LET’S EASE INTO IT THIS WEEK WITH A SELECTION OF ITALIAN MINIMALIST ELECTRO!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SO LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING A TWITTER INSIDER IT MIGHT JUST DIE:

• 360-degree Photos Now On Facebook!: It really does feel like I am announcing every new development on s*c**l fcuking m*d** three times, what with platforms’ infuriating tendency to trail their news multi[;e times before it actually becomes a thing. Latest in this trend, the news that you can FINALLY easily chuck 360-degree vids onto Facebook. So look forward to a load of tediously generic panoramic photos getting this treatment from brands before everyone realises that a rubbish 360-degree photos is actually slightly less good than a rubbish standard photo and forgets this was ever a thing.

• You Can Now Do Video in Facebook Comments: Yes! Rather than having to go to the trouble to type ACTUAL WORDS when commenting on some long-forgotten dullard’s post about their feelings on Brexit you will now be able to simply post a short video of your face contorting in horror. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there will be at least one brand out there which has an attractive community manager whose life will be TRANSFORMED as a result of this (not necessarily for the better).

• Facebook Starts Streaming For Games: Well, some (Blizzard) games, but this is only going to get bigger. To quote, “Facebook announced its working with World Of Warcraft maker Blizzard to build social login and Facebook Live video streaming into their games, starting with its new blockbuster Overwatch. Blizzard gamers will be able to login with Facebook so they can easily find friends to play with and share in-game content back to the News Feed. Thanks to the Facebook Live API, that includes live-streamed footage of them playing.” The ad stuff around this is going to be HUGE.

• Facebook Trialing Ephemeral Newsfeed Posts: Today’s second ‘Facebook is attempting to become Snapchat’ post comes in the shape of this non-news story about Facebook experimenting with giving users the option to post updates which will appear in their friends’ timelines but which won’t stay on their Page. May or may not happen – BUT THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES IF IT DOES!!!

• Instagram Introduces Algorithm: You know about this already. You may already have written a disgruntled update suggesting you will leave the platform if they don’t change it back RIGHT NOW, and then subsequently realised that you don’t actually notice the difference or indeed actually care. Anyone, the InstaAlgorithm is now here; brands, if you’re not already ponying up for Instagram ads you might want to start so doing, as NO FCUKER is going to see your updates anymore otherwise!

• Whatsapp Adds Gif Support: You can now view gifs in your whatsapp chats! Which, actually, if you’re using it for customer service-type reasons might actually be quite useful in a ‘look, this is how you sort out the thing’ instuctional ways.

• Twitter Timelines Now Easier To Embed: Basically this is a workaround to let any user easily and quickly get an embed code for any particular Twitter stream – searches, individual users, etc – without needing to know any Dark Arts. Potentially useful, although probably unhelpful if you develop WordPress plugins (niche little developer cuss, there).

• Twitter Testing Carousel Ads: This is in SUPER-LIMITED ALPHA, making it seem far more exciting than it actually is, but expect this to roll out as an ad unit all over the place pretty soon – this is Twitter’s year-later response to Facebook launching exactly the same feature in 2015. Multiple photos and videos and Tweets (they let you use 3rd party endorsements, as long as said third parties give permission) in a single advert- MY DAYS THE EXCITEMENT!

• Twitter Insiders: This has been around for a little while in the UK, I think, but they are actively recruiting new members at the moment so you may want to get involved. Twitter Insiders is the platform’s little community of ‘influencers’ (HA!), which anyone can apply to join – you get access to a forum where you and other people whose lives lack meaning can discuss issues pertaining to BRANDS ON TWITTER and what the platform could / should do to make the whole BRANDS ON TWITTER thing marginally better. Focus-grouping, for free, for a company with a market cap in the billions. HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

• Snapchat Discover Redesign Launches: Users can now subscribe to publishers’ feeds through the Discover bit of Snapchat. Christ knows why they would want to, but they can.

• You Can Now Make Calls Through Slack: Yes, yes you can. So thrilling!

• Perks Returning To Swarm: Remember when 4sq was a thing, and we used to get really excited about being Mayor of the local Starbucks? No, me neither, because noone ever actually cared about any of that stuff, which is why the platform’s been through approximately 2156 pivots since its inception. Anyway, now that it’s called Swarm it is bringing BACK the concept of perks for users who check in – so if you’re a bricks and mortar retailer, you might want to consider this again as a marketing ploy, before realising that it’s still a niche app that no real people actually use and, frankly, the whole process of setting this stuff up is too much hard work to bother with and, on reflection, you simply don’t care.

• Pin This IN REAL LIFE: I rather like this as a gimmick – agency DM9 present a project for…er…some retailer or another, in which they placed physical ‘Pin This’ buttons in a showroom, associated with specific products on display, letting people press them to add them to their Pinterest boards. Leaving aside the physical / digital DIVIDECROSSING gimmick here, this is such a smart way of creating a marketing link to browsing shoppers in the real world; this is clever, and should be stolen (not necessarily the execution, but the premise – come on, THINK).

• It Ran: This is very clever. It Ran is an actual magazine being produced by the Canadian ad industry charity – “IT RAN is a parody magazine that will be printed and distributed in the fall. The entire initiative is a fundraising campaign for The National Advertising Benevolent Society (NABS). And 100% of the proceeds for ads submitted to IT RAN Magazine will go to the industry charity.” The premise is that…oh, sod it: “At advertising award shows when agencies are called up to the stage for certain award-winning work, many in the room quietly whisper to each other, “There’s no way that ran”. And sometimes they’re right. It’s questionable whether or not some award-winning work has run in a real publication. Until now. IT RAN is a magazine designed to be filled with 100% ads. No articles. No content. Just ads that you want to run. And for whatever reason, haven’t been able to. All to be distributed in our inaugural issue in the fall to every agency in the country.” Come on, someone in the UK, rip this off in slightly less good fashion for our market.

NOW TRY THE LATEST RELEASE FROM UK GRIME PERSON RIVAL!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THE INEVITABLE UPSURGE IN JINGOISTIC XENOPHOBIA WHICH INVARIABLY ACCOMPANIES ANY INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT IN THE CURRENT CLIMATE OF FEBRILE EURODEBATE, OH YES INDEED, PT.1:

• Goal Click: I first featured this a few years ago when it started, but am resurrecting it because a) FOOTBALL IS HAPPENING; and b) they have an exhibition on, at BL-NK in London’s formerly-trendy Shoreditch. Goal Click is a project getting people from across the world to document the way in which football shapes their culture, using disposable cameras – I went to the launch thingy last night, and the photos are GREAT, so do pop along if you get the chance this month.

• Twitter Game Of Thrones Dataviz: Game of Thrones! Everyone loves tits and dragons, don’t they? That INSIGHT has prompted Twitter to create this rather excellent set of visualisations of the conversations on the platform around each episode, showing the main themes being discussed as the show airs; this is actually really nicely made, and a good example of the sort of stuff you can do with Twitter data around TV or events – the visualisation of links between characters is a particularly nice touch, I think. Contains spoilers, should you be the sort of entitled twat who gets angry about that sort of thing.

• Global Tech Inventors 2016: SO GOOD, this, by Bloomberg – their feature on the world’s biggest inventors in tech is presented as a brilliantly retro online magazine-type thing, with early web-style music and interface and the rest. REALLY slick design, and properly fun in a manner which you wouldn’t ordinarily associate with noted non-funsters Bloomberg.

• Better: There’s unsurprisingly been a huge upsurge this year in services blocking ad tracking – this is the latest to emerge, called Better, which is iOS-only but will stop you getting tracked across the web by ads. There’s a sort of pleasingly Wil E Coyote vs Roadrunner-esque quality to the ad vs adblockers thing at the moment – the only difference being that in the real world the adverts will inevitable win in the end.

• Unroll: If you’re foolish enough to subscribe to email newsletters other than this one YOU TRAITORS, you may find that they have a tendency to clog up your inbox and give you a mild feeling of guilt when you check out your unread items. Unroll aims to alleviate this slightly by aggregating your subs into one marginally more convenient daily email. Obviously if you subscribe to lots, this email becomes MASSIVE, but hey ho.

• Safe Dining NYC: Aggregating data about the health and safety records of restaurants in New York on an easy-to-see map, letting users filter by location and cuisine type to ascertain which of their potential dining choices is most likely to gift them a streptococcal garnish along with their hummus. Sort of begs the question “Exactly how filthy are eateries in NYC?”, and “I sort of want something like this for London but perhaps it’s better to live in blissful ignorance?”.

• The True Size: Lovely web project designed to provide a simple, easy way to show the actual size of countries around the world, versus the distorted picture presented by most globes and atlases. Great resource for geography teachers and bored officemongs alike.

• On Beyond Zarathustra: Oh I love this! Nietzsche as told by Dr Seuss, in a page-by-page comic on Flickr. Seriously, this is beautifully done and they have absolutely nailed the style – a little Nietzsche-knowledge will help the gag fly, but this is charming regardless of your familiarity with the Ubermensch of Ubermenschen.

• Drewbacca: A series of brilliant visual puns on Chewbacca, by London-based designer Joe Stone. Despite my general disdain for Star Wars, it seems I can’t go a week without featuring it here in some way – it’s inevitable, like a pop cultural cancer.

• The Periodic Table of Storytelling: An offshoot of the previously-featured TV Tropes site, the Periodic Table of Storytelling is a visual guide to each of the storytelling themes that the site has identfied, from Chekhov’s Gun to Jumping the Shark. Nice design, and available as a poster if you’re into this sort of thing.

• Traffic Simulation: A web program which lets you simulate traffic. Literally no idea at all why you might want this, but someone built it and so we might as well have a play. I can’t deny that there’s a sort of perverse, weird, ‘setting fire to a virtual anthill’ pleasure in watching these miniature vehicles get snarled up in a neverending gridlock.

• Twinklr: Lovely-if-slightly-pointless project, updating the concept of the music box for the modern, digital era. Twinklr has a digital touchscree interface which lets you program what it plays by touch, the melody then churned out when users turn the handle; you can save multiple tracks in the device, hook it up to other instruments, and generally incorporate it into your hipster musical outputs like a latter-day hurdy gurdy man.

• I Am Portraits: I love this idea SO MUCH, but will start to hate it as soon as it gets coopted for some sort of bullsh1t EMPOWERING marketing campaign for, say, some bloody makeup brand. Artist Sergio Albiac put together this project in April, which takes footage and transcriptions of interviews with participants and combines them into portraits made of their own words – to quote him, “ I invited attendants to describe themselves, speaking to my cloud-based artistic installation. Using the Web Speech API, their voices where transcripted into text. Then, the text was transformed or complemented with literary or philosophical passages I freely associate it with through custom semantic analysis. All in near real time. The generative collage portraits contained a personal narrative texture broken by unexpected associated inspirations and random typographic accidents.” You can TOTALLY see this being nicked for a Lion-winning stunt about WHAT MAKES US US UNDERNEATH THE SLAP or similar.

• Euro 2016 Cards: A series of beautifully-designed cards to mark Euro 2016, each depicting one of the teams involved and the animal that the agency, Splinter, has chosen to represent them. England are bulldogs, fine, but why in the name of Christ are Slovakia otters? Regardless, the style is really nice  – they should sell these.

• Motion Stills: Google app for iOS which creates cinemagraphs, gifs and even short films from Live Photos, in startlingly shiny and pro-looking fashion. Useful if you’re an iPhone person, no use whatsoever if you’re not.

• Flashfood: The latest idea around DISRUPTING the leftover food non-market, Flashfood is a really smart idea launching later this year in Canada which lets restaurants, supermarkets and the rest put food for sale at huge discounts just before it goes off; users get alerted to stuff near them that’s on sale, whilst retailers get to flog stuff that they would otherwise just throw out. SUCH a good idea, and the sort of thing which a major chain could totally steal to let stores get rid of nearly-expired inventory to locals.

• Un-Transcender: A Chrome extension which replaces all instances of the words ‘Transcended Race’ with ‘was retroactively deemed safe by white people’. Sort of not funny because it’s true.

• Weird Beach Towels: Holiday season is almost upon us, and what better way to mark it than by spending 30-odd quid on a weird, slightly unsettling beach towel featuring strange collage imagery like a small child sucking a man’s brains through a straw, or a 60s-looking woman shooting multicolour deathrays from her eye sockets? That’s a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering – there is no better way.

• The Most Popular Video In The World: Or at least the most popular video in the world RIGHT AT THIS MOMENT, based what’s the top-trending video on YouTube at any given moment. At the time of writing, that’s footage of Justin Bieber scuffling with a large bloke in Cleveland – FFS EVERYONE, REALLY?

• Interiors of Murder She Wrote: File under “Really?”, this is an Instagram account which shares photographs of the sets of Murder She Wrote, presumably so that anyone so inclined can replicate the gorgeous retro stylings should they so desire. Feels like there should be an IKEA or Dulux tie in here.

• Free Your Stuff: Interesting idea, this, not least because of the companies that have signed up to it. Free Your Stuff lets anyone download and keep the comments they’ve made on a series of websites, from Amazon to Tripadvisor to Goodreads, using its Chrome extension – you can also, if you wish, make the text available to anyone who might want it as an open source download. There are some rather fun artpossibilities here, though it depends on enough files being made available – if you’re the sort of person, though, who lives their life through slightly arsey comments on Tripadvisor then the ability to preserve your output forever might be compelling enough in itself.

• Aboard The World: The World is a wonderful solution for the world’s hyper-rich who feel that a multi-million quid address in Knightsbridge isn’t quite exclusive or isolated enough, and who want to put quite literal clear blue water between themselves and the scummy proles cluttering their view – billed as ‘The largest private residential ship on the planet, The World is home to only 165 Residences. Residents & Guests spend extensive time exploring the most exotic and well-traveled destinations, and return onboard to a lifestyle that exists nowhere else on earth.” I am sure that I’m just being a bitter povvo about this, but can you imagine the horror of being stuck on a ship with the sort of people who’d want to buy a place on this? Absolutely a horror film waiting to be made, though – has anyone done a cruise ship zombie apocalypse crossover yet? You can have this SOLID GOLD idea for free.

• Le Carillon: Lovely project from Paris – Le Carillon is a system whereby restaurants in the Capital can sign up to provide services and facilities for homeless people in the city, whether it be letting them use their bathrooms or providing free food. Can we start doing this in London, please? Thanks.

• Fatal Migrations: Photo project documenting the locations where people attempting the illegal journey from Mexico to the US have died over the past 15 years. Stark reminder of the human stories behind that horrible, ham-faced blowhard’s “LET’S BUILD A WALL” rhetoric, and a really sobering reminder of the fact that people die all the time attempting to cross borders (but that’s OK, because if we leave the EU we auutomatically get to stop caring about that sort of thing as it magically overnight becomes Somebody Else’s Problem!).

• Metal Art Abominations: A Facebook Group collecting fan-drawn metal album art; the only rules being that everything has to be created using mobile drawing apps, and therefore must look like it was designed by a three year old. Some of these are WONDERFUL; feels like there’s an ad campaign in this idea, somewhere.

• Somebody: Are you the sort of soul-flayingly dreadful person who shamelessly uses the phrase ‘personal brand’, and firmly believes in the importance of your online persona in determining your real-world status? I hate you. However, my hatred aside, you may well be the target audience for ‘Somebody’, a service which makes it quick and easy for anyone to make a reasonably attractive ‘Look! This is me! Look how unique and wonderful I am (based on this narrow selection of templates)!’ site to show yourself off in all your deadsouled glory.

• TV Title Typos: TV shows with one letter missing, illustrated. There is DEFINITELY a campaign in this, though I’m buggered if I can think what for at this point in time (my fingers hurt and I am tired, shut up).

• Contrascanned: 3d scans, available to view or print or download or do with what you will, in general, of things that were never intended to be scanned – “The scans include objects or places that are prohibited from photography, hidden from the public, or are otherwise inaccessible.”. Includes one of the Sistine Chapel, which I would rather like to have as a miniature ornament if anyone’s got a 3d printer I can avail myself of for a few hours this afternoon.

• The World of Spectrum: Men in your late 30s – THIS IS FOR YOU! A website collecting all sorts of links and nostalgic ephemera about the ZX Spectrum, with its plastic keyboard and tape deck and rubbish graphics and its games which, if we’re honest, are really, really crap compared to the standard of entertainment videogames can deliver now but about which a certain type of bloke will get all misty-eyed about until you’re forced to tell him that you really don’t care. CHUCKIE EGG WAS SH1T MATE.

• The Avant Garde Magazine Archive: An archive of every single edition of Avant Garde magazine, a design-heavy countercultural relic featuing some rather awesome typography and illustration in a hyperstylised fashion so redolent of its time that you can almost smell the patchouli.

• Blips: Is this real? It looks fake, but as it’s on Kickstarter it MUST be true, right? Blips is a 10x funded project, which has another two weeks to go, which will on completion deliver micro-thin microscopic lenses for mobiles which claim to give you insane levels of magnification on your common-or-garden smartphone camera. If these work as they say they will, they will be AMAZING.

• Don’t Worry, Be Happy: This is an ‘emotion-enforcing text editor’ – you can use the website to write anything you want, the only catch being that it only lets you type whilst its facial recognition software detects that you are looking ‘happy’ – how does this enforced emotional surveillance affect your output? The obvious problem with this is that facial recognition software is still REALLY shonky, meaning that the only way that the app would let me type for longer than 2 seconds was for me to assume the sort of facial expression normally associated with dogs sticking their heads out of car windows. That said, if you’re a journalist you can probably get 500 words of mildly interesting copy out of this idea if you’re at a loose end.

FANCY A RATHER EXCELLENT MIX OF OLDSCHOOL RNB? GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO THE INEVITABLE UPSURGE IN JINGOISTIC XENOPHOBIA WHICH INVARIABLY ACCOMPANIES ANY INTERNATIONAL FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT IN THE CURRENT CLIMATE OF FEBRILE EURODEBATE, OH YES INDEED, PT.2:

• Bookmarks: Basically this is Metacritic for novels, which I’m sure we can all agree is absolutely the best thing to happen to literary criticism ever. This service, an offshoot of bibliophile site Lithub, will give novels a rating from A-F based on the aggregate of their reviews from a variety of (US) outlets – making life immediately worse for literary publicists, if the manner in which Metacritic’s fcuked the games industry’s anything to go by.

• Useless, Unsuccessful, Unfunny Memes: A Facebook Group which collects ORIGINAL MEMES – anyone can submit, the only caveat being that all submissions must be homemade and original. There is some wonderfully (and dreadfully) odd stuff in here.

• Spaceship Noise Generator: Little browser toy that lets you move some sliders around to create a near-infinite variety of spaceship-type noises, and which is guaranteed to drive the person who sits next to you quietly mental if you set it running, lock your computer and then leave for a a few hours.

• Blue Hands: Absolutely the most beautiful photographs of fish you ever will see, taken by Visarute Angkatavanich.

• Echo Location: You may have read about the charming new anti-semitic practice of alerting people to a Twitter user’s status as a Jew by placing (((brackets))) around their name, thereby subtly alerting other scum and getting them to flood said Jewish person’s timeline with hatespeech. Lovely. This is a script which lets you search Twitter for punctuation, in this case brackets, and lets you report users using the trick to incite racial hatred – the fact that this has to be done by a third party rather than Twitter themselves says a lot about some of the problems the platform’s facing, imho.

• The Higher/Lower Game: Which get searched for more? GUESS! GUESS NOW! Simple and INCREDIBLY addictive game based on Google data.

• Massive Match: Have you ever wanted to play CandyCrush, or one of its infinitely numbered variants, on a board featuring 1000 other players? No, of course you haven’t, and yet here we are.

• The Ones That Got Away: A design project creating film posters for movies that were never made (but actually could have been in a parallel universe). These are rather beautiful, and available to buy – the design here is lovely, I think, and I am sort of intrigued by the concept of the Salvador Dali / Marx Brothers collaboration which never was.

• Google Daydream Labs: What does the future of Virtual Reality look like? It looks like this – two people in separate physical locations, collaborating on a virtual jigsaw in virtual space. Of course it does. Obviously this looks shonky as you like, but you’re an idiot if you can’t see the amazing applications for this stuff a few years down the line.

• The Tumblr VR Gallery: After last week’s Instagram effort, this is a site which takes any Tumblr you care to give it and turns the posts into pictures on the wall of a virtual gallery. I recommend that you apply the effect to your favourite Tumblr of bongo and enjoy the wall-mounted ‘artworks’ that emerge.

• Data Duo: Oh I love this! Kickstarter project, nearly funded at the time of writing, to create a two-player synthtoy – the idea being that two people, for example a parent and child, can collaboratively make electronic music together using the same physical device. I can imagine this being SUCH fun, although that perspective might change after a few hours of being exposed to the ‘compositions’ that result.

• Vizit: Not the first ‘massive visualistion of Reddit and all its subreddits and how they all fit together’ that I’ve featured here, but this is a particularly nice overview and interface, and gives a very good insight into exactly how much truly weird, niche stuff is on the network. A quick zoom into the cluster around the NSFW tag gives you a rapid and slightkly dizzying insight into the collective sexual ID of the web in a manner in which few other websites manage.

• Decodelia: I am such a fan of this. A Chrome extension which lets you view any webpage as a coded, obscured graphic which can only be deciphered using red-tinted lenses – which for the right brand is a really rather cool gimmick, I think. Alternatively, it’s an excellent way to look at bongo whilst at work – your call, really.

• Monochrome Japan: Gorgeous black and white photos of Japan, by the very talented Hiroharu Matsumoto. Such great style here.

• Suumo Soundview: Caveat – not being in Japan I’ve been unable to actually try this out. Still, the idea seems cool and my lack of practical knwledge about how something actually functions has never prevented me from linking to stuff before. From what I can tell this, is a combination citydiscovery and RJDJ-style soundscapeapp thing, which plays audio cues to users wandering around by pulling data from six separate APIs and using this to generate audio on the fly based on where you are and what’s going on. Which sounds ACE, frankly, and should be ripped for London asap.

• Powdah: The Instagram feed of SFX makeup artist Mark Clancy from Australia. At least he says he’s an SFX makeup artist – maybe it’s an elaborate ruse and he’s in fact some sort of Antipodean Patrick Bateman hiding in plain sight. He’s probably not, on balance, but you can never be too careful. He’s really, really good, though – these photos are GRUESOME, and will provide you with ample creative fuel for your next tedious zombie-themed wossname.

• The Cozy Room: Life is just TOO MUCH sometimes, isn’t it? You know those moments when all you want to do is to shut yourself inside a tiny, self-contained box with a tv and some crisps and just hide from the world until the bad things have stopped (SPOILER: The bad things will, fundamentally, never stop)? Well the Cozy Room will let you do JUST THAT – it’s literally a big box that you can sit in and shut yourself off from the rest of the world, and is simultaneously great an hugely depressing. Take a moment to imagine what the average one of these would smell like, based on the likely user profile. SNIFF DEEPLY!

• Infochammel: Asbolutely baffling, this. Infochammel is…er…I don’t really know what it is. Actually, I do – it’s an ODD show made by Amazon (I think) taking the style of informercials and extending that into a VERY STRANGE longform piece of programming; the accompanying website is very, very strange indeed, and slightly headache inducing in the way that only intensely concentrated internets can be (I know that you know the feeling).

• Thinking Machine: So beautiful, this. Watch a computer thinking whilst you play it at chess – this project lets you play a reasonable game against a chessbot, with the gimmick that it visualises each and every calculation the program is making as it considers its next move. Honestly, this is so aesthetically pleasing you have no idea, whether or not you’re a chess person.

• Light: This is a ‘multisensory aesthetic experience in VR’, apparently. Or, depending on your viewpoint, a pleasingly relaxing blue-hued musical webtoy thingy which has you hurtling through a 360-degree viewable blue void while some ambient noodling goes on in the background. On reflection, their description sells it slightly better.

• Lord Ray-el: This week’s dose of internet weirdo comes in the shape of Lord Ray-el who, it turns out, is the Messiah! Yes, totally passed me by too, but it turns out that the long-awaited saviour of mankind rocked up in Jerusalem 5 years ago – this is his official web presence, and it’s about as wonderfully lunatic as you’d hope. I’m going to feel really sheepish if he is the Messiah, you know.

• Party Pooper: A very odd little point and click game by animation studio Animade, which inolves you having to help someone clear their house of party guests who’ve outstayed their welcome. WHY IS ONE OF THE PARTY GUESTS A BUM ON LEGS? We may never know.

• Ruin My Search History: A script which autogoogles a whole load of ‘embarrassing’ stuff from your browser. Send as a disguised link to more vanilla colleagues – sadly there’s no option to create your own version with bespoke search terms, as I for one would LOVE to be able to apply my imagination to these. The current suggestions are a touch banal, to my mind – please can someone replicate this with some slightly more eyebrow-raising suggestions? I’ll start you off with “porcupine enema removal”.

• What’s She Like: Beautifully made, and very involving, Twine game made by Coney to accompany the current show at the Wyndham Theatre “People, Places, Things”. The show explores issues around addiction and therapy, and the game acts as a companion piece to it, exploring the user’s own attitudes to technology and their relationship to it. An excellent example of using storytelling platforms to augment the theatrical experience – really nicely done.

• Hush: The internet of buttplugs is here! Crowdfunded last year, this just started shipping – I’m not personally in the market for one of these (am I protesting too much? Hm), but I am SO amused by the fact that it’s operable remotely from anywhere in the world via its smartphone app. Imagine getting caught out with that in a dull meeting: “What are you doing, Matt? Not interested in the MAU figures?” “No, not in the slightest; instead I’m remote-operating my partner’s buttplug as they wonder around Sainsbury’s”. God, the future.

• Daniel Savio: Finally in this section this week, a website by Daniel Savio which presents a Wipeout-esque flight along a beautiful neon track, accompanying some rather lovely electro. This is gorgeous, and I’d like to see more of it please thanks.

LAST UP, TRY THIS COMPENDIUM OF TRACKS FROM 70s HORROR FILMS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Of The House Clinton: US politicians with GoT quotes, because apparently memes are all anyone has left in the battle against electoral idiocy.

• Ska Or Improv: Ska band of improv comedy troupe? WHO CAN TELL? Noone, according to this Tumblr highlighting the uncanny similarity between both groups.

• Weird Books I Find: A truly GREAT collection of literary oddities collected by a worker in a book warehouse. If you can look at this and not immediately Google “Me, My Goat and My Sister’s Wedding” you’re a stronger man than I am.

• Assholes In The Pit: Sadly seemingly dormant, this is a great collection of photos of photographers being dickheads at gigs.

• Mr Turner’s Ties: For most 30somethings in the UK, Boy Meets World is chiefly remembered for the appeal of its pulchritudinous love interest Topanga (don’t pretend, come on). In case you want another reason to celebrate it, though, this Tumblr is a tribute to the horrible ties worn by one of the characters in it. Why not, eh?

• The Vault of the Atomic Space Age: All of the design and illustration and artwork you could possibly want from the golden age of scifi.

• Yes Way Rose: Is this made by the American rose wine industry? I can see no other conceivable reason as to why anyone would have created this Tumblr dedicated to celebrating the easy-drinking properties of pink booze.

• Musicians You Should Know: Ever heard of Jimbo Carver? Bet you haven’t. Mainly as he’s made up, along with all the other musicians on this great Tumblr, which introduces a new fictional musical oddity, complete with wonderful backstory and lovely illustration, each week. The writing here is awesome.

• Videogames Made Me Gay: The intersection of videogames and Tumblr culture in one pink, sparkly and occasionally NSFW place. If you want photos of men covering their penises with XBox controllers, and WHO DOESN’T?, this will be RIGHT up your street.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Stanford Rape Victim Statement: Because if you haven’t yet read the piece, you really ought to.

• Being Viggo: Nice profile of Viggo Mortensen in Esquire Mag, which manages to make him seem like a genuinely nice and broadly human person – which shouldn’t really be remarkable, on balance, but given what oddities actors usually come across as is somehow noteworthy.

• The Ultimate Wedding Playlist: Exhaustive breakdown by 5thirtyeight of the most-played songs at weddings, and what that MEANS about people and stuff. It means that people have generally uninspired taste in wedding tunes, to my mind, but what do I know?

• Being A 911 Operator: Brilliant piece by a long-term 911 operator in the US – the opening, about how many times you hear people die doing that job, is properly arresting – it’s logical when you think about it, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most of you haven’t given any thought as to what it would be like taking calls for the ambulance or police services (bleak as you like, is what).

• It’s Probably Going To Be OK: In the midst of all the Trumpfear and the Brexitfear and the Terrorfear and all the more generalised horrors of modernity we are confronted with each and every minute of each and every day, it’s good to occasionally be reassured, which is why I found this piece in the New Statesman so calming – it explains, simply and logically, why we probably won’t vote to leave the EU, and why Trump probably can’t win. Yes, fine, it’s speculation and conjecture, but it’s speculation and conjecture which agrees with my worldview and therefore it’s ACE.

• On IKB: One of my actual, proper happy places is at the Tate Modern, staring at one of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue prints – single colour depictions of the shade Klein invented and which is the bluest, most perfect shade the human eye can conceive of. This short piece explains its genesis and its unique status in the art world – patent as art is something you can see replicated in the work of Koons et al later on, but Klein was a true precursor.

• Design For The One Percent: Excellent essay about the fundamentally unegalitarian nature of the work produced by the late Zaha Hadid and other ‘starchitects’, which argues that due to their being commissioned by, and for the use of, the hyperwealthy, they are fundamentally detached from much of the socio-philosophical ideals which underpinned the work of the architectural greats of the early-20th Century. Very smart and very interesting – this quote gives a flavour: “Once adversarial, architecture now not only accommodates the economic system but aggrandizes its worst impulses, edifying its gross excesses with a glass-and-steel shroud of haughty benevolence, bereft of any social mission beyond displaying its own brilliance. It has become structure for structure’s sake.”

• Cartography Comparison: Kilometric analysis and comparison of the manner and scale of information delivered by Google Maps and Bing Maps – less interesting because of the technical stuff than as an exploration of how systems such as these are increasingly determining what we see and know without us realising that information is being pre-classified and ranked prior to delivery – what we know and see about our surroundings is increasingly being mediated by third parties, and we barely even stop to consider it. Which is a bit scary really.

• The Warcraft Evisceration: You will probably be unsurprised to know that the Warcraft film is, by all accounts, total tripe – this is a JOYFUL takedown of it, written with obvious glee and no little style, by Duncan Jones. Includes so many glorious lines that I wish I was a good enough writer to have coined, including the applause-worthy “Patton consistently looks like she’s about to lose a cos-play contest for her own character”.

• How Zuckerberg Crushed G+: An insider’s account of how Facebook responded to Google’s attempt to do social networking, which offers a neat look at how Facebook operates, its staff culture, and why it’s 100% a terrifying cult which is going to continue being one of the most significant companies in history for the foreseeable future. I really don’t know which is scarier, this lot, Google, or Amazon, which is scary in and of itself.

• Body on the Moor: A lovely, sad piece by the BBC exploring why the body of a man was found, dead, in the Peak District, having apparently travelled 200 miles to die there. Sad and poignant and fascinating.

• Making Movies in GTAV: I had no idea that there was a whole industry of people dedicated to making films in-game in GTAV – this is an interview with one of them, itself conducted in-game, and shows the level of craft and dedication required to make some pretty impressive stuff. Aside from anything else, some of the films included in the piece are hugely impressive.

• Ranking All 72 New Emoji: Just in case you feel the need to have an opinion about which of the new ones is going to become your go-to alternative to the aubergine next time you want to reference a throbbing erection in one of your messages.

• Analysing the Raps In ‘Hamilton’: This year’s Broadway sensation, hiphop musical about slavery Hamilton, is brilliantly analysed in this piece by the Wall Street Journal, breaking down the structure of its songs and using that as a great starting point for the nature of rhyme and meter in hiphop. This is so good, not only as a piece of analysis but also as a web interactive – the WSJ is doing some really excellent work at the moment.

• A Night Out With Jamie Vardy’s Lookalike: You know what people abroad think of when they think of England on a Friday night, and our football culture? THIS is what they think of. Fundamentally depressing portrait of MODERN BRITAIN and football and ‘celebrity’ which will (I’m really sorry about the insane snobbery I’m about to display here, but) make you REALLY, really glad that you don’t have to go out on the booze in Leicester. You can almost feel the sticky carpets of the First Leisure nightspots.

• An Index of Other People’s Tragedies: A beautiful piece of writing, one of my favourite of the week, and a great use of an unusual format to tell stories. Gorgeous and highly recommended.

• The Creepiest Things Of Reddit: Wow, there is some REALLY weird stuff in here. You want inspiration for a horror movie, this is your motherlode.

• The Passion of Muhammad Ali: Finally, a great profile of Ali from Esquire in the late 60s, talking less about his boxing (he was on hiatus at the time, banned due to refusing the draft) than the man and the image and his faith and his relationships to his wife, his fans, strangers on the street…a wonderful piece that gives you a very real sense of the complicated and often contradictory person behind the soundbites and the flashbulb photography. Best thing I read about Ali all week, this – though if you want more, there’s a wonderful collection of other writings here.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start with a strange and poignant animation about Edmond. Edmond just wants to be close to people, but he’s got issues with boundaries. And, er, eating them:

2) Next up, the new one from Angel Olsen – this is called ‘Intern’ and it’s a GLORIOUS tune and her voice is truly mesmerising:

3) Weird and slightly unsettling internettyglitchedoutCGIvideothing of the week #1 – this is called ‘Jade Statues’ by 3 Orbs and I find it really quite uncomfortable to watch, although I couldn’t possibly explain why. ENJOY!:

4) Weird and slightly unsettling internettyglitchedoutCGIvideothing of the week #2 – this is by Rawtekk and it’s called ‘Here’s To Them’ and the video is EXCELLENT and the audio is…hard, I think is probably the best word to describe it. Really uncomfortable-making in the best possible way:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! We return to Fire in the Booth, and a repeat appeaance for Akala, his fourth one now – this is, as ever, so ASTOUNDINGLY good that I just wanted to applaud on hearing it – I seriously can’t stress enough how incredibly impressive this is. Intelligent, articulate, angry, impassioned, it’s 100% virtuoso stuff, all nearly 20 minutes of it. Worth paying attention to:

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! Akala’s been around for time – at the other end of the age spectrum is Young Ty, who at 15 is one of the most impressive young MCs I’ve seen in ages:

7) Next, this rather brilliant anthem to black womanhood by the beautifully-voiced Jamila Woods – this is called ‘Black Girl Soldiers’:

8) Finally this week, James Franco, Rose McGowan, Daft Punk, Devendra Banhart and others come together in this…odd animation. Not really sure what else to say about this, so I’m just going to leave it here. BYE HAPPY WEEKENDS BYE!!!!

FANCY AN EPIC 7-HOUR AMBIENT MIX? OF COURSE YOU DO!

THE SECTION WHICH SHOULD THINGS CONTINUE AS THEY ARE MAY JUST REPLACE ITSELF WITH A HEADING READING ‘EVERYTHING IS MARGINALLY MORE LIKE SNAPCHAT THAN IT WAS LAST WEEK’, BECAUSE REALLY:

• Facebook Brings Back Marketplace: I was never really sure what caused Facebook to shelve the earlier iteration of this service way back in…er…nope, sorry, I can’t be bothered to check the timing on this and I know you don’t care so stop looking at me like that. Anyway, it’s now BACK – you can once again use Facebook to list products for sale and browse available stuff. It defaults to being location-based, prioritising listings in geographical proximity to you, but you can browse all over the place should you desire. No obvious BRAND ACTIVATION opportunities here that I can think of, other than the inevitable WE DID IT FIRST kudos of shoehorning some marketing activation into what is effectively FB’s Craigslist, but I thought you might want to know about it anyway.

• Shopify Lets People Shop Within Messenger: One of the very few pieces of actual news in this section this week; Shopify’s systems which allow retailers to sell through their chat tech are now able to integrate with payments systems, allowing a whole transaction to take place entirely on Messenger. Which is obviously a BIG THING in theory, although there’s still no data to suggest exactly how much people are clamouring to buy stuff through FB. No matter – BUY MORE THINGS, PEONS.

• FB Launches Messenger Lite: So even people with appalling signal strength can avail themselves of the opportunity to swap inanities with their ‘friends’ and have pretend, non-conversations with idio bots. LOOK IS THERE ANY NEED FOR BOTH WHATSAPP AND MESSENGER TO EXIST NOW? IS THERE? HOW MANY DIFFERENT FCUKING WAYS DO WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO COMMUNICATE IN EXACTLY THE SAME FCUKING WAY? Oh God I feel old this week, so old.

• Facebook Testing What Is Basically Snapchat In Messenger: Look, just read this. I’ll wait for you: “At the top of the Messenger thread list, users see a row of tiles representing “My Day” and friends’ Days they can watch, but there are also prompts like “I’m Feeling”, “Who’s  Up For?” and “I’m Doing”. Tapping on these tiles provides a range of filters “I’m feeling…so blue” with raindrops and a bubbly blue font, “I’m feeling…blessed” with a glorious gold sparkly font, “Who’s up for…road trip” with a cute car zooming past, or “Who’s up for…Let’s grab drinks” with illustrated beer mugs and bottles that cover the screen.” Doesn’t that sound ghastly?

• Whatsapp Also Ripping Off Snapchat Some More, Because Really, Why Not?: You can now draw on your pictures, much like a child decorating the walls with its own scat. Calloo ca-fcuking-llay, right?

• YouTube Adds Paid Promotion Disclaimer Option: This is smart/useful – YouTube channel owners can now add a simple disclaimer overlay to new and pre-existing videos which flag that what viewers are watching contains sponsored content, which is a nice and simple way of getting around all those pesky advertising regs without at the same time having to get your perky, bright-eyed ‘influencer’ to do anything as grubby as disclose a commercial endorsement in the video.

• Automobility: A lovely, lovely site by Ideo, exploring ideas around the future of cars and driving and a whole host of related concepts. The way the site is built and structured and presented is just really slick (and, as a bonus, the actual STUFF on it is pretty interesting, even as someone who has had literally one driving lesson in their life and is still sort of weirdly impressed when people it knows can actually drive cars), and definitely worth examining from a UX/UI point of view.

• The Book of Noodle: Gorillaz – the band still getting the credit for creating the scifi hiphop concept album voiced by a cast of fictional characters despite the fact that two of the same people involved in the original album – Albarn and Del – actually created it a few years previously with the excellent Deltron 3030 project which you really ought to listen to RIGHT NOW – announced a new THING this week, through a series of short videos on Twitter, each of which make up the BOOK OF NOODLE. Which is quite a nice way of announcing stuff, if you like that sort of thing.

WHY NOT TRY THE RATHER BEAUTIFUL, ETHEREAL ELECTRO OF BEN PRUNTY’S ‘CYPHER’ NEXT?

THE SECTION WHICH IS BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT THE UK NEEDS ITS OWN VERSION OF PEPE, SEEING AS WE CONTINUE TO ATTEMPT TO MATCH THE US IN OUR POLITICOCULTURAL RACE TO THE VERY BOTTOM, PT.1:

• The Life Calendar: Burdened as I have been this week with cheery thoughts of mortality, this app which lets you record your thoughts about your life on a week-by-week, colour-coded basis seems strangely apposite. It’s very beautifully designed indeed, and the basic idea – that each week of your life is represented by a square which you can assign different colours and notes – is sort of lovely in a ‘let me build a light-touch patchwork quilt recording the progress of my existence and emotions on a weekly basis’ way. Except I can only begin to imagine the sort of bleak life reassessment you’d have to engage in were you to realise exactly how many of the weeks are a uniform dun colour, stretching to infinity. SMILE, KIDS!

• Sweatcoin: ‘Get paid for walking’  is the basic gimmick here – for every 1000 steps you take, tracked by your phone, you earn a ‘Sweatcoin’ (no, I don’t think it’s a nice term either); accumulation of these will eventually enable you to buy stuff on the platform with your virtual currency. Not sure how many partners they have on board at the moment – this will live or die based on how many recognisable brands sign up to give stuff away in exchange for a bit of marketing.

• The Information Is Beautiful Awards 2016: Another year, another opportunity for me to send the link to this round to people I work with with a note politely explaining that this is how dataviz should look and that frankly the world would be a better place if people stopped churning out sh1t ‘infographics’ as a tick-box exercise and actually bothered to spend some proper time and money making stuff that is actually visually interesting and in fact informative rather than simply instead taking a bunch of statistics out of a report and creating poorly-designed icons to sit alongside some text and pretending that that’s an adequate graphical interpretation of a data source; you can, I am sure, imagine exactly how much colleagues relish this sort of helpful intervention and the high esteem in which I am held in the workplace. Ahem. Anyway, there is *so* much lovely stuff in here so have a browse.

• Biggy Pop: You have all seen this, right? The Instagram feed which shares photos of Iggy Pop’s pet cockateel, which is apparently called ‘Biggy Pop’? Look, just click this link – whatever is happening in your life right now and however hard things feel there is NO WAY you will not be made at least momentarily cheerful by this short video.

• Fonts In Use: An independent archive of typography from all over the place – designers, typographers and fans of excellent kerning will find much to enjoy here.

• Pearl: There is, I’m sure, a wealth of data out there which describes exactly what the main differences are between people who favour macs over PCs – obviously mac users are more creative and brilliant, though. OBVIOUSLY. Also, judging by this mac OS app which lets you basically create a one-click button on your desktop which opens up a little mirror-type thing using your webcam which shows you what you look like, massive narcissists!

• Muspy: I am sure there are other ways of doing this out there already, but I’m buggered if I know what they are and this struck me as a pretty simple and efficient service – sign up to get alerts on when artists release new albums. Simple as that.

• How Big Are Things?: Excellent little album on Imgur showing how big stuff is compared to other stuff, which now I come to write it down obviously sounds incredibly dull but does allow you to answer that age-old question ‘what would it look like if a stealth bomber landed on the pitch at an American Football stadium, so, you know, there’s that.

• Piggyback Driver: Do you ever worry that perhaps you’re letting your kids assume too much control over your lives, directing your movements and, well, everything else really? Do you want to give them even more of a sense of power of you than they already possess? OH GOOD! This is a helmet for parents to wear when they carry their kids on their shoulders which has a pair of handlebars on top, thus letting said kids ‘steer’ their parents, just in case you weren’t clear enough about who’s in charge now. Brilliantly, the handlebars are also linked to servos in the helmet which will make it vibrate to suggest in which direction the tiny dictator on your back wants you to go now, which will be in NO WAY irritating at all, honest.

• Inktober: Obviously this is now a week old, but if you’re minded to start late then who’s going to stop you? NOT I. Anyway, Inktober is an initiative set up by artist Jake Parker in which people make one pen and ink drawing a day through October and share them with the wider community which is a) an excellent way of finding some pretty cool art across the web; and b) the sort of thing which would be quite nice to be involved in for certain types of brand (er, Bic?).

• The Displacement Alert Project Map: To quote: “Dap.Map is a building-by-building, web-based interactive map for NYC designed to show where residential tenants may be facing significant displacement pressures and where affordable apartments are most threatened. ANHD created Dap.Map to provide community groups, local residents, elected officials, policymakers, and the public direct and real time access to vital information on our city’s rapidly changing residential environment.” A London equivalent would be interesting to see.

• We Are All Immigrants: Following this week’s charming rhetoric emerging from the Tory jamboree, a Chrome extension which replaces the word ‘immigrants’ with the word ‘people’. Which is sort of cute, but also strikes me as an excellent way to bury your head in the sand and pretend that NONE OF THIS IS HAPPENING OR BEING SAID.

• Electropollock: I do like this – art project involving a machine which creates Pollock-esque (I mean, not really actually anything like Pollock in terms of output, but there is a lot of abstract paintsplashing going on) canvases whose composition in terms of colour and layout is determined by the ambient audio around it – louder or faster music means different colours and different strokes, painted at a different rate, to create a unique work depending on the track. I’m a sucker for this sort of generative work in general, but the physicality of this really appeals.

• Take On Me Simulator: In case you’ve forgotten, take a moment to remind yourself of the majesty of the video for A-Ha’s 80s classic – go on, WATCH IT. Now go and click on the main link and check out the installation there depicted, which lets punters step through a frame and see themselves as Morten Harkett entering the graphite world of his imagining. I want a go on this very much indeed.

• Aura: Smart frames are still a thing, it turns out – does anyone actually use them? They strike me very much as the sort of thing that was given as a present to family members or pseudo-friends who you don’t really know very well and then left to gather dust in a cupboard somewhere, but that hasn’t stopped this EXCITING NEW VERSION from cropping up. The gimmick with this is that the frame will automatically select pictures from your camera roll to display without you needing to go through the tedious process of selecting and uploading them – to quote, “Aura uses Smart Selection, updating your frame with new photos as you take them. No need to regularly check the app to select photos – your best pictures will just appear on your frame.” Erm, am I the only person who can imagine this going really, really embarrassingly wrong? Ah, ok, as you were.

• Instashare: Superuseful, this – an app which enables easy, seamless sharing of files between devices with just a few taps, letting you throw photos, documents, etc, from your phone to desktop and vice versa with a minimum of fuss.

• Knowsy: Many years ago – Jesus, literally a decade – I had a client called Videojug which did how-to videos and would have CLEANED UP had they not launched at a point when watching videos on your phone was still akin to watching stop-frame animation by candlelight. Knowsy is basically the same thing – a whole load of explainer content aggregated in one place for easy discovery (although, er, Google sort of does the easy discovery bit for you so good luck with that). Christ alone knows why you’d turn to this website of all places to get information about how to kiss someone for the first time, but there you go.

• Volumetric Video: I don’t *entirely* understand this – in fact, let’s be clear, I don’t really understand this at all – but that’s never prevented me from featuring stuff before and it won’t stop me now. This is a demo showcasing video which a user can shift the viewpoint of by moving the viewing device backwards and forwards – effectively letting you ‘step in’ and ‘step out’ of a video simply by, in this instance, moving the tablet forward. Obviously pretty janky now, but you can imagine the impact that this sort of thing could have on VR, right? COME ON, IMAGINE.

• Mylestoned: Another in the seemingly neverending series of apps and services designed to DIGITALLY DISRUPT DEATH; Mylstoned – the name’s a problem here, lads, not going to lie – lets you set up shared memorials for loved ones, which users can contribute memories or pictures to to create a sort of small virtual shrine to the departed; which is nice, but nothing which couldn’t be done with a shared, private Facebook Group. In the unlikely event that anyone reading this works in the funeral industry, though, they’re looking for partners for their Beta so, you know, get in touch for some deathchat.

• Meta: Super, super useful – search tool which lets you simultaneously look for files across Dropbox, GDrive, Evernote, desktop and other places. In no way exciting, but if you’ve ever had the creeping horror of trying to remember exactly which of the myriad online file storage options you left something in then this will strike a chord.

• The Pieous: Because no Web Curios would be complete these days without at least one link to an Instagram account featuring novelty baking of some sort. LOOK! NOVELTY PIES! The Bruce Willis one is seriously impressive, mind (YES, A BRUCE WILLIS PIE!).

• Send D1cks To Donald: A childish, puerile initiative which is therefore entirely in keeping with the prevailing political mood in the US, this site lets you pay $10 to send a penis-shaped lollipop to everyone’s favourite demagogue, in a move which will do nothing other than create additional discomfort to the poor sods who open his mail. But, you know, PEN!SES ARE LOL!!!

YOU SHOULD ALL LISTEN TO THE NEW SWET SHOP BOYS ALBUM AS IT IS EXCELLENT HINDOMUSLIM HIPHOP AND I DON’T GET TO TYPE THAT VERY OFTEN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS BEGINNING TO BELIEVE THAT THE UK NEEDS ITS OWN VERSION OF PEPE, SEEING AS WE CONTINUE TO ATTEMPT TO MATCH THE US IN OUR POLITICOCULTURAL RACE TO THE VERY BOTTOM, PT.2:

• The Joinery: I bet you didn’t know when you woke up this morning that the most comforting and satisfying thing you would see all day would be this Twitter feed of gifs of Japanese joinery techniques, and yet here we are. SO SATISFYING – if you are a fan of ‘things fitting perfectly with other things’ you will probably have a small braingasm at this.

• Ellis Island Immigrant Photographs: Beautiful shots of people arriving for processing at immigration in Ellis Island, New York, between 1892-1925. SUCH good faces in here.

• The Audit: A website reviewing English-language podcasts – if you’re jonesing for new material then this is an EXCELLENT place to look for fresh voices as there is lots and lots and lots of stuff on here.

• Google Noto Fonts: Google just released an insane number of free fonts in nearly 600 languages, with the stated aim of creating standardised online fonts worldwide which will, they hope, eliminate ‘tofu – that thing where your browser doesn’t support a particular character and instead throws up one of those little blank sqaures (no, I didn’t know that either). Oh Google, so creepy and yet so benevolent!

• Digital Gastronomy: This is a really, really horrid website (sorry guys, but), but it’s worth clicking and watching the video as the ideas behind it are really interesting – it’s a project by the University of Jerusalem to explore combining modern tech and design techniques such as laser-etching, 3d printing and the like with cookery. No idea if any of this tastes any good, but the idea behind it is fascinating; just IMAGINE what Heston would get up to with this sort of stuff.

• Nothing Personal: A photo series depicting the chilling corporate weirdness that is the world of the arms fair; canapes and mortars, shiny suits and tanks…you can imagine. Excellent pictures, and reminded me of how lovely it was when I worked for H+K and they worked for Lockheed Martin and I’d have colleagues coming back from these sorts of events ashen-faced and sort of horrified by the way in which language was used there – lots of talk of ‘IMPACT ZONES’ and ‘RADIUS OF EFFECT’ but, strangely, none whatsoever about killing large numbers of people with chilling efficiency. Weird, that.

