).
• Chowii: Dreadful name, but if you’re looking for a site which collects the now-ubiquitous ‘shot from above with quite tight edits’ form of cookery instruction video then you are in the RIGHT place. Leaving aside the fact that these videos tend to be utterly useless for actually teaching you how to make anything which is in fact edible, but WHO CARES EH THEY LOOK NICE.
• Web VJ: I’ll be honest, I really don’t know what this is or what it’s for, but it looks really fcuking cool.
• RCVRY: Despite increasing evidence that I really ought to think about it, I’ve never really experimented with the idea of abstinence and the 12-steps and the like. This is a ‘coming soon’ app which will offer a degree of community and support for people taking their own abstinence ‘journey’ (is that a thing?), and which if this is something which is part of your life you may find useful to keep an eye on.
• Riffshare: I don’t make music – I learned classical guitar as a kid and was so devastated by the realisation that noone wants to go out with a 10 year old who can play medieval tapestries on an acoustic that I basically gave up on music altogether at that point – and so am unable to comment on whether or not this is any good or not, but it ticks all the Curios boxes in terms of being a 3d webtoy that it’s quite fun to mess around with. Riffshare presents users with a synth setup which, for reasons best known to its creator, exists in a 3d space; otherwise, though, it seems like reasonably standard sequencing software. You make whatever music you like and then, should you desire, share it with the unique url generated by the program. Is it good? No idea, but I very much enjoyed playing ‘Yakity Sax’ on it earlier on.
• Virtually Dating: I am amazed that this hasn’t been snapped up by BBC3 or Channel 4 or 5 yet to be honest .’Virtually Dating’ is a Facebook Page/show which takes two strangers and sends them on a date – IN VIRTUAL REALITY! Yes, a totally pointless gimmick and yet..I have watched 2 of these episodes now and they are surprisingly funny, not least because of the intensely janky nature of the VR experience for the participants – clipping issues, poor gesture mapping and the general sense of weird dislocation VR engenders makes for some rather cute icebreaking. I would be genuinely interested in seeing this done with high production values; then again, I watched BOTH versions of Big Brother this year and so I feel like I might have perhaps forfeited my right to opine on what makes ‘good’ entertainment.
• Audio Recording In Space: I really can’t describe this – seriously, it’s SO HARD – but here goes – imagine that you could record audio in a room, moving around so that the audio bursts were visualised at various points in space when viewed in AR, and that then you could replay that audio by moving through the physical space in which it was recorded? See, nonsensical – just click the link and be AMAZED, and then think of all the fun applications for this; you could set up a pacemaking audio track for runners, for example – choose your song and run along at the right time to make the beats drop at the right moment. Or place audio clues along a trail, or use it for audioguide purposes OH MUSEUMS YES! So, so exciting, this.
• Inside Music: Finally this week, a VR music toy from Google which is so good that I don’t want to explain it to you. You don’t need a headset – it works in browser – so just go and enjoy playing with it; SO MUCH FUN.

By Roshan Adhihetty

By Nicolo Canova

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF MIXES AND STUFF, ENJOY AKIRA THE DON’S BRAND NEW ALBUM, GOLDTRON II – IT IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH, IN DEFERENCE TO THE THREE OR FOUR POTENTIAL NEW READERS BROUGHT HERE BY ROB’S VERY KIND RECOMMENDATION, IS GOING TO BE LESS OBTUSE THAN USUAL AND POINT OUT THAT IT’S WHERE ALL THE NEWS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S DEVELOPMENTS IN S*C**L FCUKING M*D*A LIVES

• Facebook To Stop Letting FAKE NEWS Pages Buy Ads: Interestingly (or not – I’m struggling rather to find anything particularly thrilling about any of this, but let’s see how we go as the fingers start whirring and I’m overtaken by the unthinking desire to just get some fcuking words down), Facebook doesn’t like the term ‘Fake News’ – they suggest it’s been politicised into meaninglessness and instead use the term ‘False News’; anyway, fake or false, those peddlers of misinformation sharing links to stories which aren’t just contentious but simply not true will soon find themselves unable to buy ads on FB, thus, they hope, limiting the ability for LIES AND PERNICIOUS UNTRUTHS to spread across Zuckerberg’s Big Blue Misery Factory. Obviously this won’t stop mouth-breathing simpletons sharing falsehoods regardless, but it’s A Good Thing in general. Feel free to make your own slightly indignant and unfunny gag about how you bet it’s not going to stop the Mail advertising, though, is it? EH?