• Airline Meals: Given that even BA is giving up on the airline food thing (at least for short-haul povvos like me), Christ alone knows when I’m next going to sample the unique delights of a meal at 40,000 feet. Thank Christ, then, for this site, which documents with a slightly fetishistic degree of detail some of the delicacies available when you peel back the film and inhale that first indefinable but immediately recognisable hit of steamstench. TRIVIA: the best airline food I ever did eat was on Ethopian Airways, which I confess caused early-teens me no little tasteless mirth at the time.

• Brendan Lee Satish Tang: I don’t really know how to describe these sculptures, except perhaps for saying that it looks a little bit like what might happen if some oriental pottery were somehow gene-spliced with a load off stuff from B&Q. Which is an appreciably dreadful description, I know, but click and you’ll see what I mean. Wevs, this is ACE.

• Gouch: Limmy has made the best ecstasy simulator ever.

• The Dictionary of Non-Notable Artists: There’s no way I can explain this better than the artist, so I won’t try: “Every day, people on Wikipedia nominate articles for deletion and discuss whether they should remain in the encyclopedia or not. This is done on a sub page called “Articles for deletion”. A frequent reason for exclusion of an entry is “non-notability”. After I had a look at those discussions, the article about my own person (Gregor Weichbrodt) ironically became nominated for deletion from the German Wikipedia, too. The anonymous person that put me on the list wrote “Completely misses notability criteria for ‘authors’. Unsatisfying notability criteria for artists too.” I wrote a Python script to download the contents of every “articles for deletion”-page from the past ten years and filter the results by artistic occupation. I saw that I wasn’t alone in my fate and that there were many more non-notable artists in this world who also failed to meet the notability criteria. This book is dedicated to these artists.”

• 30 Seconds To Fly: A bot which promises to assist with the creeping horror of the booking of corporate air travel by managing all aspects of the process, tracking your spending over time, etc. The sort of thing which if you’re a PA you might want to encourage your bosses to shell out for (and, for the rest of us, an smart/interesting way of using chatbots).

• Toby: This link is EITHER all about classic mugs OR it’s about a Chrome extension that lets you easily and simply manage tabs and favourites when you’re browsing; YOU WON’T KNOW UNLESS YOU CLICK, although I suppose you might have a reasonable guess.

• Snoopie: ANOTHER Chrome extension, this one letting you see when a webpage you’re on is using behaviour-tracking software to record where your cursor’s moving and that sort of thing. Not, of course, that you can do a blind bit about it.

• Computational Flaneur: OH I LOVE THIS IDEA! Although given it’s very location-specific nature, and the fact that that location is San Francisco, I can’t tell you whether the execution’s any good or not. No matter, the concept’s enough – this is an app developed for this year’s Come Out And Play festival which generates poetry on the fly based on where within the city you’re walking, how fast, etc. How can you not love this? YOU CANNOT.

• Easypoem: Generate really, really rubbish poems based on some simple keyword entry and a few template styles. It calls itself AI Poem, but there’s no AI here – what I love is that there’s a premium option to generate ‘professional poems’, which I sort of wish I weren’t too tight to fork out for as I would LOVE to see the sort of crap it produces.

• 30s Antifascist French Youth Camp Photos: These are so, so good – again, amazing faces. Also, antifascism looks SO FUN, we should all get into it.

• Retro Wave: You know those 80s-style graphics with customisable text you’ve been seeing everywhere this week? Well now you can make your own, just at the point where all the cool kids have gotten bored of it!

• Textanim: Seeing as we’re doing retrotexteffects (strong thematic linkage going on here, well done ME), here’s a site which lets you create the sort of spangly, animated textabortiongifs that used to proudly adorn millions of Geocities Pages and MySpace profiles. There’s something strangely pleasing about making very, very offensive phrases in this style, I find.

• The Bucket Of Scat: Available for sale on Amazon, this is a bucket – a WHOLE BUCKET! – full of fake animal dung. I have no idea whatsoever what use you might put this to, nor indeed do I need to know; I’m just going to provide you with the link and let the rest be a matter for you and your conscience.

• The Playable Cities Awards 2016: Playable Cities celebrates tech / art projects which bring an element of play to the urban environment; they’ve announced their shortlist for this year’s awards, and as ever some of the work here is wonderful; the rhythm bus stops are just genius, and frankly there is an awful lot here that agency people can look and and ‘derive inspiration from’ (inevitably nick outright).

• Trackable Luggage: Kickstarter raising fund for a range of superfancy high-end leather travel kit which comes equipped with tracking sensors, meaning you can check EXACTLY where the fcuk your luggage has ended up the next time Ryanair lose it in transit, which I am sure will be of immense comfort to you.

• Invisible Children: Portraits of kids who’ve fled with or without their families to Beirut from Syria and are now living there as refugees. Gorgeous portraits, and a timely reminder of why that whole ‘citizen of the world? Citizen of NOWHERE” schtick was *quite* so unpleasant.

• Drops: This is a GREAT idea – can someone who does fintech-type stuff please tell me why this isn’t a standard feature of all FS products? The idea is that you hook your credit card up to this service, which then automatically rounds up all your $0.99 costs to $1, donating that extra cent to a charity of your choice. SO SIMPLE! SO CLEVER! Please, UK banks, can you set up something like this? Go on Atom, or Metrobank, or one of you other fcuking ‘challengers’, do something good.

• Github Audio: This is far nicer than it really ought to be – open it up and have a listen. To quote the makers, “This website tracks events happening across GitHub and converts them to music notes based on certain parameters. There are three types of sounds(bell, string pluck and string swell) based on four types of events(PushEvent, PullRequestEvent, IssuesEvent and IssueCommentEvent). Bells represent PushEvents, string plucks represent IssuesEvents and IssueCommentEvents whereas string swells represent PullRequestEvents.” Surprisingly easy on the ear.

• The Scientology Handbook From 1994: Or at least a selection of images from it. These are so, so wonderfully WTF, and they should be added to whatever file or folder you keep your ‘selection of baffling imagery to use as light relief in a skullcrushingly dull presentation about social strategy or trends or somesuch other dreadful wankery’.

• White Lies Album Thingy: Not sure how long this is going to maintain for, so appreciate that if you’re reading this in THE FUTURE then the link might just go straight to a fairly dull band homepage rather than the FEAST OF INTERACTIVITY currently visible there. Well, I say ‘feast’ – White Lies (who I totally thought no longer existed, but am quite pleased to find out do – they are very nice young men, bless them, though probably no longer as young as they were when we spent an afternoon playing StreetFighterIV with the NME) have decided that the best way to promote their new album is to turn their website homepage into some sort of navigable isometric 3d mazegame, moving through which lets users unlock SECRET BONUS CONTENT associated with the new record. Which is fine, except the whole experience is sort of the opposite of any fun at all, and is basically punishing fans for wanting to see more stuff from the band, which seems a bit counterintuitive if you ask me.

• Media Election: Interesting site looking at media coverage of the interminable US Presidential race, examining which candidate receives most coverage worldwide (spoiler: it ain’t Hillary) and looking to see what, if anything, correlations can be drawn between that information and polling data and the results of the eventual election. Frankly I think the premise is bunkum – it’s only measuring volume rather than tone, so is an incredibly blunt instrument – but I do like the way the site’s put together (so that’s ok then!).

• The 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition: All the entries in this year’s jamboree of IF – I can’t pretend to have played more than a handful of these, but each one I did try was a delight. I’m a sucker for IF, and if YOU ARE TOO then you will absolutely lose yourself in here – there are LOTS of ‘games’ to try.

• Insomnobot3000: To quote Amis quoting Nabokov on insomnia, “All nights are giants, but this one was especially terrible”. What would make YOU feel better next time you’re lying awake at 3am with the heartsads and the lifefears and the growing awareness that none of this is probably going to get appreciably better and in fact is only likely to get worse because entropy? Would it be ‘talking’ to a fcuking chatbot? No, probably not, and yet here we are. Even Chatroulette would be a better solution, seriously.

• Pokemasks: Masks, of Pokemon. Pretty sure these aren’t licensed, so I’d get your order in now if you want to be able to dress up as Bulbasaur on Hallowe’en (also, please don’t dress up as Bulbasaur on Hallowe’en; you look like a d1ck).

• Another Hallowe’en Mask: Speaking of looking like a d1ck, for anyone who was tempted by the anatomically correct vagina mask from last week’s Curios will almost certainly want to pick up one of these so that whichever lucky person is on your arm come October 31 will be able to act as the penile ying to your yoni yang.

• Welt: Leaving aside the horror of the name – seriously, guys, naming products after skin disfigurements is a bit, well, gross – this is a STAGGERINGLY pointless product to the point where I actually got quite angry about it. Whilst many of you might think that your belt already performs the simple function of showing you whether you’ve gained or lost weight by requiring you to loosen or tighten it based upon the creeping spread of your waistline, you are WRONG! What your belt has in fact been missing is an INTERNET CONNECTION! Yes, that’s right, Welt is a SMART BELT! It will tell you when your stomach is straining against it – BUT, YOU KNOW, SO WILL THE FACT THAT YOUR SKIN CONTAINS NERVE ENDINGS YOU FCUKING TECHNOPRICKS – and track your steps and oh Christ enough. It has, of course, been funded, because there is no piece of technofutureutopianism too stupid that middle-aged men won’t chuck cash at it.

• Playing Lynch: A really rather beautiful site – and cool project – which takes some of David Lynch’s most iconic (sorry, but) scenes and presents them as reimagined vignettes, each starring John Malkovich. The whole thing is a promo for an album featuring music from some of Lynch’s works, reinterpreted by major artists from across the world – the site, though is, great, and you can tell Malkovich is having a LOT of fun in these scenes.

• LESI: A browser toy / artwork which listens to whatever audio’s being picked up by your mic and produces an INTERACTIVE VISUAL SOUNDANDVISIONSCAPE which you can navigate through / around as you please. Nice aesthetic on this.

• How God Created Animals: I don’t normally link to ‘meme of the week’ type stuff, but this collection of tweets around the [god creating xxx] meme actually made me properly cry with laughter at points. Seriously, some of these are very, very good indeed.

• Sand Ghosts: Not actually called Sand Ghosts at all, obviously, but that’s sort of what the visual effect is like, this is a webcam toy which tracks your image and represents you on screen as a weirdly floaty particulate ghost creature which is all sorts of cool; give it a go, it really is impressive-looking.

• Battle of the Bands: Do YOU like board games? Do YOU like the idea of a board game about the music industry and being in a band? Do YOU want to back a Kickstarter project by a mate of mine which looks really cool? OF COURSE YOU DO!

• My Grandmother’s Lingo: This is lovely. A project by SBS Australia looking at preserving native language, in this instance Marra – the site uses your mic to pick up your speech and ‘teach’ you how to speak the language, whilst telling you about its history and usage through narrative animations. Really rather beautiful.

• Sad Amish Tattoos: A touch NSFW, this, but these are by far and away the sexiest tattoos I have ever seen, ever. The sort of work that you’d probably not want to get in a place where everyone would see it all the time – although that probably just underscores exactly how vanilla I am. I absolutely adore the artstyle here.

• Anarchy: A brilliant interactive site featuring glitchpop music and nosebleed-weird visuals and all sorts of other stuff besides; it’s part of a bigger, wider project about which you can read a little more here if you so desire, but this works as a standalone too. Really rather excellent.  

• The Dragon Sex Calendar 2017: I refuse to believe for a second that you don’t know at least one person whose life wouldn’t be immeasurably improved by receiving this as a Christmas present – maybe that person is YOU!

FINALLY IN MUSICAL TERMS, YOU REALLY OUGHT TO GIVE THE NEW BON IVER ALBUM A LISTEN AS IT IS GORGEOUS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Jeopardybot: Generating Jeopardy questions for the LOLs. Your degree of LOL will be directly proportionate to your understanding of how Jeopardy works, fyi.

• Nick Cave Is Cross: Photographs of Nick Cave looking less than whelmed with life.

• Theresa Dredd: The Theresa May / Judge Dredd Photoshop Tumblr you never knew you wanted and probably still don’t but which now exists.

• Disney Ladies From Last Night: Texts From Last Night paired with Disney princesses to surprisingly comic effect.

• Dirty Robot: This may or may not in fact be a Tumblr, but NO MATTER; this is the site of artist Daniel Isles, who’s posting a new work each day and whose style is, to my mind, very cool indeed.

• The Pumpkin Queenn: Look, that’s how THEY spell it, OK? Literally the only Tumblr of Hallowe’en-type giffery you will ever need.

• Malia Obama Fashion: I had NO IDEA that Malia Obama was considered a style icon, but apparently she is – this is a celebration of that status.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• On Snapchat’s Specs: Not a HOT TAKE, thanks fcuk, but a more nuanced look at what the (probably) mainstream adoption of wearable camera tech might look like and mean for, you know, SOCIETY and stuff. Interesting, smart and pleasingly-unhyperbolic.

• Why The Videogame Culture Wars Won’t Die: Two years on from the seething, vile horror of Gamergate, this piece looks at exactly what it is about game culture that persists in making it so toxically ANGRY about STUFF all the time. It helps if you’ve a passing knowledge of games culture, but there are many analogues here with the manner in which men have reacted to feminist rebootings of films, etc, which make it worth reading from a broader cultural context point-of-view.

• Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny: Fascinating and not-a-little-scary profile of Y Combinator wunderkind Sam Altman, one of the biggest powers in tech right now and yet another of those West Coast white guys who, whether we like it or not, is having a disproportionate influence on the manner in which tech – which increasingly, like it or not, means society – is developing. I have no doubt whatsoever that Mr Altman is a perfectly nice human being and several orders of magnitude smarter than me and everyone I know; equally, I have no doubt that I’d rather people like him weren’t basically running quite large swathes of the world right now.

• On Sonic Branding: A really interesing (no, really, I promise) look at the creation of audio identities for brands – whether it be jingles or tones or things like the never-to-be-forgotten sound signatures of brand such as Intel. Doesn’t explain why the Skype startup jingle makes me think quite so much of having my ears syringed, but I’m conscious that that’s very much my problem rather than yours.

• VR: Your Portal To The Real World: If you have any interest in STORYTELLING and EXPERIENCE and stuff, you really ought to read this; this is a hugely clever and interesting look at how VR technology could, when it’s several degrees closer to the mainstream than it is at present, create an entirely new layer of social interaction in public spaces, and the opportunities that could afford for narrative and play and stuff.

• A Non-Linear History Of Time Travel: I was talking to my friend Hector last night about how there’s a certain level of maths or physics beyond which I simply cannot understand anything – it’s like my brain simply stops working, can’t get traction, and everything just slides off and makes a puddling mess round the edges of my mind. Or something. Anyway, this is an EXCELLENT piece looking at the development of theories around the possibility or otherwise of time travel over the years; I don’t pretend to have understood more than about 50% of the physics in here but the bits I did understand were fascinating.

• The Education Gap: This is a great piece looking at how education can increasingly be seen as one of the largest dividing factors in people’s politics in 2016, and what that might mean for the future of political discourse. Couple this with the inexorable push for EVERYTHING TO BE VIDEO and there are some really interesting potential ramifications for political thought and communication in the future – to be clear, this is very much in the Chinese sense of ‘interesting’.

• Hari Nef, Model Citizen: Transgender model Hari Nef is a really interesting character, thust into a weird ‘mouthpiece for a generation’ role whilst still being very much a kid. This is a good profile of her, tracking her rise to prominence and her context within the growing trans community – more power to her.

• Why Would Someone Choose To Be A Monster: Fascinating and uncomfortable piece about the research of one James Cantor, who is conducting psychological research into paedophiles to ascertain the degree to which their sexual preferences can be said to be pre-ordained and hard-wired and as such not, necessarily, their fault. Which is obviously not a little on the controversial side, but is an investigation worth making as we move towards an acceptance that sexuality is largely if not entirely based between the ears. Not a totally comfortable read, but it will make you think.

• What Your Favourite Childhood Books Say About Your Psyche: This is an ever-so-slightly heartbreaking essay about how the books you love as a kid tell you quite a lot more about yourself than you might have realised.

• Competitive Punning: There are, apparently, competitive punning competitions – events where a bunch of people compete to tell the most puns on a given topic in a series of 1v1 contests until a PUN KING is crowned. Can you imagine exactly how psychologically wearing spending a few hours in the company of 30-odd Tim Vine wannabes would be? EXACTLY, which is why you should read this piece, which contains just enough punning to be lightly amusing, without making you want to stove the author’s face in with a pickaxe.

• How Goldman Sachs Screwed Libya: I mean, we’ve all sort of screwed Libya, so much as I’d like to I can’t really lay the entirety of the blame on the cuddly Vampire Squid this time around; nonetheless, this is a really fascinating picture of the sort of national-level work Goldman does. The numbers are staggering, the cynicism and chicanery and naked, dead-eyed profiteering even moreso. It will be VERY interesting to see how this shakes down – the legal precedents which will potentially be established could have pretty huge ramifications for global finance (no really, it IS interesting).

• Pride & Prejudice & Trump: McSweeney’s on excellent form as ever.

• Buzzfeed On ASOS: Credit where it’s due, Buzzfeed continue to do some excellent investigative journalism; this takedown of ASOS’ warehouse working practices is well-researched and well-written and really in no way surprising whatsoever. Just to reiterate a point I am pretty sure I’ve made before here; if you are buying something and that something is REALLY cheap to the point where you’re minded to think ‘wow, that’s REALLY cheap!’, and that thing is produced / delivered in a manner involving actual human labour, then rest assured that one or more of the humans involved in said labour are getting royally fcuked as part of that process. BONUS BUZZFEED INVESTIGOJOURNALISM: this is a similar takedown this time focusing on US ‘ready to cook meals delivered to your door’ service Blue Apron.

• Life After Dictatorship: This is a hell of a piece, looking at what happened to former Sierra Leone dictator Valentine Strasser after he was removed from power in 1994, having been (according to the piece) the world’s youngest serving dictatorial leader. In part sad, in part just mesmerisingly odd, this is a wonderful piece of journalism.

• A Thing Of Beauty: The second-loveliest piece of prose in here this week; A Thing of Beauty is Leslie Kendall Die’s account of motherhood and friendship and ballet and physical pain and loss and acceptance and all sorts of other things; it is a glorious piece of writing and I recommend it unreservedly.

• My Shattered Istanbul: The best piece of writing, though, is this one – an essay about Istanbul in particular and Turkey in general, giving you a light-touch tour through it’s 20th and 21stC history, from Ataturk to Erdogan, all interwoven with the author’s memories of her mother and grandmother and their ineractions with the changing nature of Turkish society. Just beautiful; grab a cup of tea or a glass of wine and savour this one.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a beautiful short which uses light and dark and shadow to beautiful aesthetic effect – this is called ‘None’:

2) It is definitely Autumn; ignore that, though, and enjoy the in-no-way-Autumnal-at-all ‘Beach Beach Beach’ by Bosco Rogers, which is not only a lovely slice of Beach Boys-y pop-rock, but has a very nice animated vid to accompany it:

3) Next up, another unseasonally Summerish song with very Avi Buffalo vibes; this is Drugdealer ft. Ariel Pink, with ‘Easy to Forget’. Good video too – the laughing at 1:09 made me very happy indeed:

4) I featured Weyes Blood a few months back, with some comment about how it sounded like about 7 different EXCELLENT folk songs rolled into one; this is once again by them, it once again manages to sound simultaneously like every single female US folky singer from the past 4 decades and at the same time utterly brilliant. I am slightly in love with this artist, whose album’s out at the end of the month in case you are too. The track’s called ‘Generation Why’:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is new from Mic Righteous – it’s called Honour Mic and it is STRONG:

6) Last up in this week’s videos, this is a pretty stunning piece of CGI to accompany the slightly odd-pop of OY’s single ‘Space Diaspora’ – the animation here is just BRILLIANT. BYE BYE SEE YOU SOON BYE!!!:

Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle.

SHALL WE KICK OF THE MUSIC WITH THE DJ KICKS SET BY DAM FUNK? YES, YES WE SHALL (IT’S A SPOTIFY LINK, THIS ONE, FYI)

THE SECTION WHICH IS WONDERING WHICH HIGH-POWERED BUSINESSPEOPLE ACTUALLY GET THEIR NEWS FROM THE CITY AM WEBSITE ANYWAY:

• Twitter Launches Support For 360 Video: Continuing the recent and in no way share price-destroying trend of Twitter launching features several months after all the other platforms, they are now apparently supporting 360 degree video. I say ‘apparently’ – it’s not like there’s an official announcement, so I’m having to link to some third party report on this. FFS, TWITTER!

• Comment Moderation Comes To Periscope: Well, sort-of. Rather than streamers being able to, say, block comments based on tracking word usage or similar, comments on a livestream can instead be flagged as offensive on the fly – these comments will then be put to a random panel of viewers, who will determine whether the comments are or are not offensive; if they are decreed to so be, the poster will get bumped from the stream for a bit and the offending screed removed. Which sounds not only like a pretty clunky mechanic, but one RIPE for abuse; all you need is to organise a pile-on to a stream by a group of individuals who share a certain worldview and boom, you’ve skewed the makeup of the panel judging what is and isn’t offensive. FFS, TWITTER!

• Twitter Apparently Not Giving Up On Commerce: After the news the other week that the in-Tweet buy button had been mothballed, Twitter’s Head of Commerce Nathan Hubbard took the time this week to Tweet some #REALTALK (still by MILES the best hashtag ever, parenthetically) about how he sees the future of commerce on the platform. Basically, there will eventually be some sort of in-stream commerce solution, just not NOW. So that’s ok, then. What this showed most of all, though, is that Twitter’s a pretty bad place to post BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS – I don’t care who you are or what you’re saying, the whole Tweetstorm thing is not particularly readable. FFS, TWITTER!

• Snapchat Discover Possibly Getting Minor Redesign: You may be able to tell that we’re a little light on actual platform news this week, thank Christ. This SEISMIC RUMOUR suggests that the Snapchat Discover function, where PREMIUM CONTENT PARTNERS get to punt a selection of their stuff through Snapchat at eager MILLENNIALS salivating for TOP CONTENT, will soon be able to, er, choose a cover image for their Discover streams. Yep, that’s basically it. Nothing more to see here.

• Snapchat Inks Wimbledon Deal: God knows what the money was on this, but Snapchat will be broadcasting (is that the word? We probably need a new one) stuff from Wimbledon this year, featuring Stories from the Championships incorporating punter footage of matches along with BEHIND THE SCENES FUN. No doubt a whole host of players will be co-opted into signing up for this, and it makes sense – it’s the perfect setting for Snapchat to showcase how good it is at in-the-moment LIKE YOU WERE REALLY THERE fun, whilst at the same time allowing them to recoup some of the doubtless eye-watering fee paid to the tennispeople by selling ads against the Stories. I am intrigued to see how the numbers on this stack up against the Twitter / NFL partnership announced a few months back.

• Instagram Finally Launches Business Tools (But Not In UK)(Yet): THEY ARE FINALLY HERE! In the US, Australia and NZ, at least. As discussed in previous Curios, these will let Businesses have dedicated Instagram Pages, with their own ‘contact us’ buttons, proper analytics telling you how many people actually saw a post, etc, and, perhaps most interestingly, the ability to promote individual posts on Instagram, basically bringing the ad offering in line with that on Facebook rather than the rather clunky FB adjunct that it currently is. Coming to the rest of the world ‘this year’, apparently. I CANNOT WAIT.

• Reddit Launching Own Image Hosting: Basically you’ll imminently be able to upload images and gifs directly to Reddit rather than using Imgur – which is interesting mainly in terms of the effect it’s likely to have on Imgur’s viability and the fact that this may (note the very tentative nature of this statement) begin to usher in the possibility of more ads on Reddit in the form of preroll, etc, on stuff uploaded to the site.

• You Can’t Build Giant Ads In Minecraft Any More: Or indeed pay other people to build Minecraft versions of your product or whatever for commercial gain. Which I think is A Good Thing, but then again I probably would.

• City AM Goes Full Advertorial: If you do PR, this is BIG NEWS. Well, moderately big – it’s only City AM, after all. Basically they’re dropping the Chinese Walls between commercial and editorial, and thereby moving towards a model whereby anyone can write stuff for the website – to quote the piece, because frankly I can’t be bothered to rerwite it, “City AM will no longer be produced solely by the staff team (the company is 69-strong). From now on, articles will also be generated by a raft of new ‘contributors’, paid according to the number of page views they generate, and – most controversially – by corporate brands and their advertising and communications chiefs, who will be given direct access to the content management system (CMS) of the newspaper’s website.” The world doesn’t need another HOT TAKE on what this means for journalism, but can we all agree that ‘pay based on the number of clicks’ probably isn’t likely to be a mechanic through which the best quality journalism is delivered? Good. Anyway, as we await the transformation of City AM into the UK’s very own Breitbart (seriously, I can see this), let’s enjoy the raft of SPONSORED CONTENT coming our way.

• Google Website Tester: Another website by Google which tells you how good another website is on mobile vs desktop, and how quickly it loads on both. Useful primarily as a scaremongering tool through which you can, if you’re not totally dreadful at your job, sell clients with rubbish websites marginally less rubbish websites.

• Find YouTube Influencers: Well, allegedly – Peg is a service which lets you search for people who MAKE CONTENT on any given subject (and I mean any – I had NO IDEA there were so many woodwork influencers just WAITING to be thrown money by Ronseal). Could be useful, could not. THAT’S THE SORT OF INSIGHT YOU COME HERE FOR!

• It’s Meeker Time Again!: Another year, another collection of 200+ incredibly ugly slides (so unfair; and I get panned for verbosity) on THE STATE OF THE WEB AND STUFF by Mary Meeker. You can go through it yourself – you’re not paying me enough, or indeed at all, for me to do it for you – but there’s a whole load of data and stats about STUFF in there, not least the stagnation of the growth of the web as developed markets reach saturation, the growth of video as a communications medium (whodathunkit?) and the changing shape of search from text to image-based. Christ, though, can someone please give her a new template ahead of next year?

• Snickers Hungerithm: You’ve probably seen this, but in case not – smart promo from Snickers in Australia, linking the price of the bar in 7/11 stores across the country to how upset Twitter is at any given point – Twitter gets angry, the price falls (tying into their BRAND TRUTH about people getting angry when they’re hungry). At any given point during the diurnal RAGE CYCLE, users can print out a voucher redeemable at any of the stores which will let them buy the nutty glucoseturd at the price dictated by the app. Simple, clever, trackable – this is just really nicely done. Not sure how long this is going to be up for, so here’s a writeup in case it’s finished by the time you get to this.

• Cornetto Commitment Rings: A brilliant gimmick being wasted in a nonsensical brand promotion, this. These are rings which are designed to only let you stream certain shows on Netflix when they are proximate to each other – the idea being that you and your partner wear them to ensure that one of you can’t skip ahead in whatever faux-highbrow idiotbox marathon you’re currently in thrall to. Which is SUCH a lovely idea that I was genuinely quite angry when I discovered that it’s a promo for Cornetto. WHY?!?! What does this have to do with Cornetto? Aside from anything else, WHO eats Cornetto at home? NO FCUKER, that’s who. Actually getting pretty riled about this as I type, which is prettybleak for 737am on a Friday morning. Breathe, Matthew, breathe.

• This Was Louise’s Phone: Absolutely heartbreaking, this one. Louise is the name of a French girl who killed herself last year, following a concerted campaign of online bullying by her peers. This site, made with the approval of her family and in conjunction with anti-bullying charities, displays the abusive messages she was subjected to, with voicework by her dad. This ruined me. Lovely website, fwiw.

• Swiss Army Man: Promo site for the forthcoming film, which is included solely for the fact it lets you toss a ragdoll of the farting corpse of Daniel Radcliffe around the screen.

• Ogilvy Pipe: A N Other WPP Agency Ogilvy are doing an ACTUAL GOOD THING here. Pipe is the name for a programme they are running to offer access to the creative careerpath in advertising  to people who might not otherwise be able to access it. Anyone can apply for a 6-month internship, remunerated with the London living wage, as a creative with them – the only criteria is that applicants have to be over-18, but otherwise there are no caveats about level of education, experience, etc. If you know someone who can stand the soul-flaying horror of advermarketingprland, who wouldn’t be spun into a neverending cycle of existential angst by the fundamentally empty nature of the whole business, but who might not be able to get in via more traditional means, send this their way. It’s a lovely idea, and, my own cynicism about the industry left aside, should be applauded. More of this, please.

HOW’S ABOUT A NICE SELECTION OF NEW MUSIC SELECTED BY EXCELLENT GERMAN SITE NERDCORE? YES HERE YOU ARE THEN!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE JAPANESE KID HAS GONE FULL RAMBO OVER THE PAST WEEK IN THE FOREST, PT.1:

• Flow XO: The best description I can come up with for this is ‘IFTTT for bots’, which hopefully gives you a vague idea of how it works. It’s a SUPER-SIMPLE system which effectively lets you cobble together chatbots which launch or react to certain triggers you determine – so for example if someone tweets @ an account, or if you receive an email, etc – and can then be instructed to respond and react to basic inputs and queries. The interface is VERY easy to use, and a cursory play suggests you can cobble together some pretty useful things with little-to-no experience with this stuff whatsoever. Obviously not the solution if you want to build something truly fancy / revolutionary, but if you want to have a fiddle with chatbot tech in a safe and easy way, this is a good place to start.

• Build Your Own Go Robot: Seeing as we’re starting with bots, here’s another one. To quote, “BetaGo lets you run your own Go engine. It downloads Go games for you, preprocesses them, trains a model on data, for instance a neural network using keras, and serves the trained model to an HTML front end, which you can use to play against your own Go bot.”. I imagine that setting these all up to play each other in a tournament would be a beautiful and terrifying and possibly infinitely recursive spectacle. Someone please try it, whilst simultaneously not engendering the singularity. Thanks!

• Microsoft Flow: Another IFTTT thing (I’m presuming you all know what that is by now), this one really does seem to be a pretty straight rip of that service, offered this time by everyone’s favourite cuddly software behemoth. As far as I can tell, the main draw is the fact that you can make pretty complicated workflows which integrate into Salesforce and oh god I’m boring myself here.

• 1-855-LADYFUN: One of my favourite concepts of the week, this is SUCH a fun idea. 1-855-LADYFUN is a project by artist Joe Veix where he’s basically created a massive Choose Your Own Adventure-style story using automated phonelines – you know, the ones with the decision trees which fork based on you pressing ‘1’, ‘2’, etc, which takes you down a weird wormhole of twisted corporate presences, fictional companies and the like. I’m sort of amazed that more people haven’t done more of these – it’s a brilliant component in the whole TRANSMEDIA mix (do people still say transmedia, or have I just outed myself as being completely out of touch? Rhetorical, please don’t tell me).

• Anypixel: A really interesting code initiative by Google, which has open sourced script which lets you take any massive array of physical objects – say, LEDs or switches or buttons of whatever you fancy, in theory – and assign them pixel status, which means that you can create big, physical installations which can effectively behave like display screens, which is pretty cool I think. There’s a video on the site which explains all this far better than I can, fwiw, so go and look at that instead if you’re feeling upset and confused about this particularly mangled lump of prosedescription.

• Playfinders: Launched this week by former colleague of mine and FRIEND OF CURIOS (we have so few we like to capitalise them) Paul Drury-Bradley, Playfinders is a lovely project which seeks to create a digital archive of play and games from around the world – the idea being that anyone can upload details of a game played in their part of the world, thereby helping preserve the traditions of play for current and future generations. Such a nice idea, and potentially pretty useful if you have small kids and are feeling guilty about just sitting them in front of Minecraft over the past half term week.

• Eat, Sleep, Sh1t, Fcuk: After last week’s ‘HAPPY MAP OF TWITTER’, I was sent this by its creator Stuart Witts – it shows conversations on Twitter featuring mentions of any of these core fundamentals of human existence. Tells you literally nothing at all about anything, which is pretty much perfect as far as I’m concerned.

• US Commuter Maps: Yeah, OK, so I appreciate that the data here is…er…niche, given my likely readership, but I really like the interface and the way it’s displayed, so there. Select the state you want data on, and the county, and the map displays where people are travelling to and from on a daily basis – fine, not thrilling, but it just works, which is, sadly, not always the case with this sort of stuff. Good use of public data.

• HobbyEarth: A social network for people who love hobbies – which cannot help but remind me of Fist of Fun and its hobby expert Simon Quinlank, King of Hobbies and weak lemon drink aficionado (a reference which will be lost on almost all of you, I fear, but try this if you want a taste). Anyway, destined to never really take off, but if you have a particular niche interest (NOT LIKE THAT) and would like to see if you can find anyone who shares it on here then you may want to have a click around.

• Facebook Sixth Sense: I imagine that there’s a whole raft of comedians who have a ‘bit’ these days about how one of the BANES OF THE MODERN AGE is the ‘…is typing’ dots on messaging apps, which provide the delicious anticipatory thrill of FRESH ENGAGEMENT whilst at the same time leading to all sorts of second-guessing and anxiety about WHY ARE THEY DELIBERATING SO MUCH OVER THIS MESSAGE?!??! Facebook Sixth Sense is a Chrome plugin which takes this to the next level for Facebook and Messenger, alerting you not only to when someone is typing on the platform, but doing so EVEN BEFORE the chat window or message pops up. Which means, if you’re quick enough, you can scare the bejesus out of people by sending them a Whatsapp? Message asking ‘why are you messaging me on Facebook?’ before they’ve even sent their communication, guaranteeing that your more gullible friends think you are actually magic. It needs a build which automatically sends a “WHAT DO YOU WANT???” message to anyone who starts writing to you, just to scare them.

• Mouth Mover Animal Masks: Do you want a horrifyingly realistic animal mask whose mouth moves in time with yours when you speak? OF COURSE YOU DO.

• Central American Import/Export Maps: NO, WAIT, COME BACK! This is a simple little visualisation of imports and exports from Central American nations, which shows trades in a neat little map overlay animation (you need to actually tell it to display the map and start playing the data, otherwise it just looks like a blank screen). Not superoriginal or anything like that, but just shows that even the most ostensibly tedious information can be made internet friendly for basically no money these days. I’m pretty sure that none of my useless part-time colleagues read this, so I feel fairly safe here in saying “LEARN, YOU BOVINE DULLARDS”.

• Algodoo: This isn’t a new programme, but has recently been made COMPLETELY FREE – Algodoo is a pretty powerful and actually rather fun 2d physics simulator, letting you set up all sorts of Heath-Robinson-esque sequences involving falling sand, water, levers and the rest in virtual space. Aside from anything else, physics toys are just FUN – but as a modelling tool or educational resource it could also be pretty useful, I think.

• Explore Campaign Finance: A site which lets users delve into who has paid what to which US politicians to fund their campaigns – effectively aggregating a load of publicly available information on which lobbyists have their hooks into which politicos. The way the information is displayed and can be delved into is nice, and it would be quite interesting to see something similar based on, say, the Register of Members’ Interests here in the UK.

• 2d/3d Furniture: Tables, chairs, stools and the rest which you can hang on walls so that they look like 2d icons of themselves. Really clever design which I am rather taken by.

• Magenta: It’s one of those times when it seems that Google’s doing LOADS of cool stuff to counteract (or, depending on your point of view, augment) the creepiness of its day-to-day business. Witness Magenta, a programme backed by the Google Brain team, which is looking to explore, and shift, the boundaries between machine learning and the creation of ‘art’ (my inverted commas there), both visual and musical. Basically, they are teaching machines to make work – MENTAL. Want to have a listen to an original composition by a neural network? HERE YOU ARE! It’s, terrifyingly, almost-listenable.

• The Emoji Bible: As we progress towards a society where the written word is but a memory, and we all communicate using FCUKING EMOJI, the latest step in the inexorable march towards a totally visual culture. Props to the person who did this – sort of compelling as a weird webart project, though if you’re a believer I’m not 100% certain that it adds much to the general themes of the Good Book.

• First Voices: An interesting project designed to help preserve ancient native languages of peoples across North America, First Voices provides a comprehensive guide to Native American languages, and a selection of native language keyboards for people to download. If I were writing something about Native Americans this would be an invaluable resource for nailing language, etc, and as a general resource for linguistic scholars and the like this is pretty great. Also, the keyboads can help you learn, say, Inuit, which is pretty cool if of limited utility in London in 2016.

• Project Soli: More Google magic, this time coming from their Advanced Technology and Projects lab featured last week. Soli is a piece of kit which is working on purely gestural interfaces, to get us to the point where we will be able to control, say, webpage navigation simply by rubbing our fingers together in the manner of an old Jewish tailor fingering the shmutter. Is that a good thing? Who knows? GOOGLE KNOWS. GOOGLE KNOWS BEST. DO NOT QUESTION IT.

• Pessimizely: As anyone involved in online publishing knows, A/B testing gives THE BIG NUMBERS – trialling different headlines or webpages layout to different audiences simultaneously and then rolling out the ones which deliver the best traffic over a defined test window, is what pretty much all publishers do these days; this Chrome extension will tell you if a website you’re visiting is doing that to you, and display the different content you could be seeing as well as showing you how this differential content is being used to create custom audiences, etc. Won’t work everywhere as it’s only usable on sites running their A/B testing through Optimizely, but hugely interesting nonetheless.

• Grow Slow: Tweeting a picture of a fig tree, growing, once a day. The Slow Web at its finest.

• A Brilliant Ad Idea Based on Shadows and Graffiti: STEAL THIS SOMEONE IT IS GENIUS.

• Beautiful Old Colourised Photos: Marina Maral has done a gorgeous job here of taking old photos and imagining what the colours behind them were. This stuff often looks tacky and poorly photoshopped, but these are very well done indeed.

• Project Callisto: Well this is depressing – not the fact that it exists, but that it’s necessary at all. Callisto is a project deisgned to use digital to improve the rate of reporting of sexual assaults on US campuses – letting people who’ve been the victim of harassment or assault, regardless of gender, report the time, location and detail of the incident safely and anonymously. Whilst there are obvious concerns about the potential for false-blaming, it seems overall like an eminently sensible idea which you’d imagine being the sort of thing which will over time become the de facto way of reporting this sort of stuff.

• A Directory of US Payphones: Because you never know when you might be a bit fcuked and think “I know, I want to call a payphone in Nebraska and see who picks up”. Basically analogue chatroulette with fewer penises.

• The Ringer: Born from the ashes of Grantland, the Ringer is a new US site collecting writing on sport, pop culture, music, tech, data and all those sorts of things. Early days – it only launched this week – but the lineup of writers is strong and there’s already some decent writing on there.

• The Crisis Text Line: Basically the Samaritans, on text. Something that I know the Samaritans are working on delivering, being done already in the US. They’re actively looking to launch in other countries too, so if you’re reading this in a place you think might benefit, get in touch.

• Making Invisible: Inspired by a general sense of ennui with the use of the phrase ‘making the invisible visible’ this Twitter bots spits out pleasingly aphoristic statements along those lines – “making the unable able”, for example, or “making the ineffable effable”. You can probably find a strapline for your startup here should you need one.

• Civil War Tails: It’s rare that I think “You know what? That museum needs more cats”. This is probably why I am not considered a visionary in the same way as the person behind this INSANE museum in the US, which depicts some of the major conflicts of the US Civil War through the medium of carefully-constructed dioramas featuring…er…small, model cats, in uniform. Sort of like ‘The Life Of Christ In Cats’ of VIZ fame, except with Custer and, er, not a plate.

• The Universe of Miles: I’ve featured these Plygon visualisations before, but this one, exploring the impact of Miles Davis on culture of all stripes, is another wonderful piece of work. They do this stuff so, so well – fine, they obviously have a CMS which makes it relatively simple, but it’s so slick.

• GWBPLARP: A catchy title, sure, but I am only prepared to type ‘The George W Bush Memorial Library AR Project” once. Love this, though – such a clever use of AR and SUBVERSIVE TACTICS. Ellen Chenoweth has, using Layar, set up an alternative information trail through the GW Bush Memorial Library – users who have the app and are aware of the project can scan certain objects in the collection using Layar and will be given an alternative reading of their meaning and context, one which presents a different perspective from that given by the museum. SO SMART – I wish I’d thought of this, both as an art project and as a way of fcuking with an existing THING. This is eminently stealable as an idea, and can be applied to almost anything – there’s a GREAT piece of brand hijacking waiting to happen here for the right campaign organisation, I think.

• The Trump Chain: Trump as a blockchain expert. A single-gag Twitter feed which is sort of funny and weirdly plausible, which doesn’t say great things about blockchain zealots tbh.

• Simpsonwave: Combining the vaporwave glitch aesthetic with clips from The Simpsons and some sweetly wavey music, this is a rather wonderful playlist of YouTube videos which will almost certainly be projected onto the wall of some hipster houseparty this weekend while a bunch of people far cooler than me fall into their own private kholes.

• Islamophobin: Beautifully this is ACTUALLY FOR SALE – Islamophobin is chewing gum packaged up to look like a drug designed to combat Islamophobia – buy some today, and hand it out to anyone you see behaving like a racist prick (shout out the trendy-looking bloke in Holborn Sainsbury’s on Tuesday yelling at the woman in a burqa who was in the queue with him to “go back to her third world country”, this is for YOU).

• Text & Chill: File under ‘Should have been developed by Netflix’, this is a Facebook Bot which you can talk to to get film recommendations. Reviews I’ve read suggest it’s pretty good, and understands normal-ish language – you just tell it some films you like and why you like them, and it gives you suggestions of stuff along similar lines you might want to watch.

• Atelier Iwakiri: Click the link. Scroll down. Then MARVEL at these awesome leather handbags shaped like all sorts of rather wonderful animals. The hippo ones are AWESOME – it’s all in Japanese, so I have no clue at all whether they are a) mind-fcukingly expensive (but probably; b) shippable outside of Japan. Still, though, very cool.

WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR A COLLECTION OF EMINENTLY SAMPLEABLE FRENCH BOOGIE FROM THE 1980s? OF COURSE YOU WOULD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE JAPANESE KID HAS GONE FULL RAMBO OVER THE PAST WEEK IN THE FOREST, PT.2:

• Berghain Trainer: I get the impression that notorious Berlin techno’n’piss spot Berghain probably isn’t cool anymore among the cognoscenti, what with even people like me having known of it for a decade or so now. Still, if you want to experience the palm-dampeningly tense “WILL THEY VALIDATE MY EXISTENCE BY ALLOWING ME INGRESS?” moment when you confront notoriously judgmental doorman Sven, this website lets you do that very thing. Features VOICE RECOGNITION and all sorts of modern gubbins, but is actually pretty simple. Nicely made, though fails to capture the urea scent.

• Young Thug As Paintings: Classical paintings which look a bit (and I mean this loosely) like famously unintelligible rapper Young Thug (except mostly with fewer tatts).

• Screeners: A real-life art project rendering of the Ju Janta Peril Sensitive Sunglasses from Hitchhikers (which, you will recall, went completely black at the first hint of danger, stopping wearers from seeing whatever it was that they ought to be scared of and thus helping them remain calm); except they don’t go dark at sight or peril, they go dark at sight of SCREENS, thereby stopping wearers from immersing themselves in the digital when they should be enjoying the physical. Or something. Anyway, this is an artgag, but I do like the idea of applying this tech to, say, restaurants – imagine a booth fitted with cameras which dims the lights to the point of blindness at the first sign that either companion has their phone out. It would be GREAT (terrible).

• Kineman: BRILLIANT little web app which gives you a 3d model of a skeleton for you to pose however you like. Partly, obviously, a useful anatomical tool for demonstrating skeletal anatomy, but also a great way to make a picture of a skeleton, say, fingering its own bottom.

• The Der Sturm Archive: Scans of one of the preeminent journals of the expressionist movement in the 1930s, if you’re an art historian this is probably pretty cool, though you’ll need to speak German to read any of it.

• The Puff Up Club: I love this – my favourite online balloon-based participatory artwork of the week, which is saying a LOT. Part of an installation at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen/Basel, Switzerland, the piece consists of a balloon in a box which is inflated by people clicking on the ‘blow’ button on the website, which also features a livestream of the balloon; eventually it will be inflated enough to burst, at which point a new, larger balloon is fitted. Taking inspiration from those clicker games that were all the rage last year, I have no idea what the high concept is here, nor do I care.

• Rynkl: I basically stopped looking in the mirror about 9 years ago when I realised that the view simply wasn’t getting better, however many animals I sacrificed to the dark lord. If, though, you spend time scrutinising yourself in the vanitypool, watching for the inevitable signs of ageing to show and crying at the inexorability of time, then you may appreciate this – Rynkl is an app which basically tracks the development of wrinkles, sags and other signs of your body’s decay, and lets you measure them over time. WHY??? It doesn’t seem to be linked to a cosmetics brand or clinic, though that would be the obvious link. The list of feature benefits is GREAT – check these out: “keep a log and track the “wrinkleness” [sic] in vital areas of your face”; “evaluate the beneficial effects of multiple treatments”; “track how young you look compared to your friends and age group in general” – all guaranteed to make you feel FABULOUS!

• Fly By Night: It’s a FACT – pigeons are the new hotness. After LBI doing its pigeon pollution tracker gimmick earlier this year, we now have this initiative from NYC which is going to involve strapping a load of LED lights to pigeons to create lightshows when they fly. To whit: “Friday through Sunday evenings at dusk, a massive flock of pigeons will elegantly twirl, swoop, and glide above the East River, as Riley orchestrates a series of performances occurring regularly throughout late spring. At the call of a whistle, thousands of birds will emerge from their home in a grand, converted historic boat docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The pigeons will circle above the river as the sun sets over Manhattan, and small leg bands, historically used to carry messages, will be replaced with tiny LED lights, illuminating the sky in a transcendent union of public art and nature.” HOW AMAZING IS THIS???? Brands with a unique colour signature, GET ON THE PIGEON BANDWAGON.

• The Instamuseum: Turn your Instagram feed (or indeed any public one) into a 3d virtual art gallery thing, which features your ‘Grams hanging on the walls like the beautiful works of art they most surely are. I reckon there’s an INFLUENCER-LED DIGITAL CURATION FAN REWARD project you can spin out of this, probably, though having reread this phrase I’m no longer sure what, if anything, those words mean.

• Turkmenistan Is Empty: Mesmerising photoessay taking you, the reader, on a tour of the capital of Turkmenistan – Ashgabat is VERY shiny, but also very bereft of people, and looks like an insanely creepy place to visit (and, almost certainly, to live).

• Highscore Money: Remember the Million Dollar Homepage? Ten years on, we have a new version, and I am so, so bitter I didn’t think of it. The premise is simple – there’s a leaderboard, which anyone can be on – you pay money, and your donation determines how high up you rank. Simple, but it’s already netted the creator a few thousand dollars for doing NOTHING AT ALL. If you’re a funny brand with deep pockets there’s probably actually a bit of fun to be had here, probably.

• The Hotspot Poet: My favourite idea of the week, this – an art project which sets up dummy wifi hotspots whose names change every 10 seconds, through doing presenting line-by-line renderings of various works by various poets. SO MANY APPLICATIONS for this, not least as a cool Easter Egg in bars or galleries or theatres; chuck this in your next DECK (WHY IS IT CALLED A DECK NOONE HAS ADEQUATELY EXPLAINED THIS TO ME, STILL????) of ‘inspiring ideas you will never do anything with but which are arty and leftfield enough to make you feel momentarily clever’.

• The Sentence Tree: I love this. Type any sentence into this tool and it will break it down into its constituent parts, identifying the grammatical status of each word (noun, adverb, preposition, etc). Such a great teaching resource and if you’re a language nerd who’s surprisingly crap at knowing anything about English grammar (*ahem* me) genuinely fascinating.

• Music Map: A WONDERFUL ‘Taxonomy of all the musical genres’ map which combines far better UX/UI than I’ve seen in one of these before with beautiful curated playlists for each genre on both YouTube and Spotify. So, so nice, and makes me quite angry that Amazon never listened to me when I told them to build something like this 4 years ago to sell more digital records. WHY DOES NOONE EVER LISTEN? Again, rhetorical, please don’t tell me, I’m feeling fragile.

• Dolio: Right, I get it, we are ALL CYBORGS NOW (or Centaurs, if you’re a chessplayer). Still, I can’t be the only person who gets a very real frisson of horror at this, a so-called ‘Autonomous Self Agent’ which you can plug into your Facebook account and which, it promises, will do a really good job of behaving like you on the platform – liking posts, commenting, replying to messages, etc, all without you having to lift a finger. Can we take a moment to think on exactly how little engagement we have with our ‘friends’ when we feel the desire to outsource even the most light-touch of our interactions with them to a robot? Also, the strapline here – “You can be sure that the people you care about get the personal attention they deserve” – manages to be simultaneously so cold and SO CHILLING. And what if Dolio decides it knows better than you about who you should be friends with? What if it alters your social graph beyond all recognition? Actually there’s an interesting art project here about giving this control and seeing who notices, if anyone, and where it leads you, but it doesn’t make it any less FCUKING CREEPY.

• Teviot Tale: A comforting, human, interactive fiction hug to finish with, hopefully banishing memories of that HORRIBLE BOT. Teviot Tales is a project by artist Hannah Nicklin, exploring the people and places of the Teviot estate in Poplar through a story built on Twine. Lovely, charming and wonderfully personal in feel, this is beautiful digital art.