• Slight Changes To Facebook Memories: There’s seemingly no relevance to brands here whatsoever, but given the fact that someone was kind enough to write this screed up as being a GOOD SOURCE OF THE LATEST S*C**L M*D** NEWS I am now going to have to include absolutely everything that has been announced this week in fear of being found to be less-than-comprehensive. This is basically announcing a whole bunch of new little prompts Facebook is going to give you to DO MORE on the platform; tedious as you like, although the coda to the announcement, whereby they acknowledge that FB Memories are often VERY BAD THINGS and that the algorithm – whodathunkit? – isn’t ALWAYS good at working out which memories you want to see surfaced again and which, by contrast, you’ve spent a long time trying to wrestle into the lead-lined box in the dark storecupboard of your mind and which, frankly, you could have done without Facebook resurrecting thankyou very much but that’s fine, Mark, I’ll just sit here and cry as your platform ceaselessly presents memories of suicide and loss at me, thanks, THANKS, is so blandly blase that it serves as a shorthand for exactly how little Facebook cares about anything other than screwing as much advertising revenue and data out of everyone until the world ends. Oh God, I appear to have lost the ability to stop sentences; I’ll work on it, promise.
• Some FB Ad Formats Are Being Retired: Don’t worry, though, it’s only the crap ones, like being able to Boost notifications that people are attending an event or suchlike. Here’s a full list – I guarantee that, unless you’re very much an edge case, none of these will matter to you one iota. Also, LOOK how many ad formats there are; seems like reasonable housekeeping to me, although no doubt there will be some people whose world is discombobulated to an uncomfortable degree by these SEISMIC ALTERATIONS.
• You Can Now Access Insta Stories On Mobile Web: Not, seemingly, on desktop, only mobile. Equally, you will now be able to upload stories from the mobile website, not just from the Insta app (again, seemingly not desktop). I’m pretty much baffled as to the utility here, but smarter minds than mine have decreed that this needs to be a thing and lo, here we are.
• Verified Business Accounts Coming to Whatsapp: Whatsapp as customer service channel should be bigger than it is, imho, but the infrastructure’s not really been set up to support it yet. This is potentially starting to change – the rollout, US first and then more widely, of verified profiles for businesses makes one imagine that they might start making it a more robust offering in time.
• Snapchat Setting Up Verified Accounts For Influencers: Good news for ‘influencers’, and, potentially, good news for brands working with them on Snap – the deal is that a select group of ‘influencers’ (god I HATE that term with a blood-boiling passion) will receive the ability to create ‘Official Stories’ – to quote the blurb, “Official Stories accounts come with benefits. They feature a emoji symbol selected by the account holder and receive customized filters for special occasions. Perhaps most importantly, Official Stories accounts will be more visible in search results”. The search thing is a big’un for the brand tie-ups what with Snap’s legendarily poor discoverability – pay and influencer with an Official Stories account and you’re buying visibility, basically. Smart.
• //medium.com/@giphy/introducing-gif-view-counts-e3ec1899e7bd”>Giphy Adds View Counts To Gifs: LOOK! METRICS! NUMBERS! You can now add Gif Views to your Big Dashboard of Largely Meaningless KPIs! There’s literally no excuse for you not chucking all the gifs of your CONTENT onto Giphy is the upshot here, even if your ‘content’ is a load of video of middle managers giving Powerpoint presentations to a room full of disinterested Midlanders.
• Giphy World: What has 2017 been the year of? HORROR! Well, yes, that, but also THE YEAR OF AR! Or at least the year of hype around the emergent possibilities of AR which is going to all be revealed to be largely vapourware in 2018 (at least that’s what I think – I reckon however cool all this stuff looks in prototype, we’re still 18m away from true mainstream adoption). This is a little video announcing Giphy World, which is a persistent AR layer onto the world, which will let users add gifs to stuff on their phone’s camera in the now-ubiquitous AR fashion, take videos of said AR dioramas, share them, etc. Which is nice, but the reason I’m including it here is because there’s obviously going to be the opportunity for brands to get in here to make sure THEIR branded gifs are available on the platform. Talk to YOUR Giphy rep today. Or don’t. See if I care.
• GE Digital Volcano: When people ask ‘who’s really good at digital stuff in the boring, stuffy corporate space, Matt?’ I tend to look blankly into space and wish I were elsewhere. After that, though, I usually fall back on the tediously cliche answer of ‘GE’, and this sort of stuff is why. This is a site explaining how volcanoes work, all to the end of selling a GE data analysis platform. It’s not earth-shattering stuff, but it is nicely made, pretty, slick, and a damn sight more interesting than a bunch of grey prose talking about DATA IS THE NEW OIL or somesuch cant. Obviously GE spend shedloads on digital builds, but this stuff needn’t be expensive, honest. Come on, can we all try and make boring stuff more interesting-looking? Please?
• Taylor Swift Is Not A Marketing Genius: I don’t particularly care about the woman either way – although the single is notable for being a portrayal of a woman who is keen not only to demonstrate that she is self-aware enough to laugh at herself but also savvy enough to charge us money to watch her laugh at herself, which is bleakly impressive – but to all those people wanging on last week in the service of #numbers  about how she’s a marketing genius…mate, look, no marketing genius would EVER do this brand partnerships stuff. UPS? REALLY? Noone’s new record needs a worldwide delivery partner.
• This Is A Generic Millennial Ad: This is excellent – a parody of all the visual /  aural / thematic cues which ads targeted at ‘millennials’ feel compelled to hit. The shot of the beautiful, multi-hued kids dancing in the kitchen in their pants is so perfectly on-point that I actually winced slightly. One would hope that this would mark the final nail in the coffin of a certain type of visual, but it won’t, will it? Still, watch this and then hate yourself a little bit for all the times in the past year you’ve let someone get away with using the term ‘millennial’ as a target category without grabbing them by the lapels and screaming into their face with spit-flecked rage that MILLENNIAL IS NOT A MEANINGFUL CATEGORY FOR ANYTHING YOU LAZY, BOVINE IMBECILE.

By Julie Renee Jones

NEXT UP, THE NEW ONE FROM ACTION BRONSON WHICH IS ALSO VERY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS RATHER ENJOYING TAKING A BREAK FROM THINKING UP SEMI-TOPICAL ‘GAGS’ FOR ITS TITLE AND THIS WEEK IS QUITE CONTENT TO ANNOUNCE ITSELF AS BEING THE BIT WHERE ALL THE MORE GENERAL ONLINE EPHEMERA LIVES, PT.1:

• Get Lauren: Well this is one my my favourite things this week. Artist Lauren McCarthy is offering herself up to people to act as their real-life, human virtual assistant for three days; Lauren will visit your house, install a bunch of smart switches, etc, and then act as a human Amazon Echo for three days – you talk to Lauren through speakers and she answers questions and basically acts as your human robot concierge. The switches will let all the ‘smart home’ stuff work, but the really interesting thing here is the way in which Lauren, as an actual person, will attempt to bring the humanity to the interactions between person and bot – to quote the site, “she will also do things for you without your asking. She will learn faster than an algorithm, adapting to your desires and anticipating your needs.” An actual, real-life interpretation of ‘Her’ (well, ish), and my favourite performance art thingy of the year. There’s a hidden-camera gag show hidden in here somewhere, also, if you wanted to go lowbrow with it (but why? Why would you do that? Jesus, you ruin everything).