FINALLY ON THE MUSIC FRONT, SHALL WE GO WITH A SUMMERY MIX OF HIPHOP, GRIME AND ASSORTED OTHER SOUNDS BY MOF GIMMERS? WE SHALL!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Faces Of Louis Theroux: All of his lovely, confused, awkward faces. Do you think they are ever going air the Savile one again? I mean, I can see why they might not want to, but man would that make for fascinatingly grim forensic viewing now.

• Conversations With My Fake Boyfriend: Hollywood actors with imagined things that they might say if they were actually your boyfriend. They’re not, though, whatever you might tell yourself and whatever you decide to call your dildo.

• The Bright Side of Awful Things: Finding the joy is an important quality in life, one which I singularly lack. Perhaps I should take a leaf out of this site’s book, which brings nuggets of HAPPY INFORMATION about ostensibly rubbish things like, er, starvation.

• Arrested Westeros: GoT screencaps with Arrested Development captions. Literally NO IDEA whether this is funny or not, based on my ignorance of GoT, but anything to do with Arrested Development is generally pretty great.

• Bad Character Design: Taking apart bad character illustrations from comicbooks and videogames.

• 70s Scifi Art: You really don’t need more of a description than that, I promise you.

• You’re Gonna Die Here: I was convinced I’d linked to this before, but a cursory trawl of the archive suggests not – this Tumblr ‘celebrates’ the creepier listings on Airbnb, the ones that give the impression that the person listing the apartment might also be the sort of person to hide, naked, in the airvents, masturbating at you while you wash the dishes before dropping silently behind you to skin you alive and make your epidermis into a nice pair of monogrammed slippers. You know the sort.

• Redesigning the United States: New designs for the flags of each US state. A nice project which still can’t prevent the Dakotas from being almost entirely pointless.

• I See Bees: Just a whole LOAD of bee-related pictures and stuff, for all the beekeepers out there who I know follow Web Curios religiously.

• The World Cup Draw: Brilliant, beautiful drawings of footballers.

• Dads Are The Original Hipsters: Retro dads, looking cool. Nice pictures, and a nicely done variant on the standard Tumblr layout for all you styling aficionados.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Erotic Servers of Neverwinter Nights: NO, WAIT, COME BACK! Look, you don’t have to have any sort of interest in virtual sexplay in a virtual world to enjoy this piece, honest. The writeup of the author’s one and only visit to a ‘sexy’ server in original MMO Neverwinter Nights, this starts off as a general AHAHAHA LOOK AT THE FURRY WEIRDOS piece and ends up being something a lot more thoughtful about the nature of relationships and social interaction in virtual spaces. Also an excellent opportunity for me to remind you to read My Tiny Life, if you haven’t already, for what is STILL the best take I’ve read about the psychology of online communities.

• On Piaf: Review in the LRB of a recent biography of Edith Piaf, which does an excellent job in itself of presenting a picture of the artist-as-malleable-entity (/pretentious) as well as a total mess. How many car crashes? Oh Edith!

• The Afterlife of Polaroid: This is a great essay, looking at how Polaroid has managed, through the Impossible Project, to carry on its existence, and exploring the strange bridging point that it created between the old world of analogue photography and the existing immediacy and ephemerality of the photograph as unit of communication.

• The Bot Power List 2016: Included less because it’s fascinating per se, and more because this is potentially a sort of “Year 0” moment for the INEVITABLE RISE OF THE MACHINES. Are these the founding fathers of the coming bot imperium (no, no they are not).

• The Voice Actors of Videogames: It’s weird to consider that Nolan North is more famous than many actual, proper Hollywood actors and yet noone really knows what he looks like; what’s less weird and more unfair is the discrepancy between what actors such as North get paid for their v/o work in videogames compared to what they’d get for screentime. This is a fascinating piece looking at the strange world of demi-stardom inhabited by the pro game actor, with all of the perks and drawbacks it entails.

• Trump and the GOP Machine: Inevitable Trumpian long read #1 of the week, this piece looks less at the man (though the interview portion of this is pretty illuminating, I think) and more at the party which is struggling to work out how it can harness the juggernaut without destroying itself in the process. You don’t need an encyclopaedic knowledge of Republican Party mechanics to find this interesting, honest, and the questions it raises about how to ‘do’ political mobilisation on a mass scale in the modern era are as germane to us as they are to the US.

• Chatting With A Trumpboi:  Inevitable Trumpian long read #2 of the week, here we have a really interesting chat between the author, a left-leaning liberal, and a 22-year old male Californian who’s firmly intending on voting Trump. Intelligent and articulate on both sides, the crazy thing for me was the voter’s insistence that a vote for Trump was almost entirely borne out of what he sees as a need to rail against the insidious forces of political correctness. Do young, white men really feel so constrained in what they can say and where that they feel the need to rally behind an old white man famed for saying the unsayable (and often unthinkanble)? Well, yes, it would appear so. Scary stuff.

• The Racial Bias In Our Sentencing Machines: You think THAT was scary? Check this out! Software is being widely used in the US in order to help triage the criminal justice process by looking at an offenders demographic profile and using statistical analysis software to make predictions about the likelihood that an offender will reoffend, what sort of crimes they might be likely to commit inthe future, etc – which analysis is then being fed into the sentencing system. The only problem is, the software seems to be displaying an inherent bias against black and minority ethnic offenders within the system. GREAT!

• How The Internet Works: Super long, very technical but pretty exhaustive look at the actual hardware tech which underpins my ability to write this in the cloud and send it to the ether, and you in turn to read it on a phone. MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT.

• Playing Golf on Acid With Hunter S Thompson: It’s a good anecdote, this one, and ends, as all good anecdotes should, with some geese being worried with a shotgun.

• We’re Looking For Writers…: McSweeney’s once again nail the modern age with this piece on the great opportunities being afforded to young writers to create CONTENT. CONTENT! WE LOVE CONTENT!

• Betting Shop of Horrors: Pretty horrible depiction of the risks run by staff in modern high street betting shops in the UK, which also takes in a broader look at the state of the market, why they proliferate so on UK high streets (a side effect of the way Fixed Odds Betting Terminals work, apparently, which means you need lots in different locations to turn a profit), and a happy reminder of exatly what a filthy, grubby industry the bookmaking one is (and I say that as someone who’s worked with bookies, to my shame).

• We R Cute Shoplifters: Lifting the lid on the Tumblr Bling Ring, those teens on the platform sharing the tales of their ‘lifts’ – the shoplifting hauls they share as a community.

• The Madman as a Painter: Fascinating portrait of little-known (to me, at least) artist Richard Dadd, who painted pretty dense, weird pictures and who by all accounts was totally and utterly mad. Not only interesting in terms of content – Dadd really was something of a character, albeit a slightly murderous one – but also in terms of the questions it raises about whether the value of the art means that it was better that Dadd wasn’t treated with modern pharamceuticals, etc, which might have made him significantly less, well, stabby, but would also have stifled the impulses which led him to create.

• Hillary Vs Herself: Back to US politics, and another profile of a Clinton – this time, though, it’s Hillary, profiled by someone who confesses to never have really warmed to her and who ends the piece by seeminly just sort of feeling sorry for the woman and her seemingly insurmountable challenge connecting with audiences at scale which is costing her in the campaign.

• Being John Hinckley: You may not remember who John Hinckley is – I certainly didn’t before reading this. He’s the man who tried to shoot Ronald Reagan bitd, and this is the story of what happens to someone after they’ve tried to kill the POTUS. Really sad, actually, in the way that portraits of the deeply ill and lonely always are – turns out you pretty much screw your life when you attempt to pop the most powerful man in the world, so, er, DON’T TRY IT, KIDS.

• 13 Right Now: Another in the seemingly interminable list of pieces examining the lives of teens in the connected age – this one again is a white American girl, so par for the course, but as with all the others it’s grimly, bleakly fascinating (although if you already have a 13 year old of your own you can probably skip this).

• Being The Hot Felon: Remember Jeremy Meeks, the mugshot that launched a thousand ships? He’s out now, though still not totally free, and making his first tentative steps into the world of modelling. This is a weirdly sad piece, painting a picture of an awful lot of predatory people around him looking to profit from the 15 minutes and possibly not having quite as much care for Meeks as one might wish – the whole deal about the man wanting to get rid of his tatts to break with his criminal past, and his agent’s reaction to that (vis a vis his bad boy appeal) is about as cheering as you’d expect. Good luck Jeremy, you beautiful bastard.

• Juarez Returns To Life: Finally in the longreads this week, a wonderful piece looking at Ciudad Juarez, the Northern Mexican town which in the past decade became a byword for all that was wrong with the country – one of the world’s murder capitals, a place from which women and girls were regularly disappeared, inspiration for a whole section of 1666 by Roberto Bolano, it turns out that Juarez is now practically a paragon of civic order (practically). Loads of interesting stuff here, from the photography to the practical steps taken by the city’s governors, to the throwaway line about one of Juarez’s major problems being its proximity to a neighbour with a near-limitless appetite for drugs and inadequate anti-gun legislation (that would be America). A great piece of foreign reporting, this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT THIS IS AN ACTUAL PRO-GUN ADVERT AND NOT SATIRE!

1) First up, a beautiful and slightly glacial track with a beautiful video of digital foxgloves. Give it a few minutes – it goes all interestingly chopped and screwed halfway in. This is ‘Take A Chance’ by Flume:

2) Next up, the most stylish video I’ve seen in a while – this really is absolutely beautifully shot, and a perfect accompaniment to another slightly cold-feeling track by Son Lux, this called ‘Cage of Bones’. There’s some ‘artistic’ female nudity at the end, in case you care about that sort of thing one way or another:

3) I really, really hate this song, but can’t not include the video because it’s so brilliantly internet – as one of the comments describes it, it’s like the final boss of some fashion catwalk dance videogame thing. The song really is GARBAGE, though – it’s by Danny L Harle and it’s called ‘Ashes of Love’:

4) Eskimo Snow by Why? is still one of my favourite albums of all time, and as such I will happily follow anything lead singer and driving force Yoni Wolf does – this is his latest project, a collaboration called Yoni & Geti, and this is ‘Madeline’ which I promise will reveal itself to you as a perfect, melancholic pop song after a couple of listens. The video’s super-hipster, but then it was always going to be:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! The world of English language hiphop’s not exactly overflowing with Asian rappers; this is Dumbfoundead with ‘Safe’, an excellent rant against the lack of representation for Asians in Hollywood and a good video to boot:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! Is this the first anti-Donald track since he secured the nomination? Probably not, but it’s the first one I’ve heard and it’s actually halfway decent in a sort of ‘Dear God, it’s all fcuked’ way, by way of the early 2000s. This is called ‘Goodnight America’ by Until The Ribbon Breaks:

7) NEW AVALANCHES! As pointed out to me by Rishi, it’s 16 years since Frontier Psychiatrist which makes me feel SO OLD. Anyway, this is Frankie Sinatra, featuring hipster favourite MF DOOM and gaptoothed rap oddity Danny Brown, and it’s generally excellent:

8) Finally this week, the best animated tale of animal infidelity and murder you will ever see. This is SO DARK, and I really do mean that – the atmosphere is poisonously oppressive in the best possible way. It’s called ‘Chaud Lapin’ – ENJOY! BYE HAPPY WEEKEND BYE!!!!

LET’S START WITH THE NEW MIXTAPE FROM RELIABLY ODD SAFFER RAPPERS DIE ANTWOORD!

THE SECTION WHICH IS INCREASINGLY DISAPPOINTED AT THE LACK OF CREDENCE GIVEN TO IT AS AN ‘INFLUENCER’ AND WISHES TO ONCE AGAIN REITERATE ITS WILLINGNESS TO SHILL RUBBISH ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR PENNIES:

• Twitter Changes The 140 Character Thing: It was promised, and LO! it came to pass that Tweets will no longer count images, polls and @usernames in the 140 character limit, thus magically making Tweets RICHER and MORE ENGAGING and causing them to be even more PLUMP WITH JUICY CONTENT than they ever were before. Annoying that they didn’t remove external urls from this, as that would have been ACTUALLY USEFUL, but I no longer expect these updates to improve the platform. Beautifully, the changes (which you can read a nice easy to read breakdown of here) also include the ability to RT oneself, overnight becoming a brand new indicator of someone being an insufferable prick, and, most dreadfully, the ability to tag upto 50 @usernames in a tweet, thereby turning the service into one of those mass-CC email chains that you can never, ever escape from. Which is exactly what everyone was clamouring for, so THANKS TWITTER!

• Bye Buy Button: Whilst unveiling this cornucopia of feature goodness (truly, you spoil us!), Twitter’s also apparently quietly shelved (or at least temporarily mothballed) plans to introduce in-Tweet commerce, with most of the team working on the mooted ‘Buy’ button for Tweets (letting users purchase products with one-click from within the app) either leaving the company or moving to other products. Which strikes me as a frankly baffling move, but I’m going to respectfully accept that the people running Twitter might just be a *touch* better at business than me and wait for proof that they were right all along *waits*.

• Spotify Now Embeds In Tweets: It does! Playlists! BRANDS, SHARE YOUR PLAYLISTS WITH EVERYONE! This is nice, and A Good Thing, but as ever with halfway-positive Twitter announcements it feels a touch like a plaster on an axewound. Still, BRANDED PLAYLISTS!!!!!!

• Facebook Lets Users Livestream CONTINUOUSLY!: Facebook has removed the limit on how long a live stream on the platform can last, meaning that you can now use it for all your ‘wait and see’ exciting webcam moments, like waiting for some Golden Eagle eggs to hatch or streaming some newborn puppies or somesuch (I don’t know why, but all I can think of is animal stuff here). The tradeoff is that streams of over a certain duration won’t be saved for replay at a later date, but that’s OK, right? Useful alternative to setting up webcam livestreams over long periods of time, this.

• Facebook Live Video Getting Soundcloud-like Reactions, Etc: Clever idea, this – Facebook Live will soon show at what point in a stream most users were watching, letting people playing the stream back skip straight to the ‘good’ bits, meaning that if you’re really cheap you needn’t even edit the footage down as people will be able to fast forward straight to the point where the watermelon bursts (for example). Which is nice.

• Facebook Audience Network Expands: Facebook Audience Network (as discussed last week, the bit of Facebook’s advertising setup which shows ads to users on third party websites or apps) will now show ads to users who don’t have a Facebook account. Which is really big, as it means that now you can reach EVERYONE IN THE WORLD by advertising through Facebook. Which is pretty crazy, really. But, look, you can now put Spotify in Tweets! Wait, come back!

• Emoji Stickers Now Available on Snapchat: Look, I don’t care either but we have to feature everything about Snapchat as it is now THE LAW.

• The Snapchat XMen Filters: Although if it keeps on pulling stunts like this then THE KIDS will all flee like startled fauns (nice imagery, eh? Come for the social media news, stay for the weird classical allusions!); this is the platform taking ALL OF THE MONEY from the new XMen movie which resulted in all Snapchat filters being replaced for 24h with special, bespoke XMen ones. Which must have cost the studio a VIOLENT amount of cash, and all just to annoy a bunch of kids who had to do without dogface selfies for a day.

• Ad Pins Coming To Google Maps: I think this is REALLY BIG. Google announced a whole load of updates to adwords, etc, none of the rest of which interested me enough to write about them individually, one of which was this BOMBSHELL – businesses will now be able to pay to have themselves featured on Google Maps as large pinned adverts when users are browsing the digital cartographic service nearby. Which, if you’re a large chain of retail outlets or restaurants or a bar or frankly anything with a real-world location, is pretty useful stuff I think.

• Reddit Creates Own Photo-upload System: Not particularly interesting per se, but probably signals at least beginning of the end for Imgur as somewhere it’s worth spending your marketing / ad budget.

• Levis x Google = Future: Hugely smart marketing by Levi’s, which has teamed up with the futuristic bit of Google (yes, ok, the more futuristic bit) to create this prototype of a digitally-enabled conductive jacket for cyclists (based on the Project Jacquard prototype stuff showcased next year), letting you the wearer do things like, say, answer your phone, or turn your music up and down, simply by fiddling with the cuffs of your pressed denim. This is superfuture and exciting and a really smart piece of PR, and amazingly this is apparently going to go on sale next year. HELLO FUTURE!

• Cheese And Burger: I am a firm fan of ostensibly tedious organisations and companies doing surprisingly good stuff online – step forward the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, the most glamorous of ALL the dairy promotion bodies worldwide, who have EXCELLED with this website promoting Wisconsin-made cheese by celebrating the cheeseburger in a preposterous variety of incarnations. It’s slick, nicely-designed, reasonably funny (the voice-over’s pretty good, honest), and made me really, really want a cheeseburger (though I confess to not giving a flying one as to where the cheese comes from). A nice example of how to make something interesting from unpromising material.

• Reword: Another rather nice digital antibullying initiative from Canada (which may or may not be tied into the clever retargeting tactic from last week), this plugin works to prevent you (or, more probably, your offspring) from typing certain words or phrases when online. It works with Facebook, YouTube and some other sites, and will point out when users type hatespeech, swears and the like, encouraging them to take a long, hard look at what they’re writing and why. Which is lovely, although the fact that it won’t work on mobile, which is where we all spew most of our hate from these days, makes it sort of redundant on reflection.

• The Airbus Annual Report:I’m torn here – on the one hand I am all for people attempting to make tedious things like an annual report more interesting by chucking them on the internet; on the other, you’d sort of hope by so doing you wouldn’t render them borderline unreadabl as appears to be the case here. Fine, you can use the menu at the bottom to navigate the site without all the silly ‘scroll to FLY!’ UI rubbish, but you can’t seem to export any of the charts or figures or anything like that, which is the sort of thing you’d think analysts might be rather into. Total style over substance – though I concede it’s nicely built – which is a shame, I think. Wonder how much this cost, out of interest?

• Pay Your Selfie: The race to the very, very bottom of the ‘influencer’ barrel continues apace, with this latest attempt to turn everyone you know into a sales agent for A N Other deeply uninspiring brand of consumer tat. Pay Your Selfie lets users sign up to participate in SPONSORED DEALS, whereby they take photos of themselves ENJOYING A SPECIAL MOMENT WITH THEIR FAVOURITE BRANDS and posting it on social channels; they then get paid by said brand, via this sodding website, for having delivered an adequate piece of branded content to their ‘friends’. The going rate for this is $1 per branded selfie, which frankly seems like a lot less than the 30 pieces of silver Judas got for selling out his mate to the interests of The Man of the time (SATIRE!). Brands – if your agency suggests this stuff, they’re dicks. Just so’s you know.

AGEING RAVERS, AND IN FACT ANYONE ELSE, SHOULD ENJOY THIS RECENT MIX BY EVERLIVING DJ SASHA!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY CONVINCED THAT THIS IS A NEW LOW FOR SOCIETY, PT.1:

• Happy Hour: A frivolous project by Splash Worldwide which visualises HAPPY TWEETS around the world, on a map. Pleasingly retro – look! Tweets on a map! – but also, you know, HAPPY AND POSITIVE, and as such should be celebrated. Given that these things are now pretty easy to churn out, at least on a basic level, can someone please create a simple template for building them? I’d love a tool which let you quickly and simply build a realtime ‘mentions of X popping up on a map’ thing, ideally one with NO FILTERS whatsoever so I could get a facefull of human dreadfulness whenever I wanted.

• Ludwig: An interesting project, this, designed primarily for those for whom English isn’t a first language but generally useful for all who use the language; Ludwig is a program, currently in Beta, which lets users search for contextual examples of language usage – so you type in a sentence or phrase, and it gives you examples of that phrase being used, or phrases similar to it, to help you better understand how it can and should be deployed. There are translation functions there too, and some rough thesaurusing, which makes it really useful as a teaching aid, I think.

• A Mini Multiverse: I am obviously feeling a touch emo this week; ordinarily I would scoff at this tiny little illustration and accompanying website as being too twee for life, and yet something about its description about the nature of interest bubbles rather *got* me. Really rather sweet.

• The Vice Magazine Headline Generator: I’ve played around with this a bit now, and it STILL hasn’t churned out “We sacked our UK editorial team and spent the money on a private jet!”, which frankly is disappointing me a LOT.

• Li.st: Kind of baffled by this one – at what point have you, gentle reader, thought “You know what we really need? We need a Medium for LISTS OF THINGS, that’s what we need!’? No, I thought not, and yet here we are. List lets you…er…write lists of things. Which struck me as eminently pointless, and then I saw this list of things Anthony Bourdain thought about hanging out with Obama in Vietnam going everywhere this week, and McSweeney’s using it too, and though that maybe there’s something in it. Whether it’s just got decent NEW THING buzz about it, or whether the platform facilitates discovery of GOOD CONTENT, it might be worth playing around with if you need yet another place to put your FCUKING BRANDED CONTENT.

• Mind Webs: There are, I have decided, simply not enough places online which offer a massive archive of free-to-stream bedtime story-type audio out there. WHY IS THIS SO? Everyone loves a bedtime story, don’t pretend you don’t. Anyway, no idea whether this is yout idea of comforting eventide listening, but this here is a WONDERFUL collection of old and not-so-old scifi stories, read by all sorts of acting luminaries and all collected in one place, available to stream for aboslutely no cashmoney whatsoever. There’s about 80-odd hours of scifi recordings here, so enough to keep you going until someone finally accedes to my selfish demands and creates the Jackanory archive for adults online somewhere.

• Angry Nerd Socks: This link isn’t an endorsement – most of these I think are just a bit sort of pathetic really, and of the SWEARING IS COOL, YEAH! (ahem, yes, point taken) variety, but some of you may like these slightly angry-twee socks with slightly sweary designs. I’m linking to them, though, mainly as I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite as poignantly pathetic as a pair of socks which feature the proudly-embroidered statement ‘You’re not the boss of me!” placed in such a fashion that it’s totally invisible when shoes are worn. YEAH! YEAH! TAKE THAT, AUTHORITY FIGURES! Such wonderfully shit rebellion.

• Molekule: Do you ever worry that you’re not wasting enough money on pointless, first-world-problem-solving gadgets from the internet? Well fear not, as each week Web Curios will endeavour to bring YOU the reader the very best of insanely overpriced moneywasting gewgaws, ideally internet-connected ones for added pointlesslols. This week, we present Molekule (yes, that’s exactly how they spell it), an air purifying system connected to the web, which tells you when you need to change its filters (because a little flashing light is no longer future enough) and which purports to break down pollutants AT A MOLECULAR LEVEL, thereby PERMANENTLY ELIMINATING THEM. Now I’m no scientist, but surely if this tech has been developed for the domestic market then you’d think that, perhaps, we could maybe work to apply it to more important places than the homes of rich urbanites in the continental US? No? Oh, fine, as you were, then. What I particularly like is the homepage using the unit’s ability to break down E.Coli bacteria as an example – YES, BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT WE ALL HAVE FLOATING AROUND OUR HOUSES, RIGHT?

• FWRDTO.ME: Nice little Chrome extension which lets you email links to yourself with one click. Useful.

• The Dolls Of Noel Cruz: Noel Cruz is a very, very talented man who is also obviously some sort of obsessive; he takes Barbie dolls and then painstaking carves them to resemble famouses, but with a truly staggering degree of skill. This is both awesome and beautifully mad – tell me you don’t want one of the Diana dolls staring out at you from your shelves? Cruz does take commissions, so you may want to start saving now for whenever your plastic wedding anniversary is (or possibly get a doll commissioned as a comp prize for a fandom, I don’t know).

• Webgazer: Techy-but-potentially-useful, Webgazer is publicly available / accessible eyetracking code for browsers, available on Github, meaning that anyone can easily and cheaply integrate eyetracking tech into their website. I think there’s some really nice campaigning stuff you can do with this – perhaps showing people how they naturally focus on certain information on a page, for example, or games, or all sorts of stuff. Means you can add eye tracking to the list of ‘cool gimmicks you will mention in brainstorms and client meetings and which noone will ever sign off because they are all idiots and don’t understand that you’re a visionary oh god why does noone ever take me seriously’.

• Scribble: Cute little audiotoy which lets you make looping audio track based on doodline to create a harmony. Which is a dreadful description, which is why you should click the link and play with it rather than relying on me to spoonfeed you everything you pathetic whelps.

• Secret Marathon: Are you one of those weirdos who actively pursues physical pain and discomfort through running preposterous distances whilst people less fit than you yell at you to KEEP GOING? Would you like to do some MORE RUNNING, but as part of a secret, non-corporate project to RECLAIM THE MARATHON from the interests of corporate sponsors and the like? This is probably for you, then – Secret Marathon will take place…er…somewhere in London this Autumn. Allegedly – this could of course all be a clever datacapture stunt for some sportswear brand, so, as ever, caveat emptor and the rest.

• Hulten: Have you ever wanted to relive your childhood by having an old arcade machine, but think that they’re just not quite aesthetically up to snuff? Well why not drop several thousand quid on these bespoke miniature arcade machines, done in all sorts of nice wooden finishes by a PROPER CRAFTSMAN? Leaving aside, obviously, the insane pricetags. These are undeniably lovely, but SO expensive – perfect for the manchild in your life who has EVERYTHING (once you’ve splurged on the Molekule thing above, obvs).

• Spacehack: Do you LOVE space? To the extent it’s possible to love an infinite expanse of nothing whose very existence serves only to forever remind us of our own infinitesimal role in the majesty of creation, or course you do! Spacehack is a handy website which collects a host of ways in which YOU, webmongs, can get involved in the majesty of space exploration, linking out to all sorts of sites which let you explore photo of space, planets, and the like, and assist NASA and other organisations in identifying, say, features on the surface of the red planet. If you or your kids are into this stuff, this is a great resource.

• Google Advanced Technology and Projects: I mentioned the Google wearable tech project Jacquard thingy up there; this website collects information on all of Google’s most future initiatives, and is an excellent place to spend 5 minutes and get a proper frisson of scififutureisNOW-ness (an actual term, that, I think you’ll find).

• Web Up Time: SO DULL, this, but potentially really useful if you have a whole bunch of sites worldwide which you’d like to ensure don’t fall over; Webuptime is a service which will monitor all of your domains on a minute-by-minute basis and alert you should any of them stop working for whatever reason. Helpful-if-tedious.

• Pungen: This site will generate a seemingly-infinite number of ‘puns’ (are these puns? I don’t think these are puns) of the form “You put the X in Y” – most are nonsensical, but you do get the occasional gem; I for one would love to have the opportunity to deploy ‘You put the ‘sting’ in ‘thrusting’’ in real life. Needs a Twitter bot, tbh.

• Botmoji: VITAL TWITTER BOT DEVELOPMENT! Botmoji will, if you tweet it an emoji, tell you what that emoji is. It won’t, sadly, shed any light on exactly what nuanced message your interlocutor was attempting to convey with their use of ‘spangly explosion’ or whatever the fcuk they sent you, but at least you’ll be able to identify exactly what is confusing you.

• Daily Doodlegram: Geffen Raffaeli is an illustrator who each day doodles something inspired by a post she’s seen in her Instagram feed and then posts them in her feed. The sort of thing it would be really rather nice to do if you had access to a famous or an artist or something for a while – SURPRISING AND DELIGHTING people by making work based on their output. Go on, someone do this, it’s a GREAT idea.

• The Sound of Cern: We’re rapdily approaching the point whereby all data that can possibly be converted to audio will have been, and where the sound of the London Stock Exchanged, live-mixed by David Guetta, will be used to fuel the dancefloors of Tokyo nightclubs (actually sort of love the horror of this idea, on reflection) – this is the latest in the endless line of ‘let’s turn numbers into sound!’ sites, which on this occasion is using live data pulled from CERN to generate the pleasingly and surprisingly ambient soundscapes you’ll hear if you press play. Actually not all that unpleasing on the ear, though a touch on the intermittent side – this is what PHYSICS sounds like, kids!

• Rex: Rex is the latest in the seemingly-infinite list of ‘new social networks noone ever asked for and which people continue to churn out in the mistaken belief that theirs is the platform which will take off and change their lives forever’; the gimmick here is that it’s designed solely to share recommendations with friends and peers, which is OBVIOUSLY something you can’t do anywhere else and which OBVIOUSLY required its own standalone platform. Obviously. Look, it’s a nice idea, but do we really need another app for this when you can just ask Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Jelly, Snapchat, Quora, Tripadviser….you get the idea.

• Mount Improbable: So this is a promo for charmless, one-note God-denier (and, er, scientist) Richard Dawkins’ works on evolutionary biology, published by Penguin 30 years ago. The gimmick is that they have cleaned up the code used by Dawkins 30 years ago to simulate evolutionary patterns and genetic transference, and are now letting YOU AND I play with them – the further gimmick being that you can win the chance to have YOUR evolutionary design featured on the cover of the reissue of the books. This is lovely, however much of a cock you think Dawkins is (nothing to do with his atheism, more the fact that he seems incapable of realising that militant atheism is EXACTLY THE FCUKING SAME AS BLIND FAITH IN A SUPREME BEING, and is so utterly humourless about everything).

• Grimemon: Because everyone, and I mean everyone, needs a set of cards with classic Pokemon reimagined as the today’s grime stars. Big Narstie as Snorlax is a particular favourite of mine.

HOW’S ABOUT SOME RATHER LOVELY TECH-HOUSE MIXED BY NICK WARREN? GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PRETTY CONVINCED THAT THIS IS A NEW LOW FOR SOCIETY, PT.2:

• Electric Object Museum Collections: I think I featured Electric Objects when they launched YEARS ago – these are those hi-res digital photo frames which come with a a sales programme allowing you to buy digital art downloaded straight to your wall-mounted display. This week they announced a series of partnerships with a load of museums, meaning you can temporarily rent a variety of classic artworks in digital form to have hanging on your walls. I think there’s something rather nice about the idea, though Brian Sewell (God rest him) would no doubt have something pithily vituperative to say about it.

• Buy Brutalist Papercraft: I featured something like this last year, but it was only proof-of-concept I think – you can now BUY paper models of Brutalist buildings from around Europe, including London, so you too can have a concrete horrorscape arrayed in miniature across your mantel. Rather lovely, these.

• My Gululu: So much to hate about this, not least the name, My Gululu (it makes me feel a touch sick just typing it; it REALLY makes me think of the sound of someone just about to vomit) is a SMART WATERBOTTLE (yes, again) designed for children, to gamify the act of drinking and make it FUN. Really? We really need a digitally-enabled bottle to make children drink more? Are all middle-class Westenr children becoming horrifically crippled and stunted by dehydration? They’re not, are they? NOOONE NEEDS THIS THING! Also, you just know that the whole ‘tap bottles together to make your waterbottle tamagotchi knock-offs become friends’ thing won’t work properly, and that kids will just fill the sodding things up with sugarwater in any case. IT WON’T STOP THEM FROM BEING FAT, YOU KNOW.

• 42: This is quite odd. 42 is a…school? University? Cult? No idea, but it’s in the US now and coming to Europe soonish. Basically it’s a sort of unofficial university which teaches people how to code – the schtick is that it’s pretty much all taught digitally, with little to no actual teaching, and the recruitment process is BRUTAL, with 40,000 applicants each of the past few years for what are a handful of places. Really interesting idea, though, particularly the ‘learn through exploration’ model which they espouse; you can read a proper explanation of what it is and how it works here, should you wish.

• Armageddon Painted: Staggering bodypaintingartperson on Instagram, who’s not only very good at what she does but is also only 16. FFS. You can see a whole load of video tutorials on her YouTube channel if you’re into this sort of thing – they’re really rather good.

• Dungeons & Donald: A Twitter account combining the increasingly frightening lunatic pronouncements of The Donald with gags about Dungeons & Dragons, which is admittedly a pretty niche gagset but one which I am sure will appeal to at least three of you out there (you know who you are).

• The Museum of Obsolete Media: Possibly THE most digitartwankeryish website on here this week, the Museum of Obsolete Media seeks to house and record files in all those physical and digital formats which no longer exist. You want to find information about old audio and video filetypes? GREAT!

• Fair Warning: Digital art project being run by the Whitechapel Gallery (which I visited again this week and was reminded just how great it is), which “encourages viewers to participate by responding to a series of over 300 questions which range from colour preferences, politics and emotions to the latest trends in the art world. Playing with our expectations of traditional online questionnaires or personality tests, it examines the value and use of data collection when attempting to represent user tastes and asks whether an objective way of measuring the value of art exists.” So there. YOU CAN BE A PART OF AN ARTWORK, KIDS – all the data gathered by this is being displayed as part of the in-situ installation running at the Gallery til July.

• Lost America: Glorious, eerie and oddly scifi photography of America’s disappearing midwest, the abandoned hinterlands which are exactly where the scared and the disenfranchised are finding hope in the xenophobe with the bouffant hair. Heavily colourised and altered, but these are wonderful.

• Snips: The rest of this year is going to be characterised by a near-infinite number of bots and not-very-smart-tech masquerading as AI – here’s another! In its defence, Snips does look rather useful – the idea is that it’s a local knowledge graph for your phone, which learns what you do and what you have on the device so that it can start to help you find information on your phone and make recommendations for you, much like Google Now but without the overarchingly creepy feeling of Skynet reading your mail. All the info about your personal stuff is apparently only ever stored locally, so there should be fewer fears about this data being used to sell you more stuff – but let’s be clear that T&Cs can always be changed…

• Take Me Anywhere: Thespian failure and artistic nonentity Shia Lebouf, and the rest of his ‘art collective’ who are NO WAY using him as a passport to notoriety otherwise unavailable to them through their mediocre conceptual ‘artworks’, present their latest gimmick, which involves them hitchhiking around the US for a period of time, broadcasting their coordinates via this website and taking a lift from the first person to pick them up; the whole journey will be documented, with the resulting material forming the lasting body of the work. Can the web please agree to just leave them stranded somewhere, please? STOP VALIDATING BAD ART MADE BY FAMOUSES.

• Bloopdance: Load this up on your phone, and turn YOUR phone into an in-no-way-annoying synthtoy, which bloops and burbles based on how you wave it around. Actually pretty fun for 5 minutes, and the sort of thing that it might be quite fun to incorporate into a wider interactive music video type thing – maybe allow people to be Bez or something (I’m a child of the 90s, what can I say?)?

• The Rabid Puppies: Not in fact anything at all to do with hydrophobic canines, this is instead the website of WORLD-FAMOUS author of pulp erotica Chuck Tingle, best known as the ‘mind’ behind such classics of eroticism as ‘Pounded in the Butt by my own Butt’. Small, but perfectly formed, and contains a load of gags about the recent Nebula Awards controversy if you followed that as a THING – here’s an explanation as to why this website is a perfectly-formed FCUK YOU to all the strange and pathetic manboys who are weirdly incapable of dealing with women’s involvement in their boys’ club scifiworld, should you want one.

• Overnight: Have you ever wanted the exciting, slightly random “stay in a stranger’s house” excitement of Airbnb, but are too much of a free spirit to commit to such banal, bourgeois, things as ‘planning a holiday’? Excellent, you will LOVE Overnight, then – a service which works in basically exactly the same way as Airbnb but which instead of making you book in advance lets you try and find a place to stay nearby RIGHT NOW. The service links to your Facebook profile to ostensibly weed out the real weirdos (because there are no weirdos on Facebook), but I can’t be alone in thinking that this is basically either a recipe for murder or a really excellent way of circumventing whatever local laws may exist against prostitution. Can I? Oh, maybe I can. Sorry.

• Terrapattern: Rather smart visual search engine thing, currently in beta and only working for certain bits of the US, which lets you identify a certain thing on Google Maps and which will then search for other examples of that thing based on its ability to recognise the image on the satellite view. So, for example, you could use it to identify weapons depots in Iraq so that you didn’t bomb any baby milk factories by accident (topical reference to Gulf War 1 there!), or, er, some other use case I can’t quite come up with right now.

• Predominantly: I don’t really know why you’d need this, but I am glad that it exists. Predominantly presents you with a colour palette from which you can pick any hue – it then spits out all the albums it can find whose colours match the shade you’ve chosen. So I suppose if you were looking to select LPs for a house with a ridiculously draconian aesthetic it might be useful. You can also save the output as a spotify playlist – which if I worked for a paint brand (HELLO PERSON FROM FARROW & BALL WHO I KNOW READS THIS) I would totally be ripping off / using here.

• Legal Name Fraud: Not new, this, but pleasingly mad nonetheless – this is the website of a bunch of people who believe – for reasons they are seemingly incapable of explaining – that one does not ‘own’ one’s ‘legal name’ and that as such one is being CONTROLLED BY THE FORCES OF THE STATE or somesuch. Brilliant, incomprehensible, swivel-eyed conspiracy-theory lunacy here, of which this is an excellent prime example: “Q: What is your name? A: You say ‘blah blah blah’… or “My name is Blah Blah”, or Q: is this you? as the ‘person’ hold’s your ID card, A: And YOU say YES! Yikes… You just JOINED in AGAIN to the GAME.” Yes, mate. Yes.

• Post-Soviet Life: Brilliant photographs depicting life in the immediat aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. Look how much FUN everyone is having! These are great shots, partly because of the sense of freedom and opportunity they capture but also because they are just SO DAMN FASHION. About ⅓ of these could totally be used right now by Dazed or whoever. Mildly NSFW due to a few teenage nipples, but nothing serious.  

• Virtual Reality Wikipedia: We’ve all thought “you know what would make Wikipedia better? YES! THAT’S IT! A VR VERSION!”, haven’t we? Well quite, and now here we are. Click on the link, click on the Google Cardboard logo in the top right, and be transported to a world in which you can experience a 3d moose in a 3d forest with, er, some clickable explanatory text! It’s a silly idea in practice, but the thinking behind it is interesting – taking links to other pages and visualising them to show information / concepts in context, for example.

• J-Dar: Baffling service which lets you plug in any film you choose and which will then tell you exactly – and I mean exactly, with a percentage rating – how Jewish that film is. A promo for the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, but also an excellent way of choosing an appropriate film for tonight’s post-dinner entertainment. I just plugged in Yentl and it told me it was only 71% Jewish, mind, which makes me wonder exactly what something has to do to attain a coveted 100% rating – if anyone can find a 90%+ movie, do let me know what it is.

• Faception: This week’s dose of dystopian futurehorrror comes in the form of this dreadful service, which purports to be able to identify people’s personality traits and qualities based only on analysis of their faces by software – so basically applying the long-discredited principles of phrenology to facial recognition, then. SO MUCH to hate about this, from the bullshit science to the potential (and appallingly plausible) potential for this sort of stuff to be used in conjunction with CCTV for some real-life Minority Report-style precrime prevention. Think I’m being hyperbolic? This is from their website: “We develop proprietary classifiers, each describing a certain personality type or trait such as an Extrovert, a person with High IQ, Professional Poker Player or a Terrorist.” Yes, that’s right, they claim they can identify terrorists JUST BASED ON WHAT THEY LOOK LIKE? What does that sound like? OH YES THAT’S RIGHT IT SOUNDS LIKE TECH-BASED RACISM! Great, thanks The Future!

• Raining Poetry: A lovely project which is sadly ripe for advermarketingpr thievery which uses hydrophobic ‘paint’ on the pavements of Boston to paint on poetry which will become visible only when the pavemens are wet from rainfall. So, so lovely, and so, so going to be coopted for a large-scale marketing campaign come winter (unless it’s been done already, which is entirely possible).

• WTF Is Brexit: Really smart chatbot-style interface fronting this piece of pro-Remain propaganda, designed to inform THE YOOT about the importance of staying in the EU via a faux-conversational interface. This is a really nice piece of work, and the sort of thing I would imagine being ripped off left, right and centre in the next few months by all sorts of publications.

• Timestripe: Are you worried that you don’t spend enough time fretting and feeling guilty and worried about the speed at which time is running away from you, and how little you are accomplishing as the leaves fly from the calendar and you inch closer and closer to your inevitable demise? Well you might want to install this, then, which is a calendar app which basically exists to put the fear of God into you about how much time you’re wasting and OH GOD HOW FAST THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES PASS LIKE SAND THROUGH THE HOURGLASS OF TIME. Chilling.

• One-screen Star Wars: Even if you couldn’t care less about Star Wars, and even if you could happily go through the rest of your days without hearing some fanboy boring on about THE CINEMATIC PURITY OF THE TRILOGY or whatever neckbeardy guff is their particular obsession, this one–screen visualisation of the entire plot of the first movie is totally and utterly superb. Brilliant, brilliant visual storytelling  – as a piece of design or graphical art alone, it’s an astonishing achievement.

• Shotta Texts: Drug dealer LOLS part 1: this instagram account shares photos of the sort which are ALLEGEDLY sent out by dealers at the start of the weekend, advertising their wares, offering deals and generally seeking to tempt you into bunging a few hundred quid into the class-A oubliette of regret. Aside from anything else, students of language will find much to love in here.

• Class A Marketing: Drug dealer LOLS part 2: Class A marketing takes the texts referred to above and analyses them based on marketing principles – ambush, guerilla, cause-related, etc. Rather wonderful, and reminded me of that lovely conversation in Will Self’s excellent ‘My Idea of Fun’ between two addicts discussing the concept of ‘junk’ as a generic in a heavily branded world.

• Audiograph: This week’s ‘Hey, look, a whole website visualising an album, track by track’ effort comes from Pilot Priests. It’s GOOD, have a play.

LAST UP MUSICALLY, TRY SOME BRAND NEW INDIEPOPROCK BY PRISM TATTS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Pokemon As Cats: Pokemon, redrawn as felines, because there will never be enough Pokemon-themed sites on the internet, it turns out.

• Terrible Cheers Sweaters: Collecting the stylistically questionable knitwear worn by characters in Cheers over the years. There really should be an online store attached to this.

• The London Column: Not actually a Tumblr, but. The London Column collects photos and stories and anecdotes about the City, from the 1950s to now. Wonderful stuff – you could very much get lost in this if you’re a fan of London history and culture and stuff.

• The Coolest Ducks: Pictures of some pretty fcuking cool ducks for you to enjoy at your leisure. YEAH! DUCKS!

• Just Two Things: Brilliant collection of cash-in nerd culture laziness, highlighting the current trend for just taking two popular things with fandoms and mashing them together on a tshirt because, well, sales. Basically EVERYTHING on here will, if worn, guarantee that you will never, ever have sex again.

• Princess Cheeto: Princess Cheeto is a cat. This is her Tumblr. Look at how she disdains you. LOOK AT HER CONTEMPTUOUS GAZE.

• Accidental Boob Charts: Charts from academia which end up looking a bit like breasts (I mean this in the very loosest possible sense, here – there is nothing that actually looks like breasts).

• Reading and Art: Not actually a Tumblr, but. Images from classic artworks featuring people reading books. No idea what you might use this for, but nonetheless.

• Simon Stalenheg: Simon Stalenheg is an artist whose paintings depict strange and sinister future worlds in which we are all permanently plugged into the machine, or visions of a post-robot apocalypse scifi future. Good stuff, this.

• Tekkon Kinkreet Zine: The story of two semi-feral brothers, Black and White, surviving organised crime in a vertiginously-imagine near-future Tokyo, Tekkon Kinkreet is one of my favourite Manga ever and is well worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with it. This Tumblr collects artwork inspired by the comic, and is full of great work in various styles.

• Barry Owl: Not actually a TUmblr, but. Barry Owl collects Tweets trolling various brands on social media – childish, yes, but VERY funny.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Evolution of an Accidental Meme: Fascinating piece by Craig Froehle who a few years ago drew a simple doodle to illustrate a point he was making about the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, and has now seen his idea attain a life far beyond what he might have imagined for it. Fascinating not only on the power of a well-communicated concept but also on the manner in which themes and ideas evolve over time – probably one of the better explanations of memeification which actually makes sense in the context of Dawkins’ original idea.

• The Other Clinton: Looking at Bill Clinton’s role to date in the US Presidential race, and how this might develop should, as expected, Hillary win the Democratic nomination. Interesting as a portrait of the inevitable ageing and decline of one of the 20th Century’s political heavyweights, but also as an illustration of the general distrust and vague sense of…disgust(?)…felt towards the Clintons by much of the US. The piece is in GQ, which is unlikely to bat for Trump come November, and yet the underlying sneer when talking about Bill and Hillary is unmistakable.

• Peak TV: It’s generally accepted that this is a GOLDEN AGE of television, but what does this mean for the industry? This is a great, exhaustive (and -ing) look at the business of making telly in the US in the post-box set world, when the fees commanded by stars are higher than ever and the pressure to make the next GoT or Breaking Bad is immense. Makes you think that there is no way in which this is sustainable based on the current economic model – also makes you think that the future is Amazon’s and Apple’s if you look at the crazy numbers being paid to talent right now.

• The Curse of the Ramones: I’ve never been a fan of the Ramones, and I’m proud to say I don’t own a tshirt with their name on it as some sort of attempted signifier of my nonexistant punk credentials (KEEPING IT REAL). Regardless, this portrait of the band and their origins as beaten-down losers is compelling as you like – these are some pretty seriously messed up backgrounds, which sort of goes some way to explaining why they sounded like they did. Pretty much the diametric opposite of Sylvia Young, this.

• The Esperanto Conference: Wonderful vignette by Edward Docx on the recent UK Esperanto convention in Liverpool, where optimistic devotees of the world’s second or third most popular made-up language (I’m positive there are more Klingon speakers worldwide than there are Esperantans) congregate to discuss exactly how they’re going to make it the international lingua franca. Warm-hearted and funny and actually rather utopian in the end, whilst at the same time acknowledging that it is never, ever going to catch on.

• Learning Chess at 40: The author explains how it feels teaching his daughter chess, and looks into the neuroscience around why she’s better than him at it. You don’t need to play chess to enjoy this – it also contains a few mildly comforting things about how, as an OLD PERSON, you can effectively mind-bully your way into beating the children (not just in chess but in LIFE, probably).

• The Creepiest Threads on 4Chan and Reddit: From creepypastas to the potential last-writings of serial killers, a comprehensive guide to some of the darkest and most potentially disturbing threads across both forums. You’re welcome!

• Actually All Writers Steal: A brilliant short essay on how all authors of fiction necessarily appropriate details from their real lives for use in fiction, and how that affects their relationships with friends and family. Beautifully written by Rufi Thorpe.

• The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob: Brilliant real-life crime tale, featuring the best and least-likely cross-dressing bank robber you’re likely to come across all year. By the end has turned into something a lot sadder and more poignant than you’d have expected; this is a GREAT story and worthy of a novel in itself.

• Which Rockstar Will We Remember?: An essay exploring what the essence of rock and roll is, and, based on that, looking at which of the stars of 20th Century rock’n’roll will be the defining example of the concept. Good, in the way that only overly-analytical writing about music can be.

• The Unnecessariat: This is a great, and deeply depressing, essay about what the author defines as a new underclass – those who aren’t in immediate danger of falling off the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, but whose existence simply doesn’t matter anymore. Whether that be culturally or economically, it paints an excellent and pretty compelling picture of exactly the sort of people so disenfranchised in 2016 that they are contemplating voting for a beweaved thug, people whose horizons can’t and don’t extend beyond the borders of their one-horse town and who have been definitively left behind by the METROPOLITAN MEDIA ELITES. Scary stuff indeed. .

• Wealth Inequality: A brilliant explainer by Vox on how wealth inequality has arrived at its current point in the US, notable mainly for how great the illustrations are. A lovely example of using visuals to develop and communicate a concept in simple and clear fashion, this.

• The Racial Politics of Dat Boi: Ah, Dat Boi – from the Jesus Christ of memes to the latest example of how literally EVERYTHING is ‘problematic’ in 2016 in a matter of weeks. This is, to me, simultaneously fascinating and baffling and sort of silly, but it’s a pretty exhaustive breakdown of the arguments perpetuated among a meme-loving online community by Dat Boi and the apparent issues around cultural appropriation which it raises. If you’re baffled as to how a gif of a frog on a unicycle can engeder this much anger then, well, WELCOME TO THE WEB! Bonus cultural appropriation: #demthrones!

• The Strange Entitlement of Fan Culture: A rather good explanation, by a geek and for and about geeks, about how turning every single event in film into what is effectively fan service may not in fact be a good move, artistically speaking, and what exactly it is about nerd culture that turns grown men into whiny, spoilt children.

• The Pitch Meeting for Animaniacs: The Toast, a website I am genuinely going to miss, speculates as to the conversations which led to the commissioning of famously surreal and subversive not-really-for-kids-kids-show Animaniacs. Far smarter than it needs to be, this, and very funny indeed.

• Sunk: One of two ESSENTIAL long reads this week, this is a KILOMETRIC and utterly fascinating look at the development of the most feted film in Chinese cinematic history, a film which has yet to see the light of day, a film which has had myriad writers and directors and stars and which is still struggling to find distribution despite being a decade in the making. The film is called ‘Empires of the Deep’ and you will TOTALLY want to see it when you are done reading this.

• Surviving the Love Bomb: Finally, a brilliant piece of long, personal writing by Katherine Hale, about being an insecure teen and how people exploited that, from the Church of latter-day Saints, to employers, to an unnamed Hollywood star. Such a good narrative voice, this made me want to read everything Hale has ever written – pour a mug of tea – in fact, make a pot – and enjoy this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start this with an excellent and rather silly mix of star wars music with classic hiphop, all with an accompanying video – whatever your feelings about THOSE FILMS, the technique here is impeccable:

2) Next up, Kaytranada with their track ‘Lite Spots’, which features the most joyous dancing robotic companion I have seen in AGES. I want one, please:

3) This is called ‘I Wonder’, it’s by the Thin Lips, and it scratched my pop punk itch this week rather wonderfully:

4) This is by Night School, and it’s called ‘Last Disaster’, and it is SO beautifully reminiscent of 60s girl groups that it made me very happy indeed and I hope it does the same to you:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Loyle Carner continues to produce bona fide excellence, and if you’ve not heard him yet then make sure you check this out. Lovely video, too, for his latest track called ‘Stars & Shards’:

6) A potrait of the best pool party you never went to as a teenager with a slightly sinister twist, this is called ‘Drugs’, it’s by Private Island, and it’s EXCELLENT:

7) I can’t quite work out if I like the Fat White Family or not, but they are compelling as. This video, for their new single ‘Tinfoil Deathstar’, is brilliantly odd and slightly horrible. GREAT STUFF!:

8) Finally this week, absolutely the best use of 3d / VR-type video I’ve yet seen. Unsurprising as it’s by Google, but the animation and the song and the whole thing is just PERFECT. Even if you never bother with these videos, please do give this a try – I think it’s genuinely lovely. It’s called ‘Pearl’. BYE HAPPY WEEKEND BYE!!!!

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH THE RECENT ESSENTIAL MIX FROM BLONDISH? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH, IF ANYONE’S LISTENING, WOULD ACTUALLY QUITE FANCY AN ALL-EXPENSES-PAID TRIP TO SOUTHERN FRANCE TO DRINK ROSE AND MAKE FUN OF ADVERMARKETINGPRWANKERS AND IS TOTALLY AVAILABLE FOR CANNESHIRE, SHOULD ANYONE WITH MONEY TO BURN AND A QUESTIONABLE ATTITUDE TO THEIR PROFESSION BE READING:

• Facebook Adds Video Ads To Audience Network: A startlingly tedious headline to kick off with this week, this is the news that Facebook Network Ads (when you buy ads on Facebook and then they’re targeted to users on third-party websites) will now work with videos as well. Which, as far as attempting to circumvent the whole ‘targeting ads for online video is bullshit and all the inventory is horrible’ problem is rather useful, I think.

• Noone Actually Listens To Audio On Facebook Video: This piece suggests that 85% of Facebook Video plays are muted; anecdotal evidence suggests that this might even be a conservative estimate. Save the money on the expensive voice-over star (USE ME INSTEAD!) as no fcuker will ever hear what carefully-scripted phrases they’re spouting, turns out.

• Auto-generated 360-degree Photos Coming To FB: Well, sort-of. As part of the platform’s drive to force us all into VR headsets by the end of the year (what if I don’t want to spend the future with a mobile phone strapped to my face? TOUGH), Facebook’s going to start autogenerating 360 degree panoramas from flat panorama pics. Which, if you’re a brand with access to loads of hires, large-scale wide-format photography, is probably quite useful.

• Facebook Will Soon Use Your Face As Emoji: Or at least that’s what a recently unearthed patent would suggest. Basically it’s testing tech which will analyse photos of a user to determine their expression and how that matches against a limited palette of reactions; the idea being that there will eventually come a glorious future in which you type :*-( and Facebook finds a photo of you crying your eyes out at the horror of it all to use as a handy little visual emotional signifier. Fantastic news!

• Dynamic Ads Come To Instagram: This is ad retargeting – so expect to see an absolute metric fcuktonne of ads for things you’ve already bought appearing in your Instagram feed. Works exactly the same as on Facebook, and so guaranteed to make the Instagram experience marginally more unpleasant for all users, but not enough to actually stop anyone from using the platform.

• Instagram Analytics are COMING: Exciting, right? This is apparently the sort of information which will be available when companies set up one of the trailed Instagram company pages (see Curios passim), and will let you see not only ‘likes’ and regrams, but actually get data on how many people have seen a particular post, when an account’s followers are online, etc. Not in the wild yet, but only a matter of time (also, can we just take a moment to imagine what the internal life of the person who wrote this piece is like? ‘Instagram analytics are almost here and they look amazing!’. Just think about what it would be like to be a human being ‘amazed’ by the advent of analytics on a social media platform (in case you’re struggling, it would be horrific, FYI)).

• There’s a Proper DeskTop Version of Whatsapp Now: There really is! Should you want to run customer service or whatever from the platform, this is probably superuseful.

• Twitter Set To Remove Links & Pictures From Character Limit: A useful update which will make absolutely no difference to the platform’s base-level fundamental problems whatsoever! No clue as to when this will happen, but SOON is the general consensus – some poor sod’s going to have to rewrite all the Tweets in the July content calendar as a result of this, aren’t they? OH THE HUMANITY.

• Twitter To Add ‘Broadcast Now’ Button: Because the near-future is set to be characterised by everyone sharing video of what they are doing RIGHT NOW, and because this is obviously what we all want and need, Twitter’s going to add a button letting people just straight to streaming from Periscope when they’re writing a Tweet (much in the way they currently have a ‘share a photo’ button). Welcome to a whole new tedious era of people telling you that Twitter’s for people not only telling you what they had for breakfast but actually showing you.

• In-stream Ads Coming To Twitter Apps: Look, I confess that this makes no sense to me whatsoever (I’m going to blame the writeup, which is appalling even by the standards of tech journalism), but it feels like it’s vaguely significant and so I’m chucking it in here. If anyone cares to explain it to me, I’m all ears (apart from the bits which are bile and spleen).

• YouTube Launching Messenger: Another week, ANOTHER MESSENGING PLATFORM! This one built into YouTube, so you can quickly and easily share links to videos with people whilst logged into the platform. Er, has anyone else really been struggling with sharing videos with people in the current, copy and paste a link into an email or one of the other seemingly-infinite cha platforms at our disposal? No, didn’t think so, and yet here we are.

• Google Spaces: Another in this week’s selection of ‘products or features which I don’t really think anyone’s been clamouring for and which are still being presented to us as amazing solutions to problems we didn’t know we had’, Google this week announced ‘Spaces’ – basically, as far as I can tell, a group chat feature which works a bit like a Facebook Group and a bit like Slack (integrated commands such as search within the platform) but almost certainly won’t take off and will be tried once and then binned in favour of either of the two aforementioned extant tool because WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE FCUKING WAYS TO TALK TO EACH OTHER IN THE SAME WAY.

• Sign In With Slack Across The Web: You know how you can use your Google or Facebook ID to log in to websites? You can now do the same with your Slack ID, which for particular types of site is actually probably A Good Thing.

• The Snapchat Algorithm Is Coming: Well, allegedly. Depending on your perspective, this is a welcome move to cope with the inevitable ‘Oh I have so many snaps I can’t possibly watch all of them before they expire!’ problem engendered by the platform’s massive spike in popularity, or it’s the first step in the platform’s shift towards becoming yet another place for brands to soil with their content dysentry (because if users can’t see all the content automatically, what comes next? THE ABILITY TO PAY TO FORCE YOUR CONTENT INTO PEOPLE’S FACES, THAT’S WHAT!).

• You Can Now Embed Reddit Threads Elsewhere On The Web: This is pretty useful, I think, although it obviously won’t stop half the web lifting Reddit wholesale and passing it off as editorial.

• Amazon Launches Video Direct: Basically it’s Amazon’s attempt to replicate YouTube for PROFESSIONAL CONTENT PRODUCERS. Not a big thing as yet, but worth keeping an eye on to see whether they can entice people to use it as a platform due to better monetisation opportunities. There’s a decent thinkpiece on how (and whether) it might work here.

• Very Clever Ad Retargeting: I am really, really impressed by this anti-bullying campaign, which used highly specific ad targeting and subsequent retargeting to get a bunch of offensive messages to follow ‘influencers’ around the web in order to promote a campaign to prevent bullying in Canadian schools. The basic premise here is TOTALLY thievable, and you could do an interesting Facebook-based variant with hypertargeted content whicH i think would be a rather fun complement to your bog standard INFLUENCER MARKETING bullsh1t.

• Bangfit: Pornhub continue to excel at promoting hairy-handed blindness, or at least their videos facilitating it. This is a very nicely done twist on the ‘hey, sex is exercise; you can probably lose weight JUST BY FCUKING!’ idea, presenting what is basically a slightly shonky mobile version of Guitar Hero designed to tell you how many calories you’re disposing of when sexing (alone or with someone else). Really, really nicely done, from the 80s exercise video stylings to the mobile execution – turns out these smutpeddlers are really good at marketing.

• The Voice of Goldivox: Promo site for a company called Vocalid which designs speaking software – read along to the story to progress through the animation. This is lovely webwork.

• The Handy Awards: A not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is mobile site designed to highlight the somewhat masturbatory nature of ad industry awards ceremonies. BECAUSE EVERYONE IN ADVERTISING IS A WANKER, GEDDIT?!?!?! Admittedly that’s also sort of my schtick, fine, but I like to think I’m slightly subtler about it.

• The Grand Prix Generator: Finally, not the first ‘here’s a website that generates bullsh1t Cannes winners’ entry in Curios, but certainly one of the best – LOOK IT AUTOGENERATES ENTRY VIDEOS! These are UNCANNY, and every single one of them that it’s churned out for me could legitimately be an actual campaign which, frankly, you could probably nick.

• Programmatic Pioneers Summit: Want to come to a GREAT conference all about programmatic advertising? Ok, let’s be more realistic – are you likely to find it beneficial for professional reasons to know more about programmatic advertising? Would you like a discount on ticket prices? HERE YOU GO THEN! Happening next week, so GET ON IT if you’re interested (if you’re reading this on the CurioBot, btw, it is IN THE PAST NOW).

NOW LET’S GIVE THE LATEST MIX FROM AKIRA THE DON OUT IN LA A SPIN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SO PACKED FULL OF STEALABLE ADVERMARKETINGPRIDEAS THIS WEEK THAT IT FEELS IT OUGHT TO BE CHARGING YOU MONEY, PT.1:

• Google’s Domestic Spying Servant: You’ve probably seen this already, right? Google this week announced that it’s launching its own version of Amazon’s Echo – that creepy tower that sits in your house and you can give voice commands to. The idea is that it’s the first step towards and all-assisting domestic AI a la Her, which will search, play music and media, order stuff, etc, all on your vocal commands. And, er, which will have the ability to listen to EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN YOUR HOME. Now I don’t want to be hyperbolic about this, but we’ve all sort of accepted that the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ thing has sort of passed by the wayside by now (or at the very least that it’s been amended slightly with the addition of ‘…but be as creepy as you like’) – can you think of a company more likely to track everything that you say and then creepily sell that data to the highest bidder? No, me neither!

• Allo & Duo: More from Google! These two apps aren’t out yet, but they also tick the ‘wow, Google, that’s creepy!’ box and so are worth a quick mention. Duo is set to be a live video chat app whose gimmick is that you’ll be able to see live video of the person calling you before you pick it up, allowing for all sorts of hijinks where the caller can attempt to get your attention in a variety of increasingly desperate ways; Allo, far more creepily, is a text messaging app which will, Google claims, learn how you write so as to be able to automate message responses, thus saving you valuable time. Let’s just take a moment to parse that – a chat program which READS EVERYTHING YOU TYPE SO AS TO BE ABLE TO BETTER MIMIC YOUR WRITING STYLE. That doesn’t sound like a potentially disastrous and horrifying idea AT ALL. My favourite (read: least favourite) part of this is the example they use in the blogpost, suggesting that Allo will be able to work out whether you’re a ‘haha’ or ‘LOL’ person. Is there anything more horrifyingly dead-eyed and dystopian than the idea of a machine autoresponding to a message with a dull, affectless ‘LOL’ on your behalf? That was a rhetorical question – there is not.

• The Google Keyboard for iPhone: This looks pretty good, mind, even if Google’s going to use it as another way of spying on everything you type, ever. In-keyboard search, emoji, etc – actually really useful (DAMN YOU GOOGLE).

• Fast.com: Actually this is just a smart piece of promo by Netflix and so should have come up there – hey ho. God knows how much they paid for it, but Fast.com now works as a superquick, convenient way of measuring your current download speed. Not a new thing, but more efficient than other sites I’ve come across which do the same thing.

• Ephemeral Tattoos: Want a tattoo but are put off by the thought what it will look like as your body stretches and sags over time, decaying hour-by-hour as you shuffle towards inevitable putrefaction? Yeah, I know the feeling, but these people are working on ink which is matched with a ‘removal solution’ which when applied will make the regrettable ‘Heaven This Way!’ on your inner thigh disappear. Which is nice. No idea whether this is vaporware or not, but you can sign up for more info should you desire.

• Mood: “Do you have difficulty expressing your moods through text messages?” says the video. Well no, not really, seeing as I’m a sentient adult who has had a pretty good command of the written word for a few decades now. If I were the sort of person incapable of conveying nuance through prose, though, perhaps I’d enjoy this app which lets you add backing music to voicenotes to better convey your mental state. I am almost 100% certain this is a joke, but it’s almost impossible to tell now that we’re firmly embedded in the future. I do like the ‘motivational’ music, though, and might download the app just for that.

• Maplematch: Proof positive that there is no idea for a dating site too niche, this one’s for American people so scared of the concept of a Trump presidency that they would go so far as to MARRY A CANADIAN to escape. Oh, and in the interests of bundling all the links about the man in one place (how can someone so compellingly awful simultaneously be so dull?), here’s a Trump nickname generator.

• Sidewire: An interesting idea – Sidewire is a site which collects links to news, and then uses a Talkshow-esque interface to showcase pundits and journalists discussing it in informed, measured fashion. This is quite a nice concept, I think, and whilst its existence as a standalone site / app is probably not going to last long I think it’s a feature which could be implemented on news sites rather successfully.

• The 911 Bot: Proof of concept rather than working thing, but a look at how the future of the emergency services will almost certainly function.

• Devrant: As far as I can tell, this is YikYak for developers – a place where you can go and vent about, er, code, should you so desire. This is pretty niche, but if you spend your days dealing with idiots who JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW THINGS WORK and attempting to debug thousands of lines of JS, this may prove a soothing safe and happy place.

• Art Or Junk: Is it art or is it junk? Or, more accurately, is it cheap or expensive. Oddly addictive single-concept game site, which I warn you now has the most annoying autoplaying music you have heard in YEARS. Whoever coded that in is a sadist of the highest order – absolutely the sort of thing which if you leave it playing while you lock your computer and leave for lunch will have your coworkers apopleptic within a matter of minutes.

• App Blaster: We’re all agreed that launching an app in 2016 is sort of a thankless task, right? If you’re still hell-bent on so doing, you might want to check out App Blaster which promises to get your new app into the mitts of INFLUENCERS at launch, thus leveraging their IMMENSE NETWORKS to get people to download your thing. For money, obviously, but frankly I’d explore this as an alternative to PR because, really, it’s all snake oil.

• Programmable Amazon Dash Button: You can, for a limited time, get your own programmable version of the Amazon Dash button (you remember, that little doohickey which you could programme to autodeliver stuff to you from Amazon at the touch of a button), which, according to the site, can be used to do LOADS of stuff: “You can code the button’s logic in the cloud to configure button clicks to count or track items, call or alert someone, start or stop something, order services, or even provide feedback. For example, you can click the button to unlock or start a car, open your garage door, call a cab, call your spouse or a customer service representative, track the use of common household chores, medications or products, or remotely control your home appliances.” You could have LOTS of fun with this.

• Blue Feed Red Feed: Interesting experiment by the Wall Street Journal looking at th sorts of links shared on Facebook by people who self-describe across varying degrees of the liberal/conservative spectrum, and letting you see how the material you see will vary wildly around any given topic depending on what sort of people are in your network. Nothing you wouldn’t have known anecdotally, but seeing it laid out like this is rather cool – I am increasingly of the mind that I would love the opportunity to be able to tell Facebook or Google what I politically believer and then alter settings on either platform to see stuff that either reinforces my beliefs or is diametrically opposed to them, just for the variety. Is this doable with plugins and stuff? Can someone build something like this for me, please? THANKS!

• The Most Important Song: A different song each day, with links to the band’s forthcoming gigs and other stuff. Small and simple, but a nice way of hearing new stuff (though as I type, the current pick is by lumpen indie mediocrities Catfish and the Bottlemen, so your mileage may vary).

• Stary: Remember Hoverboards? No, me neither really, though shout out the man in Oval who I see every week hoverboarding along the street with his phone out, playing some HOT JAMS in masterfully tinny fashion, bopping along and generally just looking chill as. Would that we were all that cool. Anyway, hoverboards are OVER – this year’s new hotness is motorised skateboards, of which this is the first example I’ve seen. According to a man who’s seen them in action, these are super-impressive and will be everywhere in a few months as the Chinese factories churning them out with intent.

• Small Victories: I don’t even pretend to understand how this works (that’s an exaggeration; I mean, I sort of get it, but it’s still sort of crazy), so it’s probably just going to get filed in my head under ‘basically witchcraft’ – Small Victories lets you dump and bunch of files into a Dropbox folder and then MAGICALLY BUILDS A WEBSITE out of them. The exampes that people have made are legitimately amazing – this is one of the most impressively clever things I have seen in AGES.

• Art in Gigapixels: The continually excellent Google Cultural Institute has photographed a shedload of artworks from around the world with an insanely hi-res digital camera, and has made them available online to zoom in on and admire the brushwork. No exaggeration – you can actually see individual brushstrokes on some of these which is kind of incredible.

• Freewrite: You remember electric typewriters? You know how we got rid of them, because laptops? Well they are BACK! Or they will be, if these people have their way – this is basically a modern version of those horrible, clunky things, which autosyncs to the Cloud via wifi ensuring your work can never be lost, and features a nice e-ink display, but otherwise has none of the distractions of the modern internetboxes on which we’re all used to typing, and offers the pleasingly kinetic experience of typing on a big machine to boot.

• Pixelsynth: Have you ever wondered ‘Hm, what would that picture of the person I love most in the world sound like if I used a computer program to convert it into an audio sequence based on the colour value of each pixel composing it?’ No, of course you haven’t, that would be WEIRD. Nonetheless, this is exactly what you can do with this Google Chrome experiment (you can use any photo you like, but I particularly like the idea of using a portrait of your partner and then excitedly calling them over to show them what they sound like – inevitably, they will sound like a troupe of digital cats being castrated without anaesthetic).

• Bad Fan Art: Celebrities, photoshopped to look like poorly-rendered fan art of themselves. Not the first time I’ve seen this done, but these are ALL NEW. I would totally have the Picass-esque Bieber on my wall, fwiw.

• Etch A Sketch Art:This Etsy seller flogs portraits drawn on Etch A Sketches, which shows an incredible degree of patience and skill. You don’t get the Etch A Sketch, sadly, just a photo of the drawing, but she does take commissions should you want to have someone immortalised in graphite. The only commercial application I can think of for this is as a promo for Etch A Sketch, to be honest, but in case anyone doing their PR is reading, this one’s for YOU!

• Liam Wong: Liam Wong is a Ubisoft art director who also happens to have an Instagram account FULL of incredible neon photos of Tokyo by night. These are gorgeous.

• Tesloop: The guy behind this is 16. Just take a moment to let that sink in. GIT. Anyway, a very smart idea – basically Uber Pool using Teslas. Only does one route on the West Coast of the US atm, but the model is sound – taps into the environmental chic thing, and the low cost per ride means that profit margin (once you factor in the insane cost of the vehicle itself) is vast. I can see this becoming a thing.

• Curio Scene: If you do computer graphics, or are just interested in them, this is a great little site. To quote: “Curio is our subjective, curated and continuously expanding collection of modern demoscene and real-time graphics pieces. All are outstanding for one reason or another: some because they are spectacular and cutting edge, and some just because they feel right.”

• The Limited Edition Jeff Koons Phone Case: Hat off to Koons, he’s hands-down the most successful artist of recent years in terms of crazy monetisation of his work – oddly appropriate that he should be having a show at Hirst’s South London gallery coming up. This is a limited edition phone case ‘by’ the artist – LOOK AT THE PRICETAGS!!! Sadly doesn’t feature any of the works based around his former Italian politician spouse.

• The Cat Soundboard: MRRRRRRRRAAAAAOOOOWWWWWWWWWWW!

• Likemo: So clever, and a really impressive demo of how smart neural network artstyling has quickly become – doodle anything in the site’s limited colour palette, select an artistic style, and watch as it almost-immediately churns out a reasonable facsimile or Monet, Van Gogh or Renoir based on your simple sketch. Were I a Chinese knock off artist working in a provincial factory churning out ‘masterpieces’ by the meter I would be getting quite nervous about this stuff.

• Cinema Palettes: A Twitter account sharing stills from films and colourpalettes associated with them. No idea what your potential use might be for this, but when has that ever prevented me from linking to something?

• They Fight Crime: Generate your own hyperbolic pulp comicbook crimefighting due blurb. Yes, I know that that doesn’t really explain much, just click on the link.

• Online Theremin: GREAT little browser-based theremin toy which is not only fun to use but also gives me an excuse to link to this again.

• Videogame Sprites: An insanely comprehensive repository of sprite artwork from old videogames, should that be exactly the sort of thing you’re after. If you do retro-style filmmaking or just want some pixelart inspiration, there’s a lot to get your teeth into here.

• Tattoodo: Second ink-related link of the week, this is an online community for tattoo aficionados (basically everyone in 2016). Even if you don’t necessarily need or want to be part of ANOTHER online community, this is a great source of inspiration and recommendation when it comes to body art.

• The Painsaw: Doom, running on a Raspberry Pi, embedded in a toy chainsaw. Lovely, technically proficient and totally, totally frivolous, like all the best things in life.

TRY THIS MIX BY ARCANE KIDS NEXT, WHICH IS RATHER BRILLIANTLY VIDEOGAMEY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SO PACKED FULL OF STEALABLE ADVERMARKETINGPRIDEAS THIS WEEK THAT IT FEELS IT OUGHT TO BE CHARGING YOU MONEY, PT.2:

• Behind The Scenes Photos From The Original Star Wars Films: Completists will doubtless have seen these all already, but for the rest of you, who have better things to do than spend your lives poring over archive shots from a mediocre kids film from the 70s, some may be new. BONUS STAR WARS!: The latest ‘Everything Is A Remix’ video goes through the ways in which the latest Star Wars is basically the first Star Wars all over again.

• The Animated Map of US Immigration: Taking data from the past 190-odd years, this is a beautiful and slightly hypnotic visualisation of the flow of people entering the US across (mostly) the 20th Century. Proof that there’s nothing that can’t be made compelling with some nice animation.

• Olio: A great idea which all restaurants and cafes and basically everyone should sign up to forthwith, Olio is basically an app that lets you tell other people if you have spare food or ingredients going that they can take off your hands, like freecycle but for persihables. The best antidote I’ve yet seen to vegetable box guilt, and the fact that you know in your heart of hearts that you are never going to do anything with yje kale languishing in your fridge.

• Resonance Box: Make sounds into your microphone and watch them get prettily visualised by this webtoy. I imagine that if you’re a competent beatboxer or somesuch you could make something rather cool looking, but even shrieking into the mic like some sort of demented, Lidl Diamanda Galas gives some pretty decent looking visuals.

• Petita Tatata: There aren’t enough audio bots out there, imho. This link takes you to the Github page for Petita Tatata, which is a bot churning out algorithmically generated poetry which is then converted using Google text-to-speech and uploaded to Soundcloud – I would like more of this sort of thing, please; something like limerick generation shouldn’t be too hard to automate, write? Says the man who can’t code for sh1t.

• Mathpix: Another in this week’s ‘Internet as black magic’ file, Mathpix is an app which lets you photograph mathematical equations and will then ‘read’ them, offering near-instant solutions, graphs, etc, based on what it sees. This is MENTAL.

• Playdate: I’m not really a pet person – Christ alone knows I find it hard enough to care about other members of my own species, let alone those of a completely different one, particularly when they crap everywhere – but I can totally see the appeal of this. Now funded on Indiegogo, Playdate is a toy ball for cats and dogs which has a camera in it and which can be controlled by your phone, letting you play with your pet remotely. The concept is great, though you can sort of tell that if you have a cat your experience will be of a feline staring disinterestedly at the camera lens before licking its arsehole and falling asleep.

• Placewire: An interesting idea. New York-only (for the moment) site which lets users share photos based on their locality – you tell it which borough you’re from and it will automatically tag your pictures to that borough. I could see this being really useful for councils to easily let residents share photos of local stuff which needs fixing, for example, but there are probably loads of applications.

• Mush: If you’re a new parent and you’re not of the age where everyone you know has simultaneously decided to disgorge progeny then it could be a touch lonely (especially if you decide to not go down the speed dating horror of NCT classes, which always sounded to me like a hideous way to meet and be judged by complete strangers with whom you have nothing in common). Mush is designed to address that, letting parents (in particular mums) meet other parents in the same area with similar age kids based on shared interest profiles, etc. Not only useful for parents, but potentially for brands too, particularly given that we have now all definitively agreed that the whole mummyblogger thing is over (and was bollocks anyway).

• Tabsnooze: Got tabs open which you know you should read but simply can’t be bothered to look at, but whose presence is making you feel a vague sense of low-level guilt (story of my life)? Pause them and reopen them at any minute with this extension.

• Trees Sucking On Things: GREAT subreddit of photos of trees basically eating their surroundings. WEIRD AND CREEPY AND AMAZING.

• Not By Accident: A really interesting podcast by a woman who chose to have a child on her own, recounting her ‘journey’ (sorry) and how she deals with both single parenthood and the weird lack of acceptance that this is something that a woman might actively choose to pursue.

• Those Shiny Cakes: LOOK HOW SHINY THEY ARE? I have the sneaking feeling that they taste like linoleum, but there’s no denying the slightly ASMR-ish aesthetic appeal of these things. The woman’s just launched a YouTube channel to cash in on her Instagram popularity, so if you fancy watching a lot of videos of cakes being viscously iced (not in any way a euphemism), then you should subscribe NOW.

• Mikanz: This appears to be a website selling satsumas with faces drawn on them. I don’t understand why.

• KGF Classic Cars: Are you the sort of person who owns a pair of leather driving gloves and seriously considers in-car air freshener? Then you’ll probably be the EXACT target demographic for this Flickr collection of LOADS of photos of classic cars (are they classic? I have literally no idea, sorry).

• Arngren: Do you find teh experience of online shopping, with its near-infinite choice of products and endlessly appealing shop windows, slightly stressful and a bit overwhelming? Well take a jump into Amgren, then, Norwegian purveyors of all sorts of vehicular stuff (drones, hovercraft, etc), and enjoy one of the most idiosyncratically-laid out shopping experiences I’ve ever seen. Ling would approve.

• Bee-R Goggles: One-note gag designed to give you a ‘virtual beer drinking experience’ whilst, er, drinking a actual beer, I am amazed that this hasn’t been ripped off by Fosters or John Smiths or Newcastle Brown or whichever brand it is currently peddling that ‘no nonsense, drink of the people, no bullsh1t’ marketing wankery.

• On The Grid: Excellent curated city guides, put together for places all across the world by advermarketingprwankers just like YOU! Some really nice recommendations in here – the London one’s got some genuinely good stuff in it, which makes me expect the other cities to be similarly well-curated.

• The Diary of Ko Kolijn: I love this. The stories of one ordinary man during WWII, culled from the pages of his diary. “Ko Kolijn lived his whole life in Purmerend. Born in 1924 in this small city just north of Amsterdam. Here he first worked at the Tax office as an Inspector and after the war he started working at the Nieuwe Noordhollandse Courant, a newspaper. He started in the advertisement department but eventually worked as the editor in chief. During the war Ko meticulously describes every day in his diary. He writes about daily things like getting milk. But he mostly describes the end of the war that is coming closer every day. Ko’s family had a secret radio with which they could listen in what was happening outside German controlled area.” Brilliant historical resource and SO HUMAN.

• Rentberry: Ever think that the London rental market isn’t quite brutal enough, and that it could do with being stacked a little more in the favour of the landlord? GREAT! Rentberry basically lets potential renters ‘bid’ for their property of choice – meaning you could actually be gazzumped on  rental by someone willing to pay £20 more a week. I for one am THRILLED at the prospect of bidding wars being introduced to renting. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!

• The Canvas Project: Instagram account posting photos onto which have been superimposed elements from classic artworks to pleasing effect. There’s a campaign for an art gallery here somewhere, surely (although on reflection that’s such an obvious idea that it must have been done already, no?).

• London In The Blitz – Then & Now: Nice photoprpject on the Atlantic, merging historic photos of Blitz-era London with contemporary shots taken on the same site.

• The Partridge Cloud: A search engine for Alan Partridge. There is at least one of you for whom this is the best thing in here this week – you’re welcome, Matt.

• Track My Flow: Last year saw the Looncup, the digitally enabled mooncup for the techologically curios hippy in your life. Now we have Track My Flow, another menses-manager (not a phrase I ever envisaged typing, I confess) which this time uses tampons rather than a cup. So, er, if you’ve ever felt the need to have your phone tell you exactly how saturated your tampons are, now’s your chance to get your…er…mitts on one. MENSTRUATING READERS: A QUESTION – erm, is this necessary? Don’t you just change the things X times a day anyway? WHY DO YOU NEED THIS INFORMATION?

• The Corgi Orgy: I’m just goingto reiterate what I said on Twitter about this one: “Click this link. Marvel. And then click again, and realise you can make your own with whatever images you want”. You work with at least one person whose corporate headshot would be PERFECT for this.

• Spire: Spire is a wearable designed to tell you when you are stressed; alternatively, you could just PAY ATTENTION TO HOW YOUR FEELING rather than relying on a bundle of sensors. Christ’s sake.

• BOx: This week’s best ‘Internet of Bullshit’ thing, though, comes in the form of this bottle opener, which will tell the world every time you…er…open a bottle. WHY IS THIS A THING? WHO COULD POSSIBLY WANT IT? I particularly like (read: despise) the lame attempts at gamification, including a leaderboard to climb with your friends based on who’s opened the most bottles – DRINK RESPONSIBLY, KIDS!

• My Sticker Face: A service which will print stickers of your actual face. Or, even better, someone else’s – just imagine how much fun it would be getting a bunch of stickers printed of your friend’s face and then plastering them all over the tube network, focusing on those stations they use the most. HUGE bullying potential here.

• Resize My Home: Lovely website highlighting the plight of dolphins in captivity – you can play with the lovely CGI critters in a variety of different ways, but the payoff comes when you resize your browser – really slick execution.

• The President of Virtual Reality: I think that this is actually part of the promo for a recently released Oculus game, but even if so it’s an impressively mental spoof. Welcome to the world of John ‘Neverdie’ Jacobs, a real-life virtual world millionaire (a sentence that doesn’t get any less strange the more I think about it) who, according to this website, has recently appointed himself the first President of Virtual reality. His policies are…interesting.

• The Making of Me & You: A lovely interactive by the BBC which lets you plug in your age, gender, weight, etc, and then tells you about all the amazing stuff your body’s been doing since you’ve been alive – what you’re made of, how much STUFF you’ve produced, that type of thing. I am immensely uncomfortable about being reminded of the fact that I’m made of meat, but this is still really rather cool.

• Auntie’s Recipes: All the recipes from the BBC archives, preserved (hopefully) forever. TAKE THAT, MURDOCH, YOU SHITHEEL. I mean, obviously Murdoch still wins eventually, but let’s pretend for a moment that he doesn’t shall we?

• All The Hiphop Mixtapes EVER: Seriously, this is an incredible collection of music. SO MUCH GOODNESS HERE.

• Licki: In case you’ve ever wanted to be able to brush your cat with your tongue. Have you? No, of course you haven’t, and yet once again here we are.

• Trumptendo: Finally in this section, a selection of classic NES games playable in your browser, each of which has been modded to turn The Donald into the villain. Makes Punch Out infinitely more appealing, trust me.

LAST UP FOR MUSIC, A TRULY BRILLIANT DE LA SOUL MIX FOR WHICH YOU AREVERY WELCOME INDEED!

HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT THE WU TANG CLAN WOULD SOUND LIKE IF THEY RAPPED ABOUT WORLD OF WARCRAFT? THIS IS WHAT THEY WOULD SOUND LIKE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Manchester Estate Pubs: Not actually a Tumblr, but noone cares and frankly nor do I. This is a collection of photos of unprepossessing Mancunian council estate drinking hovels; I have a personal rule about not drinking in pubs with flat roofs, because they tend to look like this and are TERRIFYING.

• Business Direction: A rather odd Tumblr, this, taking a VERY in-depth look into the business dealings behind One Direction and all their associated companies and hangers-on, as well as posting a lot of fanboy stuff. STRANGE.

• Cooking With Mumm-Ra: Cooking tips from the badguy from Thundercats. Inexplicable.

• The Logo Archive: A project collecting logos from all over the place. Useful inspiration, or, per recent revelations, to just rip off something obscure in wholesale fashion.

• Six UX: A collection of Vines showcasing nice UX from around teh web. Actually a really good example of potential use case for shortform video in a b2b context (he says, tediously).

• Windows Is Broken: Collecting photos of digital advertising where Windows has fcuked up and is showing an error message. Sort of poignantly de nos jours, this.

• Leader Ladies: I didn’t know this was a think at all, but (to quote) this is a “collection of from-the-rewind-bench snapshots of “China Girls” (or “Leader Ladies,” as we’ve heard at least one person call them) – the photographs of (most often) women that sometimes appear in the countdown that begins every reel of motion picture film meant for exhibition, often accompanied by color bars. Their images were used by film lab workers setting color timing or black and white density – and they were often film lab workers themselves.” So now we know.

• Better Book Titles: Book titles for the tl;dr generation.

• Yamanote Eki Melo: Each station on the Yamanote trainline in Tokyo has its own melodic audio signature; this website collects them all. WHY IS THIS NOT A THING ON THE UNDERGROUND?!?!?! TFL, come on, this would be HUGE. Can someone compose a ‘Sound of Oval’ for me, please?

• Guns Replaced With Selfie Sticks: You can guess what this is from the title, I would hope.

• Every 70s Movie: Another non-Tumblr, this website’s been reviewing 70s films of varying degrees of fame and quality since 2010, meaning that there are THOUSANDS of film reviews up on the site; great for connoisseurs of the retroweird. Man, there were some ODD films produced that decade.

• Pornhub Sherlock: Pornhub comments on Sherlock screencaps.

• Carl Burton: Lovely little CGI animationgifthingies, featuring some gorgeous light effects. Beautiful style on display here.

• That First Page: The first pages of a bunch of novels, scanned and put online.

• BowieBranchia: “Nudibranchia or other opisthobranchia compared to the various looks of David Bowie.” – basically, sea slugs that look like the Thin White Duke.

• X Files Documents: Documents from the XFiles. Probably didn’t need to type this, on reflection.

• Church of Lux: After the Y2k aesthetic BLEW UP having been featured on here a few weeks back (OBVIOUSLY THIS IS CAUSE AND EFFECT – OBVIOUSLY), here’s a Tumblr collecting brilliant chrome and neon 80s inspiration.

• Who Pays Influencers: Collecting anonymous submissions from influencers as to how much they are being paid by advermarketingpr drones to shill stuff for them. This is PROPER wild west stuff here – the variance in sums is crazy. THE EMPEROR IS NAKED, LOOK AT HIS TINY PENIS, etc.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• I Was Prince’s Personal Chef: Not actually that long, but a rather sweet little tale of what it was like being at the beck and call of a PROPER superstar for a few years, and a lovely window into what it must have been like being one of the most famous and revered musicians on the planet (tl;dr: weird, but in a really good way).

• The Fecal Matter Transplant: If you have bad guts, you can fix them by having a poo transplant. This is apparently a medical ‘thing’, which has its scientific basis in bacteria levels in the gut and that sort of thing. Would you do your own poo transplant, though? Ingested orally? You would probably not, I’d wager, but you might find it interesting (or indeed repugnant) to read this account of a man who did. Nowhere near as disgusting as you’d think, and actually really interesting (but, you know, all about bowels, so bear that in mind).

• The Unibiased Algorithm Is A Myth: Following the recent furore over alleged editorial bias in Facebook trending topics, a piece rather sensibly setting out that all algorithms are by nature biased and simply saying ‘let the algo decide!’ won’t suddenly make us, or our media, magically value neutral. If you know / think about this stuff already, nothing in here’s likely to surprise you too much, but it’s a smart overview of why bias is inherent in all human-designed systems.

• How DFW Was Bad For Literature: I’m including this not because I agree with its conclusions – I most definitely don’t – but because it’s a counterpoint to my near-ceaseless lauding of Foster Wallace’s output. This takes the knives to his most famous work, This Is Water, delivered as a commencement speech to Kenyon College students in 2005 and which, it’s fair to say, is far from his best work. The author posits that its ubiquity, and its distillation of Wallace’s core tenet of the importance of sincerity and the correlative corrosive effect of cynicism, has basically led us to the point where everything is PERSONAL and about our FEELINGS, and how this validates anything and everything. She’s wrong, but it’s an interesting read.

• Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in ‘72: Read Hunter S Thompson on the US elections from nearly 50 years ago, and then spend a moment imagining exactly how wonderful his coverage of this year’s shitshow would have been. Masterful writing throughout, brilliantly angry and cynical and simultaneously weirdly pure.

• The Dictator’s Son, the Footballer: A snapshot of that weird moment at the beginning of the century when attention seeking Perugia President Luciano Gaucci hired one of Gadaffi’s kids to play for the Serie A team. It’s almost a shame that this sort of thing couldn’t really happen any more; it’s VERY odd.

• Toons In Therapy: Brilliant and slightly harrowing comic strip imagining characters from Family Guy, The Simpsons and King of the Hill in a therapy session as adults. Really rather beautiful.

• The Curious Case of the Besa Mafia: VERY weird, this – The Besa Mafia is a darkweb site which purports to offer hitman services. Is it a scam? Is it for real? Is it both? This post picks apart the evidence and tries to get to the bottom of the mystery – it’s inconclusive, though subsequent other posts this week suggest that it’s probably all a scam. Probably.

• The Uncanny World of Muslim Memes: If you ever want to prove to a racist idiot that we are all basically the same regardless of religion, race or creed, go no further than this post which deconstructs Muslim memes and proves conclusively that, no matter your faith, unfunny Facebook fodder based around THOSE FCUKING MINIONS is everywhere.

• Twittering From The Circus of the Dead: A short horror story, told in Tweets. Really rather excellent, and quite gruesome.

• Deep Blues: I LOVE THIS. A translated excerpt from a conversation between Chen Zhiyan, a Chinese journalist, and three chatbots: Chicken Little, Little Ice, and Little Knoll. The interview was conducted on WeChat, and it is just amazing – beautiful and poetic and creepy and distant and WEIRD. Alex, who has been learning Chinese, reckons the translations may have been polished slightly to make them a little prettier, but this is just gorgeous. I would like this read out over an ambient backing track, please, ideally in a vocoder-style text-to-speech voice. THANKS!

• Becoming An Amnesiac’s Memory: A beautiful account of what happens to a relationship when one party starts losing their memory and as a result their identity. Really quite gorgeous writing here.

• Lionhead: The Inside Story: This is LONG, and you sort of have to be either REALLY into the UK videogames scene or work in it for this to be your thing, but if that applies then this is a great story about the birth, life and death of Peter Molyneux’s Lionhead Studios, which got canned by Microsoft recently. Aside from anything else, the stories about workplace BANTZ are great.

• Dear Mummy Blogger: Brilliantly vitriolic rant about the bullshit world of mummy blogging, which concludes that noone reads your posts, noone cares, and no brands are deriving any value from this rubbish, regardless of what their agencies are telling them. Watch this get repeated for ‘influencers’ in a couple of years.

• Being Dr Miami: Great profile of the deeply weird-seeming ‘Dr Miami’, US plastic surgeon and Snapchat star whose no-holds-barred stream of pics from surgery and easygoing manner have made him hugely popular and fed his frankly GARGANTUAN ego and need for fame. The really interesting part of this is not the Snapchat and rise to fame thing, but the weird and slightly broken seeming bloke trying to reconcile being Dr Miami with also being a fairly devout ad ostensibly family-oriented middle-aged Jewish man. I’m calling it now – Dr Miami sex scandal coming by Q4 2016.

• The End of the End of the World: Jonathan Franzen goes on a National Geographic cruise to Antarctica, sees penguins, writes about his family and generally does a very good job of being Jonathan Franzen. This won’t convert anyone who finds his particular brand of emoschtick writing unconvincing, but for those who don’t have a natural aversion it’s a great bit of writing.

• In Search Of Something Real With The Cast of Geordie Shore: Finally, absolutely my favourite read of the week, in which Web Curios favourite Joel Golby goes and hangs out on a press junket with the cats of Geordie Shore and, through so doing, confronts some deep truths about existence. Seriously, this is WONDERFUL, and made me actually, properly LOL on several occasions – helpfully, you need never have seen an episode of what I assume is a DREADFUL show to enjoy this. Read it NOW.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS, WHICH WOULD ADDITIONALLY LIKE TO RECOMMEND TO YOU THE ANIMATIONS DERIVED FROM THE WONDERFULLY TWISTED TOONS OF JOAN CARNELLA!

1) Do you have children? Do they love Thomas The Tank Engine? Are you sick of seeing the bloody fat controller every day, and hearing about the Island of sodding Sodor? Would you like to ruin Thomas for your kids FOREVER, and probably condemn them to some pretty serious therapy? HERE YOU ARE! NB – probably best to show this to other people’s kids rather than your own, on reflection:

2) Next up, this is a great piece of slightly 80s-tinged indiepop with a brilliant, shonky, VHS-style video from the Diamond Age, which has an inexplicably low number of views considering how good it is. It’s called ‘Popular Science’:

3) This is by Hinds, it’s a great song, and the video gets increasingly horrible as it goes on. It’s called ‘Easy’, and its channeling a lot of 90s, soundwise, imho:

4) Do you remember Power Rangers fondly? Do you like slightly overblown 70s-ish rock? Would you like a combination of those two things RIGHT NOW? OH MY DAYS YOU WILL LOVE THIS THEN! This is called ‘People Vultures’ and it’s by the fabulously-named King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizard. Such a great video:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Not so much hiphop as ‘urban’, tbh, this is Olivia Louise whose mixtape I featured the other week, and Curios favourite Manga St Hilare, with ‘Roll It’. SUCH a tune:

6) ACTUAL HIPHOP CORNER! This is by Ezza, who I’d never heard of before but whose flow is refreshingly idiosyncratic and who’s worth keeping an eye on, I think. This is called ‘The Kick Off’:

7) EVEN MORE UK HIPHOP! This is a month old, but still EXCELLENT. Menacing and jagged, and the video’s a gret complement to it. Production on this is great too imho – it’s ‘No Drama’ by Cadence:

8) This made me well up. It’s really surprisingly emotional, about friendship and love and loss and basejumping. A short film called ‘When We Were Knights’ (for a second Curios in a row, thanks Wilson):

9) Finally this week, longtime Curios readers may remember this from WAAAAAY back in the H+K days, depicting a dystopian Augmented Reality future peppered with advertising and looking like the most terrifying videogame ever. Well the same creative mind behind it is BACK, with this similarly bleak glimpse at what our AR lenses-enabled future is going to look like. It’s called Hyperreality and it is a brilliant, scary piece of short filmmaking. Enjoy, and SEE YOU NEXT WEEK!

SHALL WE KICK OF THE MIXES WITH A WOOZY SELECTION OF HIPHOP BY DRAE DA SKIMASK? WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS IS REALLY GRATEFUL FOR THE LACK OF BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS IN THE WORLD OF S*C**L M*D** THIS WEEK AND WHICH WOULD QUITE THIS TO CONTINUE FOR THE REST OF 2016 THANKS:

• Instagram Business Profiles IN THE WILD: SUCH a slow news week. We knew these were coming, but they are now beginning to be visible – profiles for businesses which feature all sorts of EXCITING business-related gimmicks such as the ability to email a business directly from its Instagram profile, access to maps, and the ability to categorise your business by type (which means, as ever, that at some point in the future you will inevitably be able to pay money to ensure that you rank highly in the coveted ‘London Haberdashery’ Instagram category. Not available in the UK yet, to my knowledge, so probably best not to get too ‘excited’ about this just yet.

• Instagram Launches Video Carousel Ads: You know those multi-image carousel ads you can do on Instagram? You can now do them with videos, too – the format supports 3-5 units, letting buyers mix and match video and stills. There’s probably a cute gimmick or two in here that you could play with in terms of the creative – telling a STORY (sorry) across the panels, maybe, although whether anyone outside of advermarketingprwankerdom will notice or care about your brilliance is, as ever, questionable.

• You Can Now Save Periscopes: Twitter once again plays catch-up to Facebook on functionality; now that EVERYONE can use Facebook Live to not only stream to the world but also to create a replayable permanent record of said stream, Periscope too is abandoning its 24h lifespan for its streams – users can simply include #save in the streams title and it will be available in perpetuity. Useful and inevitable. By the way, the reason I’m linking to a TechCrunch piece rather than the announcement itself is that they announced this as a live stream which you can now rewatch – a staggeringly inefficient way of delivering what’s a 2-sentence concept which made me really quite annoyed. VIDEO IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER FFS.

• Snapchat Launches First eCommerce Tie-ins: Inevitable, really. Ads for Lancome and Target (interesting polar opposites there on the luxury spectrum) running in Spachat Discover, with a simple ‘Swipe To Shop’ action which takes users to a ‘BUY THIS THING’ page. Almost certainly only available in the US to eye-wateringly high-spending brands, but if you sell stuff to THE KIDS then this should be very much on your radar as a THING for the future.

• What Is Snapchat?: ‘A terrifyingly vivid and confusing symbol of everything which is wrong and frightening about the future’ may well be your default position, but this short TechCrunch piece contains a couple of interesting lines from founder Evan Spiegel on how its cameracentric focus defines the platforms role; might be useful if you’re thinking ‘BUT HOW DO WE, BRAND WITH A DESPERATE THIRST FOR MILLENNIAL RECOGNITION AND VALIDATION, MAKE USE OF THIS STRANGE AND TERRIFYING NEW SET OF TOOLS?’. Might not, mind.

• Soundcloud Ads Go Live In The UK: Oh, and they’re also launching the premium subscription service and Spotify competitor ‘Soundcloud Go’ over here too, but really the ads are the thing. ‘What sort of ads?’, I hear you cry, feverish with anticipation: “these will include audio spots; in-stream “native” ads; promoted profiles; and creator partnerships”, comes the frankly underwhelming answer. Speak to your Soundcloud rep TODAY for details – again, for the right brand I think this is a worthwhile platform to explore.

• Soundtrack Your Brand Expands To US: Sticking with audio – and remember, David Shing once said that audio was going to be ‘really big in the future’, so PAY ATTENTION! – Spotify is launching its ‘Soundtrack Your Brand’ service, running streaming in retail outlets, to the US from the Nordics. Worth keeping an eye on how it works, as should it do OK it’ll be over here pretty soon too.

• YouTube Working On TV Subscription Service: Pretty speculative this one, to be honest, and it’s been bubbling about for a while now, but if you work in TV you should be halfway aware of the fact that this is potentially a THING happening next year in the US.

• Google Slides Q&A: Pretty tedious, this, but possibly actually quite useful – Google Slides is Google’s PowerPoint clone, which this week announced that you can now use the free software to get live questions and feedback to any talk as you give it. Simply give a url to the audience – they can submit questions and comments, as well as voting on other audience members interactions, which seems like a brilliant (and, crucially, free) way of adding interactivity to events. Still really dull, mind.

• Diadora Make It Bright: As Cannes approaches, so we start to see those campaigns which seemingly exist solely to win a Lion. In this case, Diadora have put together a LOVELY site to accompany a stunt they did in which the first person to pre-order a new line of shoes got theirs delivered to them by hand as a result of a relay which took the footwear from their place of origin in Italy to his flat in Barcelona. You can see all the people who participated in the relay on the site, there are HEROES and STORIES and stuff, but, well, this is an awful lot of work (and money) to spend on what is basically an award entry. Hope you win, guys!

• Instagram Escape The Room Game: Look, well done, you get a pat on the back for being clever and using the format in INTERESTING WAYS. Just, er, take a look at the numbers on these videos, though. I would be FASCINATED to know how many people have actually interacted with this in any meaningful fashion, although I suspect that whoever’s behind this would probably prefer to keep that number secret…

• KHOLE Talk Sleep: A welcome return to Web Curios for brand consultancy / modern performance artists KHOLE, the Brooklyn trend analysts who, you will doubtless recall, brought us the glorious Normcore a few years back and who have since continued to churn out reports about YOUTH CULTURE which are so brilliantly oblique as to be utterly meaningless. This time they tackle SLEEP, commissioned by TRENDY MATTRESS STARTUP Casper – if you find sentences such as “If Buzzfeed’s modus operandi is OMG, a connected mattress’ is ZZZ. In 2016, our über elites’ obsession with ROI has backwashed into every aspect of our lives. Both laughter and luxury are expected to perform” as wonderfully awful as I do, or you need to sell mattresses to THE KIDS, then you will like this a lot.

• The Douchebag Strategist: The Douchebag Strategist is a bot built by Roberto Estreitinho. The Douchebag Strategist is EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US. This is so good – go through the timeline and see how many are plausible enough to be dropped into any agency conversation or strategy without a pause (clue: most of them). “The idea is to leverage millennials through un-branded content” – yes, Douchebag Strategist, yes it is.