• The Smell Of Data: Another webdigiartthing to kick off with, the high concept here is the role that smell and scent have always played in alerting us as a species to danger – the smell of burning, say, or the fact that rotting food smells foul to us as a disincentive to eat it. The Smell of Data is a device that you put in your home and link to your phone – every time you visit an unsecured WiFi spot, or a website that doesn’t use https, or other such data unsafe browsing practises, the device will spaff out a spurt of THE SMELL OF DATA to alert you to your less-than-secure activity. I LOVE THIS, not least because of the potential to extend it – if you work for Airwick or somesuch other purveyor of chemical stench-maskers, PLEASE take ‘inspiration’ from this and make a domestic air freshener whose smells change depending on what people in the house are browsing at any given time. “Why does it smell of wet dogs and regret, Dad?” “Oh, that must mean John’s back on RedTube!” – see? How can this fail?
• The Citibike Commute: We have Sadiq Cycles, NYC has Citibikes. This is a WONDERFUL site, visualising Citibike trip data across Manhattan and Brooklyn across 24h in early June, letting you see not only the quantum of journeys as they happen, but also allowing users to zoom in to a particular street or block and see the journeys which stem from individual streets. This is beautifully made, and I would be thrilled to see this for London, so pull your fingers out Santander and make something like this – it’s not like you can’t afford £20k’s webdev, is it, you appalling banking fcuks?
• Second Hand Songs: Kudos to my LOVELY EDITOR PAUL (*waves* Paul’s nice, he runs Imperica and when I say ‘editor’ I mean he occasionally deletes the more libellous bits of Curios) for finding this – we were talking the other day about which songs have the longest ‘chain’ of covers (inspired by my earth-shaking discovery that ‘Torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia is in fact a cover of THIS – WHO KNEW?) and he pointed me at this site, which helpfully lists all the published versions of a song in chronological order and which has just led me to learn that there are 15 official versions of this song and OH GOD NATALIE I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU THIS IS CRIPPLING ME.
• Formafluens: A selection of webtoys and analyses using the dataset from this year’s Google Draw experiments (you remember, the one where Google got us all to draw bananas and cats and then revealed that we’d all been training a rudimentary AI to draw and oh look we’re one step closer to the singularity how did that happen?), which let you examine the similarities and differences in the ways people drew certain images, explore the datasets and even download hi-res poster-quality images of some of the aggregated drawings. FYI, I would pay actual cashmoney for some of these printed on decent stock in case anyone fancies sorting this out for me thanks.
• The Gif Polaroid: Wonderfully, pointlessly, this bloke made an actual, working Polaroid camera which spits out a little cartridge on which is captured a gif of whatever the camera has just shot. The link here takes you to the Imgur page on which he details the project and how he did it, meaning all the instructions are there should you fancy making your own. You won’t, but it might please you to know that in theory you COULD.
• Uber Movement: Uber is doing SO WELL! They have a new CEO, you can now tip drivers to make up for the fact that they get gouged so hard by their employer (OH NO SORRY NOT EMPLOYER AT ALL), and now they’re making a whole bunch of anonymised data about their trips available to urban planners to help devise DATA-LED SOLUTIONS to the problems facing us as urban-dwelling bipedal apes. Sadly data for London isn’t part of the available set, which is a shame, but overall this is a huge resource for anyone interested in the mechanics whereby cities function. Also interesting from the point of view of where Uber’s business is going – these people aren’t stupid, they know that cabbies aren’t going to make them profitable anytime soon. Let me just say it again, thereby once more violating my ‘no more predictions, Matt, as 2016 made you look REALLY STUPID’ – Amazon will buy Uber. One day. Maybe.