LET’S KICK ON WITH THE HIPHOP AND CHECK OUT MEYHEM LAUREN’S LATEST EP ‘PIATTO D’ORO’!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PROUD TO NOW SAY WHAT WEB CURIOS HAS OUTLIVED A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER – THANKYOU, 17 LOYAL READERS! (PT.1):

• Gifs.com: This is so, so good. Really, I properly mean this – SUCH a useful tool if you need / want to make gifs quickly and easily. Plug in any url from YouTube (other sites are also supported, OBVS) and it quickly brings up a video editor which lets you isolate your gifable moment from the clip, add effects and a caption, and gives you a unique URL for it, all with a simple interface. I made this BEAUTY in less than a minute, and if I had to do this sort of stuff semi-regularly I would make this my default free online tool for gifcreation. They have not paid me ANY money for this endorsement, but if they would like to I am open to offers. Oh, and they embed nicely on Twitter too.

• Shine: Are YOU an insecure wreck of a human being who needs daily validation just to get out of bed in the morning? Are YOU in the (actually on reflection really quite sad and not at all the sort of thing which should be glibly mocked in a niche newsletter about the internet) sad position of not having anyone to give you said validation on a regular basis? Well FEAR NOT, as Shine is here to help – launching earlier this week, the app will send you a platitudinous message about, you know, BEING AWESOME or somesuch trite crap, every morning, complete with the occasional gif because LOLS, to help you escape from your malodorous-yet-comforting duvet prison. Look, if this works for you I’m not going to judge, but there’s something coldly awful about needing software for this I think.

• Fullest House: Full House is an old, long-running and (from what I can infer) much-loved US sitcom; this site collects scripts for the show generated by a neural network which is going back over the show’s old scripts and using them to churn out its own. This will go on FOREVER, so potentially we’ll have something which sort of vaguely makes sense by the mid-2200s. Dip into these and take a look – they’re broadly nonsensical, but there’s just enough of a shadow of coherence to give them a slightly creepy and desperately broken air which I quite enjoy. You can read more about the project here if you’d like.  

• Pictofit: As far as I can tell, this is witchcraft. Pictofit is, if it does what it says it does and looks halfway decent, a supersmart piece of tech. Basically it’s a clothestryingon app – you upload photo of yourself to it, and then snap photos of clothes you like as you see them (either in the real world or by importing pictures seen when browsing online). The app then – and this is the clever bit – warps the clothing so as to fit on the photo of yourself you supplied it with, meaning you basically have a virtual shop’s dummy of yourself to try clothes on with. You can then share these mockups with others to get their approval of your sartorial choices, but frankly that’s the least interesting thing about this – if it manages to avoid looking hugely shonky I could see this doing rather well.

• When To Leave: If you’re a ceaseless travel optimiser, incapable of doing ANY travelling without obsessing about how best to shave off a few seconds from your journey time because EFFICIENCY (you know who you are) then this might appeal; you tell it where you’re driving from and it tells you the average and current traffic times based on Google Maps traffic data – AND lets you set an alert to tell you to leave once the projected journey time drops below a certain threshold. Gimmicky on its own, but there’s something in this which is pretty thievable I think.

• Franz: Slack, Facebook, Whatsapp, Gchat, Skype, Wechat, Telegram, and the sodding rest; I think it’s pretty clear that WE DON’T NEED ANY MORE FCUKING MESSAGING ALTERNATIVES PLEASE. Franz is a Windows download which integrates all your chats from the above platforms, and more, into one place, which is hugely useful if you ‘do’ chat (I try not to, the format gives me the fantods tbh).

• Billshark: Another concierge service outsourcing the more tedious aspects of quotidian mundanity, this is US-only but I reckon could happily be exported over here (or, er, copied). Billshark works on a simple premise – you send them a photo of your bill(s), they run off and see if they can get you discounts on said bills by exploiting offers, loopholes, etc, you pay them a 25% commission on any savings which they accrue on your behalf. Do MoneySupermarket have a concierge service? Maybe they ought to?

• The Star Wars Galaxy Map: Given that this week saw the annual ‘tedious franchise related pun day’ it seems only fitting to feature this Google Maps-style depiction of the Star Wars universe. Is it canonical? I DON’T CARE.

• A Hot Viking: If you are the sort of person who would really, really appreciate a bunch of pictures of a strapping, bearded, 6’6” Norseman, often with his top off, shot in a variety of Athena Poster-friendly poses, this will be RIGHT up your street.

• RetroMinder TV: Don’t really know why this exists, but perhaps there IS no reason; this is a retro-themed site which posts a whole bunch of clips from old VHS films and invites you to name the actor or character in the clip. Totally pointless, but worth sending to younger colleagues to make yourself feel old.

• Toilet Guru: There may well be other, more comprehensive websites out there about public conveniences all over the world, but if so then I’m yet to find them. This has been around for AGES, but is no less brilliantly weird for it. I particularly like the ‘about’ page, in which the site’s admin Bob Cromwell rather prissily suggests that it’s not he who is obsessed with toilets, it is the visitors to the site; well, yes, but mate, let’s be clear, YOU PUT THIS TOGETHER AND IT IS FCUKING ENCYCLOPAEDIC ON THE SUBJECT OF SANITATION FACILITIES. You have to accept that it looks a touch obsessional.

• Seenapse: Seenapse describes itself as an ‘Inspiration Engine’ – you type in a ‘thing’ and it spits out a bunch of stuff vaguely related to that thing which it hopes will provide you the user with some sort of creative inspiration. Basically what I have long been saying to anyone kind enough to listen that I would like to build from the Curios archive, and which ONE DAY will become a reality to the sound of crushing global indifference.

• Duograph: If you like Spirographs (and WHO DOESN’T? No fcuker, that’s who) then you might want to back this Kickstarter, already funded, which is going to put a SUPERLUXURY SPIROGRAPH FOR GROWNUPS into production. You don’t need it, but you might want it.

• Nixie: “The First Wearable Camera That Can Fly”, proclaims the website, breathlessly, which is an incredibly future statement when you think about it. It’s a little wrist-mounted drone, with a camera attached, which can fly on command and film you while you do your thing, and which (and this is the fun bit) will return to you on command like a technocameraboomerang. Obviously this doesn’t actually exist yet – the future is very good at promoting itself in advance, it turns out – but the videos on the site make it look really cool. When do you think we’re going to get to the point where kids can have wrist-mounted toy fighter planes which take off and fly and zap each other with lasers? Can it be soon, please?

• Tastemates: I think this is a nice idea – then again, I would as it’s an idea I have been banging on about for about 5 years (without, OBVIOUSLY, doing anything about it at all). Tastemates is effectively a dating app which works based on shared interests in films, TV, music, etc – it also lets you watch and listen to stuff directly from the app. Using a Tinder-style interface you can swipe to select what you’re into (and what you’re not), see who else is around nearby with similar tastes…you get the idea. You can also see to what degree people’s tastes match yours, which is where I think it gets interesting; I like the idea of being able to select matches with people who share, say, 60-70% of your tastes – enough to know you’re sort of similar, not too much to be boring. Always thought there was something in this type of mechanic for Time Out, personally. ARE YOU READING THIS, TIME OUT? Eh? Oh.

• Quiet Time: Politely, secretly and temporarily mute people on Twitter. Useful, particularly on post-election or post-football days.

• Open Library: I just checked, and remarkably I haven’t featured this before. Over 1million free ebooks – SO MUCH READING HERE.

• What Were You Wearing: Unsurprisingly very affecting photo project by artist Katherine Cambareri, in which she photographs the clothing worn by victims of sexual assault at the time the attack took place. Highlighting the preposterousness of the (sadly ubiquitous) “what were you wearing at the time of the attack?” question, this is starkly awful but also a smart project which I think has interesting applications for the right charity.

• Videorama: Powerful phone/tablet video editing tool for iOS – text overlays, Nollywood-style SFX, you can do the lot with this.

• Trump Against Humanity: Cards Against Humanity, except with all the standard copy replaced by Donald Trump quotes. Produced by ‘creative incubator’ Sid Lee Collective, these are currently only available by application on the website – like they won’t get a full production run, though, once the emails start flooding in. The sort of thing that will only be funny if America doesn’t do the stupid thing (it won’t, will it? Any sort of reassurance here would be helpful, as I’m getting a *touch* scared now).

• Relay Maps: Simple, custom maps for travel – create routes, itineraries and the like, with the ability to make multiple maps for multiple trips. Pretty sure that there are other solutions that do this already, but the interface is nice and I liked their launch video.

• Joel Dongsteen: Utterly childish, but, I’m ashamed to say, it made me laugh a lot. Joel Dongsteen is a Twitter account which tweets out inspirational messages about God, but replacing ‘God’ with…er…’your dick’. Yes, yes, I know. If it makes you feel better you can argue that it’s actually some smart satirical commentary on how men feel about their genitalia (did you know that, back in the day, the word ‘cock’ was a term used to refer to God? WEB CURIOS TRUFACT, there).

• National Geographic Travel Photos of the Year: It’s still accepting entries, but this is a selection of some of the more spectacular entries to date, courtesy of The Atlantic. Glorious, as you’d expect.

• The Wayback Pack: Script which lets you download the entire Wayback Machine archive of any given site’s history, should you so desire. Interesting should you be doing some journalising around, say, how a political party/brand has changed its site over time (for example).

HOW ABOUT SOME BREAKS AND BASS FROM SAM BINGA’S AUSTRALIAN TOUR? HERE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS PROUD TO NOW SAY WHAT WEB CURIOS HAS OUTLIVED A NATIONAL NEWSPAPER – THANKYOU, 17 LOYAL READERS! (PT.2):

• 2016 Is The International Year Of Pulses: I am shocked and appalled that it has taken me nearly half of 2016 to wake up to this momentous fact, but I encourage you to spread this far and wide. CELEBRATE THE PULSE! WORSHIP THE LEGUME!

• Watch Videos in Fast Forward: You know how annoying it is to sit through videos at normal speed when you’re just trying to find the weird bits? Well consider that problem SOLVED, with this rather helpful Chrome extension which lets you watch YouTube and Netflix and Facebook videos in fast forward at the push of a button. I have JUST realised that it’s a promo by MINI, which is REALLY rather clever I have to say. Anyway, useful.

• People & Crosses: Photographs of crucifixes in Romania. Read the statement at the top for the HIGH CONCEPT – I personally just quite like the pleasingly shonky nature of most of the Jesuses on display here.

• The Whimsical Woodsman 2017 Calendar: I know it’s early, but if you know someone who likes their men BEARY then this may well be the best Christmas present you could get them.

• Glossy: Glossy is a brand new online magazine which operates at the intersection of technology, luxury and culture – if you work in and around clothing and digital, there’s probably enough stuff of relevance to your job here to make this worth bookmarking.

• The Evolution: Wonderful collection of illustrated gifs by the very talented Prasad Bhat, depicting different famoses in different roles over the course of their career. Brilliantly done.

• The Sales Call Abyss: If this is real, it is BRILLIANT. Allegedly what gets played to nuisance sales callers by some unnamed individual, I challenge you to make it more than a few minutes through this. Another in the long list of things I encourage you to set up to play on a loop before leaving the office for a very long lunch.

• Adaptoys: This is such a lovely project, seeking to raise funding for a range of toys designed to allow children (and in fact anyone) suffering from varying degrees of paralysis to experience play in a normalised fashion. The headset-controlled RC cars are a GREAT idea – if you know anyone who’s got kids who are wheelchair bound, this might be worth sending to them.

• Agnelli Bikes: Half hipster, half steampunk, these bicycles are made in Italy from the reconditioned chassis of old motorbikes. I can’t work out whether they’re brilliant or sort of horrid, but they’re definitely eyecatching. Coming to Deptford ASAP.

• PocketChip: A weird cross between a Raspberry Pi and a retro console, the Pocket Chip Pico8 console lets you build and refine your own, simple 8-bit handheld games which you can then play on the console or share with others. If you or your kids are into game design and programming and are slightly retrofetishistic then you will love this, I think.

• The Woman Cards: One of the few positive things about Trump is that he’s prompted quite a few little projects like this – taking the preposterous suggestion by Trump that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is based on ‘the woman card’ (that well-known…er…trump card in US politics, amirite?), this is a now-funded Kickstarter for a nicely illustrated deck of playing cards celebrating American women. A Good Thing.

• Face Makers Mascots: Upon seeing this site, I realised that not enough agencies have mascots. This company will help you address that – order a corporate mascot costume from them TODAY, and use it as a shaming mechanism to incentivise underperforming account teams to SELL MORE DIGISPAFF, else they be forced to don the suit of humiliation. I mean, LOOK AT WHAT YOU COULD GET.

• Project Include: Oh-so-well-meaning project aimed at creating a framework for tech companies to improve their diversity, offering “perspectives, recommendations, materials, and tools to help CEOs and their teams build meaningful inclusion.” Should it be this hard? Should you need a framework to, you know, just not hire people who are all white men? I’m not 100% convinced that this is going to make ANY difference to anything, but maybe I’m just a miserable cynic (I’m just a miserable cynic).

• Geocities FOREVER: Procedurally generated Geocities homepages, brilliantly capturing the aesthetic and just general wonky weirdness of the pre-MySpace virtual community of choice. As pointed out on the homepage, the Turner Prize has been won for less than this.

• Audobon Photo Awards: EXCELLENT photography of birds, which I promise you is about 300% better than you think it’s going to be before you click.

• My Trans Health: Excellent US initiative collecting information for trans people at all stages of the journey on medical matters – you tell it how you identify, genderwise, and where you live and what you need help with, and it pulls from a database of medical providers who have experience dealing with trans issues. Helpful, and the sort of thing which would be worth establishing in the UK also.

• Scifi London 48h Challenge: Once again Scifi London this year ran it’s 48h film challenge, in which anyone could submit a short film inspired by a particulr brief and completed in 48h total – this site collects the 10 shortlisted entries, which if you’re into scifi and/or filmmaking are pretty interesting, and are worth checking out even if you couldn’t give two figs about scifi because frankly anything cobbled together in 48h tends to be at the very least interesting.

• Graphtreon: A site collecting information and data about people on Patreon (the site which lets people who make stuff source subscriptions to pay for their output). Mainly of interest for its ranking of the top-ranked artists on Patreon – there are some SIGNIFICANT monthly sums being raked in, and some really, really weird and niche things being funded. Bottom line – if you’ve ever thought ‘Hm, I wonder if I could actually make a living out of selling mygraphic illustrations of slashfic scenarios  to Tumblr fandoms’ then the answer, based on this list, is an emphatic, spunky yes.

• Hermicity: I don’t understand this at ALL, but I was partly convinced that it was part of a new Radiohead thingy when I saw it on Monday. Read this and see what you make of it “A hermit colony ran as a decentralised autonomous organisation on the ethereum blockchain. We now have the technology to allow people to live completely alone. Drones will airlift soylent packets and water to the members of the hermit colony. Membership is paid with ether to a smart contract. The smart contract sends drone from a solar powered docking station to the members.” YEAH, OK.

• ReTech: Interesting art / maker project which takes old tech and repurposes it to create working arttech sculptures with a heavy steampunk/junk art aesthetic. Which, I’ve just realised, is a hideous and near-meaningless jumble of WORDS; you should probably just click the link and check it out. Sorry, having a bit of a 10am flag here.

• 3 Words For Paris: Cute project, this, which feels like it should be an official touristpromo thing but which doesn’t seem to be. You plug in three words of your choosing to the site, and it presents you with a video of Paris stitched together from clips tagged with your chosen terms. Not sure how flexible it is, or how big the vocabulary is, but it’s an interesting and nicely-presented take on the neverending Subservient Chicken knockoff conveyorbelt.

• The Lyttle Lytton Winners: Another year, another collection of wonderful examples of the art of the dreadful first line of a novel. As ever, this page collects a selection of the best entries, of which my absolute favourite is this masterpiece: “Call me Bastardo Medio, for my costume is black, my skin is pasty white, and I am one muy malo hombre.” I would read the fcuk out of this book, no question.

• Visuwords: I featured a visual thesaurus last week, but this one knocks it into a cocked hat. Type in any word and get synonyms, use cases, information on sentence construction…all presented in a really rather nice floating bubble visual interface. Wordy people, you will find a lot to love here.

• Find Face: This is currently only in Russia, and currently only works on VK (their local popular social network), but as a ‘scary harbinger of future doom’ it’s a doozy. Find Face lets users input a photo of anyone, whether taken from the web or from a cameraphone snap, and uses said photo to find the subject on VK. Which means, let’s be clear, that you could surreptitiously take a photo of a stranger on the tube and then track them down online for IN NO WAY STALKY fun. Or, as is currently happening in Russia, use it to take photos of adult performers to find their social profiles and send them abuse. Ah, WHAT LARKS!

• Stroovy: Despite the much-documented furore of Peeple (see Curios passim), it seems we’ve not got over our desire to apply arbitrary ratings to people online. Welcome to the party, then, Stroovy, whose appalling tagline ‘Stroove Before You Groove’ (I really hope noone got paid for that) fails in any way to explain what it actually does – to whit, let people post reviews of people they have gone on online dates with, to let OTHER people check out what past…er…’users’(?) of a date thought about the experience. This will OBVIOUSLY not lead to a whole load of needless unpleasantness, oh no siree.

• iAnimal: Smart use of 360 video/pseudo-VR for campaigning purposes, this site by PETA-esque organisation Animal Equality uses 360 video to explore the condition suffered by livestock in intensive farming; it features all the sort of footage you’d expect of pigs in cramped conditions and the like, and is as good an argument for eating free range as you’ll ever see – plus there’s a BONUS ENDORSEMENT from Peter Egan, so, you know, GREAT.

• Snapshorts: Let it be known that I don’t endorse this AT ALL. Ahem. Have you ever wanted to own a pair of swimming shorts which are decorated with a print of one of your photos off Instagram? Would you pay close to £400 for such a pair of swimming shorts? If the answer to those questions is ‘yes’, I’d politely invite you to stop reading and go and take a long, hard look at yourself (but then to come back, because frankly I could do with the numbers). Also, they are called Snapshorts. SNAPSHORTS. What are we become?

• Creatures Of Yes: I don’t really know what to make of this. It’s like the Muppets – I mean, really like the Muppets, but the old, 70s Muppets, where everything was a bit brown and faded. It purports to be done on 70s equipment and in a replica 70s studio, and the look and feel is just PERFECT; the short videos on display here are less overtly odd than, say, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared”, but there’s something off about each of them, and the more you watch the odder they get – sort of like Muppet Scarfolk, but less obviously a parody. Basically you should watch a few of these, possibly when stoned, and see if they grab you.

• Radzyn Stories: Finally this week, this is a WONDERFUL collection of stories and interactives, all centred around the fictional town of Radzyn, a place of safety for the Jewish diaspora for centuries. Obviously, you know, really Jewish, but the goyim will enjoy the stories and the gently explanatory nature of the project with regard to Jewish history and terminology (or at least this one did). Gorgeous artwork in the stories, also.

FINALLY, WHY NOT TRY SOME UK R’N’B-TYPE STUFF FROM THE EXCELLENT OLIVIA LOUISE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Craigslist Plates: Documenting all those instances where people putting a car on Craigslist can’t work photoshop to blur their license plate and so try to obscure it in the listing photo with a poorly-placed fingertip. Obviously a DEEPLY IMPORTANT site, this.

• Bosch Work Memes: Characters from the paintings of notorious weirdo Hieronymous Bosch, accompanying world-weary “WORK SUCKS” memecaptions to surprisingly excellent effect.

• Profound Insights: Criminals captured on CCTV, captioned with the sort of motivational insights which, if you’re anything like me, inspire you to commit grievous acts of physical harm on those sharing them.

• Hattie Stewart: Hattie Stewart draws on photos and her work is STRONG. Commission her now.

• Parliament Fights: Not in fact a Tumblr, but what does that matter? Everyone loves watching videos of politicians from around the world lumping seven shades of each other – the volume of entries here is sort of depressing, though, on reflection.

• Are There Lesbians?: Analysing popular culture for its depiction of lesbian characters. Not, let’s be very clear, the sort of ‘yes, there are lesbians, and they get naked at 13:32” website you may be hoping for.

• Once Upon A Town: Photos of 19/early-20 Century towns, mainly in America. GOD THINGS WERE BETTER AND SIMPLER THEN (apart from the disease, the oppression of minorities, the grinding poverty and the lack of distraction from the base-level horror of existence, obviously)

• Bad Flags: Collecting BAD FLAGS from around the world, and offering helpful suggestions as to how they could be improved. Which is nice.

• Trumphole: If you, like many, are convinced that the words of The Donald are equivalent to excreta, then this will be right up your street. I first found this almost a year ago, but it seems a good time to repost it – be warned, though, this really is a collection of pictures of Trump in which his mouth has been replaced by an actual anus. Some of the animations here are…upsetting.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Uncanny Valley: Another excellent piece on the unpleasant reality of life in a Silicon Valley startup, this piece is brilliantly written and so close to The Circle in many respects that it reads almost like a companion piece; the chutzpah, the bragaddoccio, the relentless pursuit of investment dollars, the rictus grins designed to communicate all the FUN that’s being had. It sounds, as I’ve previously said, horrible.

• Gigging with Hatsune Miku: Such a shame that this is a Kotaku piece and as such is a touch pedestrian (sorry, author, I’m sure you’re being hamstrung by house style here), because the subject matter – going to a US gig by Japanese virtual pop sensation Hatsune Miku and looking at what the appeal is – is really rather interesting. The concept of a ‘vocaloid’ alone is a fascinating one – are we going to need to create new idengtifying terms for subcategories of bots?

• Cocaineomics: Nicely put together large-scale interactive by the Wall Street Journal to house their big invetsigative report on the history, growth and evolution of the global cocaine trade, from Escobar to the Sinaloa cartels and beyond. As pointed out by Simon, the little interactive ‘chop the powder’ section at the top of the piece really does look like it was designed by someone who was taking their research for this piece VERY SERIOUSLY.

• Robot Carers of the Future: Investigating how a future might look in which we are all accompanied into our senile dotage by robot companions to help and distract and feed us and prevent us from dying (WHY, THOUGH? CAN WE NOT JUST DIE, PLEASE? I JUST WANT TO DIE. LEAVE ME ALONE, ROBOT COMPANION, I AM 126 AND I NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF AND I AM SO TIRED). Chilling and comforting at the same time; if you have ever enjoyed the excellent film ‘Robot & Frank’ (and if you haven’t, you should) you will get this.

• Choking Victim: An excellent piece of fiction by Alexandra Kleeman in the New Yorker, from a new mother’s perspective. Obviously I’m not, never have been and never will be a mother, but I enjoyed this immensely. Reminded me of AM Homes, stylistically, though I couldn’t possibly explain to you why.

• Giphy Wants All The Gifs: Profile of gif search engine company Giphy, which is less interesting in terms of them and their story than it is in terms of how large organisations can and should approach the ownership of their content in 2016 and beyond. This is a semiserious question – why don’t TV channels employ a rolling bunch of junior staff to make gifs on the fly from all their shows for release into social media? You could pay children PENNIES (ahem living wage obvs) and you’d get some great, timely stuff which you would own. DO IT.

• The Death of the Greatest Hit Album: Slightly Canute-ish from Pitchfork here, but raises an interesting point about what happens to musical curation now that anyone can do it, and where the entrypoint to music comes if you can’t serve people a ‘Best Of…’ selection. Also made me think about how you could algorithmically automate these things – Spotify could very easily create a ‘Teach me about [artist x]’ feature, playing you their ‘best’ tracks based on streaming / sharing numbers, say. Hang on, do they do that already? Ignore me, if so, I’m SHATTERED.

• Making Movies In VR: Profiling a variety of filmmakers experimenting with 360 video and VR to MOVE THE MEDIUM FORWARD or something. One shouldn’t (meaning: I shouldn’t) be cynical about this; this is obviously going to be a huge technical shift in time, however clunky the current output is. I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff here about how you create a narrative when a viewer isn’t being directed quite so closely by the auteur – lots of potential for clue-dropping, nuance and misdirection in storytelling. Probably.

• The Madness of the Trump Tweets: Joe Keohane of Politico Magazine goes where noone else has dared – deep into the Trump firehose. He read all of Trump’s Tweets (ALL OF THEM – just imagine what that would feel like) and presents this analysis of what it tells us about the man, his campaign and us (well, them). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry (really, it’s pretty depressing), you’ll wonder whether it will ever be possible to visit the alternate universe in which this man wins the Presidency as it would be a pretty unique vision of Hell (remember, he CAN’T WIN. If I keep saying this it becomes true, right?).

• Inside Meow Wolf: Did you know that George RR Martin of Game of Thrones fame also owns a theme park/immersive theatre/art collective THING in Santa Fe? Well he does, it’s called Meow Wolf, and it sounds like a Punchdrunk show but without all the crap bits (ie the whole thing turning into a bunch of drunk Londoners legging it around a nicely decked–out set chasing performers to a mutually unsatisfying conclusion). I WANT TO GO – can someone bring this to London? Thanks.

• Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’: Brilliant piece arguing for an end to, or at least a reining in of, the habit of making all reviews and in fact just about all journalism an exercise in personal framing. Whilst the author of this newsletter is in no position to rail against people using the personal pronoun, this is an excellent article exploring how that changes the critical eye and in turn the culture informed by it.

• The Last Phonecall: Excellent US big paper interactive of the day #2, this is a lovely and heartbreaking series of comics telling the stories of Death Row inmates in the US, presented by the New York Times. Simple and effective and beautifully illustrated, these will stay with you after reading.

• Safety Rope: Beautiful writing about growing up a young gay man in the US, first sexual experiences under cover of secrecy, and generally the whole horrible feeling of fear and alienation and almost irrepressible sexual frustration that comes of being a young bloke dealing with STUFF. Lovely prose.

• My Dinner With Rasputin: (In my notes this was called ‘Raspu-dins’, which is a FAR better title – SEE I AM A REAL WRITER, I AM I AM I AM). Anyway, this is a translation of a piece by a Russian writer in the 20s and it is BRILLIANT, all about the mad cult around Rasputin and what it was like meeting him (creepy, is the short answer). So, so good, not least because the writing is so fresh it could have been written 90 years later.

• Flesh Interface: Remember last week when I told you about the weird Reddit comment storytelling of 9Mother9Horse9Eyes? Well this is more of it, presented in a slightly easier-to-digest linear format but no less brilliantly twisted. This is one of my favourite things on the web right now – it’s really rather special, I think.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is (to my mind) a legitimately terrible song, but the video has been created solely using Snapchat filters and as such it earns its place here by dint of being both SO INTERNET IT HURTS and an actual WORLD FIRST (I think). There’s going to be an ad campaign using this schtick within months, guaranteed:

2) Next, this is small animation called ‘Totally Normal’ which is creepy and cute and wonderfully drawn. ENJOY:

3) I chucked PartyBaby on here a few weeks ago – they have a NEW SONG, which is once again great, and the video, whilst being the least compelling thing you’ll watch this week, is sort of ballsy in it’s “yes, and?” indifference. This is called ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’, and it has nothing to do with this:

4) This is called ‘Companion’; it’s by a band called ‘Braids’ and the vocal here rather blew me away::

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Skepta this week with a new track – this one’s called ‘Man’, and, like the Stormzy vid last week, this is a great slice of UK grime which really is going through a period of HIGH QUALITY CONTENT right now:

6) MORE HIPHOP CORNER! These, though, are some global big boys. French Montana featuring Kanye and Nas, with Figure It Out. Hook-laden, radio friendly and sadly Autotuned to fcuk, this is going to have MILLIONS of views by the time the Curiobot gets round to it in 10 days time but which as of the now is HOT OFF THE PRESSES. Tick off the hiphop cliches in the video while you watch:

7) I featured Yllis the other week – this is another of their wonderful, seapunky internettumblrvisualculturestyle vids, this one for the track ‘Parade’:

8) I don’t want to explain this two much. It’s 3 minutes of ODD, and it’s worth your time. Meet the Tom Scouts (thanks, Wilson):

9) Finally this week, the song is pretty dreadful (it sounds a LOT like ‘Hey Mickey’ in the verse, to my mind) and yet STRANGELY COMPELLING. Is this what it feels like to be THE YOUTH in 2016? Christ alive, I hope not. In any case, this is featured more for the video which includes enough preposterous tongue-on-tongue action to see you through the weekend and beyond. Enjoy the VERY OVERT KISSING in ‘Symptom of Youth’ by Rena, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks – BYE! BYE! BYE!

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LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE EXCELLENT NEW ‘ENGLISTAN’ MIXTAPE BY RIZ MC!

THE SECTION WHICH IN PART THINKS WE SHOULD JUST GIVE ZUCKERBERG THEY KEYS TO THE WORLD NOW AND BE DONE WITH IT:

• Those Massive Facebook Numbers: Massively increased profits beating expectations! More ads being sold! Mobile is massive! 1.65billion registered users! The inevitability of Facebook as a part of human communications infrastructure for the rest of the decade at the very least! Yes, that’s right, EXCELLENT NUMBERS for the big blue misery factory this week, meaning you’re not going to stop throwing cash at it any time soon. In terms of reach, targeting, etc, it really is the biggest game in town.

• Facebook Small Business Store: As previously hinted at (see Curios passim), everyone who bothers to read this top section is OBVIOUSLY a complete expert on all aspects of social media (just like its author, natch) and so would have no need of a series of simple, step-by-step guides on how to maximise Facebook utility if you’re a small business. You might know someone who does, though, in which case point them at this newly collated selection of resources which are really very helpful indeed, taking you through advertising, targeting, Page optimisation, remarketing and all sorts.

• Twitter Numbers: It’s sort of unfair that company law forces all these results to come out at broadly the same time, as Twitter once again suffers not only absolutely but also by contrast with Facebook. Main takeout from the opening paragraphs of the shareholder letter are that user numbers are once again up, but brand spend was lower than expected – well what do you expect when your audience segmentation and targeting is so ropey? It’s OK, though, because Twitter has rebranded as a news app – oh, Twitter!

• Better Abuse Reporting On Twitter: This is a good move, though why it’s taken so long is something of a mystery; rather than having to file multiple complaint tickets to report a single user for multiple abusive Tweets, users getting harassed on the platform can now report a bunch of Tweets in one complaint. About time really.

• Twitter Adds Ad Groups: This should have been in last week, but…er…I totally forgot to write it up. Sorry. Seriously, though, it’s pretty dull, so don’t feel like you missed anything; it’s basically a marginally better way of running multitargeted campaigns. To quote them, “one campaign can have many ad groups, and an ad group can have many targeting criteria and creatives”. So there.

• Yelp Geotags Now Integrated Into Tweets: If you want them to, at least – newly launched in the UK, you now have the option to add a Yelp! tag to your Tweets, pulling in venue info, Yelp! Reviews, etc, into the Tweet. So if you’re a venue, a reason to care marginally more about Yelp! than you might otherwise have done.

• The Twitter Mobile App Playbook: All the hints and tips you might ever want should you be a developer of mobile apps wishing to integrate with Twitter in any way. Useful for people who build stuff, probably less so for the rest of you.

• LinkedIn Numbers: No, I don’t care either, but we are nothing but thorough here at Imperica.

• YouTube Launching Unskippable Bumper Ads: You can now put unskippable six-second ads at the front of YouTube videos, basically. These are designed specifically for delivery on mobile, and are capped at six seconds; the idea being that it will perhaps force advertisers to get to the point faster. Smart idea, seeing as it’s only a second longer than the standard ‘you can skip this now’ time limit on pre-roll; if you’re quick, you can probably do something quite nice and creative and FIRST with the time limit – maybe some sort of “We have you for six seconds – THIS IS OUR BRAND” superhighintensityhighspeedvideodump which has to be paused to catch the Easter eggs, or something. Yes, I know your ideas are all better than that, THIS IS WHY I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO CANNES.

• Snapchat Users Watch 10billion Videos A Day: Or at least so says Snapchat. I would love to know, just out of interest, what percentage of those views are of brand-created content.

• Smart Use of Snapchat Geofilters by Macmillan: Really, really nice, this – Macmillan Cancer set up a bunch of Snapchat geofilters at certain bits of the London Marathon course last weekend, letting people add a Macmillan skin to their snaps of the runners. Simple and effective – other brands, especially the standard sporting ones, also had filters in place around the course, but this one’s my favourite execution because, you know, charity and all that.

• Jelly Is Back!: Do you remember Jelly, Twitter founder Biz Stone’s attempt a couple of years back to out-Quora Quora with a Q&A service? Well having been mothballed it’s now BACK, with a slightly more pleasing interface and the ability to submit questions to the community anonymously without creating an account. I thought this might be quite a useful place for certain specific brands BITD, and I was SO WRONG, so I’m just going to leave this here and walk away whistling nonchalantly before I embarrass myself again.

• Adult Digital Media Usage 2016: That time of year again when OFCOM kindly publish a load of numbers which yet again suggests unsurprisingly that, whodathunkit, lots of people in the UK go online for information, many of them do so using mobile technology, and this number continues to grow year-on-year across all demographics. If you’re in the invidious position of still having to persuade clients that, you know, this web thing might actually catch on a bit (you may scoff, but YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S LIKE), then this contains everything you need to beat them to death with (metaphorically. Obviously).

• Hold Your Breath: Right, so this is all in Dutch and whilst I am sure that, like all Dutch websites, they have probably had the common decency to have an English translation built I am buggered if I can find the button to switch to it and so I am sort of guessing a bit here as to what it’s actually about. BUT, you don’t need to read Dutch to work out that a) it’s to raise awareness of a Dutch charity for…er…lungs(?) and b) that the gimmick is that it’s raising awareness of lung problems and c) that it invites you to film yourself holding your breath for as long as you can and then share the video to your networks so they might do the same. Whilst the obvious answer to “we want an icebucket challenge!” is “ahahahahafuckoffmate”, this at the very least is smart enough to do EVERYTHING it can to reduce barriers to participation. Smart, and a nice site to boot – plus watching people go all red in the face from autoasphyxiation is WELL EROTIC…no, hang on funny. Funny. Yes, that was the word.

• INRA At 70: Whereas this French website made it REALLY EASY to turn on the English version, for which THANKS. This is a 70th anniversary celebration site for the French Institut Nationale de Researche Agronomique, showcasing its achievements over its lifespan. A really nicely made timeline, this, which might provide some design inspiration.

• Taglin3r: A Twitter bot which punts out a new autogenerated tagline every hour. Some of these are genuinely usable, so worth following and sprinkling your next presentation with. Why not? Noone will ever know, and to be honest most of these are better than actual brand taglines.

• Strategy Maker: In a similar vein, this churns out some bullsh1t copy about ‘strategy’ every time you refresh. Again, terrifyingly plausible. I mean, read this and tell me that it’s not press release ready: “Our strategy is agile. We will lead a digital first effort of the market through our use of culture and data leaders to build a competitive advantage. By being both collaborative and customer focused, our sustainable approach will drive internet of things throughout the organization. Synergies between our digital business and platform will enable us to capture the upside by becoming open in a disruptive world. These transformations combined with ecosystem due to our social media will create a learning organization through value and leaders.” Well, yes, QUITE.

• The Best Email Capture Page Ever: At least it’s honest.

• Monopoly Does Facebook Live Video: One of the big selling points of Facebook LIve Video is that it lasts in perpetuity, which is why I am able to bring you this absolute car crash of a show from Monopoly who last week decided for reasons known only to themselves to film their Mr Monopoly character playing Hungry Hippos with the Potato Heads. No, me neither. Watch this video. Then watch it again, keeping the knowledge that these are real, adult human beings doing a job at the front of your mind. You can’t see their faces, but you know that behind the masks there are the tear-streaked faces of people for whom the childhood dreams of career fulfilment are but a distant, poignant memory.

• Imperica Commercial Services: Serious point – if you would like to speak to Imperica about bringing our ‘unique’ brand of knowledge of the web, digital, social media, culture, etc to bear on YOUR agency or brand, then click on the link and see about getting in touch. From bespoke newsletters to trend papers, creative ideation and all the rest of this bollocks, we’re yours to do with as you please for a few pennies (we’ll pretty much do anything).

NEXT UP, THIS HIGH QUALITY RINSE FM MIX FROM A COUPLE OF WEEKS BACK!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CARE WHO BECKY IS, AND IS GENERALLY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED THAT NOONE SEEMS TO BE CONSIDERING THAT THE WHOLE LEMONADE THING MIGHT JUST, YOU KNOW, BE AN ARTISTIC FICTION RATHER THAN ANYTHING TO DO WITH REAL LIFE, PT.1:

• Talkshow: This week’s HOT NEW THING is Talkshow, an iOS-only app which basically does for messaging what Twitch did for gaming (sort of). Effectively it lets users stream a messaging conversation between x number of participants, live; so other users can watch the conversation in realtime. Not 100% unlike Twitter if you removed all the noise and just focused it on individual chat threads, this has a lot of potential, I think, for interviews and brand ambassador work, as well as for anyone who thinks of themselves as a comedian (although the inevitable horror of all the aspirant comic writers on here makes me shudder slightly, I confess). I could imagine the roast format doing quite well here, for example. No idea if it will take off properly, but it’s a fun idea.

• Procedurally Generated Baby Names: I confess that I have no recollection where I found this, but the URL suggests it’s a Stanford University project; it’s a seemingly-infinite list of baby names generated by…er…some program somewhere. Sorry, this is a pretty poor show even by my standards. Included mainly because I really like the idea of setting up a script which emails each and every one of your pregnant friends with one of these at random on the hour: “How about Wynther?” “How about Luchine?” “How about Gerfand?”. ONE OF THEM HAS TO BE GOOD ENOUGH.

• The Visualised Thesaurus: A nice project which is, now I look more closely, a promo for some company which promises to help you write better emails (not possible, mate, my emails are AMAZING), this is a visual thesaurus which displays results based on their affinity with the source work and lets you simply click through them to refine what you’re looking for. Not a bad resource, this.

• Social Capital: Newish regular column from the New York Times which analyses a famouses social media profile from a semi-professional point of view, looking at the brand their profiles create and how that relates to their public persona. Actually really interesting if you’re in the business of managing brands through social media, and frankly even if you’re not; you might not have heard of the famouses in question, what with it being all American and stuff, but the principle’s a good one. Come on, The Guardian, don’t pretend that this isn’t going to be in G2 ASAP.

• I Really Don’t Know What These Are: I mean, I sort of know what they are – they’re seemingly language instruction cards from Japan, showing situations with English language captions and Japanese translations, but the captions are all wrong and this has to be a joke but it’s all in Japanese and frankly I am pretty much incapable of distinguishing ‘comedy’ from ‘just odd stuff on the web’ after all these years exposed to the radiation of ODD emanating from all this stuff I am forced to consume for YOU oh God I have been doing this for so long and for what no don’t answer that maybe I just need to take a break and look at some trees or something.

• Fresh Team: You know when you make up a meeting at work because you just can’t face it any more, and instead of working what you actually go and do is sit in the park eating pastries and crying until the crumbs form a buttery mulch in the bunched crotch of your slacks? Imagine how rubbish it would be if you couldn’t do that because your boss knew where you were ALL THE TIME – well that’s the premise of Fresh Team, a co-working facilitation app which is chat, conference calling and stuff for teams but which ALSO lets you share your location – meaning that your employer can know where you are (or where your phone is, at least) at ALL TIMES. Hideous, and not even the creepiest location tracking thing on here this week (foreshadowing).

• I am bnb: I’m sure this isn’t the first variant of this I’ve seen, but I’m buggered if I can remember. Anyway, if you’re so lazy that you can’t even be bothered to administer your own Airbnb listing, this Dutch service does it all for you for a nominal fee – they set up the listing, email prospective tenants, arrange cleaning, etc etc. Not yet in the UK, from what I can tell, should you want to set up a quick ripoff.

• The World Economy, Visualised: Sent to me by Josh (thanks Josh!), this is a BRILLIANT-if-overwhelming site by Harvard which visualises the global economy based on the exports of each country in the world, graded by sector. It’s hypnotic to see the sheer volume of global trade here and to play around tracking where exports go (CLUE: EUROPE, YOU FCUKING IDIOTS). Brilliant and fascinating and you should have a fiddle with it.

• The Fanfic Maker: Pick a fandom., pick some characters, pick your desired levels of sex and violence and press a button to get your very own piece of Harry/Draco smut (or, er, whatever you want; not suggesting anything, honest) stitched together to order from a whole host of actual fanfic sentences culled from around the web. The outputs are obviously in large part nonsensical, but that only adds to the authenticity.

• Bard Jam: HAPPY DEATHMONTH, WILLIAM! Leaving aside the horror of the term ‘The Bard’ (there’s something horribly miladyish about people referring to Shakespeare as such, isn’t there?), this is a nice project inviting people to submit works of IF (sorry, interactive fiction) and the like to celebrate the anniversary. There’s 24h or so left to submit something, in case you have a bit of Shakespearean code lying down the back of the sofa or something. Also, er, there are only three submissions so far, so you might even WIN A THING! They’re quite fun, in a lightweight sort of way, even for non-IF enthusiasts.

• Perfect Ear Training: Want to test how good you are at determining frequency and pitch? This is for you, then. Proved to me beyond doubt that I am utterly cloth-eared.

• Hover: If you’ve always wanted a drone camera but have been slightly freaked out by the prospect of those exposed propellers, Hover is for you. Designed to be safe for indoor and close-up use, the gimmick with this is that the rotors are all safely encased, meaning that it can bounce off walls, pets, people, etc, with minimal damage, and won’t get caught on the curtains. Obviously like everything vaguely cool looking on the web at the moment it doesn’t in fact exist yet, but you can register for updates and cross your fingers that it might one day actually come to market.

• No Logo Is Original: Apparent proof that Airbnb, Beats, Tripadvisor, etc. have, in an INCREDIBLE COINCIDENCE, lifted their logo design almost exactly from those of a bunch of old, forgotten organisations as illustrated in an obscure design book from the 80s. Worth scrolling down and expanding the comments on this Twitter thread, not only for some other great examples of design *ahem* inspiration, but also to see all the people saying “yes, and?” as though wholesale theft is an accepted part of the graphic design proce…oh.

• The Snake Artist: This man paints snakes. Lots and lots of snakes. The term ‘artist’ is a pretty elastic one, but he’s definitely not messing around with the snakes here. Definitely lots of snakes.

• Seenote: You know those notes that families stick on the fridge with reminders, shopping lists, little nods of affection, and passive-aggressive exhortations to DO THE FCUKING WASHING UP YOU LAZY BASTARD I AM NOT YOUR MOTHER? This is like those, but digital – with an e-Paper display and internet connectivity. A nice idea in a lot of ways, although I am immediately drawn to the hacking potential for this – imagine the dark, dark things you could do to people if you managed to get into this and leave your own messages. “3 pints of blood (cow’s); cable ties; DO NOT OPEN THE BASEMENT”, that sort of thing. FUN TIMES!

• Round: The worst conversation in the world. Round is a website which lets anyone anonymously post a message to it, marking where they are from on the globe. You can just sit and watch strangers typing rubbish at you, and it’s weirdly compelling although I couldn’t tell you why. At the moment people are talking about what foods they like, which is sort of heartwarming (although your ETA to something foul is about 2 seconds, just so you know).

• Zero Minutes Of Fame: A Chrome extension which automatically removes the names and pictures of people guilty of mass shootings from your browsing experience. There are a couple of interesting extensions to this I can think of – there are a few charity ones, obviously; maybe a domestic violence charity could do the same thing for famouses who’ve been convicted of offences to highlight the problem, or you could create a Trigger Warning version which censors anything potentially upsetting from the web and leaves you with simple, empty swathes of blank space – oh I don’t know, you think of something.

• The Steve Buscemi Galaxy Onesie: Presented without comment here.

• Chris Moss Acid: You like wibbly-wobbly acid-style tunes? You can get literally EVERYTHING you could ever want here, then, and it will take you RIGHT back if you’re an old raver.

• Imzy: Like Reddit, but, er, cute and nice, this is by an ex-Reddit staffer and is invite-only at the moment, but the idea is that it’s another community-based site but designed to be more welcoming and user-friendly than Reddit, both aesthetically an in terms of tone. There’s some quite interesting stuff in here about payments integration and the like – you can read a bit more about it here, should you wish. Could be worth keeping an eye on, though unlikely to trouble Reddit’s numbers any time soon.

• Pol Clarissou: A selection of small-but-gorgeous digital art projects collected in one place. Many require a small download, but some of the art style here is very beautiful indeed.

• Diversity Tickets: Want to get your conference out to a more diverse audience but don’t, er, know any people who aren’t EXACTLY LIKE YOU to invite? This service lets conference organisers specify a set number of tickets they wish to assign to audience members of a certain gender or ethnic classification; it then seeks to find people to take those tickers. You can offer to help with transport costs, etc, to encourage attendance, and the idea overall is well-meaning, but you can’t help thinking that it doesn’t really address the root cause of the problem here; if you need to use this, maybe you need to actually broaden your circles IN REAL LIFE rather than farming out the work of making a cosmetic nod towards diversity to a website. Just a thought.

• Microsculpture: The most incredible hi-res photographs of beautiful insects you will see all week. Look at their glorious iridescent carapaces!

• Show Score: IMDB for theatre, effectively – as far as I can tell this is NYC-only, but I really like the premise; you can filter in all sorts of ways, and it presents shows classed by their popularity or price or divisiveness, and the interface is pretty easy to use. Something like this for London would be genuinely great, given that I am yet to find a decent all-theatre site which aggregates this sort of stuff (if anyone knows of one, please do send it my way).

• Things Work: This is OLD, for which apologies, but I only found it this week – mesmerising animations explaining how everyday things actually function, Tweeted at a rate of one-per-day. These are just lovely.

• Beachy: Clever idea, this, currently only available on a few beaches in Florida – the idea being that it’s a beach-specific delivery and concierge service, where users can reserve a spot on the beach which will be claimed for them by one of the app’s attendants, order snacks and drinks, etc etc. There is a GREAT and massively casually racist anglo spin on this all about GETTING TO THE BEST SPOTS BEFORE THE GERMANS, but I am sure none of you would be so crass as to suggest or execute that.

• The Wayback Explorer: A tool by the Wayback Machine which lets you quickly see an overview of a site’s edit history – major and minor edits, redirects and 404s. Potentially useful, I’m sure, though I confess that at the precise time of writing I am sort of baffled as to how.

• Littergram: Excellent Streisand Effect-ing by Instagram here, who only alerted me to the existence of this app by dint of their legal battle to get it to change its name. Littergram is a nice idea – it lets users take photos of litter in their local area and share them with the council via a public sector portal for eventual cleaning. Smart and simple and effective, and Instagram (well, Facebook) are being dicks about it.

• Gone For Good: ANOTHER nice, fluffy, friendly app from the UK (well done US!), this time which lets people who are too lazy to take stuff to charity shops (or, more charitably, who can’t for whatever reason get to one) arrange for their unwanted goods to be collected by the charity of their choice. You share details and a photo of the unwanted stuff, let the charity know, and they can (if they want to take it off your hands) come by and pick it up. Simple and useful and exactly the sort of thing that if Uber or Amazon wanted some quick CSR points they could contribute to (covering the cost of / assisting with pickup / delivery, etc).

• Landmark Play Houses: Following the heartwarming examples of two apps for GOOD, let’s come right back down to earth with a crushing bang – LOOK! IT’S A KICKSTARTER FOR LAVISH CAT HOUSES IN THE SHAPE OF GLOBAL LANDMARKS! 3 weeks to go and only 9k off the total, these are destined to be funded – SERIOUSLY, THEY ARE CATS, THEY DO NOT FOR A SECOND CARE ABOUT THE ABILITY TO ‘PLAY’ ON A SMALL SCALE MODEL OF ST BASIL’S FCUKING CATHEDRAL. Madness.

• Misplaced Design: Iconic (sorry) buildings from New York, picked up and moved out of context; through this de/recontextualisation one is better able to appreciate the unique qualities of each structure. Or, er, something. I really like the project, the photos are great, and actually the whole site’s a pleasure to navigate.

• Rich Parents Of Instagram: Because we’re all bored of hating on the children.

NEXT UP, ENJOY THE FULL STREAM OF THE NEW AESOP ROCK LP ACCOMPANIED BY A VERY ODD PUPPET VERSION OF THE SHINING!

THE SECTION WHICH DOESN’T REALLY CARE WHO BECKY IS, AND IS GENERALLY SLIGHTLY PUZZLED THAT NOONE SEEMS TO BE CONSIDERING THAT THE WHOLE LEMONADE THING MIGHT JUST, YOU KNOW, BE AN ARTISTIC FICTION RATHER THAN ANYTHING TO DO WITH REAL LIFE, PT.2:

• Volte Face: A new online magazine, launched a couple of weeks ago, which collects writings in support of a liberalisation of drug policy in the UK and beyond. Obviously entirely one-sided, but if you’re of this persuasion already you’ll find a lot of interesting stuff here to reinforce what you already think. There are some good articles here, regardless of your perspective.

• Top Pitch: Topshop are the latest company to decide that they want a piece of this entrepreneurial action, and are inviting anyone with an idea for some wearable tech that they might produce to submit an application to join what is effectively a Topshop accelerator. As far as I can tell the terms are actually pretty reasonable – they will help you develop the idea and teach you about pitching a product to a major global fashion house, and contrary to many of these projects they’re not demanding any equity. Worth a look if you have an idea for a tshirt which automatically displays Instagrams from a certain hashtag on a 3-minute rotation (for example) (you can have that for free).

• Google Maps Font: Comprised of satellite view images, in case you’ve ever wanted to compose vaguely threatening messages composed of major geographic or architectural features.

• Britain’s Diet In Data: Nice datavizing from the ODI, showing how trends in British food consumption have changed over the past 20+ years. Lots of interesting information in here should you choose to dig; we are LOADS healthier than we used to be, diet-wise (stop the presses).

• Game Of Thrones Spoiler Blocker: For those of you for whom your weekly dose of death, nipples and dragons is sacrosanct.

• Gender Equality in US Media: Interesting data from US organisation Prognosis, which analyses US news media for its coverage of gender and reports on trends therein; there are three mentions of men for every mention of a woman, although obviously this is raw and presented free of context. The breakdown by outlet is interesting – I would love to see a similar study run in the UK.

• All Prior Art: Algorithmically generated digital art concepts. Very good indeed, if you’re into this sort of thing which if you’re reading this or following Imperica I sort of assume you are (AUDIENCE INSIGHTS!).

• Sanders Vs Trump in Second Life: Bernie Sanders supporters clashing with Donald Trump supporters in amazingly-still-going-mid-00s-virtual-world-sensation Second Life. This is so, so bizarre and yet due to the overall bizarreness of the US election marathon to date is sort of weirdly unsurprising.

• Food Photographer of the Year: In case you’re searching for the next person to hire for that photoshoot. These are EXCELLENT.

• Wolf Boxers: I really want to make a joke about damp noses, but I’m not going to because that would be beneath me.

• The Semantic Brain Map: Fascinating project by scientists at the University of Berkely, who plugged a bunch of people into an MRI scanner and then had them listen to stories; they have created a 3d scan of the brain which shows which areas of the organ responded to which words / themes from the stories. It all looks quite random until you start clicking on brain bits, and then you get this sort of weird jolt of realisation about the clustering and realise that you’ve just found out which bit of the brain pertains to words and phrases about, say, measurement and weight, and if you’re me you feel a bit ‘funny’. SEMI-RELATED: the lovely Katie Moffat recently lent me her copy of the beautiful and sad book ‘The Iceberg’ by Marion Coutts, which you should read if you haven’t but which if you HAVE will mean that this site will resonate with you a lot more.

• Chatty Door: Instructions on how to set up a door to send you messages letting you know when it was opened and for how long, using just a Raspberry Pi and a bit of simple coding. If you want to get a teenager into coding, this is an EXCELLENT place to start imho.

• Prevo: Absolutely THE creepiest location, etc, tracking app of the week is this one, which promises to keep ‘your closest friends and family at your fingertips’. Get them all to install the app and you (and, in fairness, they) will be able to see at any given moment where they are, whether they have any battery left on their phone, whether their phone is reachable…I am sure that there are good reasons as to why this is useful, but all I can think of is how insanely paranoid it would make you anytime someone went off-grid for a while.

• Affdex: Emotion tracking software for video, which if you want to do one of those big experiential mall-style installations in which you get 6 actors to caper in front of an interactive screen for free product, film the whole thing and then send it to Cannes for a Lion (because we all know that that’s what this is mostly going to be used for) might be of use / interest.

• Members Only Colouring Books: A whole book full of penises for you to colour in however you want. Currently seeking funding, so if you want to be able to experience cock-based mindfulness later in the year then DIG DEEP.

• Shmupulations: A ridiculously comprehensive archive of translated videogame developer interviews from Japan. If you worship at the altar of Kojima and his ilk then you will find much to appeal to you here.

• Laura Catherine Soto: The Instagram account of the artist, which features a selection of videos of her brilliant, kinetic, glittery, unsettling melty sculptures. No I couldn’t have explained that better, SHUT UP.

• Drop Drake: With Drake’s latest album ‘The Views’ dropping overnight, and hot takes being penned across the country AS I TYPE, here’s a chance to drop the titular rapper off the tower which features on the album cover. Because why not. BONUS DRAKE: you can also use this site to create your own album cover with a mini-Drake sitting and looking emo on the photo of your choice.

• Sebastian Lyserena: The best ‘website as business card’ I have seen so far in 2016, this is (I am presuming quite a lot here) a Danish webdev’s personal site which he’s turned into one-page Rube Goldberg machine, ending in an ‘email me’ button. Really rather brilliant.

• Prepare for Impact: Do you know anyone who’s scared of flying? If so, why not encourage them to download this app before they next get on a plane, being as it is a simulation of what it would be like if your plane actually blew up in mid-air, or started plummeting out of control towards the sea, or something similarly palm-moisteningly awful. I’m going to quote the full blurb here: “This 3D game has been developed in the context of an international, aviation safety research project, aimed at exploring possible new approaches to safety education.The game reproduces the experience of real-world aircraft emergencies from the passenger’s viewpoint, with the highest fidelity allowed by today’s mobile devices. In each virtual emergency experience, the player can try first-hand right and wrong actions that a passenger can take, and see the positive or negative consequences those actions have.” YOU COULD DOOM THE PLANE BY YOUR ACTIONS! So much fun.

• 6×9: The Guardian does a 360 cardboard-ready experience, illustrating the particular horror of being in solitary confinement via 360 degree video. Nicely made, although I’m slightly disappointed that they didn’t make the experience a potential 24h long for the full immersive horror experience; there’s an interesting charity endurance angle there for someone to explore if they really feel like having an unfun time.

• Heat Street: You may have forgotten, or blocked from your memory, the fact that the Murdoch empire was going to launch a new news site with the input of Louise ‘Terrifying Female Piers Morgan-analogue’ Mensch, focusing on attracting clicks from the same sort of abhorrent nu-right knuckleheads who hoover up the Breitbard word like so many shitvacuums. Anyway, it’s launched and it’s as hateful as you’d expect. Head on over if you want to make yourself all angry and righteously lefty.  

• Your Boy Black Trump: A website from US ‘comedy’ staple The Daily Show, showcasing their Black Trump characters and promoting a hiphop track and video they’ve made comprised entirely of entirely real Trump quotes from the campaign trail. Let me reiterate that – THESE ARE ALL ACTUAL QUOTES FROM THE MAN. Astounding.

• The Ecosexual Bathhouse: I don’t understand what this is at all, so if one of you who lives in Melbourne could possibly go and check it out that would be great, thanks. I think it involves wanking on flowers, but I might be wrong.

• Handjob: This is included solely for the childish reason of its name. Handwritten letters for the Canadian market, which obviously has different terminology for certain sexual acts than we do.

• 4 Human Species: Another in the occasional series of ‘Truly mad people we found on the internet’, this comes courtesy of the internet’s very own Weird Scott (who I can’t link to since he stopped doing social media last year) who dug this out of the YouTube comments. This is a truly bizarre and wholly mental and pretty racist take on the human race and how we are in fact constituted of 4 separate species – reds, yellows, whites and blacks. I say ‘racist’ – I mean it is, obviously, but in a sort of weirdly benign, mental and even-handed way, so it’s impossible to get offended by. Go on, click through and take a gambol through the mind of a madman.

• Andy2016: Amidst all the Trump furore it’s been easy to overlook some of the other lunatics running for office in the US at the moment – let’s quickly rectify that with a visit to the website of Andrew D Basiago, American, Patriot, Mars visitor and time traveller, who went back in time with Barack Obama as part of a secret services operation and is now committed to revealing the TRUTH about this to the American people. I suggest you go and read the ‘Proposals’ section right away, for some deep, Icke-level truths about THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS. Wake up, sheeple, etc!

• Cyrano: Finally! The long-awaited digital scent compiler is here! Cyrano is a little box which you can control with your phone to mix a bespoke scent out of its various components; scents which can be shared with anyone else with one of these gadgets too. I would imagine that one of the home scent manufacturers is working on this already, but again my main thought on seeing this was around how pleasingly evil it would be to hack someone’s home scentbox and make them smell burnt toast all the time to convince them that they were at permanent, imminent risk of a stroke.

• Iceberg Songs: A project drawing attention to the melting icecaps by letting users listen to the sounds they make as the creak and crack and slowly disappear, all messed with and reconfigured by a bunch of electronic music composers. Beautifully made and visualised, though the UI is a *touch* ropey in places, and you can also download and remix the sounds – REMIX THE ICEBERGS NOW!

• Run Tomorrow: A Japanese site promoting running and exercise as a hedge against dementia for the country’s famously methuselan population, this is just beautifully made. The stories are all rather poignant, so you might want a hanky at the ready.

• The Modular Body: I rather like this. A scifi story about genetic engineering and vat-grown people and (sort of) vampirism, all told through a series of short videos which you, the user, can watch in whichever order you prefer to build up your own picture of what is (or might be) going on. Nice STORYTELLING (sorry) technique here.

• Lexlydia: Well this is the oddest thing I found all week. Part theatrical performance, part web 1.0 horror experience, Lexlydia is an…art(?) thing happening in Austria for the next few weeks, which is a full-scale single-site full-immersion S&M art horror play thing, which has its corresponding website at the URL above. There are livestreams and things hidden within, through which you can see some of the VERY ODD things that are going down within the performance – this is simultaneously hugely compelling and a little too creepy for me; you can read more about it here, should you wish to attempt to understand exactly what it is that you are seeing (you still won’t, really, though).

• Ghost: Finally this week, one of the best interactive music video website thingies I have seen all year. This is called ‘Ghost’, by With You ft. Vince Staples, and the song is good and the experience is really rather like getting really, really messed up of an evening. Excellent tech here too with the graphical / interactive overlay on the video – check it out, this is GREAT.

LAST UP, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS SPOTIFY MIX SELECTED BY PRINCE HIMSELF!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Weddings and Lesbians: Photos from f/f same-sex marriages. No jokes here about lesbians getting married on the second date, just some really nice photos of happy couples.

• Drag Queens Trying To Use Straws: The struggle is real.

• I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked: Odd, this one. Coders may understand this more than I do: “I Dropped My Phone The Screen Cracked is a web audio library that uses method chaining and CSS-style selectors to simplify creating, configuring and connecting audio nodes in the browser.”  Either way, there are some ODD audio clips on here, generated by said code.

• Mid-Century Modern Design: Compiling the aesthetic in one place.

• Is Ken Livingstone Still In The Loo: A joke which was funny for approximately 20 minutes yesterday.

• The High Life World Series: Collecting collaborations between UK-based Brian d’Souza aka Auntie Flo and Esa Williams working with young musicians and traditional instruments around the globe. If you’re interested in world music this is worth bookmarking, I think, as more updates should be coming soon.

• Unflattering Cat Selfies: Did the cats themselves take these photos? DID THEY???? Christ.

• Natural Colour Palettes: Creating colour palettes from photos of nature.

• Reverse OCR: To quote, “a bot that grabs a random word and draws semi-random lines until the OCRad.js library recognizes it as the word.” The library, judging by the results here, has a VERY elastic point of recognition.

• The Overlook Hotel: Collecting ALL SORTS of Shining-related digital ephemera in one place for all you Kubrick/Nicholson enthusiasts out there.

• Headless Women of Hollywood: Turns out there are a LOT of fiml posters which don’t seem to want to feature women’s heads of faces. GREAT!

• Ruggadah: HAPPY PASSOVER WEEK, JEWISH READERS OF CURIOS!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind: You may have seen this one already as it did the rounds on The Social Network over the weekend; in case not, though, it’s a pretty astonishing account of what it’s like to live with the condition Aphantasia – that is, the inability to visualise images. You know when someone says ‘picture a dog’? Yeah, well this bloke can’t. Really, really interesting, not least from the whole ‘the impossibility of knowing what it would be like to be a bat’ point of view – you want a deep insight into the inherent subjectivity of human experience, click on this link.

• Here Are The Times I Am Free To Meet: McSweeney’s as ever nailing something absolutely perfectly – in this case,the horror or trying to arrange a mutually convenient meeting time in the workplace.

• Writing For Reality TV: An exploration of what it is actually like writing for reality television and being the person who has to go and find the people to fit the desired narrative the production company wants to project (it should come as no surprise to you that these shows tend to start with a title – say, “Amputee Lesbian Chocolatiers” – and then work to see whether the people exist to populate the title. There’s a lot of interesting stuff here about the constructed nature of the self – also, the fact that we will inevitably scoff at the ‘reality’ label is interesting when in 2016 we are all engaged in our own personal reality social media vanity projects. As an aside, my friend Shannon used to have the job title “Senior VP of Reality” at MTV USA, which I always thought was brilliant (although she did get tired of my occasional “Shannon, can you confirm whether this is in fact real?” emails).

• An Exegesis on Spanking Fetishists: Really interesting exploration of this particular side of kink. Really in no way titillating, and pretty much totally SFW, this is fascinating on exactly what it is that draws people to this peculiarly English fetish.

• The Passion of Hobo Hank: One of those great occasional pieces about niche amatuer sports, this is the tale of Hobo Hank, a minor player in a very minor smalltime wrestling league; containing all the drama and posturing of the WWE, but with literally none of the money. If you like wrestling at all, you will really enjoy this – it’s like looking at the nuts and bolts of the whole thing.

• I Am Your Conscious: Of all the outpourings about Prince, none come close to matching the brilliance of this 2012 piece from Harpers, featuring meditations on his sexuality and his relationship to black men and gender and women and art and business. This is just SO well written that I was compelled to read it all, despite having no real affinity to the man’s music. Brilliant writing.

• The Ken Livingstone Row: Included almost entirely because I really like the way in which this is presented. Nice work, HuffPo.

• Playboy Meets Kurzweil: A good interview with singularity-peddler Ray Kurzweil, giving a decent overview of his position with regard to the terrifying, robot-controlled future and our place in it, and also giving him an opportunity to respond to some of the charges leveled at him (namely, that he’s a complete fantasist who’s making a living off the intellectual equivalent of vaporware). Whether or not you believe in the schtick, he’s always an interesting read.

• Welcome To The Post-writing Web: A depressing look at the fact that we’re all about video now, and that’s only become more prevalent. If the advent of mass global literacy in the 20th Century made the word the prevalent means of communication, it’s pretty clear that video’s what’s going to dominate at least the next couple of decades. Maybe I should do Curios as a video. God, that would be awful, can you imagine? Just me, SHOUTING urls into a camera.

• A Protocol For Dying: To quote, “Pieter Hintjens is a writer, programmer and thinker who has spent decades building large software systems and on-line communities”. He is also dying of cancer; this is what he wrote about it last week – it’s one of the clearest, least-sentimental pieces about end of life management you will ever read, and I can only hope that I’m this sanguine about it when it comes to my turn to shuffle off.

• The World Beyond Storytelling: I’ve long railed against the advermarketingpr world’s insistence on describing itself as one whose primary aim is ‘storytelling’ (look, lads, your job is to sell stuff, OK? Also, if this is storytelling then stories are shite), and now comes this GREAT piece which articulates using far more literary examples than I could ever muster exactly why the use of that term is an absolute load of balls. If you work in the industry, I really do encourage you to read this.

• It’s Not The Dark That Kills You: On suicides in Greenland, and the Danish government’s decidedly un-Hygge policies vis-a-vis the territory and its native inhabitants which have contributed to this. This is really good, honest, though I concede it’s not quite a laugh riot.

• The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality: Absolutely the most brain-meltingly hard thing in here this week, this is a whole host of arguments as to why that which we perceive may in fact have no real bearing on what is actually around us, and why there may in fact be strong and compelling evolutionary reasons as to why that is the case. I can’t pretend to understand all of this, but that which I do understand weirded me out a LOT and made me remember the very peculiar experience of attempting to get my head around The Argument from Supervenience while very stoned all those years ago.

• The Day The Cities Stood Still: Scifi short #1 of 2: this imagines what might happen when all our cities are networked, and then what might happen if they just sort of stop. Lovely writing, totally plausible and fascinating if you’re interested in AI, IoT and general city planning and stuff. Don’t let the scifi tag put you off, it’s more just general smart futurology with a cautionary note.

• The Mika Model: Scifi short #2 of 2: this one really is scifi, though. Chandler-esque noir, featuring a sentient sexbot and a murder and a world-weary cop who’s SEEN TOO MUCH, there’s cliche and genre-trope running through this like a stick of rock, but it’s a good yarn, well-spun, and you can see the Hollywood potential – this is totally going to be a film, right?

• The Odd Reddit Comments Of 9MOTHER9HORSE9EYE9: This is BIZARRE. About a week ago, this hitherto unnoticed Reddit poster started writing long and bizarre comments all over the site at the rate of about one a day – if you look at the comments page and read from the bottom up it seems to be a slowly unfolding scifitimetravelbodyhorrormetafictionthing, which is actually really rather nicely written and utterly baffling in its purpose. Worth bookmarking and seeing where this goes.

• The Whole Time Though: The best, and only, thing that you need read about Beyonce, Jaz-Z, Lemonade and, er, a whole load of other stuff. This is so, so good and had me properly LOLing like little else this week. ENJOY!

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, I couldn’t really tell you why I like this but I do. It’s by Tom Prior and it’s called ‘Voicemail’:

2) Next, this is called ‘Balance’, and I guarantee that if you are having a hard day at the end of a long week then watching this will soothe you and make it all feel marginally better. Your problems will still be there, obviously, but that’s just LIFE so deal with it:

3) This is a GREAT song – I mean really, surprisingly and wonderfully brilliant in ways I wasn’t expecting, with touches of early PJ Harvey – and, not that this should matter, one of the most beautiful bunches of musicians I’ve seen in years. This gets better and better on each listen – it’s called ‘Blood’ and it’s by Starbenders:

4) If you reminisce fondly about the days when shoegaze was a thing, I think you’ll enjoy this. Shades of Mazzy Star and others, this is “South Collins” by Beverly:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Big new one from Stormzy, this – called ‘Scary’. He really is VERY good indeed:

6) MORE UK HIPHOP CORNER! Very different to the Stormzy track, this is less hiphop then it is spoken word to a beat. SBTV Warmup session from the very talented Big Zuu – worth taking the time to properly listen to, imho:

7) As I get old I am getting WELL into modern classical music; this week, I discovered the work of Japanese composer Kashiwa Daisuke – this is called ‘Meteor’, and it’s just beautiful (even the drum patterns are sublime) and so is the accompanying video:

8) More simple beauty in this – kung fu movements, visualised. Hypnotic and glorious:

9) Finally this week, a video for a song I was expecting to absolutely despise, and which oddly reminds me of the execrable Chelsea Dagger, and yet which I sort of love. This is by the exceedingly camp Yoko Oh Noes, and it’s called ‘Love U’, and it is EXCELLENT. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

HOW ABOUT KICKING OFF WITH A CONTEMPORARY SELECTION OF TRACKS PICKED BY GERMAN MAG ‘NERDCORE’?

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT, WHEN WE AS A SPECIES ARE TOO LAZY TO EVEN TRY AND TYPE WORDS PERTAINING TO THE TYPE OF BONGO WE WANT TO WATCH, WE MAY WELL BE ON SOME SORT OF SLIPPERY SLOPE TBQHYWM:

• Facebook Tweaks Newsfeed Algorithm (Again): BREAKING NEWS! Or at least it is if you’re reading this hot off my fingers (wow, that sounds wrong doesn’t it? Sorry!); if you’re getting it from the CurioBot then maybe less so. Anyway, Facebook just announced that the Newsfeed is once again going to behave slightly differently – now prioritising content based on the likely amount of time it thinks you’re going to spend looking at it, as well as seeking to minimise multiple posts from the same source in your feed. As ever, they maintain that brands will see minimal disruption – which considering the near-0% status of organic Page reach is probably about right AMIRITE KIDS?! Although actually if you’re a prolific publisher then this is perhaps rather more important (cf the New York Times, regularly taking up ⅔ of my feed with its NEWS, dammit).

• Facebook Testing Differentiated Newsfeed: It’s a REALLY slow news week when I’m reduced to posting speculative Mashable links like this one. RUMOUR HAS IT that Facebook…oh, I’m just going to quote here: “Facebook is experimenting with a new layout on mobile that highlights multiple news sections, with topics such as World & U.S., Sports and Food. However, the primary (and presumably default) section is still the classic news feed we’re accustomed to seeing.” Interesting idea, though whether test users will find it overwhelming remains to be seen. Just think of all the differentiated ad options this will allow for, though!

• You May Soon Be Able To Monetise EVERYTHING on Facebook: I mean, realistically you probably won’t, and ‘soon’ is frankly a massive red herring, but. SOURCES suggest that they’re floating the idea of being able to apply a sort of virtual tip jar to posts, letting your ‘friends’ contribute pennies to reward you for the pithy bons mots about your idealised children and relationship you choose to spaff all over Facebook. Perhaps more probably, it seems they are also canvassing people about their willingness to shill on behalf of brands – direct influencer marketing with Facebook raking in a potential cut of any fees paid, thereby cutting out agencies? WHY NOT?

• Group Calling Launches in Messenger: Basically just that; you can now start group voicechat through FB Messenger, with the ability for others to drop in mid-call. The idea of speaking on the phone on a one-on-one basis scares me enough, frankly, but you may be more socially ept than I am.

• Facebook Lets You Buy Video Ads A Bit More Like You Do On TV: Yes, that’s a bit clunky, but what do you want? It’s vaguely factually accurate – you’ll soon be able to buy Facebook video ads in time blocks, so to air between specific times of the day, and (in the US at least) match your ad targeting on Facebook to your TV targeting, allowing for consistent campaigns (and, I suppose, better compare/contrast benchmarking of ad performance across platforms). So there.

• YouTube Introduces 360-degree Livestreaming: Hot on the heels of Facebook attempting to OWN live video last week comes this update from Google, announcing that (with the right kit) you can now stream video in 360. It’s currently only available in YouTube Space locations, but London’s one of those so if you work for the FA or similar I’d probably start talking to them about your next big live event thingy.

• Google Also Tweaking TV Integration: I know that I am supposed to at least pretend, but I have to confess that I find stuff about ad buying and placement and programmatic and all that jazz INTENSELY dull, so I’m just going to leave this here and you can do what you like with it: “Today we are taking big steps to bring new addressable advertising capabilities to TV Broadcasters and Distributors by announcing DoubleClick’s Dynamic Ad Insertion. This makes ads hyper relevant for viewers across any screen that they watch. By creating individual streams for every viewer using server side ad insertion, we are able to deliver a better, more personalized viewing experience that looks and feels as seamless as TV today. And not only will this work for both live and on-demand TV but it works across directly sold and programmatic.” Exciting, eh?

• Snapchat Stops Charging for Replays, Launches Additional Faceswap Capabilities: The fact that the newly announced ability to swap your face with that of ANY photo on your camera roll is news is strangely comforting in the middle of all this celebrity death stuff. Anyway, that is now a thing, as is the fact that Snapchat’s given up trying to monetise replays of Snaps. Seeing as we’re on Snapchat, this Prince tribute is nice and a just-in-time antidote to MarleyGate; this is how you make Snapchat Stickers on video (announced last week; DO KEEP UP) work; and did you know that they are bringing back MTV Cribs as a Snapchat show? YES THEY ARE! Actually makes a lot of sense, that last one; when Through The Keyhole takes the same step then we’ll truly know that the platform’s adoption by the mainstream is fully complete.  

• Shazam For Brands: Slightly odd one, this, as there’s not 100% detail on what this actually means; from what I can tell, though, Shazam for Brands effectively indicates that the platform is going to start adding more Augmented Reality capabilities and wants to persuade brands to partner with them to create AUGMENTED ADVERTISING EXPERIENCES linked to packaging, etc. So basically fancy logo/packaging-based QR codes a la Blippar, maybe; this isn’t a bad idea actually, given the high install base the app has, although whether anyone actually wants to, say, scan biscuit for content is another thing entirely.

• Quora Introducing Ads: Which, if you’re targeting Silicon Valley types or people in India, is potentially BIG NEWS.

• The Future of Bots: You know how Facebook announced bots for Messenger last week? This is what the future of that is going to look like – brand-owned bots, butting into your conversations unbidden, shouting about special offers and GREAT DEALS. “Meet outside Starbucks at 6…” “I NOTICE YOU SAID STARBUCKS; WOULD YOU LIKE A VOUCHER FOR A HOT CAFFEINATED BEVERAGE REDEEMABLE ONLY TODAY” “Fcuk off, Starbucks”.

• The Public House Failed Pitch Emporium: Dublin-based agency The Public House is selling off unsuccessful creative from pitches on eBay.  A rather nice idea, I think, although you sort of hope if anyone does buy and use these successfully that they’ll chuck the agency an additional few quid as a thankyou (you won’t, will you? GITS).

• Press Release Bullsh1t: Generate your own and see how many people you can get to sign it off.

• Emoji for Bongo: Pornhub are GREAT at PR, there’s no doubt about it. Although the less charitably minded among you might suggest that there’s no easier job than peddling bongo, you have to concede that they do it with imagination. This is the latest iteration of the “order X with emoji” bandwagon which we saw last year with pizza and film and stuff; in this case, users just text an emoji to a certain phone number (works in the UK too, kids!), and they will receive back a particular style of bongo based on the emoji they sent – you can see a list of commands at the link, but brilliantly there are a whole load of secret ones they don’t tell you – and because you pay (and they earn) per text, they earn pennies every time you experiment with the more esoteric of the unicode characters. Really rather smart, although make sure your teenage children don’t hear about this as the potential phonebill consequences could be ruinous, not to mention the hairy palms.

SHALL WE PROCEED WITH A TRULY SPECTACULAR DUB/REGGAE/DANCEHALL MIX IN TRIBUTE TO THE LATE, LAMENTED DJ DEREK? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.1:

• Reuters TV News: Obviously not TV as it’s on the web. STUPID REUTERS. Although obviously that’s an increasingly meaningless distinction, so, er, stupid me. (parenthetical aside – I once had a client who, in an early meeting about website design, asked me the following question with a very serious face: “But, Matt, what is news? What is blog?” I was plunged into a pretty serious taxonomical tailspin for weeks, I tell you). Anyway, a clever idea from Reuters whose TV news site will stitch together a bespoke selection of video news stories HOT OFF THE CAMERAS based on how long you tell it you have; 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, etc. The idea is superclever – you can imagine with a combination of geolocation and really smart software in the back you could produce very slick bespoke reports on the fly – although at the time of writing it’s not seeming to update quite as quickly as you’d want (it was still leading with Japan’s earthquakes after Ecuador’s had happened, for example). Still, interesting idea and slick site.

• The NASA Standards Manual: NASA’s design handbook, available for sale next month, has a beautiful-looking website teasing all the lovely, lovely branding. If you’re a designer then you may want a copy of this – it’s *ahem* ‘iconic.

• Hello World In Esoteric Programming Languages: Included for no other reason than that I had no idea that there were so many joke coding languages. Who made these? You probably have to be a certain type of person to enjoy these (ie a coder), so feel quite free to skip this one if you’re not.

• The Motherlode of Skating Brands: An encyclopaedic compendium of brands pertaining to skateboarding and skater culture, with logos and information about who they sponsored as well as a selection of their ads. Brilliant if you’re looking for logo / design inspiration, but also as an look at how a culture has evolved (or hasn’t, depending) over time. I had no idea there was a skate brand called ‘Bitch’, for example – the logo’s, er, nice.

• Holonumber: You want to be able to set up a whole load of numbers across the world all feeding into one place? You can, apparently, with this service. Yes, OK, not a superexcitingfunsoundingthing, but it might be REALLY USEFUL for some of you, and there’s probably some sort of fun international prank you can set up. It’s launching at the end of this month; you can sign up if you’re interested.

• We Stay: Well, we might; let’s see how the next couple of months pan out, shall we? Anyway, this is a campaign site by the Lib Dems (remember them? They were all the rage back in 2010), exhorting people to share their memories and photographs of how ACE being in the EU is, with the promise of Eurostar tickets as a potential prize. Which is nice. It’s all so EARNEST, though, the site, with all the smiling politicos and activists. Whilst Web Curios FIRMLY ENDORSES staying in the EU (in case you were wondering), we also firmly endorse getting involved with this and, er, livening up the submissions a bit. Got a nice picture of MAD BARRY on some stag do in ‘Dam? CHUCK ‘EM ON THERE!

• HOVR: Standing desks were a THING for a while last year, if you recall – good for your health, keep you thin, convince your colleagues that you’re some sort of indestructible uberworker whose dedication to both your toned calves and the wellbeing of the company is unparalleled amongst the workforce. The only downsides were all the standing up and the fact that, well, you look like a bit of a weirdo. Here, then, is the new solution to the problem of how to work off the Graze box at your desk – HOVR is, basically, a set of pedals you shove under your desk to let you simulate walking whilst sitting down in white-collar servitude. Much like Diet Coke, if you spend all your time at work scoffing cake and crisps this probably isn’t going to be the solution to your waistband issues, just FYI.

• World Of Waterfalls: Literally THE only website celebrating the waterfalls of the world you are ever going to need. There is much to love about this, not least the breathless enthusiasm for these crazy conjunctions of water and gravity, but I think my favourite line is that the author and his wife “Love chasing waterfalls”; mate, they don’t move, you shouldn’t have to chase them. Or is that a TLC reference? Either way, I LOVE THEM.

• Love Clock: Would you like a Chrome extension which gives you a beautiful, animated clock each time you open a new tab? Yes, of course you would.

• Cyark: You’ll doubtless have seen the story of the recreation of the Arch of Palmyra in Trafalgar Square this week; Cyark are a company which goes around the world 3d scanning global heritage sites so that they can be preserved and in some cases replicated. A wonderful project, and the tech behind it is really rather interesting; if I were a really rich brand I’d look into working with them in some way (or, you know, just throw money at them because they do GOOD THINGS).

• Happy Dude: Absolutely my favourite moneymaking scheme of the week; Happy Dude is a website selling ‘units of happiness’ online for $1 (Canadian) apiece. You buy a unit of happiness, you get, well, marginally happier, as well as a digital representation of your Unit of Happiness to demonstrably prove that you’re marginally happier on Facebook. Give this person a medal, they are a BUSINESS GENIUS (I have bought three, and can confidently state that I feel several orders of magnitude happier than I did when I first woke up this morning – in case the site owner is reading this, you can totally use that endorsement for, say, $3 (Canadian)).

• Basically One Of The Games Off Tron In VR: Setting a new low bar there for the descriptors, I am aware, but seriously, I have no idea how to describe this and the details are pretty iffy at best, and frankly it may never arrive, BUT…this is created by the people who make giant spaceship spreadsheet simulation EVE Online, and is basically their prototype eSport which, using Oculus and other tech, lets you play a frankly BRILLIANT-LOOKING neon 3d game which involves you and an opponent flinging weird future lightfrisbees at each other, just like in Tron. Take a look – this really does look very fun indeed.

• Brilliant Mashup: A Twitter account generating ideas for pop-culture mashups, many of which may well prove legitimately decent inspiration, but which generally does a terrifyingly good job of capturing the tone of all this “look, it’s a steampunk Mario!” posts. “I want this! It’s a Twitter account that has pictures from The Dark Knight but with quotes from Aladdin” – actually, that’s almost certainly already out there. Ah, culture!

• Jasper St Aubyn West: I really hope that that’s his real name. Anyway, this is an Instagram account featuring photos which have had small cartoons drawn over them, illustrating everyday scenes with cute monsters and flourishes. Not superoriginal, but the execution is nice and I think that there’s a nice reactive brand Instagram thing you could do with some artists over a week – share your pics on Instagram with a brand using a particular hashtag, some get picked to be drawn on by artists and sent back to the submitter who then obviously reshares them, BINGO BRANDED CONTENT REACH ENGAGEMENT. God, this is wasted on you, isn’t it? Christ.

• The Raycat Solution: This is…odd. Imagine a future in which we need to warn people about potential radiation outbreaks. Done that? Good. Now imagine a world in which that’s easy to do because our predecessors thought to genetically engineer cats so as to change colour if they’re exposed to degrees of radiation. “Alan, the cat’s turning pink – what does that mean?” “TO THE BUNKER, SHEILA!”. You know, that sort of thing. Anyway, this is a seemingly serious community of people dedicated to discussing issues around genetic engineering and biology and stuff, and the cat thing is just a starting point, but still – GLOWING RADIOACTIVITY-SENSITIVE CATS!

• IconSpeak: A really nice piece of design, this; a tshirt which is covered in a series of icons designed to work as universal signifiers for a bunch of things which travellers might need to communicate when in a foreign land; ‘hungry’, ‘thirsty’, ‘imminently in danger of spectacularly voiding myself in public if you don’t help me find a bathroom sharpish’, ‘a goat has eaten my passport’, that sort of thing. I imagine that this is already getting ripped off left right and centre all over the world, but maybe the right brand could partner with them for something. Perhaps.

• An Online Metronome: Look, it might be useful for you.

• Online Speech-to-Text Tool: If you need one, this is actually pretty good – as with all these things you’ll need to speak slowly, but suggest you have it open in the background whilst attempting to lure colleagues into saying something personally or professionally compromising, just in case.

• Wander Round Don Draper’s Apartment: Yes, I know that Mad Men finished years ago, but it’s not my fault that this software developer’s only decided to make this now. Anyway, this is a nice promo for some 3d modelling service which creates interactive models based on floorplans; you can stroll through Don’s apartment and, er, add loads more furniture to it, should you so desire.

• Timeular: Timesheets are HORRID, aren’t they? Not that I’d know, to be honest – I never really did them, even when at a PROPER BIG AGENCY, and even when I did they were entirely fictitious (YEAH! TAKE THAT, THE MAN!). Still, I’ve had enough experience to know how unfun the general premise is; this is meant to take the pain away. Timeular is a die-like thingy which links to the web and times your activity – you position it with a certain face facing upwards and the clock starts ticking, assigning your time to whatever you’ve determined said face corresponds to;when you switch to another task, you switch the device so that the appropriate face is uppermost and the whole thing begins anew. The idea being that having a physical object there will remind you to log your time properly, and that this is somehow less onerous than clicking a button. Hm. Well it looks nice, at least.

• OurMix: A N Other music suggestion toy, this one with the gimmick that it uses what your friends are listening to on Spotify to select and suggest new listens for YOU. Except, and this is a pretty significant flaw, just because I like someone and am friends with them it doesn’t mean that I share any musical tastes with them whatsoever (in fairness this is something my friends, or at least those of them who I have ever shared a house with, are far more likely to say about me).

• Mighty TV: Clever idea, ripping off the Tinder interface to let you swipe through films and TV shows in order to teach it what you like and provide recommendations based on algorithms and STUFF; there’s ‘Watch Now’ functionality built in, and you can link it with your various streaming accounts. A nice idea which I could see being coopted by Sky or someone similar.

• Skute: Slightly shamefully I think this is a) London-based; and b) not in any way new, and yet this is the first I’ve heard of it. Skute is an interesting idea – physical…thingies (yes, yes, I know) which can be used as little dead drops for digital files; you use NFC tech to transfer files from your phone to the…thingy…which can then go with you as a sort of phone-compatible USB, or be left somewhere in the physical world for anyone to tap-to-download the stuff on it. As with all these things – this is not, obviously, an entirely new concept – the potential for some really rather fun executions is big – music especially strikes me as really fertile territory for this one.

• The Simpsons Brand IDs: Like the Simpsons? Like branding? OH GOOD! These are really rather odd, and all the better for it.

• The Latest Crazy Magic Leap Video: In case you didn’t see it already next week, the latest in the series of ‘is it vaporware? Is it magic? NOONE KNOWS!’ promos from Google-backed purveyors of AR trickery Magic Leap is, as per the previous ones, simply jaw-dropping. Raises a lot of questions – namely, HOW DOES IT WORK? – but the most future thing you will see all week, hands down. Other AR tech is of course available, but it’s not anywhere near as stupidly impressive.

• Colordot: A really useful little iOS app for picking colours and associated palettes; the interface in particular is really rather impressive.

• Name That Blue: All tech / web companies are blue. ALL OF THEM. See how many different shades YOU can identify in this surprisingly fun pseudogame.

• Slitscanner: Tweet gifs at this Twitter account and it will (eventually) tweet them back at you, having run them through a slitscanner filter which will make them look all streeeeeetched and glitched and generally weird and sort of cool if you like that sort of thing.

I WENT TO SEE NONKEEN THIS WEEK AND THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY LOVELY; LISTEN TO THEM HERE AND MARVEL AT THE BEAUTY!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY CONVINCED THAT CARTOONS WERE BETTER IN THE 90S, PT.2:

• Losswords: OH THIS LOOKS FUN! Kickstarter campaign which just got funded to produce a mobile game which is all about playing with words; users get given passages from literature and are tasked with finding the words within words – “ass” within “passage”, that sort of thing – these then get turned into other puzzles which challenge yet other users to reconstitute the passages. Annoyingly hard to explain, you can click the link and watch the video for a far more cogent explanation – this looks GREAT.

• DoGooder: Interesting set of online tools for campaigning purposes, letting you do a whole load of stuff you’d traditionally have to pay an agency for for a fraction of the cost. Email systems, simple websites, political targeting…this is potentially really quite powerful, and is set up to work in the UK. If you’re a small campaigning body with limited budgets this is DEFINITELY worth a look, I think.

• PostLoudness: The latest in a series of sites which seek to shine a light on some of the more diverse corners of the podcasting world, PostLoudness showcases podcasts by women, POC and queer-identified hosts; doesn’t mean that the topics have anything to do with gender or identity politics, mind, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in getting some slightly more diverse opinions on stuff you’re interested in.

• Source CodeVHS: In the unlikely event that you know anyone who wants a VHS recorder beautifully customised to recreate the artwork of VHS covers from classic horror movies then THIS is for you. Or if you’re looking for an artist to commission to beautify some other electronic gewgaw, perhaps – you can probably think of something, can’t you?

• Take A Look Back At 1986: This was the world as of 30 years ago, as reconunted in pictures on The Atlantic. Such wonderful shots – absolute time travel here.

• Electmeme: Picking the favourite memes of the US Presidential contest so far; this site is a depressing reminder that the memes have been a rare moment of light in what’s been an almost uniformly toxic and depressing process. Oh, and it links to voter registration too, so well done them – you want to mobilise the young vote, Stay in the EU-type people? This sort of thing might be a better bet than that Lib Dem site up there. Just saying.

• MOON!: I have no idea who actually wants one of these in their house, but judging by the success of the Kickstarter campaign there are LOTS of people who desire a beautifully-realised scale model of the moon, complete with accurate lighting to depict lunar phases and stuff. If you want to make some sort of moon-based space epic, on reflection, this could actually be the most cost-effective SFX solution out there. Also, it is called MOON, which is rather lovely.

• Hunch.ly: This is REALLY interesting. If you’re a reporter or a muckraker I can imagine it coming very much in handy – Hunch.ly is a Chrome extension which stores webpages as you browse, creating an archive of all text and images you’ve viewed as you’re looking into something, tracking names, etc, that crop up. It’s all stored locally – if you’re a journalist I’d suggest having a play with this as it sounds VERY useful.

• The Gear Award: A gallery of digital art experiments, mostly in WebGL. I love this sort of stuff; there’s LOADS in here to check out and play with.

• Our Unfinished World: Unfinished World is a London-based project which leaves cards around various locations in the city and invites people who find them to leave their own reflections on London around the web. Whimsical and lovely, and some of the writing on the site is really rather nice. Still in its infancy, but the seeds of a nice piece of art here.

• The Hovercart: Hoverboards were so 2015, weren’t they? Do you remember that brief vogue for the things, thousands of which are now gathering post-Christmas dust beneath teenager’s beds the continent over? Well DRAG THAT PLASTIC BACK OUT, kids – this attachment lets you turn your staggeringly unsafe and flammable personal transportation device into an in-no-way-equally-unsafe GoKart! What could possibly go wrong?

• The Black Dahlia: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.1 – The Black Dahlia is a special box which appeared on Indiegogo this week designed to keep your weed fresh for ‘up to a year’; I might suggest that if it’s lasting you a year you should perhaps just buy less of the stuff, but it’s your money.

• Tony Greenhand: Obligatory 420 post of the week, pt.2 – another of those ridiculous weedporn Instagram accounts, the blunts and joints on display on here are sort of preposterous. The one shaped like a T-Rex, for example, is adorable (and looks like a marijuana suicide waiting to happen tbh).

• The Pyongyang Metro: Until recently, tourists to North Korea were only allowed to experience one stop of the Pyongyang Metro – this only changed a few weeks or so ago, and these are the first pictures to ever be taken by a Westerner and show the slightly crazy grandeur of their tube network. The mosaics alone are GLORIOUS.

• How To Operate Your Frog: Can someone explain this to me? Seriously, I know that this is a joke, but I simply cannot for the life of me understand what it is about. Anyone? Bueller?

• InkHunter: As I discovere when on holiday earlier this year, I am now in a minority when it comes to ink (insofar as I don’t have any). Maybe I should finally get that mid-life crisis tattoo done, on reflection; I’ve always rather fancied having a reassuring “It probably doesn’t matter” in small letters over my wrist, to look at in times of emotional distress. Anyway, were I to be considering such a thing I could use this app to get a reasonable idea of what it could look like; InkHunter lets you superimpose tattoo designs on a photo, changing the orientation, size, etc to give you an idea of exactly how INCREDIBLY COOL you’ll look with the teardrops on your cheekbone or whatever you’re considering. I once saw a bloke at Highbury many years ago who had the Arsenal cannon tattooed on his face, which I always thought was an impressive commitment to the cause (if a potentially career-limiting one outside a few select North London postcodes).

• ManyGolf: Multiplayer infinite golf game, which if you ignore the fact that you could be playing on a BBC Micro circa 1988 is actually quite a lot of fun.

• GRAPHIC Novels: Bike safety is a hugely important thing, obviously – a position with which the city of Phoenix REALLY agrees, judging by this frankly astonishing selection of comics promoting cycle safety to kids which really do put the ‘graphic’ in ‘graphic novel’. Effectively a 2d analogue to the PSA films of the 70s in which simply looking at a kite stuck on a pylon was enough to get you a few million volts to the craium, these present a series of short vignettes which demonstrate exactly how much bone, muscle and viscera can and will be exposed if YOU, CHILD fall off your bike whilst wearing inadequate protection. HILARIOUSLY overblown.

• Exploring The Cosmic Web: The most amazing ‘oh my God we are tiny and insignificant’ thing you will see all day, this – have a wander around inside a visualisation of the universe. To quote: “The concept of the cosmic web—viewing the universe as a set of discrete galaxies held together by gravity—is deeply ingrained in cosmology. Yet, little is known about architecture of this network or its characteristics. Our research used data from 24,000 galaxies to construct multiple models of the cosmic web, offering complex blueprints for how galaxies fit together. These three interactive visualizations help us imagine the cosmic web, show us differences between the models, and give us insight into the fundamental structure of the universe.” This is AMAZING.

• Visual Art Sessions: Lovely Chrome experiment which lets you participate (sort of) in the creative process of six different visual artists making work using 3d painting and sculpture tools – you can watch, and zoom around, them as they go about creating artworks in VR environments. The tech’s pretty beta, so the end results look very much like the sort of Kinect scans you were seeing in music vids a few years back, but the window into the creative process is a gorgeous one.

• Naked Fit: There’s a reason I tend not to look a myself in the mirror very often, let alone do so when I’m unclothed (in fact there are many reasons, most of which would require more expensive psychoanalysis than I’m willing to put myself through); I don’t understand why ANYONE would want to engage with any technology that gave them a better understanding of what they really look like with their clothes of. And yet, here we are – Naked Fit is a piece of tech which basically looks like a full-length mirror with a special stand in front of it, and which will scan your entire body, head to toe, in 360 hi def so that you can, over time, track how it’s changing. I KNOW HOW IT’S CHANGING, YOU BASTARD, IT’S IRREVOCABLY DECAYING TO THE POINT WHERE THE SIGNS OF MY MORTALITY WILL BE ETCHED IN EACH AND EVERY SINGLE SAGGING, DYING MILLIMETRE OF MY EPIDERMIS. Thanks for the reminder.

• Tootz The Unicorn: A crowdfunding campaign to raise money for an internet-connected model unicorn which will actually fart rainbows when certain predetermined conditions are met (you get an email; someone ‘Likes’ your photo; you get the idea). Sadly not even the most preposterous internet of things-thing I’ve seen this week.

• SwearJar: SUCH a good idea and ripe for reappropriation. SwearJar is a Slack bot which you can set up to automatically charge users $1 each time they use any of a list of proscribed terms in the channel and donates them to a charity of your choice. SO many applications here, both for brands and for charities and for campaigns – the possibilities are HUGE, particularly if you build this as a Facebook bot instead.

• Livia: I don’t have a womb, and have never had a period, so am probably in no way qualified to discuss the brilliance or otherwise of this, but nonetheless. Livia is a…thing…which you can attach to your stomach and which will, it maintains, MAGIC your menstrual cramps away. I mean, there’s some purported science on there but the description doesn’t fill me with confidence that it’s any better than, say, magnetic bracelets to prevent headaches – to whit, “It tunes into the wavelength frequency of your menstrual pain and blocks the pain from registering in your body.” Oh, right, OK then. Also, and this is incidental, not sure of the branding behind naming it after Augustus’s famously unpleasant and machiavellian (can one be machiavellian before Machiavelli? Hm) wife.

• Fantastic Vocab: Adorable project which uses a bot to create and define new words. If you love language you will love this – some of these are beautiful, some are silly, but the whole list is just a joy to dip into.

• Replace Tube Ads With Cats: Crowdfunding campaign to replace ads in a tube station with cat pictures. Fine, great, but could we maybe do it with something better than cat pictures? Please? You can read a proper writeup here should you so desire (you should desire).

• Google Creative 5: Google Creative 5 is an annual project giving people the chance to apply for a year-long paid position at the Google Creative Lab – they welcome people from all disciplines with a cxreative artistic bent, and the website through which you apply is lovely, featuring as it does a fun design-based challenge riffing on the Google logo. Try it out.

• Peggy: I have just realised that this is a washing powder promo gimmick (for OMO, which was, trivia fans, used as a signifier of a housewife’s availability for extra-marital affairs bitd; a packet of OMO on the windowsill signified ‘Old Man Out’ and that the lady of the manse was open to solicitations, or at least so Jonthan Meades told me in Pompey), but nonetheless it’s STILL the silliest IoT thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s an internet-connected clothespeg, FFS. A CLOTHESPEG. It will tell you when it’s likely to rain, for example, or if it’s started raining; OR YOU COULD LOOK AT THE WEATHER FORECAST, OR OUT OF THE WINDOW.

• Helena: Take a look at this. It’s a startup, apparently, with a view to…er…MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE. “Helena is an organization of thirty global influencers who work together to achieve positive world impact. The group collaborates to create breakthrough ideas, then leverages its collective reach, strategic partnerships, and network to make them happen.” Wonderfully, this seems to be a collection of rich children of rich businesspeople who have secured funding for a nonspecific project designed to let them play at philanthropy in an ill-defined, outcome-light sense. THANKS, BENEVOLENT CHILDREN OF THE GLOBAL RICH, FOR YOUR ALTRUISTIC MUNIFICENCE! Truly, without initiatives like this the world really would be hurtling hellwards in the proverbial handcart.

• My Colour Me Book: Take your Instagram pictures and turn them into a colouring book, courtesy of this service. Smart idea which costs next to nothing to produce and I really, really wish I’d thought of myself. Perfect for any of the shallow narcissists in your life!

• Slither: Like snake, but for an infinite number of simultaneous players. Moderately diverting for 10 minutes or so.

• The Cavalier Challenge: A series of pretty fun 3dish minigames inviting you to complete a variety of knightly tasks like riding horses through a dark forest and that sort of thing; really quite slickly made, and worth playing with for 15 minutes while there’s noone looking at your screen.

• Choose Your Own Adventure Fallout New Vegas: You know those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type videos using YouTube annotations that were sort of vogueish a few years ago? Well this is one of those, but using Let’s Play vids of Fallout New Vegas to create a truly impressive adventure game. Obviously slightly improved if you have an interest in / knowledge of Fallout, but even if you don’t the scope and ambition here is laudable, and might give you some ideas if you fancy making something like this yourself.

• The Album Cover Special: An INCREDIBLE opportunity to own some original South African art; Marks Sign sells handpainted artworks from South Africa, and for a limited time only will, for the knockdown sum of $200, reproduce your favourite album cover in their own inimitable style. You want to know why you should consider this? JUST LOOK AT THE WORK! JUST LOOK AT IT! Your office refurb will look SLICK with some of this on the walls.

• DOS Emulator: Finally, this *sounds* dull but in fact is a one-stop site letting you play Wolfenstein 3d, the original Civ, or Monkey Island on a PC emulator in your browser. Go on, do it, they will NEVER sack you. Never.

FINALLY FOR THE MIXES, HAVE THIS BY METALHEADS AND TURN IT UP LOUD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Supper Mario Broth: More Mario-related stuff on here than you could shake a stick at. Also, I love the title.

• STNW: I don’t ordinarily feature Tumblrs collecting odd images, etc, without an overriding theme, but the stuff on here is just so good in general. Gently weird.

• Ru Is My Rabbi: I was going to try and write a description for this and then I read their own and I thought ‘sod it’: “daily wisdom from jewpaul: supermohel of the world”. EXACTLY.

• Star Wars UI: User interfaces from the original Star Wars. Some really quite cool design in here.

• Fakepics: Not actually a Tumblr – SORRY – but still wonderful, this blog collects pictures doing the rounds which are doctored in some way and debunks them. Decent place to search if you’re suspicious about some vintage photo or another and want to check its provenance.

• Diego Cusano: Combining food and illustration to charming effect. Hire this man for a food-related ad campaign, someone.

• Listing To Port: I really don’t know what this is, but some of the writing on here is lovely and silly and whimsical (like properly whimsical, not like that fcuking boat).

• Text-Mode: ASCII-ish graphics and animations, 8-bit-style art and generally great retro-giffery collected here.