• La Tabla: This is ace. Prototype only at the moment, but a working prototype, this is a great project by games designer and Phd Chaim Gingold which has seen him create an interactive, multiuse tabletop surface which uses a combination of AR techniques to create…oh, look, here: “La Tabla introduces a groundbreaking way to interact with computers. Rather than using a finger to click on a mouse or poke at a screen, you reach into the simulation world with two hands, bringing the full force of your hominid dexterity and playfulness to the table. Because you can put whatever you like—coins, stones, books, drawings, yourself—into the simulation world, play is surprisingly improvisational and open-ended.” There are multiple use-cases demonstrated on the site, and, beautifully, the whole project is being done open source so anyone can fcuk with it. There is SO MUCH potential here for anyone involved in games and play, so do check it out.
• Harvey In Pictures: Photographs from this week in Houston and elsewhere, ordered as a day-by-day series. Not going to opine on this except to say that CHRIST it’s lucky the US is a rich country.
• Kick: I get that social anxiety is a thing, I really do – it can be a crippling problem and I’m all for solutions that help people live normal lives and not break out in hives at the thought of, I don’t know, ordering a coffee. That said, I’m not sure that this app – Kick, designed to help people develop their confidence in social situations – is necessarily the answer. It sets users daily challenges of various sorts designed to take them out of their comfort zone (an aside: look, it’s called a comfort zone for a reason – it’s COMFORTABLE. Who in their right mind wants to hang out in their discomfort zone? NO FCUKER, that’s who) and help teach them that interacting with other human beings is, you know, OK! Thing is, though, challenges involve things like ‘strike up a conversation with a complete stranger on the street’ and ‘compliment someone who serves you on their outfit’ which, fine, might be ok in the US but I guarantee if you try complimenting a waiter or waitress on what they’re wearing in the UK they will start avoiding you so hard you may never eat. There’s too much of this that reads weirdly like some sort of PUA forum instruction list, basically, which actually makes sense given the Venn Diagram overlap between these sorts of communities.
• Google AR Experiments: Anything Apple can do…after Apple’s ARKit (see Curios passim) has shown us the exciting possibilities available to us in the glorious AR future, now comes Google’s version (called ARCore) which effectively offers a similar suite of tools for developers on Android and which is eventually going to be baked in to all future Android OS. This video showcases some of the demo uses, but it’s worth going to the actual Experiments page and clicking through in more depth; it’s all toy/gimmick stuff at this stage, and I’m pretty certain that noone really wants to be able to superimpose a screaming wall on their surroundings, but the potential is obvious and undeniable.
• Callum Art: Callum is, apparently, 12 years old. Callum makes dolls from found stuff. Callum has the sort of dark imagination which you’d imagine has his teacher’s occasionally casting anxious glances at each other as they stare ashen-faced at the latest product of his twisted little mind. I mean, the kid’s obviously really talented but these are…unsettling.
• The Trebuchet: Who doesn’t want a slightly shonky, old school website which lets you simulate – with real physics! – how trebuchets work? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Trebuchets, for the three people who might not know, are catapults, effectively, which use counterweights rather than springs to fling their mass; this features a variety of different sorts which you can meddle with, changing their payload, size, proportions, etc, to see how the different variables affect the flight of the boulder/cow you imagine it flinging. Sort of weirdly fun, and actually a really good way of learning about physics if you’re feeling all didactic.
• Render Search: A great project, not least as it led me to thinkk of something I hvae honestly never contemplated before. You know when you see CGI mockups of urban developments, right, like shopping centres or public spaces, and they are always populated by oddly indistinct homunculi, blurry of face and generic of dress? WHO ARE THOSE PEOPLE? WHERE DO THEY COME FROM? This site is seeking to answer that question – it presents a variety of ‘people’ taken from architectural renders around the world – the goal of the project is to get people to find themselves in the renders. Where are the images culled from? Who has the ‘right’ to use them? Do any of us ‘own’ our physical image, particularly in a surveilled city like London? SO MANY QUESTIONS. Go on, see if you’re on there.

By Sander Abemma