• Morten Just’s Experiments: Morten Just occasionally undertakes small experiments in building techthings and posts them here. Some of these are really clever and could serve as excellent ‘inspiration’ (*ahem*) for campaigns, etc, should you need some.

• Brutalist Websites: Websites which don’t really do ‘pretty’. Great design examples if you’re into this sort of aesthetic.

• East Like A Duck: Recipes from the Simpsons, made and eaten, with photos. A noble endeavour, although you feel that the author may end up with the same sort of physique and complexion as one of the characters if they continue in this vein.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Disney Songs Ranked From Worst To Best: Depending on the sort of place you work, this list could potentially shut down the office for the rest of the day. If nothing else will give you a decent excuse to belt out the Beauty & The Beast soundtrack at the top of your lungs to your oh-so-grateful deskmakes (yes, I’m talking to you).

• Inside Magic Leap: As a companion piece to the Magic Leap promovid up there, this kilometric puffpiece in Wired suggests several things; firstly, that they have some GREAT PR; secondly, that the bloke from Wired was really very impressed with it; and thirdly, that they are either completely unwilling to give away ANYTHING AT ALL about the tech, or indeed what it actually is, or that this is the biggest tech=based prank ever devised. Because really, indescribable technology which noone has ever seen working in the wild, based on completely new systems which noone can seemingly adequately explain, delivered to the user…er…somehow? You can forgive me for being perhaps a touch on the sceptical side here.

• A Primer For Mushrooms: A clear, well-written and crucially pretty funny guide to doing mushrooms. Not that we’re suggesting you should, obviously, but in case you were ever tempted. Web Curios just wants you to be SAFE.

• Using Foursquare To Predict Sales & Share Prices: So this is long and is also about s*c**l m*d**, for which apologies, but if you’re interested in DATA and predictions and stuff then this is not only a really interesting writeup of how Foursquare checkin data around Chipotle stores in the US was used to predict what was going to happen to the brand’s shareprice, but also contains lots of food for thought about other uses for data of this sort. Smart, if technical.

• Plays For Normal People: Excellent comic writing around the theatre and how people involved in the theatre often think about it as opposed to ‘normal’ people. Thespy sorts among you will particularly appreciate, I think.

• How Food Became Pop Culture: A BRILLIANT essay by US celebrity chef and general personality Mario Batali, about the rise of food as a ‘thing’ in culture, the elevation of the chef to a position of festishised commodity, and how our relationship with what we eat has changed as a (Western) culture over the past few decades. Obviously from an American perspective, but this is a lovely piece of writing about food and what we eat and how we eat it and who we are.

• 27 Things That Concern A Millennial: Is this a joke? I think it’s a joke. I hope it’s a joke. Anyway, it made me laugh. BONUS MILLENNIAL!: If you can pass this off as a real thing to anyone you work with, you win a million(ial)(sorry) points.

• When Rape Is Broadcast Live Online: When Periscope and Meerkat first appeared last year, I confess to this sort of thing not even crossing my mind. Fast forward 12 months and we have our first spate of horrorstories about non-consensual sex being broadcast over the web, live and in realtime, for people to watch. So much horror/questioning in here – why do people watch, and how do companies who run these services set up systems whereby people stumbling across these feeds can quickly report stuff to appropriate authorities? Seriously though, the horror of the idea of thousands of people passively watching this and doing nothing about it.

• Explaining The Alt Right: The alt right is the name given to a loose coalition of post-internet groups all coalescing around strange and amorphous ideas of economic and social liberty, allied with small-c conservatism of all stripes, and united by a shared hatred of political correctness and, sadly often, non-whites, women and a whole host of other groups of people. This is a pretty exhaustive look at the factions and elements within it, which will leave you feeling sort of exhausted and a bit grubby by the time you’re through.

• I Have No Idea What This Startup Does: I linked to the company in question – Helena – up there; this is the piece through which I find out, in which the author gets a press release about this mysterious philanthropic company and tries to find out a little more about what it is and what it’s for. And fails, completely. Partly sort of amusing and partly just a little sinister; where is the money coming from? What is it for? Is it performance? Is James Franco going to end up appearing in promo videos for it? Literally no idea at all.

• Meet Richard Prince: The title of the piece refers to him as ‘The Warhol of Instagram’, which is perhaps about right; both artists are interested in the reappropriation of contemporary culture by art (establishment) as art (product), and both have a ‘loose’ relationship to their eventual output (studios et al doing a lot of the heavy nonconceptual lifting). Prince got internet famous a few years back when controversy erupted over the ‘plagiarism’ inherent in his instagram images, where he takes screencaps of Instagram pictures that he has commented on, and then prints and resells them as canvases; this is an interesting profile of his career and his place in the contemporary pantheon. I’m not qualified to comment on the artistic validity on display, but I will say that a lot of the people quoted here as his friends sound like dicks.

• Our Well Regulated Militia: You probably don’t need to read another piece about why the availability of firearms in North America is, you know, not always a great thing, but this is superbly written about gun culture and history and all sorts of other things.

• I Don’t Care About Your Life: A brilliant skewering of the stylistic trend towards imbuing all critical writing with a clear, distinct and often intrusive authorial voice and perspective – the elevation of the ‘I’ in criticism, if you will. Obviously something of which I am totally guilty (this sentence being a fabulous demonstration of exactly that, which is pleasingly reductive), this gets bonus points for the tone, which is fair and measured, and for recognising the influence of DFW on all of the writers in question.

• The Bifurcation of Social: Very smart essay talking about the essential difference between the phone and the phonebook in contemporary digital / social culture, and how this distinction embodies what Facebook is, and is becoming. Clever thinking.

• Meet The Man Who Owns 8chan: 8chan, the place where a bunch of dreadful people off 4chan fled when Moot decided that doxxing people sort of wasn’t ok, is owned by some bloke who lives in the Philippines. This is all about him, why he bought it and what he wants to do with it – did you know you can buy ads on 8chan for $5? Terrifyingly I was quite tempted to give it a go – should I advertise Curios on there? I bet they’d love the vaguely pinko worldview.

• The KFC Sandwich That Ate Pakistan: One of those wonderful pieces which gives you a totally new perspective on a country or culture, this is a wonderful look at how the ‘Zinger’ has become ubiquitous in Karachi and beyond; awesome on food and culture and (sort of) semiotics. Also, you will CRAVE a zinger biryani by the time you get to the end of this, I guarantee it.

• The Only Wild West Town In England: This is Laredo, a fully-functional replica of a Wild West town. In Kent, in 2016. So wonderfully eccentric and peculiarly British, and all the nicer for the fact that it’s a self-contained community rather than a tourist cash-in machine.

• Inside The World Of Offstage Touring Musicians: When I worked at Buckingham Palace many years ago, the bloke who ran the ticket office was a lovely queen called Kevin, an acid-tongued veteran of the West End who taught me the immortal phrase “my throat is as dry as a nun’s cnut”, and whose regular job involved sitting in the wings in BIG West End musical productions, being vocal cover for the more storied performers who could guarantee a sellout with top-billing but whose vocal range wasn’t quite up to the task. Anyway, this is a portrait of people who fulfil the same role for touring rock bands. WEIRD GIG.

• Being Metro Boomer: A profile of one of the hottest producers in US hiphop right now, painting a picture of an endearing and talented kid, backed by a lot of drive and ambition and a seriously understanding mother, who, by the time you get to the end of the piece, you’re sort of getting a touch worried about. You hope that the throwaway segment about his having recently bought a gun isn’t unpleasant foreshadowing.

• On Open Marriage and Illness: A glorious essay about coping with a partner’s long-term sickness and navigating the choppy emotional waters of an open marriage. It sounds pretty awful, to be honest (the open marriage rather than the illness, which obviously is awful), but whatever your feelings on polyamory this is an excellent piece of writing.

• Cork Is A Male Place: A confession: I really don’t get on with professional Irishness, the nonspecific fug of ‘craic!’ and lyricism and blarney which swirls around so much that comes out of the country (to my mind). This, from Granta, about Cork, is about as far from that as it’s possible to be; I’ve never visited, but having read this it feels like I have. One of the best evocations of place through prose I’ve read in years, this deserves a cup of tea and some proper concentration. Enjoy it, it’s fabulous.

• The Internet Has Changed Everything: Finally, a piece looking at how growing up in the middle of nowhere is different in the online era. For everyone who was ever a teenager stuck in a personal hell from which you couldn’t wait to escape.  

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called The Others and it’s by Hiroshi Kondo and it’s the best video I’ve ever seen of people crossing the road:

2) Next, a fabulous piece of animation to accompany the pleasingly funky ‘Freaking Out’ by Magnetic Skulls. Basically a Saturday morning cartoon in 3.5-minute music video form:

3) This is called ‘Your American Girl’ and it’s by Mitski, and I LOVE the song but possibly love the video even more for its odd awkwardness and the handkissing which is just SO poignant:

4) This is by Kangding Ray, it’s called ‘These Are My Rivers’ and it’s a nice slice of techno with a wonderful video taking nature and glitching it all out in geometric black and white:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! I’m obviously a prude (what?) but I tend to get a little bit embarrassed at overtly explicit hiphop; this track by Run The Jewels is no exception, and I find the whole thing quite silly, but it’s catchy as all get out and the video, featuring extreme hi-res insect-and-flower bongo, is LOVELY:

6) I don’t know what this is AT ALL, but it seemed to me like the audiovisual equivalent of an icecream headache. It’s “あなくろノイズ” by tilt-six:

7) This, by contrast, is soothing in a wonky sort of way, although the video’s another slice of CGI weirdness. It’s called ‘Wiik’, by Yllis:

8) Have you ever watched ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’? If you have, you may recognise this woman, who’s apparently on it; no matter if you don’t, though, as the song and the video stand alone as the most awful/brilliant musical thing I have seen in ages. It’s called ‘How Many Fcuks?’ and it’s like a laser-guided missile to the heart of bitchy hi-camp. ENJOY!:

9) Finally this is the weirdest thing I have seen all week, by miles. Stick with it, it’s worth it. This is ‘A Prank Time’. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

LET’S START WITH THIS SURPRISINGLY BRILLIANT ALBUM, IMAGINING THE LIFE OF PABLO BY KANYE HAVING NEVER HEARD IT BEFORE! NO, WAIT, IT’S GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH COULD REALLY HAVE DONE WITHOUT THE FACEBOOK F8 STUFF THIS WEEK, FRANKLY, BUT HERE WE ARE:

• Facebook F8 Overview: I’m chucking this at the top because I appreciate that you might want a general, actual journalist’s summary of all of the things that Facebook wanged on about this week, but I swear, if you just click on this and ignore all my carefully (ha!) crafted prose that is coming up then I will cut you (I won’t, obviously; I have no idea who you are or where you live, and frankly it’s not like my readership’s large enough to start alienating any of you with bladed physical assault, but I hope you understand that at the very least I’ll be hurt. Good). Oh, and if you’re interested in the BIG FUTURE stuff, this is a great piece of writing about what this all actually MEANS with regard to Facebook and the world (so frightening that that’s a totally legitimate sentence in 2016). (There is also our writeup – “Facebook’s F8 – Release the Zuckerbot” – Ed).

• Facebook Rights Manager: Facebook finally addresses the  issue of content theft on the platform, or at least the video-based side of it; content creators / publishers who see their videos getting ripped and reposted by others for FRAUDULENT NUMBERS can now use Facebook Rights Manager to tag videos to which they own the copyright; Facebook will then, using what frankly sounds a bit like magic, attempt to spot the same images being played on different videos – so spotting when someone’s just ripped and reuploaded stuff. There’s a lot of quite deep functionality here about rights and permissions, which if you’re a brand which publishes a lot of video is, I’m sure, very welcome indeed. Oh, and semi-related, it’s now easier to get integrated analytics for videos posted across multiple Pages, which is useful for multi-Page brands to see which of their properties are driving the greatest ‘engagement’ (sorry, but it’s early) with any given piece of ‘content’ (I’M SORRY).

• Instant Articles Really ARE Here For Everyone: I’m sure we’ve been saying this for MONTHS. Anyhow, they are now OFFICIAL, with their own website and everything; here’s Facebook’s prosey explanation of the things, again, and this is a really useful guide to setting them up. If you do lots of long-ish form written stuff then you might as well have a play with this, although I’m sort of ideologically opposed to us all blithely playing along with moves that cement the Hotel California-like status of The Network (as I am increasingly calling it, with caps, in my head).

• Welcome To Bots On Messenger: Or at least, BOTS FOR EVERYONE! After Kik and KLM last week, the floodgates open – watch every single ON TREND brand churn one of these fcukers out in the next couple of weeks, to questionable actual public utility but a great fanfare of self-aggrandising press screed. Anyway, this is some of the technical stuff about how to make them, in case you want to start bullying your tech team about it right now. Unsurprisingly, it took about seventeen minutes for this to be complemented by an announcement about, guess what, ADVERTISING! (in fairness, not 100% new information, but) – not yet open to all, but you’d bet your next of kin on this being a big line item in revenue projections for the next few years. Early reports suggest that they’re, well, a bit rubbish at the moment – the lack of standardised command vocabulary means that we’re sort of in a weird retro 80s limbo whereby we’re trying to second-guess the vocabulary the bots have at their disposal, like some sort of tedious, shopping-and-news-focused Infocom adventure. If you care, though, here’s a list of all the current Messenger Bots for you to play with – LOOK THEY HAVE ZORK!

• Facebook Live API: There’s a whole load of really rather interesting stuff buried in here if you’re the sort of person who wants to integrate Facebook Live into your existing broadcast and filming schedule – I can see TV going HUGE on this come the Autumn.

• Create Looping Facebook Profile Pictures From 3rd Party Apps: Basically you can now have a Vine as your profile picture, should you so desire. Look, I didn’t say that the quality of updates from F8 was consistent.

• Better 360-degree Video On Facebook: A set of updates designed to help users get more out of 360 vids (including a whole set of signposts to help them understand how the sodding things work), as well as an interesting update to analytics which shows publishers heatmaps of exactly where in the video people are focusing on, which if you did consumer product-type stuff is probably hugely significant in gauging potential consumer interest in a particular thing.

• Facebook Social VR: This gave me a headache and a not-insignificant jolt of future shock when I read it, I have to say – it sounds DREADFUL. Anyway, FB also debuted its weird sort of remote Second Life ‘let’s all wear Oculus and interact with our ‘Friends’’ avatars in some weird virtual third space through Facebook-thing; this is it, see if it makes you feel as uncomfortable as it did me.

• Autotagging Friends In Videos Is Now A Thing: Another reason to ensure that people don’t in fact capture your face on film, ever. I’m losing enthusiasm for this, can you tell? COME ON WE CAN DO THIS TOGETHER!

• The Facebook Save Button: I made that Hotel California reference up there as a sort of throwaway, but I’ve been thinking about this as I type and it’s weirdly, creepily accurate in a way. Additional proof: the Facebook Save button, which already exists on the platform but is now being rolled out to developers across the web – you can add a ‘Read Later on Facebook’ button to anything now, letting you go back to it to read through the Facebook app at a later point. Leave Facebook? Why would you ever want to leave Facebook? It’s so nice here; everyone’s so friendly! Noone ever leaves; you don’t want to leave, do you? No, that’s right, you don’t! Now, take a sip of your calming, warm drink and settle down while we show you another set of slightly stale memes and some of your loose acquaintances’ baby photos, and more targeted adverts than any sentient being should ever have to experience. Good. Good.

• Facebook Quote Sharing: I think this is really clever; simple, integration to share quotes from Kindle titles directly to Facebook. This is going to become a thing EVERYWHERE on the web, I can confidently predict.

• Sponsored Posts On Pages: Not actually part of the F8 jamboree, but BIG NEWS this; brands can now pay other publishers for posts on their Pages, and therefore leverage (sorry) said Pages’ reach and audience for BETTER CONTENT REACH AND DISTRIBUTION. There are rules and guidelines, but as an extension to your local market influencer outreach stuff, this is BIG NEWS. Will also come as a relief to all those Pages who have been trousering cash to post things for months on the sly and who were technically breaking the rules.

• Buy Tickets Through Messenger: It’s another bot, basically, this one from Ticketmaster. Which means it should be up there, really, but my whole sense of how this is all fitting together has been absolutely SCREWED by all this Facebook stuff, sorry. Anyway, think this is quite interesting particularly w/r/t touting / bot marketplace stuff (cf Facebook’s REAL PERSON policy).

• Dropbox Now Integrates With Facebook Messenger Too: So there. Potentially useful for filesharing with customers, etc, if you’re looking for a customer services solution, maybe.

• Facebook Changes The Rules On Text On Images: For those of you whose professional lives involve worrying about whether or not you have too much text overlaid on an image to comply with Facebook’s Page guidelines, I am so, so sorry. But also, you should probably know that it’s a bit different now. Not better, just different.

• Instagram Rolling Out Suggested Videos: Coming soon, to the Instagram Explore tab! You know what this means? What’s that? A better-curated selection of video goodness from your favourite people and brands, pumped straight to your phone? Well, er, possibly, but what it also almost certainly means is A NEW WAY TO ADVERTISE! *sighs*

• Twitter Launches First View Adverts: No idea how much this costs, but I’d wager it’s LOTS – Twitter announced a new ad unit the other day, which lets a promoter pay £lots to ensure that their promoted video is the first thing that targeted users see when they fire up the app or website – with autoplay video, that basically works as a preroll for Twitter, which now I think about it sounds so fcuking irritating I’d probably avoid any brand that did that to me on principle.

• Twitter Moments Now Work With Soundcloud: Effectively turning Moments into a potential playlist vehicle. Which is of little or no use to you seeing as Moments is still a ‘curatorial’ exercise and this open to all, but if you’re a brand with a lot of money and a link to music then I would expect Twitter to start making fluttery-eyelash ‘come hither’ gestures at you and then nicking all your money for a piece of this.

• Watch Vines Like Telly: Vine introduced a new ‘Watch’ feature this week, which I saw described somewhere as a sign that ‘old people’ had won – the feature creates a constant flow of new Vines from any given channel, one after the other, like some sort of exhausting stream of 6-second “You’ve Been Framed”-type LOLs, which sounds dispiriting in the extreme to me, but there is DEFINITELY something in here in terms of new ways of storytelling (again, sorry) or interesting things you can do with the ordering of your films.

• Twitter Doesn’t Drive Traffic: WHO KNEW?! Oh, we all did. Sorry.

• Snapchat Launches Stickers On Video: Christ alone knows what the children will do with this; I feel so OLD and so TIRED. If you do too, this is a potentially helpful / useful guide to Snapchat and how to do stuff on it, although to be honest it’s almost certainly too late for you. YOU’VE BEEN LEFT BEHIND, GRANDDAD.

• Tesco Launches IFTTT Channel: I think this is really smart; Tesco’s had an API for YEARS, but it’s now linked to IFTTT – meaning you can now set it to, say, drop items into your basket should they fall below a certain price threshold (Casillero at £5? EMPTY THE SHELVES!), or purchase eggs on a Thursday. Interesting antidote to the EVERYTHING HAS TO BE ON FACEBOOK new bot ecosystem.

• A Wonderful Tourist Site: After a frankly overwhelming tsunami of s*c**l m*d** news, this is a balm to the soul. A REALLY lovely piece of webwork by Humboldt County tourist board, letting you watch a series of short video vignettes of lovely places in the area tourists could visit; you can hit space whilst watching to add anywhere you like the look of to your personal itinerary, which is then saved as a map with directions, places of interest, accomodation and dining suggestions and the like. The UI here is really rather good – take a look.

• BUPA and the FutureHeads: I was late to this last week, but this is the best healthcare digital thing I have seen in YEARS, except possibly that sexual health game from Nottingham NHS Trust which featured that supervillain with penises for arms shooting sperm at people. This uses the band to showcase the importance of having a working body to keep the SWEET MUSIC OF LIFE playing; I can only say that, personally, I currently feel like I’m down to the triangle and the castanets and even they’re flagging.

LET’S TRY SOMETHING FROM LIL’ KIM (YES, HER) WHO IS BACK WITH A NEW MIXTAPE WHICH IS ACTUALLY PRETTY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.1:

• Chatty Maps: After all the naked commercialism of the above (how DARE companies attempt to be successful and make money, eh? Christ, what a predictable, teenage lefty bore I am), this is a nice antidote. Chattty Maps looks to…er….map city streets based on their sounds, classifying each depending on its prevalent audio profile and creating colourised city streetmaps as a result. Now, I’m not going to claim that it’s 100% accurate in its aural assessments (the street opposite me, for example, doesn’t sadly sing with the sounds of nature as the map seems to currently suggest), but the outputs and the idea are lovely. Take a look.

• The French Meter: This is such a good idea, to the extent that I don’t think it can be 100% new, can it? Anyway, the French Meter is an app to help with your French pronunciation; you speak into your phone, and it compares your strangled attempts at gallic insouciance with the recordings of actual French people to gauge exactly how atrocious your accent is. I sent this to the only Frenchman I know (HI NICO!) this week to see what it made of his accent, but as yet I don’t think he’s tried it out yet.

• The First Choose Your Own Adventure Book: Called ‘Treasure Hunt’, and from…er…ages ago, this is a wonderful hit of nostalgia – far more of the Enid Blyton school than the Ian Livingston, it’s interesting to see how little the mechanics of these things have changed. Also, frankly, playing this is going to be more interesting than whatever professional tasks you have on your plate right now, so indulge yourself. Let the inner child FREE!

• BitBonkers: Another audiovisual representation of the IMMENSITY OF BITCOIN, creating a cascade of different sized and coloured balls to represent all the transactions going on around the world RIGHT NOW. Oddly reminiscent of those strange magnetic ball sculpture things that were popular in the 80s (YOU KNOW), I could watch this all day. Mesmerising.

• Good Email Copy: A whole load of examples of ‘good’ email copy from companies around the world, giving examples of how to do ‘Hello, welcome’ mails, confirmations, etc. Skews very much towards the tech/startup world, and the tone of a lot of this stuff veers quite sharply away from what I might turn ‘good’ and instead towards ‘cloyingly cheery and frankly a little too much like the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation for my liking’.  

• Do You Speak Tourist?: I love that this exists. A great website set up by (I think) the Parisian administration designed to help Parisians deal…better with tourists coming to visit. Containing useful hints and tips about what different nationalities like, and are like, this is actually really rather sweet and nowhere near as comedically stereotypical as one might initially have hoped. All in French, obviously, so the degree to which this will amuse you will depend on your ability to read foreign; can we just take a moment to imagine how WONDERFUL something like this would be for Londoners? CAN SOMEONE PLEASE WRITE ONE?!?! Anyone from VICE reading this, seriously, this would be GOLDEN.

• The Mushroom Ninja: No ninjas (although on reflection they might just be hiding), but lots of mushrooms – an Instagram feed of uncommonly pretty mycology. Loads better than you’d think, and really quite interesting.

• The Start Page: A website collecting a whole load of different booting up animations from a whole load of old operating systems; if you’re nostalgic for the sound and visuals of your PC rebooting in 1997 then this will give you an unparalleled hit of retro. Take the least tech savvy person in your office, put this on their browser on fullscreen, and watch them get very confused indeed.

• Flappy Vape: After the bloke who programmed it into Super Mario the other week, it now appears that programming Flappy Bird into unlikely places is a THING. Witness this (very impressive in a sort of pointless and hypergeeky fashion), whereby someone somewhere has programmed a vape pen to play Flappy Bird on its little LED readout screen. I wish I used my spare time this productively (the most pathetic thing about that statement is that it’s not even really a joke).

• More Tracks Like This: A N Other music recommendation service, this one mashes Spotify and Pandora. Simple, but might throw some semi-interesting recommendations your way.

• Webkay: A simple website which tells you EVERYTHING that your current browser knows about you. Which is sort of weird – on the one hand, it’s a bit creepily impressive and a useful reminder of how much we are being tracked everywhere we browse (and if, like the majority of us, you’re on Chrome, how much information we’re giving Google just by being online); on the other, this pales into insignificance when compared to what we’re telling Facebook every second we browse the web whilst logged in. The upshot? EVERYONE IS WATCHING US.

• Botlist: BOTS! WE NEED A BOT! WHAT IS YOUR BOT STRATEGY! Seriously, go into a meeting with a client TODAY and drop that bombshell – you’ll have a speculative white paper gig within MINUTES, guaranteed (free consultancy there, kids!). Botlist is a(n almost certainly already out-of-date) website listing all the bots currently available across all the platforms – Kik, Facebook, etc. Useful if you want to see what other people are doing, and what’s currently IN VOGUE in the world of slightly shonky automation.

• Calm: What is it with the scions of the OLD startup web (Acton Smith, Tew et al) all getting BIG into mindfulness over the past few years? The coke ran out? Middle-age kicked in? Regardless, ANOTHER online tool to help come to terms with, you know, LIFE and modernity and stuff comes in the form of Calm – a website which lets users set up a MEDITATIVE SPACE with a peaceful background and audio track, which can then be shared with other users online through Twitter and other networks to create shared meditations online. Because NOTHING, and I mean nothing, says I AM A CALM AND CENTRED BEING like having one tab out of 19 displaying a photo of a Japanese temple and some panpipes. Obviously.

• Kite: This may be good, this may be awful – as a non-coder I really couldn’t tell you. Kite sells itself as a ‘coding companion’, delivering assistance and suggestions to help coders as they…er…code. This will either be superuseful, pulling in suggestions on publicly available solutions to coding problems from the web on the fly, or the most irritating thing in the world, like Clippy for JS. YOU DECIDE!

• Quantify: This looks REALLY clever; an app which lets filmmakers tag footage as they film it – meaning you can timestamp and rate clips as you go, leading to LOADS of time saved in the edit. This is such a smart idea, and if you spend lots of time making films then I’d definitely give it a go.

• Lorem Dimsum: You can probably work out what this is without me explaining it to you; if you’re designing a website for a new oriental eatery then this might be for you.

• Natural Cambodia: It’s really easy, if you’re me, to get all cynical about the web, and people, and Facebook in particular (bloody Facebook *shakes fist, impotently*); occasionally, though, you find projects which just make you think “oh, everyone’s just quite nice really aren’t they?” – this is onesuch. Natural Cambodia is a Facebook Group where people post photos of nature they have taken in Cambodia but which they can’t identify; the community then works to tell them exactly what that bug/plant/strangely-toothed marsupial might be. That’s it! Nothing else! A lovely example of community development which brands could probably learn a thing or two from in terms of harnessing the power of interested individuals to help, etc.

• 2001 A Gif Odyssey: You want over 500 gifs depicting pretty much the entirety of Kubrick’s 2001, from start to finish? OH GOOD! Suggest you pick one colleague and simply reply to every single one of their next 500+ communiques using nothing but loops cribbed from this site, just because.

• Lightwork: So this is actually pretty shonky, but bear with me here as there is an IDEA. It might be a crap idea, but. Lightwork is a site which lets you set up an LED array using something called Flickerstrips (basically a programmable strip of LEDs for the home); you use the interface to choose the colourpattern you want, and you can then watch this pattern come to life on an actual LED array in some bloke’s house somewhere in the US. Which is about as dull as it sounds, frankly, BUT the site also lets you download the short film of the pattern as a gif, which is where the IDEA comes in – I REALLY like the idea of something like this which lets you set up and create real-world gifs; is there some sort of fan service thing that can be done here? Live gif studio with INFLUENCERS making them for you on the fly? Something in conjunction with the ability to make looping animations as your FB profile shot? Has this been done before? I’m wittering, aren’t I? MORE TEA!

• Urban Rail: Statistically speaking, it’s likely that at least one person reading this is a secret, closet railway network enthusiast. This site, collecting maps and information about urban railways the world over, is for YOU. Don’t be ashamed (but, at the same time, please feel free to never talk to me about your hobby, ever).

• Rage Yoga: A rare instance of something being featured in Private Eye before Curios (I am slipping), Rage Yoga is either satire or madness but I’m unsure which. Purporting to be a form of yoga which actively encourages cathartic anger and profanity, if you’ve ever wanted to scream whilst yog-ing then this is possibly for you.

• The Finnish Wartime Photo Archive: A wonderful collection of wartime photography from the Finnish WWII archives, featuring pictures both from at home and at the frontline, and the best collection of military reindeer you or I will probably ever see.

• Obscura Day 2016: Obscura Day is a THING, apparently, and it is happening TOMORROW! Organised by Atlas Obscura, and sort of an adjunct to thinks like Open House day, the idea is that places around the world open up to be explored. It’s mainly North American, but there are a couple of London things at Westminster and Tower Hamlets cemetary, and it’s a generally lovely idea should you wish to get involved.

• GUM Play: The unfortunate side-effect of capitalising GUM is that it invariably puts one in mind of ‘genito-urinary medicine’, which lends the concept of ‘GUM Play’ a slightly different air. However, if you’re able to keep your mind away from that sort of thing (sorry) you will discover that this is in fact the latest iteration in the SMART TOOTHBRUSH market; basically, a thingy that you stick on the end of your brush which tracks movement to determine whether you’re cleaning your teeth properly and lets you play games, etc, while so doing. Not novel per se, but I really like the musical application (brush to play songs), and the news idea is quite clever (brush to get headlines in the morning read out to you). Looks slick, though obviously just a gimmick.

• A Neural Network In Your Browser: This is quite (read: very) techy, and sort of more interesting in theory than output, but if you’ve ever wanted to get a better understanding of how neural networks actually operate, with some simple visual examples of how they parse information, then this is pretty good. COMPLICATED, mind – this stuff is quite…*hard*.

• Photographs From Obama’s Visit To Cuba: As far as I can tell, this is SPONSORED CONTENT from some camera manufacturer or another (hence the brand name write massive in the headline); that aside, though, these photos of contemporary Cuba are rather lovely – and one or two of the pictures are phenomenally framed.

• SpaceX Photos: Seeing as we’re doing pictures, have this selection from last week’s triumphant SpaceX ‘Oh, wow, this really is the future’ rocket-landing-on-a-drone extravaganza.

• Behind The Name: A website which will give you all sorts of information about the background, history, geographical spread and etymology of any given forename; wonderfully, it also gives you translations of any name you give it, which means if you want to start annoying people by referring to them by their name in a variety of foreign languages then you now can.

MORE NEW HIPHOP, THIS TIME FROM TATE KOBANG WITH HIS MIXTAPE ‘SINCE WE’RE HERE’!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER MR WHITTINGDALE IS A DEVOTEE OF THE MUIR ACADEMY (WHICH I AM AT PAINS TO POINT OUT IS, LET US REMEMBER, NOTHING TO DO WITH WEB CURIOS’ AUTHOR), PT.2:

• Lewk: Are you a man? Do you HATE shopping? Would you like to outsource all responsibility for your wardrobe to a mysterious algorithm which will, if you let it, send you clothes up to the value of $XXX each month based on what it thinks your taste is? I mean, to be honest I’d be totally up for that (other than the suggestion that I might have a monthly clothing budget – HA! Biennial, morelike). I would love to know whether there’s actually any software behind this, though, or whether it’s actually people pretending to be software (this happens, you know, lots. Back in the mid-90s, 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).

• I Grew Up Star Wars: Pictures of people back in the day enjoying Star Wars stuff. Depending on the point of view, the fact that this is happening for a whole new generation nearly 40 years hence is either a lovely example of the enduring power of popular culture or a terrifying example of the power of advertising. Your choice there.

• Hippo: You know that asking the web to help you by photoshopping stuff is such a guaranteed route to LOLs that even marketing departments are onto it and are gaming it now (really, this was not a naive mistake)? This is sort of the antithesis of that; Hippo lets you submit your photos to a ‘community of photoshop experts’ through the app, for them to improve them however they see fit; these pictures are then available for others to view, including steps taken by the artists to apply the effects seen. Actually a nice idea, particularly for aspirant photo editors, but I’m buggered if I know what the ‘shoppers are getting out of the experience as the whole thing is free.

• The Wine Project: You know that feeling you get when you’re drinking but you’re not drunk, but the booze has just taken the edge off and you’re feeling NO pain, and you already know that you are going to have another and it is good, and everything’s funny and light and full of, you know, possibilities, and maybe you WILL have that cigarette because fcukit, it’s the weekend, and you DESERVE it, dammit, and maybe I will text Darryl because it’s been weeks since I last scored and…ahem. Sorry. This photoseries captures the photographers friends at four stages – after 0,1,2 and 3 glasses of booze. The worse abstinence-promoter you will ever see; I mean, it’s 9:26am as I type this and this has made me WELL want a booze (I am resisting the siren call of the fridge, mum, in case you’re reading this).

• The Poetic Router: I could explain this, but they do it SO much better: “It is a middleman router designed on a Arduino Yun (readily available as one of the favourite IoT module running openWRT). It connects to your home router and then creates an Access point for other devices to connect to it directly. Once connected, it now knows the ip address of the machines(computer) and can monitor the traffic going to them from servers. On click of a button it does that. Then it scrapes the data for finding the server links. Once it lists down the links , then with the help of a terminal based browser it pings each one of them and downloads the text on their html page. From the created corpus it generates the poem and runs it through a speech engine which then is passed through an USB audio channel to a FM transmitter. That’s when you hear the poet recite.” Lovely.

• Le Grand Bazar: SUCH an aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed, this one. Really very calming indeed.

• Book In A Box: Interesting idea, this one. Internet relic Tucker Max (remember fratire?) has stopped getting drunk and writing about it for thick-headed fraternity lunks, which is reasonable given he’s over 40, and has instead started a company which productises ghostwriting. Aimed squarely at the deluded, arrogant business guru end of the market, Book In A Box charges around $20,000 for the whole process of writing your bestseller for you – from outline to finished manuscript, based on a series of interviews with you, the author. The part of me that actually likes books and thinks that writing is actually a sort of proper talent (yes, yes, not one that I possess, fine) is appalled by this; the part of me that admires someone who can spot a market is really impressed. I can imagine this becoming really rather successful.

• Velocipedia: Can you draw a bike? Go on, draw one now. I’ll wait. *waits* Ok, so look at it – would it work? This is the premise of this project, in which drawings of bicycles from memory are rendered in 3d by Gianluca Gimini, showing how rare it is that we can actually recall something properly. Some of these are GREAT, if totally impractical – I would like to see this as a real-world exhibition, please, thanks.

• Virus Trading Cards: Pharma companies looking for SHAREABLE CONTENT – a) here you are; b) pay this nice Phd student actual proper cashmoney to make more of this stuff for you.

• Film Dialogue Analysis Motherlode: Alongside the Guardian’s good-if-expectedly-depressing look at who gets the most crap in the comments section (spoilers: WOMEN! whodathunkit?), this is the best example of data journalism this week; the visualisation and the way it all just fits together is beautiful, and (another) great example of how far this stuff will go if you take the time and trouble to make it look good (yes, fine, films are a popular topic, and sexism always gets teh clicks, but this was EVERYWHERE this week, which considering the site itself is a new publisher is pretty good going).

• Habito: FULL DISCLOSURE: my friend weird Scott off the internet works on this, BUT it’s good even without that fact. Habito is a really rather interesting company which is seeking to automate the mortgage application process, automatically scanning all available mortgage deals, seeing which you’re eligible for, getting in touch with the provider…all within a matter of minutes. Very smart, with an indication that they will be automating more of the services (renewals, etc) as the product matures, this could be really very big indeed. DISRUPTIVE, as I believe the kids say.

• The Umbrella Cover Museum: In the same manner that there is, inevitably, bongo of everything on the internet, there should be a parallel rule around the fact that there is nothing so niche or ostensibly mundane that someone, somewhere, won’t collect and display it. So it is with the Umbrella Cover Museum – you had no idea, did you, that those little waterproof sheaths (not, on reflection, a pleasant word, that – sheath) were so pregnant with stories and interest? It’s been going 20 years and is, according to the homepage, raising money to BRING THE MUSEUM TO ENGLAND. I think that that’s a project which Web Curios can firmly get behind, so consider this an OFFICIAL ENDORSEMENT (you can quote me on that, Nancy).

• Glued: A common problem of family life (I say this as though I know anything about it; I am so not into such concepts as to have once had the following statement rhetorically shouted at me by my mother as I prepared to go out one night: “What do you contribute to family life, Matthew? FCUK ALL, that’s what”. She had a point) is that everyone is so busy staring at their magical internet distraction boxes that they simply don’t communicate any more. O NOES! What better way to fix that than with a smartphone app? Erm. Anyway, Glued basically gamifies (haven’t used that word in a while) the process of not looking at your sodding phone, awarding points for inactivity and letting families compete with each other. I’m going to hazard the opinion that maybe, just maybe, if this is the best ruse you can muster to get your family to prefer spending time with each other than with the infinite distraction boxes then you might have one or two other problems.

• Kids Drawing Necklaces: These are BRILLIANTLY dreadful. You know those ‘we will make a soft toy from your kid’s amusingly shonky drawings’ websites? This is like that, but for jewellery. You too can own a necklace which looks like the distressingly deformed depiction of ‘mummy’ spazzed out by your jam-fingered progeny! Suggest you buy one of these for a parent in your life and then film their reaction as they open it, for the lols like.

• 90s Indie Film Polaroids: SO SO GOOD. Jason Rail, who was obviously *someone* in 90s indie cinema, is INstagramming a load of old polaroids from way back when. Featuring all sorts of GREAT shots of 90s stars (seriously, a quick scroll will net you Beyonce, Heather Graham, Lisa Kudrow, er, Roseanne Barr…), these are brilliant. You could spend a long time here, be warned.

• Spoil Me: I presented this on Twitter as something for people who didn’t actually like films very much so that they could talk knowledgeably about movies with people who do, this presents a series of spoilers for any film you care to mention. Want to know what the BIG TWIST in the latest blockbuster is without having to go through the tedium of actually watching it? This is for YOU.

• Photobomber: Simple but poleasing quiz which invites you to complete sentences with hints based on the top-rankedFlickr photo for certain particular words. Look, just click, it’s actually pretty self-explanatory and it’s not MY fault I’m struggling with the descriptors (again) this morning.

• WikiHow Guessing: Guess the title of the WikiHow article from the cartoon illustration accompanying it. Some are obvious, some are obscure, all will convince you that WikiHow is a deeply odd website that contains some…questionable advice.

• Happy Couple: Apparently the secret to a happy relationship is communication; what better way to communicate with your partner, then, than via the medium of faceless tap-tap-tapping on a mobile phone? NONE! This is Happy Couple, which lets you and your partner answer various questions about each other and your life together, sort of in the style of Mr & Mrs, and then discuss your results. This sounds HIDEOUS, frankly, but your mileage may vary.

• MarkMaker: There was an automatic logomaker in here last week, but this blows that one out of the water. MarkMaker is a site which lets you type in the name of your company or business and then spits out a variety of logos for you – you tell it which you like, and it automatically develops and refines these based on your preferences. I’m not suggesting for a second it can replace a designer, but frankly I now have an EXCELLENT Matt Muir logo which I am going get tattooed forthwith (if you would like to get the Matt Muir logo tattooed, please get in touch).

• Public Information Films: The BFI continues its crusade to kill productivity in workplaces everywhere by putting a whole load of brilliantly retro public safety films online. From Charlie Says to all those terrifying ones featuring mop-haired 70s children of the corn getting electrocuted after carelessly flying their kite into a substation, I would personally happily attend an evening screening of a few hours of these.

• Barbie Savior: Barbie, on Instagram, in the guise of a white woman going to SAVE AFRICA through her high-profile charitable works. Insert whichever celebrity you feel most appropriate as the butt of this one.

• Warm Presents: Sadly it’s now practically summertime and so you’re unlikely to need these for a few months yet, but it’s probably worth buying a load now in advance of the inevitable November cold snaps – knitted pants for men, with conveniently knitted…er…cocktubes (sorry, but that’s what they are). Coming, inevitably, to a stag party near Ljubljana, soon.

• Koze: Kickstarter for an inflatable, go-anywhere hammock. Included almost entirely because, well, is it just me or does it look awfully labial? Please say it’s not just me.

• The Centre for Corporate Studies: An excellent website skewering startup and business speak. The most terrifying thing is that the following sentence, describing the fictitious institute, could well be lifted verbatim from an actual website: “The Center for Corporate Studies is a best-of-breed, high-level institute with a core competency in leveraging the power of language to develop personal, synergistic paradigm shifts within each of our students. You’ll learn how to champion mission-critical learnings across all verticals resulting in high-yield growth, for both your organization and your personal brand. “ Fess up; we’ve ALL written something like that.

• Smarttress: Most depressing link of the week! You know how the internet of things is going to connect everything we own to the web, so we ca monitor it and track it and know exactly what temperature our sofa is at every single moment of the waking day? In the spirit of that comes Smartttress, a mattress with inbuilt sensors which can track how people are using it and when – so that you can in theory tell if it’s being used for sex when you’re not there. Take a moment to let that sink in. Your mattress can spy on a partner you suspect of infidelity. Welcome to the bleak, bleak future, my friends.

• Nosajthing: Web Curios favourite Nosajthing has a website for his forthcoming No Reality tour, where you can listen to his EP and play around with a variety of simple geometric animations for each track. It is GREAT, play around with it.

• Almost Forgot Me: Mobile only, this one – load up the website and use your phone’s camera to track your heartbeat and determine the pace of the track and the accompanying animation. A nice idea and use of tech, but a special mention has to go to Anders from the developers, who saw on Twitter that I was having trouble making it work and emailed me to ask what phone I had and what exactly the problem was, and then looked at recoding the site to fix it. Which is a stellar attitude, and which means I now recommend Hello Monday as GOOD PEOPLE.

• Morning Makeup Madness: I have never tried to apply makeup whilst on the tube, but I imagine this game is a pretty accurate representation of what it’s like.

• Play Zork in Facebook Messenger: Look, men in your 40s, I’m not going to judge you for this. Go on.

LAST UP, LET’S HAVE A BIG WEEKEND HOUSEY MIX FROM LEE FOSS – THIS IS GREAT!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Vomit Inducing: One of the best collections of horrific inspirational rubbish culled from Facebook. So good that you might be tempted to start posting one a day to see how people react – possibly a good experiment should you be feeling like culling a few ‘friends’ from your life.

• Ben Affleck Looking Sad: He’s looking at the Captain America reviews.

• Pls Revert: More horrific corporatespeak. Sadly now dormant, but there’s some wonderful horror in here.

• Dan Smith Pointing At Things: A cursory Google suggests that this is Dan Smith of slightly-dull pop people Bastille with the pointy finger; it’s stuff like this that makes me get some small inkling of how odd it must be to be a famous. Imagine living in a world where someone wanted to make something like this about you.

• Fake Buddha Quotes: No, Buddha did not say “dance like noone’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt”. He really, really didn’t.

• Texturings: A really rather useful repository of texture files. If you do graphics and design this is worth bookmarking.

• Pokemon Sketches: Sketches, of Pokemon. Because it is a trend that will NEVER DIE (seriously, Pokemon is like Star Wars for a whole generation of kids – seminal, and around forever. Just imagine).

• Classic Programmer Paintings: If you code then this will be SIDE-SPLITTING. If you don’t, send it to the people in your office who do and watch them split their Red Dwarf tees with mirth (SORRY SORRY SORRY).

• Dirty Zootopia Confessions: You know that Disney film that’s out now about the version of our world with no people, just animals (it’s called something different in the UK, isn’t it? Zootropia?)? This is a site compiling all the filthy things that some furries thought when watching it. Sort of NSFW, and almost certainly NSF your sense of childlike innocence and wonder.

• Mime Academy: Absolutely the best VR gag yet, hands down.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• 56 Women Writes Everyone Should Read: A brilliant selection of nonfiction pieces by women over the past 56 years, there are some classic pieces in this list and some all time great authors. Worth putting all of these into your ‘read later’ pile; aside from anything else, there’s a really interesting ‘changing role of women / perceptions of gender’ thread running through these if you read them chronologically.

• Emoji Miscommunication: It turns out that perhaps emoji aren’t the solution to human communications after all, and that those little yellow blobs can, by dint of their differential representation based on your phone’s OS, cause quite a lot of confusion. WHODATHUNKIT?! Has anyone created an Urban Dictionary equivalent for emoji yet? That’s a GREAT stunt for Collins, in case anyone from there is reading.

• The Death of 3Pac: Strange and sad story about the life and death of Ryan Harryman, a kid who gained 4chan fame by rapping, poorly but committedly, under the name ‘3pac’ (better than 2pac, do you see?); really interesting on the nature of microfame and community and, tangentially, about performance art and hiphop and the internet.

• How Empowerment Became Purchasable: A great piece about how the term ‘empowerment’ has come to have a multivariant meaning in popular culture, particularly as it pertains to women, and how it’s now as much something packaged and sold as a commodity as it is anything ‘real’ per se. Addressing the plastic (to me, at least) versions of the concept peddled by entities as diverse as Sandberg and the Kardashians, it’s smart if a little disheartening.

• How Boots Went Rogue: An excellent piece of longform by the Guardian this week, taking as its starting point a pharmacist at a Boots store in the midlands and uses it to tell the story of how private equity buyouts have transformed the nature of the business and, by extension, the lives of those who work for it. A brilliant microcosm of how capital at scale works, globally, in 2016, and how it defines the lives of all of us in ways we probably don’t spend enough time trying to understand.

• 1993, The Greatest Year In Rock History: In case you’ve missed the recent spate of people claiming ‘No! The year I turned 21 is the greatest in musical history’ (as someone who turned 21 in 1990. I am unlikely ever to make this claim), here’s an argument for 1993 as the greatest year in Chicago’s rock history. A great, slightly fuzzy look back at the growth and spread of grunge, and some top-class 90s rock royalty anecdotage for good measure.

• When Radiohead Built A Bot: they were 14 years ahead of the curve, the gits, when they built GooglyMinotaur.

• The Minecraft Generation: Seems a touch late to the party, this piece on Minecraft, but it’s a brilliant piece of writing and it really does nail what makes it a special piece of software, particularly for the under-11s; the manner it feeds off and rewards curiosity and experimentation is wonderful, and the breadth of application of the lessons it can teach shouldn’t be underestimated. If you have kids who are, or were, in its grip, you will very much enjoy this. Similarly, you should probably also pre-order the lovely Keith Stuart’s forthcoming debut novel ‘A Boy Made Of Blocks’, which will explore many of the same themes.

• Welcome To The Terrifyingly Convenient Future: A really smart look at what the bot ecosystem might actually mean to how we consume things, and who exactly controls what it is that we choose to consume. The points it makes about the Amazon Echo service (you know, the speaker that sits in American homes, eavesdropping on their conversations) are fascinating and frightening – our choices will be constrained by the bots, or more accurately those who program them. Not great news for market pluralism.

• Lunch With Farage: Look, none of you will ever vote for him (will you?), but you can’t deny he makes an entertaining FT Lunch profilee. Strong boozing, and just enough caricature euroscepticism to make it endearing. You probably wouldn’t have actually wanted to be there, mind.

• Small Supa Tough: A year or so ago I featured a VICE piece about the nascent Ugandan film industry, which since that piece has become something of a cause celebre online, much as Nollywood did a few years back. This is a far better, far more in-depth look at the industry and how it’s developing in light of all the attention – several bits made me laugh out loud, not least the quotes from the VJ overdubs of the films (“YES IT IS TRUE UGANDANS LOVE SUPER ACTION!”) which I maintain should TOTALLY be done here by someone; seriously, red-button alternative soundtracking with genuinely funny people riffing over classic films? GOLD, I tell you. Anyway, this is great – but it’s also sort of sobering when you consider the fact that it’s easier for these people to make CGI helicopters on their laptops with cracked software than it is for people in Uganda to get 24h electricity or, you know, afford a fridge.

• When Bitcoin Grows Up: John Lanchester in the LRB on Bitcoin, its history and its evolution. The best thing I’ve yet encountered explaining how it works and why you should care about it, this is really very useful indeed.

• The Crazy World Of Post-Production CGI Facelifts: And body lifts. Basically all about the fact that we simply don’t really need actual actors anymore, at least not beyond facial and physical mocap. Imagine – it’s actually someone’s job to airbrush the wrinkles and cellulite from every single frame of AN Other famous’s latest film. What a time to be alive.

• How Famouses Get Paid For Club Appearances: Or, ‘Being a minor-league Kardashian’. It’s MADNESS.

• The History Of Content Moderation: A really interesting piece about the history of moderation of online communities, looking at all of the big player s(YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc) and asking a series of really interesting and important questions about the degree to which the usage guidelines of these platforms – and their enforcement – determine cultural discourse to a staggering degree. Will make you think about the extent to which mores are defined by these gatekeepers/arbiters.

• How To Be The Shakespeare of Facebook: I mean obviously not that, and this is basically a guide to writing better posts on The Network, but it’s ALSO a really interesting 101-style guide to a whole load of literary concepts such as rhetoric and is actually far smarter than you’d expect. If you’re interested in writing and language then this is a surprisingly good refresher/primer, honest.

• The Iceberg: One of the week’s most beautiful pieces of writing, this is an excerpt from Marion Coutt’s memoir ‘The Iceberg’, about discovering that her partner has a brain tumour. It’s gorgeous and sad, as you’d expect, but the prose is truly wonderful. Give it a go.

• The Ferryman: Strong contender for longform piece of the week, this is the story of a man in Afghanistan, retrievig and burying bodies for money on behalf of US forces. Touches on the war, the Taliban, religion, respect and much else, and paints a picture of the area so evocative you can feel the dust on your lips. Beautiful.

• The Great IP Address Fcukup:A great piece of real-world, present/future dystopia, all about what happens when millions of IP addresses get attributed to your real-world location (spoiler: nothing good).

• Exposing the Crimes Of Assad: Ah, Syria! The enemy of our enemy is our friend! Bashar, old pal, old mucker, you’ll help us out with those IS people, won’t you? Great! We’ll…er…gloss over the past few years in exchange for you helping us maintain an illusion of control in the region, right? Great! Long and extremely depressing account of the Assad regime in Syria, and how people have been working to smuggle evidence out of the country about exactly what has been done to people over the course of the past 3-4 years. Chilling – and whilst the rhetoric is ‘we’ll have enough evidence to out-Nuremburg Nuremburg’, you do sort of wonder what type of bargaining’s been done with dear old Bashar behind the scenes.

• BONUS MIDDLE EAST HORROR: Probably the best writing of the week, though, is this piece, which ranges across the whole of the region and presents a series of vignettes from Libya, Syria and elsewhere which simply serve to illustrate just how many unpleasant shades of grey are involved in everything happening in the region. Wonderful writing, incredibly depressing.

• The Suicide Survivor Stories: A reddit thread containing stories of people who survived suicide attempts, and how they felt when they realised it hadn’t worked. I found this almost unbearably hard to read, but if you are feeling very, very sad then I recommend that you take a look – the overwhelming feeling amongst survivors is “thank fcuk that didn’t work” so, you know, take a moment.

• Being Thrasher: Finally my favourite piece of the week – not the best written, but the most fun – is this profile of the editor of skate bible Thrasher – a 50something year old big punk kid, who embodies the spirit of the mag and its culture like few other editors I can imagine (the Anna Wintour of the vert ramp). This is a great piece, will make you smile (whether or not you know or care about skating) and will also make you feel incredibly, terribly square.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this is called ‘Threads’ and it’s by a band called ‘Once Upon A Dead Man’ which may or may not have something to do with Charlie Simpson who used to be in Busted. Anyway, the song’s rather nice but the video, featuring all sorts of CGI…er…threads, is great. Also, interestingly / depressingly the video’s been done by a marketing / branding agency. ODD:

2) Next up is this, by Zulu. It’s called ‘Your Grace’ and the animation is brilliant, stylised and contains some of the finest handheld-vacuum eroticism you will EVER see. Nice track too:

3) I’ve always quite liked Death Cab For Cutie, though I appreciate they’ve also been a byword for a particular type of cardigan-wearing hipster faux–miserablism. This is their latest, called “Good Help (Is So Hard To Find)”, which is seemingly all about the difficulty of finding REAL FRIENDS as a famous (boo hoo). The accompanying video animation is brilliant and I love it rather:

4) Probably the least effective music video ever, seeing as you can’t actually hear the song or the (imaginary) video, this wins ALL the points for being annoyingly clever-clever – the song you don’t really hear is called ‘Day Wave’ by Stuck, and instead of actually showing a video, the video is Mark Hoppus of Blink182 fame, being filmed ‘watching’ and commenting on the ‘actual’ video (if you see what I mean). So arch it might actually fall and hurt itself:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! It’s been TIME since I had a Fire in the Booth on here, so take a listen to this effort from the commendable Miss Banks – it’s very good indeed:

6) MORE UK(PSEUDO) HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Prince’ and it’s by Jorja Smith, and it features Maverick Sabre who I ordinarily think is pretty mediocre, but her vocal here is wonderful and the video’s great and I think she will be FAMOUS (is she already? Not to me):

7) Best animation of the week is this, to accompany this rather beautful French pop song called ‘Ma’agalim’ by Jane Bordeaux. Watch it all the way through, it’s really gorgeous:

8) A slice of the mid-90s now, with the most triphoppy track I’ve heard in years. This is Shura with ‘The Space Tapes’, and this took me back all the way to the Beta Band and Portishead and the like. It’s GREAT:

9) Finally the most internet video of the week – by Gerald Casale of DEVO, for the track ‘It’s All DEVO’ – it’s ODD. BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!

* = Note: We have decided to remove the names of the alleged celebrities involved in this incident to avoid being furnished with legal threats. But it’s OK, we’re still standing. – Ed

LET’S KICK OFF WITH AKIRA’S LATEST LIVE MIX FROM LA SHALL WE?

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT IF WE JUST GRIT OUR TEETH ALL THIS S*C**L M*D** STUFF WILL BE OVER SOON, HONEST:

• Facebook Goes Big(ger) On Live Video: I keep reading stuff about how one of the BIG THEMES of this year in terms of social is the mover from filtered and carefully created glimpses of our lives towards a more raw, untramelled glimpse at the fascinating nuances of our existence – less Instagram, more Snapchat. Obviously this is rubbish – noone, believe me, wants to see the unvarnished reality of my existence, let me tell you – and yet here we are. Facebook this week announced a whole load of tweaks to its Live Video streaming service, including the ability to include comments and interactions in Live Video replays, streaming to Groups, better discovery, the ability to scrawl doodles over your livestream (which you can also now do on Periscope, but), etc. Depening on your audience, this suddenly makes Live Video a really, really strong alternative to Periscope – certainly, if anyone says the word ‘webcast’ to you ever again, you can probably slap them – and people who have experimented with this have suggested that reach from Facebook Live Video beats that from Persicope into a cocked hat. Have a play.

• Facebook Launches Video Search: Basically another great big landgrab on YouTube – you will now be able to search for videos and livestreams on Facebook, results showing both standard vids and stuff recorded as live. I could imagine this becoming really rather popular – and, let’s be clear, this is TOTALLY going to open up another ad revenue stream (what’s that? You want your videos to place highest in Facebook video search for ‘food’? That’ll be $millions, thanks!). Oh, and there’s a whole load of new video metrics too which you can use to track exactly how much more popular this makes your thrilling branded content moments.

• Facebook Launching Video Ads In Instant Articles: This. It’s all about sodding video this week. I don’t like video. What’s wrong with reading, you PHILISTINES?

• How Facebook Ad Auctions Work: A simple, clear explainer of an admittedly skullcrushingly tedious topic, this is a decent primer as to how ad targeting and buying on the platform works. Probably won’t be news to you, you clever thing, but others may benefit.

• Instagram Gets Easier To Use On The Web: I thought this was reasonably big news, but noone else did which suggests my opinion may well be bunkum. Nevertheless, this is the ‘news’ that notifications, etc, have all been launched on the web browser version of Instagram, basically meaning that it’s now possible to get the full app functionality from desktop – which, by extension, means that it’s a lot easier for brands to manage an Instagram feed. Oh, not really related but I don’t think it warrants its own bullet; you can now also easily search through a user’s followers/following on the platform, which is useful when it comes to manual influencer mapping.

• Instagram Launches 60-Secondd Videos: Have you seen the flurry of Instagram video ads and thought to yourself “you know what would make this advertising content I am happily consuming on Instagram even better? Yes, that’s right, MORE OF IT!” then truly, these are wonderful times to be alive. Ostensibly designed to make the platform more appealing to entertainment brands punting film trailers, etc, this is going to usher in some absolute HORRORS of self-regarding brandspaff, mark my words.

• Snapchat Basically Becomes The ur-Messenger: Pretty punchy move from Snapchat, this, effectively turning itself into a very feature-rich one-size-fits-all communicator solution incorporating chat, video, photos, etc. The on-the-fly switching between video and audio calls is really impressive and quite scifi, although I think that most of this stuff is focused on the user-to-user experience rather than being automatically significant for brands (no, brands, most of you are not any normal human being’s idea of a favoured interlocutor, STOP TRYING TO TALK TO US). Oh, and it’s rolled out longer captions on pics (upto 80 characters!)! And here’s some information about how most users actually…er…use it (clue: most of it is people talking to each other rather than diving deep into the crystalline azure pool of exciting branded messaging via Stories or Discover or the like).

• Twitter’s Going To Stream Some NFL Games Live: Interesting from a media point of view, It will be fascinating to see how this works – both in terms of how live broadcast optimised for social media actually works, but also how the monetisation / advertising part of it spins out, as this is where the real game is.

• Twitter Makes It Easy To Add Alt Text To Images For Accessibility: Facebook does it with AI, on Twitter it’s manual. Sort of sadly indicative, really. Anyway, as it’s manual you need to know about it to take advantage of the feature if you care about the visually impaired being able to experience Twitter properly, which you ought.

• Take a Tweet Straight Into DMs: Now with ONE CLICK you can move a Tweet from your main stream to a DM conversation – ostensibly designed to streamline the customer service experience (make a conversation with a customer private with just one click), but basically just the starting point for a whole LOAD of snidey shade as you all immediately take your snarky side-beefs into your DMs and slag each other off on the hush. I know what you’re like.

• Tumblr Brings Back Replies & Improves Notes: I’ve literally just re-typed the article headline here as I can think of literally NO way in which I can gild this particular lily. Look, it is what it is. It basically brings back some of the community features which some recent updates had stripped back. Happy now? Christ.

• Pinterest Launches ‘How To’ Pins For Brands: HUGELY interesting if you do foodstuff or interiorsstuff or DIYstuff or makeupstuff on Pinterest (and frankly what else is there?) – this is a build on existing Rich Pins, available to brands for a while now, which effectively helps them create tutorial sequences. Not open to everyone as yet, just BRAND PARTNERS, but I imagine this will be extended to other paying customers at some point.

• Medium Gets Better For Publishers: LOADS of stuff in here which is beg news for publishers and which make Medium a significant option for all your content repository needs on the web. Integration with Facebook Instant Articles, ease of migration of archive content from old platforms to Medium, and, of course, the addition of new ad units – Promoted Stories, effectively shunting content from SELECT BRAND PARTNERS onto the end of select articles from select publishers, like a less single-mindedly turdy Outbrain (this may not be a great comparison, but), and the ability for publishers to set up a sort of members-only gated area to offer EXCLUSIVE CONTENT to paying punters. Makes Medium worth a serious look as a publishing platform for everyone, I think.

• The KIK Bot Store: Look, I’m not suggesting that any of you need to get your brands on KIK (you don’t, really, probably) – this is just interesting as the precursor of things to come on Facebook in a few weeks. This is the page showcasing the bots which are currently available on the platform – automated content delivery and sales drones, all up in our chats, EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY. You watch how mental all this gets when Facebook really starts punting this hard to the public.

• Etsy Pattern: If you sell ribbon-wrapped, glitter-adorned hand made artisanal STUFF on Etsy then this might be of interest – effectively it lets any user with an Etsy store turn said store into a simple, standalone website, all powered by Etsy. Really rather useful if you’re a small seller and want to synchronise your sales on and off Etsy – costs $15 per month, but that doesn’t strike me as a bad deal to be honest.

• Reddit Launches Mobile Apps: On Android and iOS. Community Managers! Journalists of a certain stripe! YOU ARE SAVED!

• Best Practice For Bloggers Reviewing Stuff, From Google: If you do influencer work with bloggers, you need to read this – a whole load of info about what Google’s current stance is on linking-for-goodies, basically, which if your clients are the sort of people who stand with spittle-flecked lips in update meetings repeatedly screaming “HOW MANY BACKLINKS THIS MONTH????” (they are, some of them, aren’t they?) is quite important to know.

• Google Search Will Let You Vote In Talent Shows Direct From Search Results: Yep, that. I have nothing more to add.

• KLM Launches Facebook Messenger Integration: This is the future. From the blurb: “KLM is offering a new way to receive your flight documentation: Facebook’s Messenger service. After booking your flight on klm.com you can choose the option to receive booking confirmation, check-in notification, boarding pass and flight status updates via Messenger. This makes your travel information easy to find in a single place, available at the airport, en route or at home. Any questions? No problem. Ask away and contact us directly through Messenger, 24/7.” Really rather smart, though it made me nostalgic for the days of Flynt.

• ANOTHER Great KLM Site: Noone from KLM has paid me for these endorsements, more’s the pity, but this is a gorgeous piece of webwork and just a really nice experience. An online anniversary edition of KLM’s travel mag, this showcases 50 lovely places around the world, coincidentally all reachable with KLM flights, with photos and videos and STUFF, as well as links to get flights straight from the site. Not groundbreaking by any means, but just so nicely made.

• Smart Use Of Preroll By Netflix: Really, really clever, this – creating preroll ads which contain clips from Friends, said clips relating to YouTube searches, and then delivered to users based on said searches. So, you search for “cat” and you might be served an ad featuring a Netflix preroll shilling Friends and showing that bloody character singing that bloody song (it wasn’t funny the first time around). Very nice idea.

• Zurich’s True Love Maps: Included mainly because I find the idea of the link between insurance and love a pretty hard one to swallow – how did the agency rationalise this one? “Insurance is about security, yeah, and the foundation of love is security, so, you know, the Zurich brand equity is totally compatible with love!”. Or something – this is why I’m not allowed to work on anything proper. Anyway, this site lets you mark the location of your first ‘x’ (kiss, dinner, chat, etc) with a significant other on a map, play with some filters, and then send a short romantic video to said person commemorating the historic moment. The Google Maps integration is actually quite nice, but I just can’t get over the utter unromanticism of receiving a video commemorating your first kiss with your husband, say, emblazoned with the strapline “Zurich Insurance: For Those Who Truly Love”. I mean, really.

• The Internet Marketing Workshop: A very smart and almost sickeningly selfless offering from Stephen Waddington of Ketchum, looking at how to use a host of free digital tools for campaign planning. The sort of ACTUALLY PRACTICALLY USEFUL stuff that you rarely see round here, so take the time to look through it as it’s very helpful indeed.  

SPEAKING OF AKIRA, THIS IS A WHOLE ALBUM COMPOSED OF SAMPLES FROM THE FILM AND IT’S ACTUALLY REALLY RATHER GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE GLUT OF GENUINELY QUITE INTERESTING AND GOOD WEBSPAFF WHICH IS TO FOLLOW MAKES UP SOMEWHAT FOR THE MESS OF WORKSTUFF WHICH WENT BEFORE IT, PT.1:

• Digging Into HipHop: A really rather nice timewaster which is worth playing with, this creates a browser-based recreation of the experience of digging through crates of vinyl in a record store devoted to old hiphop records – you can flick through them, play tracks, and generally have a gently exploratory meander through the stacks. Obviously a totally inefficient way of discovering music, but sometimes efficiency isn’t everything DO YOU HEAR THAT, ROBOT OVERLORDS? I DEFY YOUR ALGORITHMIC INSISTENCE ON EVERYTHING BECOMING FASTER AND MORE CONVENIENT! (I don’t, obviously).

• Romesco: A slightly trippy and largely pointless webGL thingy which basically produces psychedelically coloured shapes that look a little bit like trippy cauliflowers. No, look, seriously, most of the stuff in here this week is better than this, honest,.

• SonikPass: Basically tech which uses audio signals as passwords, the idea being that users will be given unique audio signatures whose playback will act as an access code. Designed to work in both physical and online worlds, this is quite an interesting idea I think.

• The Interactive Punchbag: This is a really nice experientialidea for a Dutch Cancer charity, taking the ‘fight cancer’ idea and literalising it with a punchbag which, once it’s been told your age, gender, and some lifestyle details presents you with a visualisation of the cancer you’re most likely to end up getting offed by and, well, invites you to beat the sh1t out of it. You get shown how well you’ve done at the end and invited to make a donation – although the one slightly jarring note on the site is that suggesting that punters will be told if they’ve ‘won’ or ‘lost’, which makes me think that being told that you have failed to beat up the cancer which might one day kill you might be a somewhat sobering moment. Still, really nicely done.

• Lipstrike: If you were a woman who enjoyed playing online shooter Counterstrike, what would be the BEST way of really, really irritating all the idiots who believe that your gender means that you shouldn’t play games like that? How about setting up things so that you can trigger shots in the game by applying lipstick in real life and then streaming the display over Twitch? Yeah, that’ll work. Generally applauseworthy, not least because I love stuff which turns unusual things into controllers.

• The Panama Papers: So obviously we’ve spent all week getting really angry and uppity about this – and rightly so, if somewhat Cnutishly in my opinion (that’s a reference to the king of legend rather than a bowdlerisation, just fyi) – but I get the feeling that most people haven’t checked out the website containing all the materials. Well you should, it’s GREAT – not only because  it’s full of interesting and infuriating stuff (click the ‘Power Players’ section), but also because it’s a textbook case of presenting an awful lot of dense info in a rather nice way, and even MORESO because it actually contains a small game-type element which shows that just because you’re participating in one of the biggest whistleblowing events of the new(ish) millennium you can’t have a light-touch sense of humour about it.

• The History of Electro/Electronic Music, 1937-2001: A pretty astoundingly comprehensive archive of electronic music from throughout the 20th Century. Any DJs reading this, if you can somehow incorporate something from 1937 into your next set I will never know but be aware that I approve immeasurably.

• Songbranch: Totally pointless website which does lyric visualisations; you plug in a song and it will create a weird little floaty flowchart of its lyrics, which is, strangely, much more appealing that you might think. Or at least it is to me as I type this at 751am, addled by lack of sleep and on the fourth cup of tea already.

• Skakespeare’s Sonnet Generator: Cobbling together new works from the Bard’s existing oeuvre, this is included solely in the hope that one of you out there is in a new relationship and can use this to temporarily fool your paramour into thinking you can just knock out sonnets at the drop of a hat. Actually, why not try using these as opening gambits on Tinder and seeing how you get on? Please?

• Hipster Sounds: Ambient sound generators are nothing new, but this one simulates the soundscapes of hipster-friendly destinations like Parisian cafes. Loses points for its lack of insistence that these are artisanal soundscapes.

• Make A Song From Your Face:Traditionally, the best way to make music using ones face was to mash it repeatedly onto a piano keyboard, or to append a selection of small bells from one’s extremities and then violently shake one’s head – OH PROGRESS! This very neat site uses your webcam to scan your face and, based on a few simple datapoints like the distance between your eyes, the height of your ears and the like, cobbles together an algorithmically-determined piece of music which you can then download and keep forever. Impressive, not least because it managed to turn even my mangled features into a semi-pleasing piece of audio.

• The Swedish Number: Such a nice idea, although it indicates a degree of confidence in their people that I’m not sure we could match over here; the Swedish Number is a project whereby anyone in the world can call the number on the site and be connected to an ACTUAL SWEDE who they can chat to about herrings or saunas being comfortable with familial nudity or any number of other lazy national stereotypes you care to mention. Such a lovely idea, and so heartwarmingly positive in its fundamental belief in human nature – let’s be honest, you know EXACTLY how this would probably work out if there was a UK version.

• Data USA: A pretty incredibl collective of data and associated visualisations, encompassing all sorts of information about each of the US’s states – employment data, crime, civil engineering, the lot. Sort of an object lesson in how you might want to make this sort of stuff publicly available, and should you be reading this from the US or have US clients it’s also potentially a really interesting provider of ‘insights’ for planning. Maybe.

• The Hong Kong Sky Project: We’ve all stopped being excited about large-scale projection mapping onto buildings, which is a shame as when it’s done well it’s still truly jaw-dropping. This is one of the best examples I’ve yet seen, a high concept art piece about TIME AND DEATH AND STUFF, all projected onto Hong Kong’s tallest building last month.

• Meet Another Day: Want to look busy so that people don’t book up your time with FCUKING MEETINGS? Use this to fill up your Google calendar with fictitious appointments. Or, you know, just do it yourself, manually. Or say you’ll turn up, but don’t – just pop outside to the park and start walking and keep walking until you can no longer hear the voices in your head and the office is just a distant, bad memory. Go on. You can do it.

• The Techies Project: Documentary project looking at issues of diversity in Silicon Valley, and profiling some of the people working there who are from non-traditional (ie not white and straight and male) backgrounds. Not just a nice idea, the interviews with participants are genuinely illuminating and (much as I hate the term) maybe even a touch inspirational. Oh, and the site’s nicely designed too.

• Slidebox: Really, really easy to use photo organising app, ripping off the Tinder UI to excellent effect to allow you to quickly filter, delete, group and file pics off your phone with a few judicious swipes. Slick.

• Claimdog: I was SO excited when I found this. Claimdog is a site which, if you type in your name, pulls up a list of people with your name who are owed ACTUAL CASHMONEY – if one of them is you, you can get the site to get it for you and they take a small fee once they’re returned the cash to you. Sadly, it transpires, this is only a US thing – there’s some weird stuff going with people being owed Government rebates or something that I don’t really understand, but imagine my chagrin when I realised that I wasn’t one of the Matt Muirs owed hundreds of dollars by the US state. Bastard other Matt Muirs.

• Netflix Party: Lets you simultaneously watch stuff Netflix via the web client with other users anywhere else, so you can carry on streaming your favourite box set with your significant other even if they are on the other side of the world. I think there’s something in the idea of a large-scale variant on this, with mass-viewing parties around sporting events and stuff, but I’m too tired to think it through properly.

• Tell Me Elliott: One of a number of really good projects I saw for Autism Awareness Day the other week, this one’s a French site which uses fullscreen video and simple gesture-based interaction to help communicate the experience of being – and dealing with – an autistic child. It’s all in French, obviously, but you should be able to get the gist of what’s going on even if you only vaguely remember who Claude LeClochard was.

• Bomber Jackets: A great Flickr collection of photos of customised bomber jackets worn by pilots in WWII.

• Articoolo: Is this a real thing? I honestly can’t tell, but it’s being presented with an entirely straight face, so let’s assume. You know how last year there was a whole raft of ‘robots will steal our jobs’ chat? Well this is the first step in that process for us CONTENT PRODUCERS, being as it is a service which purports to basically automatically write copy on any given subject given a few prompts and a bit of time. Unfortunately the output’s only visible once you’ve ponied up some cash and I was feeling a little tight at the time I found it so I can’t vouch for the quality, but judging by half the stuff you read punted out on corporate blogs and the like you might consider it worth a punt.

• Beecaster: A wonderful-if-pointless/doomed idea to create entirely crowdsourced radio, Beecaster lets anyone upload audio files from anywhere on the web, or alternatively record up to five minutes of audio through a mic, and then upload it to the station, which plays a live collage of everything submitted to it. When I tried it the other week it was a weird sort of stream of consciousness of 4chan and memes and people sounding a touch confused, which was charming in and of itself, but just be warned that the likelihood of hearing something a bit iffy is reasonably high – a SAFE SPACE this is not.

• Soundslice Licks: A different short bit of musical instruction every day, presented as audio and video and animated sheet music to help you learn the notes A really nice idea, and the fact that all the video tutorial bits are posted as Instagram videos each day is a good extension.

• Is This Prime?: More diverting than any maths-based game about prime numbers has any right to be.

• Smartwatch Sonar: So clever, this – using smartwatch (or phone, but the watch thing looks more impressive) microphones to effectively let you use your finger as a gestural interface away from the screen (so by moving it across your arm, or over any surface you care to mention). Yes, I know that that’s a rubbish explanation – click the link then, instead of complaining at me.

• Gaze: Trippy little Chrome experiment which takes your webcam and mic and uses them to create psychedelic pictures. Pretty cool results – have a play.

• JPEG Bot: Posting pictures of JPEGS which have been saved 100 times, with each save reducing the quality until they weird, bleached and pixellated and sort of ghostly and otherworldly. Webarty / new aesthetic fans will approve. Oh, and if you’re interested in the aesthetic theory behind digital picture degredation (and who isn’t, amirite kids?!) then you’ll like this piece too

• Capsula Mundi: What would YOU like to happen to you when you die? If your automatic answer is ‘actually, you know what, I’d like to be scrunched into the foetal position and then buried in a strange little capsule thing with a tree planted on top of me so that my decaying corpse can provide much needed nutrients to a beautiful living organism and thereby contribute to the ineffable mystery that is THE CIRCLE OF LIFE’ then this will be WELL up your street.

• Purristan: Almost certainly the best and most comprehensive website about a fictional nation state ruled by cats that you will see all week. I don’t really understand whether this is satire about the US election or whether it’s meant to be a means of interesting people in politics generally, or whether it’s honestly just a really, really extensive joke about what government by communist cats might be like, but there’s an awful lot of it.

• Shootlr: This week’s “Really? You think people need or want this?” app comes in the shape of Shootlr, which takes the concept of the self-taken photograph and allies it with an in-no-way-annoying demand mechanism. The premise is that you can use the app to request a photo of someone at any given time – they get a notification, and the app automatically takes a snap of them and sends it back to the requester. WHY WOULD YOU LET THIS INTO YOUR LIFE?!?!? And, aside from anything else, when was the last time you thought “You know what I really want? A poorly-lit cameraphone snap of person X, that’s what!”? Well, quite. Stupid idea. Obviously it’s now going to be MASSIVE and I’m going to feel like the dumb one, but I’m going to enjoy the temporary feeling of superiority and righteousness whilst ignoring the fact that it’s not like I make anything so perhaps I should pipe down with the ivory tower criticism.

THIS SELECTION OF PIANO MUSIC CURATED BY NILS FRAHM FOR PIANO DAY 2016 IS ABSOLUTELY GORGEOUS AND I SUGGEST YOU BOOKMARK IT FORTHWITH!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES THAT THE GLUT OF GENUINELY QUITE INTERESTING AND GOOD WEBSPAFF WHICH IS TO FOLLOW MAKES UP SOMEWHAT FOR THE MESS OF WORKSTUFF WHICH WENT BEFORE IT, PT.2:

• Sesame: An interesting addition to the messaging landscape, Sesame is a service which purports to let you closely manage people’s permissions through the platform – you can set who can save, forward, screenshot, etc, your conversations and who can’t, who you can share files with and not, all under encryption. The white labelling side of this is interesting if you’re after a secure corporate messaging solution, I think.

• Cast: Potentially rather useful end-to-end podcasting solution, encompassing recording, mixing, editing and publishing, which comes at a cost of $10 a month which seems pretty reasonable if you do the podcast thing properly or with any degree of commitment.

• Gendered Baby Foods: SATIRE about how kids are, you know, FORCE FED gender tropes from a young age. Nice design work here, in fairness, even if it’s a touch heavy handed. Reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend Ben about designing slogan baby clothes for parents who didn’t want to brag about their kids’ potential – “Probably Not Oxbridge Material”, or “Slightly Malcoordinated But Still Loved”. On reflection, that’s still a great idea, we should totally sell those.

• Juicero: This…this has to be a joke, no? Juicero is basically Graze (you know, that service whereby you get sent a preposterously overpriced cardboard box full of snacks and fcuking goji berries which will then moulder on your desk until the next one arrives) but for juicing. Juicing. You’ll get a bunch of stuff to juice sent to you on a weekly basis, all packaged up to use with the SPECIALLY DESIGNED JUICING MACHINE you also have to buy. FFS WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE IT’S JUST FRUIT AND SODDING VEG BEING SOLD AT A REPELLENT MARKUP TO IDIOTS WAKE UP SHEEPLE TONY B LIAR NEW LIEBORE. Sorry, don’t know what came over me there.

• Vivaldi: An actual new web browser! Vivaldi is designed for ‘power users’, which I think means ‘people with a tendency to have over 20 tabs open at a time’, and has all sorts of neat features around grouping tabs, bookmarks and the like which, having played with it a bit this week, are genuinely useful if you find yourself having to do lots of online research and the like. Worth experimenting with, and persevering with – once you get over the jarring shock of the new, it’s rather good. Obviously I’m still working in Chrome as I type this, though, so we’ll see.

• Sayable: You know that service which has been knocking around for YEARS and which ascribes a three-word phrase to every single physical location in the world in an attempt to make postcodes redundant? You know, this one. Well this is like that, but for urls – plug in a web address and it spits out a three word phrase which, when typed into the site by someone else, will redirect them back to that website. Sort of largely pointless except if you REALLY like the idea of Famous Five-style password secrecy and intrigue, which is obviously totally fine with me.

• Ridezum: A chauffeur service, a la uber, for kids. For parents who don’t have the time or inclination to pick their kids up but don’t feel comfortable with public transport and who for some reason feel an ordinary cab is somehow unsafe. Fcuk’s sake, everyone, really?

• Linify: Turn any picture, from a file or URL, into a rather nice line drawing version of itself. Quietly aesthetically pleasing, I think.

• Ostensibly Ordinary Pyongyang: A GREAT set of photos and commentary smuggled out of Pyongyang earlier this year. Better photos and a more interesting range and selection than your standard ‘OMG Kim Jong LOL’-type fodder.

• Subdivision: Rather cool geometric imagery, available for download. The sort of thing that can make you feel a touch *funny* if you stare at it too long, just so’s you’re aware.

• Paperback Paradise: My favourite Twitter account of the week, this Tweets out doctored images of imagined old paperbacks. If you’ve ever wanted to live in a universe in which the Sweet Valley High series contained such classic titles as “I Want This Date To End So Badly” then this is for YOU.

• Profilehopper: I don’t imagine that this is goingto stay up that long as I’m pretty sure it violates the LinkedIn T&Cs; profile hopper basically automatically visits a shedload of people’s profiles on LinkedIn based on whatever critieria you give it, making it look to those poor, unwitting dupes that you were interested in them, and, based on their understanding of human nature, probably getting them to look at your profile. Personally speaking, my immediate reaction to anyone looking at my LinkedIn profile is “wow, you must be really, really bored”, but perhaps you feel differently.

• Autonomous Track Day: Someone’s organising a race for self-driving cars in California. This is one of those harbingers of the singularity that we’re all going to really kick ourselves for not noticing at the time, isn’t it?

• Podcasts In Colour: A decent repository of links to podcasts from the non-white community, should you desire such a thing. Very US-centric, but.

• Daylui: A GREAT idea, this, currently in Beta, Daylio lets users rent out their stuff for cashmoney – basically a rental eBay. WHY DID I NOT THINK OF THIS? Although on greater reflection the potential to get really, really screwed over is pretty strong; still, I think the core of a decent idea exists here.

• Typevoice: A nice gimmick by Ogily in the US for the Webby Awards, this takes your vocal patterns and turns them into a unique typeface JUST FOR YOU. Sadly the fonts look universally dreadful (or at least they do for me, no matter WHICH hilarious accent I affect), but your mileage may vary.

• Design Facts: Er, facts, about design. Presented rather prettily, but still, there’s not really much more to say about this one. Christ, look at the state of me. Sorry.

• The Champagne Gun: Coming soon to a Rich Kids Of Instagram-type thing near you IMMINENTLY (or possibly more accurately, to Geordie Shore), the champagne gun is a device which you attach to a bottle of champagne (or possibly more accurately Asti Spumante) which lets you press a trigger and spray the stuff all over the place. There will be exactly ONE music video in which these are used to spectacular comic effect and then they will be OVER.

• Halo: Nice theoretical design project by MIT Media Lab which has created a portable self-lighting rig which you can place around your neck or head to give you whatever sort of nice warm glow you desire in your inevitable self-taken portraits. There’s probably some sort of low-rent gimmick ripoff the right makeup brand could do here for SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER CONTENT CAMPAIGN purposes if you can be bothered to think about it a bit.

• Thington: You know how in the future, right, all of our STUFF will be on the internet and it will all talk to each other and to us and the world will just be one jabbering cacophony of NOISE and DATA as fridges speak unto shoes speak unto supermarkets speak unto people? Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? Well Thington cemented my belief that this is all AWFUL BUSINESS when I spotted it this week – effectively it’s selling itself as the ‘concierge for your smarthome’, creating a signle interface through which you can administer all your IoT gadgets. YES THAT’S RIGHT ANOTHER LAYER OF BETA-ISH SOFTWARE IS EXACTLY THE SOLUTION TO THIS PROBLEM. I want the world to stop.

• Soundgifs: Can you imagine just how irritating an everlooping soundclip could be? You are TOTALLY RIGHT! Torment your colleagues with this, starting NOW.

• These Memories Won’t Last: A truly beautiful webcomic, both in design and execution, about the author’s grandfather’s dementia. The way the scrolling works to tell the story is really gorgeous, as is the art style. Highly recommended.

• Narro: This is potentially REALLY useful – Narro takes all your longread links (you know, the ones you save up from the last section of this and then never get round to reading, until they are all piled up and you just feel guilty for looking at them and so just go back to Tinder or Instagram again) and converts it to audio, so you can listen to them being read on the move. Obviously has all the limitations of stuff using text to speech engines, but if you can get past that then it is a GREAT idea.

• Grime Writer: A pen designed specifically for you to scrawl stuff in the dirt on the back of white vans. May I suggest “I wish my dad was as dirty as this” for maximum headscratching pervolols? No? Ok.

• Vintage Beauties On Postcards: No, I don’t like the term ‘beauties’ either, but that’s just what the collection is called. Questionable milady-ish titling aside, these are great – a collection of pictures of woman of all sorts of ethnicities and aesthetics taken from vintage postcards. Some great faces in here. Totally SFW, though there is the occasional glimpse of stocking.

• Logoshi: Surprisingly really rather good logo generation toy – you scribble something in the appropriate box on the site, and it generates a logo free for you to use based on your hamfisted scribblings. Really quite impressive.

• PowerPuff Yourself: So you too can create a PowerPuff Girls-styled version of yourself for use in your SOCIAL CHANNELS. TBH they all look the same to me, but I appreciate I may not quite be target audience here.

• Phone Stories: I LOVE THIS IDEA SO MUCH. A project by Pop UP Magazine, whereby every few weeks they will record someone reading a contextually appropriate story for a particular event or situation – the idea is, you call a number when you find yourself in that situation (getting dressed, in a park, etc) and listen to the story and get TRANSPORTED BY ART. I think that this is a great concept which could easily be lifted for brand LOLs and joy.

• Fukushima No GO Zone: A site collecting photography and audio captured in Fukushima since the disaster there by Carlos Ayesta and Guillaume Bression. Lovely, haunting shots and a nicely curated selection in the galleries – the audio layer really does add something, too, which isn’t always the case with these things.

• Sound of Change: A really nice project. The idea behind Sound of Change is to help street musicians get their music out to a wider audience on the web – the idea being that anyone can upload footage of a street musician playing, including information about who they are, where they play and any contact details they have for them, thereby making them discoverable by the wider global community of music lovers. It’s really new and there are so far only 5 musicians on it, which seems a shame for a project which has obviously been put together with a lot of care – spread the word, it’s a lovely idea.

• My Sharona: What would you do if you were the inspiration for The Knack’s hit single My Sharona? Why, you’d set yourself up as an estate agent in the US and have this rather wonderful website, is what.

• The NRA Family: Another to file under ‘should really be parody but sadly for everyone currently living is actually real’, this is the National Rifle Association (you know the ones, they who think that you’re a fool and a communist if you think that perhaps there’s a causal link between easy access to lethal firearms and the depressing litany of gun-related deaths we see every single week across the US) giving it the whole FAMILY thing. It’s FULL of heartwarming things, by far and away the best of which are the fairy tales rewritten to feature MORE GUNS. Brilliant. Well done, everyone involved in this, you FCUKING IDIOTS.

• The Most Incredible Phone Case Prototype You Will See All Week: Seriously incredible theoreticalfuturetech, here.

• Luminescent Labs: A rather beautiful website letting you explore the glorious world of undersea bioluminescence. No, wait, come back, it’s GORGEOUS and will make you want to go night diving or at the very least to watch some ultra-HD sealife documentary type stuff.

• Apollo 17: Space stuff is generally some of the best out there in terms of interactivity design and stuff; this is no exception. A brilliant site letting you explore the Apollo moon mission as it happened, using radio transmssions and photos and all sorts of other stuff. As an example of how to pull together a whole load of stuff and present it in an ‘as it happened’ sort of way this is pretty much peerless.

• Pause: An app designed to help with relaxation and meditation and MINDFULNESS and stuff which does so by encouraging users to sit with their finger pressed against their phone screen, thereby encouraging CONTEMPLATION. I’m leaving this here without comment, but see if you can imagine the expression on my face as I’m typing this, go on.

• Things You Shouldn’t Google: A GREAT Reddit thread which is full of temptation. Suggest that you send it round all of the people in your office as a tacit test of self-control; I guarantee that within ten minutes you’ll have heard a variety of strangled cries of revulsion, which cannot fail to satisfy.

• Camera Club: Spectacularkly grubby photo series, capturing images of photographers who are in turn taking photos of young women who’ve been duped into posing in various states of undress by men pretending to be fashion photographers. Seedy as you like, but there are some great shots here.

• Burner: An app to create as many fake, throwaway phone numbers as you could ever want or need. No idea why you might need such things, but just in case you ever do.

• The Humanion: The best utterly mad website I have seen in a long time, this one sort of has to be seen to be believed. You think you’ve seen mad on the internet before? This is up there with Time Cube in terms of sheer force of weird. Oddly, despite the ‘straight out of Geocities’-style aesthetic, this was actually only made last year, which suggests that there’s possibly more going on here than meets the eye as it’s actually not that easy to make something this wonderfully bad-looking in 2016. Go on, lose yourself in it, it’s spectacular.

• Blandly: The best spoof agency website I have seen in a long time. Your agency’s not like this, is it? Nah mate, course it’s not.

• Next Rembrandt: The subject of much sniffiness from Jonathan Jones this week, I still very much like the concept and the output here. This is the website to accompany the recent project to 3d print a ‘new’ ‘Rembrandt’ painting, based on machine analysis of the painter’s extant body of work and the subsequent creation of a new work based on learned stylistic and aesthetic principles; leaving aside the art/not art question (fwiw, I say art), this is a lovely site for a fascinating project.

• Vagina Beer: The only thing about this which I can feel positively about is the fact that it looks very, very unlikely to meet its funding goal.

• I Can’t Make You Love You: This week’s single-serving music video website comes with a FRESH GIMMICK! To watch the video you need to sync your mobile with the site, and consistently double-tap your phone’s screen in the manner of a simulated heartbeat to keep the track going; you stop, it flatlines and ‘dies’. I have to say, there’s obviously a high concept here about the song’s themes and stuff but I got really bored about halfway through. Sorry, songpeople.

• Life Is Life: It’s been AGES since I’ve seen a decent Facebook scraper – thisis like going back in time a few years to that era when people made all sorts of websites pulling in FB data. This takes EVERYTHING you have ever posted to Facebook – I mean everything – and presents it as some sort of overwhelming cascade of data and images and videos and comments and Likes and frankly it’s sort of dazzling and brilliant, even if, like me, you rarely actually say anything on Facebook. Great digiart, this (YES, ART I TELL YOU).

• Every Single Issue Of Select EVER: I used to think I was WELL COOL for reading Select Magazine. So much so, in fact, that I occasionally responded to personal ads in the mag with a resounding 0% success rate, which fact really troubled me at the time (what was it about the poorly focused polaroid of myself that I included didn’t entice you, 15 year old Dodgy fan from Nuneaton? No, don’t answer that). This is every single edition, scanned and made available for your reading pleasure, which if you enjoyed this week’s #indieamnesty thing you will almost certainly find pleasing and comforting.

• Future Sex: The BEST magazine archive, though, comes in the form of this selection of scans of the sadly short-lived FUTURE SEX magazine – basically a WIRED for teledildonics. There is SO MUCH great stuff in here – from the weird photoshoots that are like a cross between Hackers and Reader’s Wives, to the articles confidently claiming that there is a VIBRANT DIGITAL EROTIC UNDERGROUND exploding all over the UK, to the classified ads for CD Roms full of bongo…it’s all pretty much entirely NSFW, but I reckon you can pass this off to your boss as cultural anthropology or something. Immerse yourself in the neon latex world, which reminded me an awful lot of THIS great film incidentally.

• Science Combat: Remember those lovely 8-bit gifs of scientists as Street Fighter-style game characters which did the rounds a few weeks back? Well this is the game they were designed for. Surprisingly fun for a 5-minute afternoon distraction – ENJOY.

SHALL WE CLOSE OUT WITH THIS EXCELLENT TRIBUTE TO THE LATE PHIFE DAWG WHICH CLOCKS IN AT NEARLY TWO GLORIOUS HOURS? OK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Samsara Termonucleara: Literally no idea AT ALL what this is about, but it’s wildly odd and very NSFW in a pleasingly all-inclusive sort of way.

• Confirm Shaming: Examples of those really, really annoying ‘Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?’ Popups where one option is ‘yes’ and the other is something like ‘no, I actually prefer slavery to knowing stuff’.

• The Gif Connoisseur: Really EXCELLENT gifs./

• Video Game Densetsu: All sorts of interesting concept art and behind-the-scenes material from videogame studios, primarily Japanese.

• Otomblr: Celebrating the art of Akira illustrator Katsuhiro Otomo.

• Art, Innit: Exploring the idea of Rule 34 and imagining the sort of bongo mags you might have found in skips if there had been magazines about, say, chocolate fetishism back in the 70s and 80s. Totally SFW, honest.

• 90s HipHop, Rap & R&B: All SORTS of stuff on this from performances to interviews. If you’re into that era of hiphop this will be CATNIP to you.

• Stephen King’s Boners: Apparently Stephen King talks about penises a LOT in his books; here’s a Tumblr collecting some of those mentions. Is this a horror writer thing? I remember once sneaking a look at Rats by James Herbert when I was about 7 and being VERY CONFUSED about one particular explicit fellatio scene, which for a few years had me convinced that urolagnia was a lot more commonplace than it in fact probably is.

• Dating App Fails: Submissions from the horrible, grimy coalface of human sexuality.

• The Sock Covers; Classic album covers, recreated with socks.

• Animated Chronicles: Lovely animated gif illustrations. There’s a beautiful aesthetic to all of these, I think – really very pretty indeed.

• Deadscripts: Scripts for adverts which for whatever reason never made it to production. Whether or not these are real or false, there are some actual proper gems in here.

• Loopism: More stylised animated artygifs, these channeling quite a lot of the more surreal and trippy bits of the Sorceror’s Apprentics or that acid dream scene in Dumbo (you’ll get it if you click, honest).

• Look Into The Lens: Photos of people being a bit rubbish at using their cameraphones for narcissistic purposes.

• Men of Designer News: Collecting the heartwarming comments left by men under the articls on Designer News. Some top-quality meninist horror, right here.

• One Week, One Band: This is GREAT – each week, a different author goes DEEP on a band they love, posting songs, essays, etc, about JUST that band and their music. A really great way of discovering new music as well as a lovely collection of paeans to favourite artists.

• That’s Not Shakespeare: Quotations misattributed to Shakespeare. A bit depressing after a while tbh.

• Of Sparrows: MORE gifed artworks. Again, lovely and distinctive style here – the cartoon of the tattoo blossoming is really rather nice.

• Y2K Aesthetic Institute: Curating the turn-of-the-millennium aesthetic. So much great lookbook material here if you need that sort of thing.

• Finals Fantasy: Speculative projects for game art students. There are possibly two or three of you who will like this, I think, but you sort of need to know a little bit about game design to derive any value from it, I think.

• Prattle En Route: This is a GREAT idea. An Uber driver in the US interviews his passengers on a dashcam and posts the resulting clips here. It’s an EXCELLENT content idea – if I were a brand that regularly had access to famouses I would totally speak to Uber about getting an occasional driver ID that they could use for this exact purpose -imagine the excellent reaction vids you’d get from people getting into car and realising they were being driven by…er…some famous person. In fact, you could livestream the whole things. DO IT, SOMEONE, MAKE ME PROUD!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Day of the Dre: OOOOOLD piece from Rolling Stone interviewing Dre (and Snoop, a bit) just before Doggystyle dropped back in 1993. Great nostalgia piece about a very, very different musical landscape – also, LOOK HOW YOUNG SNOOP LOOKED!

• On Genius and Text Annotation: Genius (you know, the lyric website) also lets people annotate any page on the internet, however they want. You only see the annotations if you choose to, which is why most people have no idea that it’s an option; this article looks at what the growing use of such annotations means for debate and freedom of speech online. Interesting as much for the theory as the practice here.

• Branding in the Age of Social Media: Only really worth reading if you do this sort of thing for a livin (and seriously, you have my sympathies), but this is a pretty smart look at how brands might wish to consider themselves and what they do when trying to ENGAGE on the web.

• The Weapons Bazaars of Facebook: Given the insane reach of Facebook it’s probably no surprise that there are all SORTS of illegal marketplaces on there; this is a look at the ones you can use to buy, say, rocket launchers. I do rather like the whole ‘hiding in plain sight’ aspect of this – reminds me of someone I found on eBay back in the mid-90s who was comfortably selling a LOT of weed over the site by pretending to sell GREEN laser pointers (cunning, eh?).

• The Rest Is Advertising: A sort of poignant account of what it’s like being a sponsored content writer at a major publisher, and how the author comes to terms with the fact that he will never earn as much money doing proper journalism as he will for churning out a few thousand words of puffery which masquerades as editorial. Welcome to the glorious future of the written word, kids!

• My Mum Ran My Tinder: Not mine – I’m not on Tinder, and my mum would not, I don’t think, enjoy the experience. No, some American bloke who decided to hand over the keys to his Tinder account to his mum. Funnyish, but actually more interesting in the way in which it lays bare the frankly slightly weird nature of the courtship dance when conducted over magical pocket internetboxes.

• Why The Internet Of Things Is Going To Be  A Nightmare: This might look techy, but that’s not the important bit. The important bit is the implication when you realise how easy it was just to hijack a bunch of printers all over the world, and then extrapolate that into a future in which everything is online. Just IMAGINE how much fun it will be when the script kiddies on 4chan work out how to fcuk with your home’s power supply from their mum’s basement in Delaware!

• My Year In Startup Hell: A brilliant account of the lunacy of one man’s year working at startup Hubspot as a middle-aged former journalist. Ticks every single startup cliche in the book, and will make you quite glad that this isn’t your life.

• Crowds On Demand: Inside the slightly odd and surreal world of paid-for crowds, hired to pretend to be paparazzi or journalists or fans or whatever else you might need. Part of me thought that it would be quite fun to do this; part of me then thought of all the wonderfully nefarious uses you could put it to. Does anyone know of a UK-based equivalent they could put me in touch with please? I promise what I have in mind is (broadly) legal.

• Hunter Thompson On The Art of Journalism: Another piece from the Paris Review archives, this is a great interview with a surprisingly toned-down Thompson, focusing less on the myth and more on the works and the history. If you’ve ever read the Doctor’s output then this is pretty much a required companion I think.

• Lost In Trumplandia: We’ve not been short of campaign trail and op-ed pieces on the Donald’s campaign, but this is one of the best that I have read.

• How ISIS Is Winning The Social Media War: A fascinating analysis of how the group is harnessing digital communications platforms to spread their less-than-cheery worldview. I’m slightly disappointed that this has yet to spawn a raft of ‘10 things marketers can learn from so-called Islamic State’ thinkpieces on LinkedIn, but the year is yet young.

• On Using the HTC Vive: It’s a standard product review from Kotaku, this, so not stellar prose by any means, but if you’re interested in what it’s like spending a lot of time hooked up to one of these new-fangled VR machines then this is a very comprehensive rundown of the pros and cons of the kit.

• Pascal’s Cryonics: A REALLY interesting breakdown of the cryonics business – you know, freezing your head/body in the hope that one day people in the future will be able to unfreeze it and magically restore you to life – which rather effectively comes to the conclusion that you might as well give it a go if you can afford it, because, well, why not, right?

• The Hatton Garden Heist: A truly excellent piece on the diamond robbers from Vanity Fair, which is so redolent of a 60s crime caper that you can almost see Michael Caine mugging furiously to camera in one of the lead roles. Read this, and save yourself the trouble of watching the inevitably disappointing film of the whole thing which I’m sure will be out in the next year or so.

• The Voyeur’s Motel: The most astonishing thing I’ve read in a while, this – writer Gay Talese spills the beans on a secret he’s held for decades, about a motel owner in the US who for many years shared with Talese the stories he’d accrued from spying on his guests having sex. Astoundingly grubby, but perhaps the weirdest thing is the general air of authorial detachment about the whole thing – there will be many, many instances in this where your inner voice quizzically goes “and so this is when you went to the cops, right Gay?”, and where you don’t really quite understand how he didn’t. Great, great writing, though.

• The Bridge to Sodom and Gomorrah: A brilliant piece of journalism about the slums of Accra and the people who survive there (‘live’ frankly seems like a bit of a stretch). Great writing and a picture of a city I knew next to nothing about, this one’s very much worth taking the time on.

• The Ballad of George Galloway’s Campaign Bus: Finally, the semi-obligatory Joel Golby link; this thing about George Galloway and his mayoral campaign bus is the funniest thing I read all week.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, this EXCELLENT and horrifying depiction of office life, cobbled togther from stock video and providing an excellent visual companion to the Tame Impala track ‘’Nangs’. THIS IS YOUR LIFE!:

2) Next up is this, by Emma Louise. It’s called ‘Talk Baby Talk’ and I adore the vocal. Video’s not bad either – he is very pretty, isn’t he?

3) This animation is called ‘The Old New World’ and it is SO CLEVER. Using old photos and smart editing, I’ve not quite seen anything like it before. One for the ideas scrapbook, probably:

4) Resolutely uncool but WHAT a great tune – this is called ‘Men Without Hats’ (no idea why) and it’s by The Burning Hell:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! This is A$AP Ferg, featuring ScHoolboy Q with ‘Let It Bang’. Doesn’t really get going til the second minute, so give it a chance, eh?:

6) This is a few months old, but I only heard it the other week and it TOTALLY stuck in my head and even now I’m listening to it daily because it is SO GOOD. It’s called ‘Your Old Man’ and it’s by a band called Partybaby and it is EXCELLENT:

7) I’ve got a real soft spot for work that combines projection mapping with dance, and this is phenomenally good. It’s called ‘Levitation’, and it’s beautiful (also, this was performed LIVE. Cripes):

8) This week’s helping of ARTPOP comes in the form of this, called ‘Human Female’ by Bloodboy. It’s rather good, and I do love the aesthetic of the video – oh, contains BARE BREASTS at one point, in case that’s problematic for you: