LET’S KICK OFF THE MIXES WITH THIS ESOTERIC AND DOWNRIGHT ODD HOUSE-Y MIX BY LORD TUSK!

THE SECTION WHICH IS MOSTLY JUST GLAD THAT PEPSI APOLOGISED TO POOR KENDALL:

• You Can Now Search Stories On Snapchat: Snapchat’s in-app discovery is still a total car-crash when it comes to actually finding people you know, or want to interact with, or indeed anything at all, but they have now introduced the opportunity for users to search among Stories (at least those posted publicly to Snapchat’s ‘Our Stories’ channel); there’s something compelling about being able to cycle through the little human vignettes, and I say that as someone who has as little truck with Snapchat as possible. Of course, we all know what search means, right? AD OPPORTUNITIES! This is going to spin out into bidding to appear top in search for keyword x, and there is NOTHING we can do to stop it. Not that we want to – we love adverts here at Web Curios, and you’d be a fool to think otherwise.

• New ACTUAL Snapchat Ad Offerings: It’s offering App Install ads – that is, targeting at people who the service thinks are likely to install your app – and targeting of people who have previously interacted with one of your ads. Which is all well and good, but there’s still appalling demographic info and the ad units are still violently expensive and, you know, tracking and conversion stuff is at best patchy, but YOU GET TO ADVERTISE AT YOUNG PEOPLE, and, despite the fact that they have no money to actually buy anything, the ad industry continues to fetishise them in a way which, frankly, is a bit creepy.

• Say Hello To Facebook’s ‘M’!: Or don’t – after all, it’s just a Messenger Bot and won’t care at all. This is ‘M’ – the virtial assistant which Facebook has been trialling for a couple of years(ish) now with people in the Bay Area and which was at its inception an odd sort of chimerical hybrid of human intelligence and machine automation but which at its launch to the public is, as far as I can tell, basically a bot version of that fcuking Clippy assistant from mid-90s Word, popping up in your Messenger converstations to suggest Gifs you can include in your chat, or to exhort you to get an Uber or Lyft…obviously the interesting / coming thing here is its suggestion of context-relevant products or services, and how it decides whose offerings to pimp – here’s a thought, do you reckon it will be more likely to recommend stuff from brands or companies that have paid a lot of money to Facebook? NEVER! This is US-only at the moment, but expect it to be rolled out in other English language territories soon; does, er, anyone else find the fact that they just seem to be basically announcing that this will read ALL your conversations on Messenger from hereon in a touch on the creepy side? No? WAKE UP SHEEPLZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

• A Free Version of Facebook At Work Is On Its Way: No idea as to when, but worth keeping an eye out for as I still think it has the potential to be a really useful internal comms platform when you remove the steep fees that they charged at launch.

• FB Testing New Newsfeed: Because it’s FAR too hard to have stuff that you don’t necessarily like or care about spaffed in front of your field of vision online, Facebook is testing an alternative Newsfeed, sitting alongside the standard ‘rubbish from people you are friends with and Pages you ‘like’’ version, which will instead feed you ‘interesting stuff we think you will be interested in which comes from Pages you have never actually expressed an interest in’. Yes, that’s right, ANOTHER POTENTIAL AD CHANNEL!. No clear indication at present as to how this might play out – or indeed if it’s ever going to go beyond a test phase – but, you know, it’s ‘news’.

• Facebook Has FIXED Fake News: They haven’t, of course – here’s a novel idea, maybe it behooves the consumer to actually apply some small degree of critical analysis to stuff they’re told rather than hoovering everything up like some sort of bovine infosponge? – but they’s said some stuff about how, you know, they will be CRACKING DOWN on this sh1t. Details are pretty sketchy, and there’s no implication here for advermarketingprdrones, and it’s 726 and I already feel like this is slipping away from me, so let’s crack on and talk of it no more.

• WhatsApp Set To Launch Payments In India: Just FYI really, and a convenient reminder that if you’re working in/on a payments business you’ve got a pretty finite window before the big boys absolutely screw your pooch, so to speak.

• Twitter Has Fixed Harrassment!: HA! NO IT HASN’T! Although accounts without a profile picture won’t have egg avatars anymore, they’ll have generic human silhouettes; which, frankly, didn’t strike me as THE biggest problem with Twitter when it comes to people being vile, but THEY KNOW BEST! (I am increasingly of the opinion that noone at Twitter knows best).

• New Twitter APIs Launched: Look, I’ve never pretended to be an engineer or developer or whatever, so don’t expect me to be able to explain what all this stuff is actually about. There’s stuff in here about being able to do more stuff with DMs, and about them having “launched the Account Activity API, which provides access to real-time events for accounts you own or manage, with delivery via webhooks.” Exciting, eh? God, I am such a dumb marketing drone.

• Businesses Can Now Ask Customers To Share Their Location In DMs: Which, from a customer service point of view, is quite useful if you have physical stores and the like; imagine the easy ability to direct people to their nearest store, or, using it as a way to help breakdown engineers reach people in their cars. Potentially useful.  

• Twitter Lite: Ignore the spelling – this is a new version of Twitter which is designed for people with crappy connectivity. No brand implications that I can see, but I had a play with it and it’s quite a lot smoother to use than the standard app so you might find it worth a look.

• Amazon Does ‘Influencer’ Stuff: This is basically just an extension of the standard Amazon Affiliates programme, whereby anyone can get commission on stuff that gets sold on Amazon through links from their webpage – the difference is this is a slightly shinier version, available by application only to people deemed INFLUENCERS by Bezos and his terrifying drone army. Worth being aware of if you’re trying to use a famous to flog your tat, though no indication as to how long it will take to get to the UK.

• ALL OF THE APRIL FOOL’S GAGS!: Whisper it, but it feels slightly like this year might have seen the beginning of the end – or at least a slight lessening – of the dead-eyed, humour-free adcuntpalooza that has been branded April Fool’s gags. We’re all just too tired and sort of dazed by everything to be able to parse any of this stuff, and frankly we’re being lied to by everyone on an hourly basis and could do without a fcuking biscuit brand adding to the confusion. Anyway, here are all the BRAND LOLS from the US, and here are all the UK variants (I presume PR Week is throwing some shade here with its reference to ‘creative flair’ in the url).  

• What Google Thinks Kids Think Is Cool: The most pilloried thing in advermarketingprland this week until Pepsi happened and buried it under an avalanche of woke, this is Google’s report into what THE KIDS are into in 2017, which cause the Steve Buscemi meme to become so ubiquitous that it really should be retired for a while. It’s worth pointing out exactly HOW bad this is, though – from the title (“It’s Lit!” – is it, Google? Is it?) to the casually-included statistic which suggests that 42% of Gen Z is on Google+ (YES MATE YES THEY ARE), this is a pretty clear example of why you shouldn’t publish a bunch of claims based on a sample size of 1,000.

• That Pepsi Farrago: Look, it’s DONE – but in case you missed it, the Indy’s takedown is very good, as is the New Statesman’s, but both of them pale before the (predictable) brilliance of McSweeney’s. Oh, and in case you missed it, this longread from a couple of months back seems eerily prescient in the light of this sh1tshow.

• Impossible Fortress: From what I can tell, Impossible Fortress is a book which has seen Ready Player One and thought ‘yes, the world needs another one of these so let’s channel every single little bit of fan-fulfilment 80s pop/nerd culture nostalgia into a cash-in tonal ripoff so blatant that it’s almost a touch embarrassing’, but they have made a really rather good 8-bit browser game as part of the promo campaign so all is forgiven.

• The Fedex Soundtrack: Fedex have just officially killed the ‘hey, let’s turn DATA into MUSIC’ thing – you can now turn your FedEx tracking number into MUSIC! Actually I’m being a bit unfair – the site’s pretty, the visualisation of the package’s journey is nicely done and the music’s actually not bad, and there are plenty of cues for users to sign up with the brand thereby making it all TRACKABLE and MEASURABLE and stuff, – but who has ever thought “I want to spend 8 minutes of my life logging on to a website and entering in an alphanumeric string in order to hear some algorithmically-generated plinking based on some logistical data”? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.

• The Poop Troop: There were yoghurts when I was a kid – and, turns out, also nowadays – which were called ‘Munch Bunch’ and had cheery anthropomorphised fruit mascots all over the packaging. Now imagine if instead of humanoid fruit designed to sell you edible bacteria you were instead confronted with humanoid faeces designed to educated you about chronic idiopathic constipation (CIC) – wouldn’t that be fun? Well IMAGINE NO LONGER, as here come THE POOP TROOP! This is…just amazing, really. It’s basically a series of stickers/gifs which are designed to be used…no, sorry, I have literally no idea as to the use case for this. “Brings to life multiple types of bowel movements and some of the associated emotions with each”, it says! “Use the series to determine treatment goals and have a more productive dialogue with your doctor”. Really? Would you be LESS embarrassed introducing your doctor to ‘Clogged Chris’ rather than saying ‘Doctor, I am having trouble defecating’? Special mention here to whoever thought that it was necessary to add a hashtag to this campaign – I can really see #confrontconstipation being used ALL OVER the web.

NEXT UP, A NICE SUNSHINEY AMBIENT-Y BEACH-FEELING MIX BY DJ ROCCA!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE AND SUGGEST THAT MASTODON IS NOT GOING TO KILL TWITTER, PT.1:

• Mastodon: Right, let’s get this out of the way now – apologies, it might take a *little* explaining. Mastodon is a Twitter clone, whose main selling points are its open sourceness and its straight-up position of banning Nazis. The link there takes you to a list of all the Mastodon ‘Instances’ that are currently live – rather than just existing in one place, Mastodon effectively lets anyone set up their own version of the software which acts both as a local community and one which can link up with the wider ecosystem (to a degree). Pick an instance which is accepting signups and have a play – it works like Tweetdeck used to, is full of people who work in software and advermarketingpr, it already has a parody Trump account on it (why would you do that? WHY?), and its onboarding and explanations make Twitter look like a user-friendly cakewalk. You can read a writeup of it here and here and here – see what you think. Bonus points to any of you who can convince your clients that they need a Mastodon strategy by close Monday.

• Emo Diary ‘05: Tweeting a line at a time from an emo teen’s diary from 2005. If you have ever enjoyed Cringe or things of that ilk you will adore this – come on, how can you not love an account which shares gems like: “24/06/06 megan gets what she fckin deserves when harry disses aidan, seeing as she’s been doing it about my bfs like, forever”? Impossible.

• The Internet Noise Machine: A response to the in-no-way-creepy-or-thin-end-of-the-wedge-ish recent legislation passed by US Congress which “makes it legal for your Internet Service Providers (ISP) to track and sell your personal activity online. This means that things you search for, buy, read, and say can be collected by corporations and used against you.” This site will, at the push of a button, open a new tab in your browser and keep loading up new random websites within it, thereby creating a false internet history to confuse and befuddle the buyers of your data. Which is fine, but personally the real joy in this comes from the strange journey that it takes you on – I could pretty much put this on a big screen and watch it cycle through odd sites and searches forever. Look, it just searched for “Turkey motor section dungeon”, it’s BRILLIANT.

• Moodelizer: Silly but sort-of brilliant, Moodelizer is an iPhone app which lets you add dramatic soundtracks to any video you shoot – there’s a simple synth-style interface which lets you change the intensity and tempo of a series of predefined backing tracks simply by dragging your finger over a little trackpad, and the results (you can play with it on the site) are actually pretty fun (in a dumb way).

• The Great Taxonomy of Cock: Does ‘cock’ present firewall issues? Tbh my slightly inconsistent attitude towards swearing in Curios means that I’m pretty sure that this gets Scunthoroped by most corporate email servers, so I can’t imagine that this will be the particular straw that fcuks the dromedary. Anyway, this is a GREAT visualisation of a whole host of different terms for ‘penis’, arranged by whether they are descriptors relating to purpose, shape or whatever else. You can discover your own favourites, but I’ll wager that whoever referred to it as a ‘bowel starter’ in the late-19thC probably didn’t get much use out of it.

• JellyTank: This doesn’t appear to be a joke, in which case I WANT ONE. Jellytank is ‘coming soon’ – a small fishtank for jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. Buy one of these, sit it on your desk, fill it with little jellies and watch, mesmerised, as they pulsate around all over the place. I confess to having no idea at all about the morality of keeping jellyfish in a confined space like this, but I’m going to be hugely vertebrate-centric about it and presume that they’re not hugely sentient and as such it’s broadly ok. JELLYFISH TANK FACT – jellyfish tanks should always have curved sides, as otherwise the jellies can get trapped in the corners. I have no idea how I know this.

• DroneClash: This is going to be on TV soon, no doubt. DroneClash is a Dutch project designed to basically do Robot Wars but with drones – it’s going to happen in December 2017, and they’re currently after sponsors; as far as I can tell, participating teams are going to be able to bring a team of drones with them to race and fight, with some sort of additional drone bosses to fight (details are a touch sketchy at present). This sounds simultaneously dreadful and all sorts of fun, and if Craig Charles isn’t fronting a C5 version of this by 2019 I will be most disappointed.

• Make Slogan Great Again: Make your own Trump 2020 campaign poster! Laugh, and try and ignore the terrifying reality of that man being in charge of significant US foreign policy decisions!

• Trump’s Ties: Childish-but-great, this – Tweeting pictures of Donald Trump doctored so that his ties are of kilometric length. Particularly nice because the ‘shopping is actually really good; technical skill elevates the gag slightly (‘elevates’? What is this, Great British Menu? Christ, Matt, sort it out).

• Sounding Gestalts: You know how I said up there that the FedEx thing has killed the whole idea of ‘make music from datasets’? Yeah, I take it back – this is the sound of MOULD. To quote, “by inoculating and documenting the different growth patterns of Yeast, E. coli and Lichen via a large format enlarger (treating the Petri-dishes as photographic negatives)…[a] bespoke grid system is then placed above a petri dish or a select microbial colony, enabling the transcription of growth patterns onto fully chromatic punch card strips to be fed into a mechanical music device such as a grinder organ or music box.” Want to hear the sound of lichen? COURSE YOU DO!

• Diverse UI: A good project compiling user images of non-white people for use by developers who need avatar images to illustrate their social network or whatever. Useful, and generally A Good Thing.

• Lolly: Crowdfunding project which looks like hitting its target – its goal is to produce a 3d microphone which can be plugged into an iPhone or iPad, which basically means that anyone will be able to do full 360 audio on the go. If you’re a filmmaker, ASMRtist or just someone who likes the idea of messing around with 360 video and audio, this might be quite useful.

• MeMoji: Look, I didn’t name the bloody thing. MeMoji is an app which lets you take photos of your face (or your friends’ faces) and warp them into human emoji. Which sounded like a rubbish idea when I started typing this but then segued into my imagining what an exquisite troll it would be to make my friend Paul’s face the go-to expression of laughter, say, or mild embarrassment, in all future conversations with him. Try it today with the fizzog of YOUR most shy and self-consious pal!

• World Emoji Map: I think this was an April Fool’s thing by Dark Sky, which provides weather data to developers – you can see a map of the world with, instead of temperatures or wind directions or whatever, emoji overlaid atop it, giving a really quite surreal impression of the world’s general mood – I think the emoji are determined by weather, but as I type the whole of Europe is covered with largely shell-shocked little yellow faces which feels about right, emotionally-speaking.

• Theo Cook: Theo Cook is a very skilled carpenter and craftsman, and his Instagram feed is full of beautiful woodwork. The Japanese Dovetail Joint may well be the most satisfying piece of video I’ve seen all year.

• Defrag Drive C: Emulating the old Windows defragging programme which you used to have to do every now again for reasons that were never made clear to teenage me, and which made a noise like death and took forever. Weirdly nostalgic, and also SO old and arcane looking that you can probably set this to fullscreen and just leave it running while you tell IT that your PC is ‘doing updates’ and slope off to the pub (you’re welcome!).

NEXT UP, SOME LATE 80s/90s HOUSE AND TECHNO COURTESY OF SLIP-D!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GOING TO GO OUT ON A LIMB HERE AND SUGGEST THAT MASTODON IS NOT GOING TO KILL TWITTER, PT.2:

• Women When Noone’s Watching: A lovely series of drawings by artist Sally Nixon, depicting women doing stuff alone and unobserved. Mundane, funny, cute, and with a beautifully idiosyncratic art style, these are gorgeous.

• Kate Nash Is Making A Record: I don’t care what you think, Foundations is one of the best singles of the past decade, and she was on Watsky’s excellent Cardboard Castles album, and she’s crowdfunding to do another album without label support and, frankly, I reckon she deserves a tenner. You may do too. BONUS RETRO MUSIC CONTENT: the video for Foundations really reminded me of this CRACKING promo for Plan B’s ‘No Good’, which is still a brilliant clip.

• Cassini’s Greatest Pics: It was announced this week that the Cassini spacecraft, which has been taking pictures of the cosmos for the past 20 years, will suicide itself in September this year as it will finally succumb to Saturn’s gravitational embrace. This is a collection of some of its finest pictures, and they are glorious.

• The Post-punk Motherlode: Literally ALL the post-punk music you could ever want to download, all in one place – there are about 25h of artrock, punk, new wave and the rest here, all zipped and ready for you to snaffle; it’s all free, so it would be practically rude not to sample some of it.

• Vintage Patterns: An amazing collection of vintage sewing patterns – ‘vintage’ in this case meaning ‘more than 25 years old’, which if you do fashion or craft or whatever else might be rather useful and potentially quite fun; if nothing else it might save you from being scalped by some nefarious Brick Lane boutique owner who definitely saw you coming, fresh from your bottomless prosecco Shoreditch brunch (I’m not judging you)(oh, ok, I am).

• Elicia Edijanto: The Instagram feed of artist Edijanto, whose black and white watercolours are rather beautiful I think.

• Birth Photography Competition 2017: I wasn’t expecting much here – I mean, there are only so many pictures of purple, wrinkled, squinting homunculi cradled to a sweating parent’s chest that anyone need ever see, right? – and then I clicked and realised that these were perhaps slightly more interesting; fine, there are a few standard ‘mother and child post-partum’ shots, but there are also quite a few which show slightly different sides to childbirth (namely, the screaming) – the winning photo is stunning, and there are dozens of hugely impressive shots here. Even for someone who keeps telling himself he’s getting a vasectomy for his next birthday, these are really rather incredible.

• Joycestick: An interesting project looking to create an interactive, explorable 3d world inspired by Ulysses; it’s still in development so the site’s mostly explainers and proof of concept stuff, but it’s worth a look if you’re interested in how 3d/VR can be used to do experimental narrative stuff, or to assist with the educational / critical experience.

• Cheese Science: A WHOLE WEBSITE dedicated to the science of cheese and cheesemaking, which may not sound thrilling (OK, it’s not) but is exactly the sort of pleasingly niche concern which is Web Curios’ bedrock. “Blue cheese has a unique aroma that is between perfume and cough syrup.” Cough syrup? Really? Anyway, if you’d ever wanted to conduct some in-depth research into the chemical properties of casein, you need look NO FURTHER. Also, how can you not love a site with copy like this: “Want to learn about the chemistry of Fondue? More like FUNdue, am I right?!” EXACTLY.

• Arabic Letters: A beautiful and rather clever illustration project, taking Arabic words and drawing them in the shape of their meanings – so the word for ‘fox’ is drawn in the shape of a fox, etc etc. So lovely, and made me temporarily want to take up calligraphy until I realised who I am and what my limitations are.

• Cedric Grolet: It seems not a week can go by without my discovering another baker on Instagram making cakes so magically Wonka-ish that they look like something from the early bit of the fairtale before the kids get punished for their gluttony by being eaten. This is the feed of French patissier Cedric Grolet, who has raised the bar even higher than last week’s cakes in the shape of actual rocks with his frankly incredible creations. LOOK AT THAT APPLE TART. Bake Off can DO ONE, frankly, I want to see this bloke at work.

• Deep Colour: Input a line drawing, give the software some pointers as to what sort of colours you’d like it to be, and be AMAZED as this website colourises the outline for you. It’s sort of crap, but simultaneously quite impressive when you think that this sort of thing will work perfectly in about a year’s time.

• Hyperlax: A really relaxing site which pulls new videos tagged #hyperlapse on Instagram and plays them one after the other with some slightly crap chill soundtrack in the background. Turn the sound off, put something decent on  in the background and zone out as you travel around the world at several millon miles an hour. This is honestly wonderful – much like the Snapchat Stories discovery thing I mentioned up top, there’s such a wonderful feeling of the breadth of humanity you get from this stuff (sorry, that was uncharacteristically upbeat – NO MORE!).

• Old Cinemas: Vast Flickr archive of photos of old cinemas, the sort which have latterly been transformed from art deco masterpieces of the golden age of movies into dun-carpeted cirrhosis megastores – CHEERS, WETHERSPOONS! There are a LOT of photos here, so if you’ve ever wanted to lose yourself in the ODEON architecture of the 1950s then WOW are you in luck.

• Giphy Says: A new gimmick app from Giphy which, much as it pains me to say so, I am quite in love with the idea of – film yourself talking into your phone camera and this will recognise your speech and produce a gif of you talking with auto-captioning, meaning it has never been easier for you to create a series of looping animations of you telling people to “FCUK OFF” in a variety of entertaining fashions – if that’s not progress I don’t know WHAT is.

• Eyegaze: If you want a slightly creepy glimpse into just how easy it is soon going to be for anyone to create their own digital version of you, which looks like you and moves like you and which they can manipulate in virtual space for whatever purpose they choose, then take a look at this little tech experiment which takes photos of people and makes them reactive so that the eyes follow your cursor around the screen. It’s a small thing, fine, but it looks *just* close enough to real to be really quite unsettling – take a second to let your imagination go crazy on where this sort of tech might end up. Yeah, LOVELY, isn’t it? Christ.

• Actual TV Shows Being Pitched This Week In Cannes: Because we’re all advermarketingprtwats (oh come on, we are), we think Cannes is just the Sorrellfest in June – but NO, there’s the film festival, or course, and MIPIM, and this one which is all about the TV industry. I have literally no idea at all as to whether these are ACTUAL shows being pitched, but I don’t care because they sound so brilliantly awful – it’s quite TV Go Home, and the fact that I can’t tell whether it’s satire or not is in and of itself a touch troubling. Is this real? “Wild Therapy (Banijay Rights): Crisis couples try surviving wilderness w an ex-Special Forces soldier”? Is this? “Sins of the Father (Gil Formats) – children of notorious criminals tell their stories and confront their parents”? God I hope so.

• Reddit Place: This was an unexpected positive news story about internet culture, which isn’t something you can often say – last weekend, Reddit launched one of its occasional experiments (remember the Button?) – this one presented Redditors with a blank canvas on which they were invited to collaboratively draw. A cursory understanding of ‘how stuff works online’ might suggest that this would quickly have descended into a hell of swastikas and crudely-drawn penises, and yet this was the lovely result. This is a rather good piece explaining it a little better, and this is an annotated version of the final image explaining who made each element of it and what they all signify. Honestly brilliant, this – sometimes (and only sometimes, and only for brief intervals) I love the web.  

• http://www.wwwwwwwwwwwww.xyz/: No idea. Really, I don’t understand this AT ALL – it’s a piece of webart pulling stuff from YouTube and letting you create your own audiovisual collages by switching between 30-odd channels at a pace of your choosing and in any order you like, but beyond that I have NOTHING. This would look great on a big screen, but is oddly immersive even on your monitor – have a play, and if you can work out wtf it’s actually about / for then please do let me know.

LAST UP IN THE MUSIC LINKS, AN ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-GOODNESS EMO RECORD, BY SORORITY NOISE! IT IS ACE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Bad Samples: Celebrating the outputs of neural networks and machine learning systems that don’t quite work in the way their creators would like to present to academia (this is pretty niche, I think, even by Curios standards).

• Lewis & Quark: Subtitled ‘Postcards from the Edges of Science’, this is a WONDERFUL Tumblr and a new personal favourite; from recipes produced by neural networks, to bot-created knock knock jokes, this is FULL of brilliant, funny and slightly geeky work which also does a gentle job of exploring how this stuff actually works. Excellent and worth reading.

• Daniel De Bruin: Digital artist and inventor, collecting his projects on Tumblr – includes a frankly TERRIFYING-LOOKING biometrically-controlled ‘thrill ride’, which looks like an absolute horrorshow.

• Marvel 1980s: Marvel comics of the 1980s! Er, that’s it! Lots of really cool illustrations from comics published bitd.

• Death Sentences: Lovely literary snobbery, this Tumblr collects ‘the last phrase you read before abandoning a book’ – marvel at sch prose gems as “With that she moved in between them and shortly was enjoying being the middle layer of a triple layer orgy.” (from this, apparently).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK INCLUDE 5 ACTUAL PROPER MUST-READ THINGS!

• Alexa Is Not Your Friend: Let’s kick off this week’s longreads with this in-no-way depressing look at the emotional connections people are forging with their Amazon voice assistants – hot on the heels of this week’s revelation that people want to fcuk Siri (look, noone wants to fcuk Siri), this piece examines how easy it is to create a bond with something with which we interact vocally, and the role that digital assistants like this could play in helping us cope with the lonely, disconnected futures that all await us.

• I’m With Her: At the time of typing this site’s down, but hopefully it’ll be fixed when I publish this as this is a great piece by the designer behind the Hillary 2016 campaign logo – you probably don’t remember, as, well, it was ages ago and quite a lot of other stuff’s happened since then,  but when it was launched it was widely ridiculed as being simplistic and childlike; over time, though, it was adopted by her supporters and became an instantly recognisable – and hugely flexible – piece of design. The author’s explanation of how it felt to be the person who created it and watched it go out into the wild is honestly fascinating.

• My Fully Optimised Life: Yes, ok, so making fun of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop and all that stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel, but it doesn’t mean it can’t also be very funny (the smoothie bit alone is worth the click).

• Computer Moves: Despite being whatever the opposite of a chess savant, I am increasingly drawn to reading longform articles about it; there’s so much interesting stuff around the edges of the game, not least the manner in which it’s possibly the field in which AI/human collaboration is most advanced. This piece looks at how AI in chess currently works, and explores (though perhaps not in as much depth as I’d like) how, despite the absolute dominance of AI in matches against humans, a human/AI combination will nearly always beat a pure AI opponent. Slightly reassuring, insofar as there’s hope that the machines may find some use for us in the future.

• Breaking the Seal on the Kayfabe: If you’re not familiar with the term ‘kayfabe’, here. Got it? GREAT! This is a brilliant article by a woman who had never previously watched wrestling experiencing the hallucinatory madness that is Wrestlemania for the first time and recording her impressions. Very funny, totally confusing, quite odd, and proof that WWE is basically ‘Days of Our Lives’ in tiny pants.

• The Emotions of London: Hugely geeky but rather wonderful academic paper which analyses novels set in London from the 19thC onwards and maps how they depict the city and their characters, plotting where gothic vs historical novels are set, how ‘happy’ characters are depending on where they’re said to live…I would LOVE to see a whole website dedicated to this sort of analysis, should anyone have a whole bunch of time and money they can devote to creating one.

• The Style of the Decade: An interesting NYT piece on female fashion in the second decade of the millennium, which posits that the defining aesthetic trend of this 10-year period in women’s fashion is the covering up of the female form, with a move away from visible flesh towards a slightly more androgynous silhouette, and the idea being that this is the result of a general Western trend towards female rejection of the male gaze.

• Sequoias: A lovely piece, again from the NYT, on the frankly MASSIVE sequoia trees of California. Will make you want to get on a plane to the West Coast and hug one – if you have never been, add it to your list of ‘stuff I would like to see before the world becomes too fcuked and we are all living underground’ as these things are INCREDIBLE. Also, lots of them are in a park called ‘Muir Woods’ which when I visited my dad out there when I was very small made me feel SUPER important, which is a small personal detail about which none of you will care but of which I was just reminded and got all misty-eyed about.

• What’s In Your Spank Bank?: A bunch of YoungTwitterJournoCrowd writers wax lyrical about the weird things which they crack one off to. There are a couple of excellent pieces of writing here, and fair play to them for not using aliases – in particular Carl Anka, whose Google results will forever reveal that he once joined a ‘no wnking’ community on Reddit. Fair play, Carl, fair play.

• Tony Hawk Teaches Me How To Olly: Sadly not actually ME – had it been I would probably still have been surgically attached to Mr Hawk’s ankle, begging him “PLEASE BE MY FRIEND TONY” – but instead Kelly Conaboy, whose endearingly silly tale of how she travelled to Tony’s house and spent a few hours with him as he patiently tried to get her to jump on a skateboard is honestly just heartwarming and goofy and fun. I challenge you not to smile whilst reading this, go on.

• Uber’s Dark Patterns: A look at all the tricks and techniques that Uber uses to keep its drivers driving – mainly using the sort of UX/UI tricks that app and videogame designers have used for years to trigger the ‘just one more play!’ impulse and keep you jabbing at the Skinner box. Notable not for the fact that it happens – after all, this shouldn’t really be news to anyone and it’s not like we thought Uber *wasn’t* a deeply sinister corporation with the morals of a sexually voracious tomcat – but more that we don’t realise that 90% of service providers and brands use stuff like this ALL THE TIME to a greater or lesser extent. Bear this stuff in mind next time you’re on Amazon, is all I’m saying.

• Cars & Second-order Consequences: Very smart piece by Ben Evans exploring some of the broader economic and social outcomes that might be engendered by the advent of self-driving cars. Made me feel REALLY stupid, not least as I hadn’t thought of any of this stuff myself – the points about the knock-on effects on jobs in retail, manufacturing, etc, are all hugely relevant and you ought to read this if you have even a cursory interest in futurology and stuff.

• Fcuk You And Die: Something Awful is one of the weird, semi-forgotten places where internet culture as we know it all began – this is a great oral history of the site, featuring interviews with Rich Kyanka who founded it and who is responsible for some of the funniest things I have ever read online, as well as several other contributors including @fart and other WEIRD TWITTER icons. It’s worth noting that these people, who all presided over a site where some really pretty reprehensible stuff got posted, are collectively of the opinion that ‘the web’s a really horrible place these days’, which, fine, might just be old men shaking their fists at the newfangled motorcar contraptions, but gave me slight pause for thought. BONUS SOMETHING AWFUL! Edward Penishands, still making me cry with laughter a decade on, and the terrible story of Swap.avi and why it’s not really OK to laugh at stuff like 2G1C.

• A Lexicon of British Comedy Writing Terminology: You’ll need a passing familiarity with the UK comedy scene to really get the most from this, but see whether you like this and then click or don’t: “Jazz Trumpetry – the extra, unneeded punchline that comes after the punchline you should’ve finished a sketch or scene on. It comes from the Brain Surgeon sketch which the Dawson Brothers wrote for Mitchell and Webb. The original draft was road-tested at (they think) London’s tiny Hen and Chickens theatre, where they had a joke where a rocket scientist comes in and says “Brain Surgery? Not exactly Rocket Science.” Big laugh. But they’d written an extra line after that, where a Jazz trumpeter comes in and finishes his line with “Rocket Science? That’s not exactly Jazz Trumpetry.” It tickled them to write it, but at the test out night, no laugh at all. So Jazz Trumpetry was cut from the final sketch that got on air – and ever since, has been the Dawson Bros’ shorthand for misjudged bonus punchlines. “

• Love in the Time of Cryptography: Another week and this would have been my best-of pick, but it’s SUCH a strong collection that it’s been beaten into 5th place. Still a GORGEOUS piece of writing by Quinn Norton about her relationship with her reserved, geeky and super security conscious foreign partner, and how it developed alongside encrypted conversations between them. Really very lovely indeed.

• Bringing it Back Up: Anorexia and blindness and parents and control all mixed up in this beautiful piece by Ethel Rohan. Superb writing here.

• Confessions of a Watch Geek: I have wanged on enough about how good Super Sad True Love Story is that you should all have read it by now and should therefore all be excited to read a new essay by Gary Shteyngart – this is about his middle-aged watch obsession, how he became a collector and an obsessive, and how, to quote the piece, “In a society hopeless and cruel, the particular and the microscopic were the only things that could still prove reliable”. Brilliant.

• Boys: This is absolute virtuoso stuff – tightly structured with a stylistic tick which could be considered a gimmick were it not so successfully realise, this essay by Rick Moody is about two brothers growing from childhood to adulthood, their relationships with each other and their parents and the world around them. It’s rare for prose to read so poetically, but this is wonderfully lyrical.

• Out Line: Finally though, THE BEST THING IN HERE THIS WEEK. No question – if you didn’t see it on Twitter on Wednesday, please do click this. Get a cup of tea and enjoy what is possibly the best piece of (ever so slightly) interactive fiction I have ever read – not only is it a great piece of writing, but the way in which the form and function work together left me on the floor. It’s so, so good, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is called ‘Reliquary’ and it’s by Pivovar, and I love the CGI in the video as well as the skittery percussion:

2) Next up, this is by Greta Isaac, it’s called ‘You’, her vocal is great and I want gifs of all the faces of the people in this as they are just SPLENDID:

3) Dante’s Tail is a NEW SHORT BY PIXAR! Well, that’s a bit grandiose – it’s more of a trailer for their next full-length film called ‘Coco’, but it’s a cute little vignette and the dog has a GREAT spastic face, 12/10, great doggo:

4) This is the new one by Bjork, called ‘Notget’ – you know what it’s going to sound like, it’s Bjork, but even if you’re not 100% charmed by her electropixie stylings this is worth a wathc for the excellent Lawnmowe Man-ish visuals alone:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Featuring Scrufizza, Mikill Pane, Dream Mclean & Al, the Native, this is called ‘Drumroll Please’ and sounds like a bunch of grime MCs going over the soundtrack to ‘Whiplash’, which is exactly as good as it sounds (no really, this is excellent and the production is huge imho):

6) Finally this week (sorry, time has been TIGHT), an absolutely brilliant and VERY ODD animation about ‘love and regicide’ by Felix Colgrave called ‘Double King’. Enjoy, and HAPPY EASTER PLEASE TRY NOT TO GET DIABETES FROM ALL THE CHOCOLATES OR TO GET CRUCIFIED BY THE ROMANS!:

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SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH KYLE MCLACHLAN’S SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF TWIN PEAKS-THEMED TRACKS? YES, YES WE SHALL!

THE SECTION WHICH PROBABLY WOULD PAY FOR TWEETDECK TBH, WHICH SPEAKS TO A SORT OF DEEP-LEVEL ADDICTION I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD:

• Facebook Live From Desktop Now…Er…Live: It’s one of those weeks where I’m going to have to report on the launch of features that were trailed a few weeks ago, because this is how the tech news cycle works these days. Isn’t it fun? Anyway, we can all now SPEKE OUR BRANES live from the comfort of our own Cheeto-encrusted chair of choice, as Facebook this week rolled out the ability to stream live from desktop. Will be interesting to see how this develops, and whether it makes any inroads into Twitch’s territory (the lack of inbuilt payments means Twitch is probably not to worried right now) and how quickly the Mail starts frothing about the bongo possibilities this affords. I also reckon that each of you knows one person who, though you and they don’t yet know this, are going to use this feature as an opportunity to go LIVE at any opportunity to offer their own blistering HOT TAKE on news and current affairs to their ‘friends’. It’s going to be so great.

• Reactions Come To FB Messenger: Yes, this was trailed too. Sorry. Anyway, this is now live and, as predicted, appears to basically be a wholesale lift of features from Slack. Nothing specific for brands here at the moment, but I quite like the idea of using this to determine the course of conversations – why not treat your next interaction with a group of people on Messenger as an elaborate ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game whilst keeping it a secret from your interlocutors? Each time someone reacts to something you write with a ‘Love’ reaction, say, bring your conversational tone one step closer to ‘murderous rage’, just for LOLs!

• FB Awards 2017 – Nominations Open: In case you want to win a metal balloon, pace Koons/Kapoor, and the envy of advermarketingpr people around the world. They have NEW CATEGORIES this year, based on the effect your work had on consumers – click that link and die inside a little when you realise they have had to explain the categories as though everyone likely to be reading it has an IQ in double figures. “Love – This is the work that made us fall in love with a brand”. Oh God, everyone thinks people like us are stupid, don’t they?

• Twitter Considering Premium Tweetdeck: I think this isn’t a bad idea actually. Twitter is currently asking a test group of users whether they’d pay for an upgraded version of Tweetdeck (doesn’t actually sound that upgraded at all tbh, but hey ho) and exactly how much they’d be prepared to fork out. I’d pay – Tweetdeck basically underpins the fiction that I know how to do my (any) job – as would journalists and other advermarketingpr drones like me; it’s not enough to unfcuk the business in one fell swoop, but it’s certainly a good way of driving regular income. Although if you try and charge me $20 a month, I’ll…I’ll…well, almost certainly acquiesce, but grudgingly.

• Periscope Broadcasts API: All of the fancy LIVE Api multicamera tech wizardry now on Twitter! Great! Not 100% certain why anyone would choose Twitter as their go-to platform of choice for a LIVE given Facebook hammers them on reach, but what do I know (as ever, rhetorical)?

• You Can Now Save Livestreams On Instagram: Erm, not much more to say on this other than it’s only the broadcaster who has the option to save the file; obviously useful should you want to reuse the video on other platforms after the fact.

• Instagram Trialing Letting Users Book Through The App: This could be quite big and DISRUPTIVE (can everyone please, please stop saying this?) – no suggestion as to when this might come to pass, but the option to book, say, restaurants through Instagram is a pretty big deal when it comes to marketing destinations.

• Instagram Launches 2FA: So, er, turn it on. There are also a few other feature announcements in here – users will soon start to see some content in the feed not automatically displaying on scroll – this will be stuff that has been flagged by other users, and verified by Instagram, as ‘sensitive’ (no, me neither) and as such only viewable by choice rather than by default (following another day in which Twitter users continued to erroneously believe that I, and others like me, really wanted to have pictures of a human torso pinned under the wheel of a double decker waved in front of their faces, I can sort of get behind this). Oh, and this, too, which tweeness is so appallingly emblematic of Silicon Valley’s bland tech utopianism that it has made me REALLY annoyed and it’s only 714: “On March 25 and 26, tens of thousands of Instagrammers all over the world will come together for the Worldwide InstaMeet 15 to share their stories and spread kindness in the world. You can find an InstaMeet near you or spread kindness by leaving an encouraging comment, giving an inspiring person a like or sharing a message of support with a friend.” Insagram is about FOSTERING KINDNESS and in no way about selling you things. HONEST.

• YouTube Statement On Improving Brand Security: Says nothing other than ‘we’re working on this’. One of the more interesting things about this whole story, imho, is that it points out one of those very weird areas where, despite the vast might of both Google’s computational power and the brains of its workforce, actual people are better than machines at picking out THE BAD STUFF – as poor, embarrassed, bongo-addicted Ben Evans pointed out, pulling down copyrighted material is relatively easy (“does the audio match what’s in our database? Yes? PULL IT!”) whereas determining whether a piece of content is allied to, or inciting, hate or extremism is a little tougher for a machine to determine.

• YT Annotations Are No More: A slightly sad farewell to afeature which sort of defined the early YT aesthetic – you will no longer be able to enjoy the sudden, unbidden pop-up of an oddly-coloured ‘SUBSCRIBE BELOW’ box, or watch a YouTuber pointing into space at a suddently appearing message linking to their commercial sponsor or whatever. Except you sort of will, because all the features (including the ability to create branching narratives, etc, which annotations afforded) are all supported by YT cards anyway. As you were, then.

• Google Posts Extended to Museums, Teams, Etc (In The US): Google Posts were, you will doubtless recall, launched last year and effectively acted a little as a changeable pinned Tweet at the top of Google search which famouses could set up to share LATEST NEWS with fans searching for them. This is being extended, in the US and Brazil, to sports teams, cultural institutions and, in the case of Brazil, musicians – this will be global eventually, so, you know, GET READY.

• LinkedIn Introducing Trending Storylines: This is a rejig of the LinkedIn newsfeed, whereby it will pull out popular stories from across the network and present them in a ‘Trending’ tab on the app; you can use HASHTAGS to JOIN THE CONVERSATIONS. Great! Absolutely no details whatsoever on what the eventual options are going to be for brands to force themselves into the top of this new, exciting information curation EXPERIENCE via the injection of LOTS OF MONEY, but give them a few weeks.

• Medium To Offer Premium Service: Now you will be able to pay a small fee to access some fairly rubbish-sounding stuff – EXCLUSIVE CONTENT (what, you mean more endless platitudes from the VC/founder community about how awesome everything is and how the relentless march of global capitalism can only be A Good Thing and by the way do you know how successful and alpha I am? THANKS!) and offline reading lists and new features (unclear what). HM.

• Google Data Studio: Potentially useful service, this, which lets you produce reports on your Google Data (analytics, adword performance, etc) which then automatically refresh – basically custom Google data dashboards. Dull, but some of you might find it helpful.

• Apple Launches Clips: Sort of their own Snapchat-type thing, except it’s no social element – this just lets iPhone users create Story-type content (video, stickers, drawings, effectszzzzzzzzzzzz…you know the drill by now) which can then b pushed out to all other social platforms. Quite a smart idea – rather than attempting to compete, this is simply providing a high-end content creation tool which is platform agnostic and, if the output’s half-decent and the cool kids pick it up, make iPhones a Thing To Have so you can use it too.

• Meet Walter: A new Alien film is coming. This may or may not excite you; I couldn’t possibly comment. This is one of the doubtless myriad web promos for it, introducing the Leyland android Walter (the Fassbender character from Prometheus). It’s pretty but shallow, presenting various android features and letting you click some stuff, but the bit where you click ‘Reserve’ to attempt to buy one broke my heart slightly – you are presented with a message in dead-eyed legalese which states: “Walter is a fictional character in the film Alien: Covenant. By clicking the Connect button, you will not receive an actual “Walter”. Fox may place ads about your fictional “Walter” tailored to you on certain websites that you visit. By clicking the check box and proceeding, you agree to receive email updates and offers from Fox” YEAH THANKS FOX FOR KILLING MY IMMERSION IN YOUR METICULOUSLY-CONSTRUCTED SCIFI UNIVERSE. Christ.

• Great Britain Experience: Joint work by Expedia and Visit Britain showcasing some of the GREAT THINGS around Britain, this is just a bunch of promo videos, let’s be clear, but the tech which syncs them all together seamlessly as you, the user, switch between London, Manchester, Cornwall, Wales and the Highlands is really rather nice – you can’t see the joins at all.

• Tech Nation: This is the website accompanying the recent Tech City UK report into the state of the tech industry; it’s not hugely exciting, fine, unless obviously you work in UK tech or policy (and even then tbh), but this is a textbook example of how you can launch a piece of research with a decent digital version alongside it. All the graphs are individually shareable, the interface is nice, it’s reasonably shiny but not too much so…look, you may not be impressed by this, but I promise you that there are still more organisations such as this who think that creating infographics from a report is DARK VOODOO, so let’s applaud those who are at least a little more advanced in their thinking.

• Gucci Memes: This is sort of genius. Not all brands have a right to play (oh my God, WHAT did I just type? Sorry) in this space (OH GOD SORRY), but Gucci do – this project, where they work with artists to create memes featuring Gucci products, nails the aesthetic and the tone perfectly. STRONG work, and if you’re fascinated by the bleeding between high fashion / art and the edges of web culture then this is all sorts of interesting.

NEXT UP, JOE ‘HOT CHIP’ GODDARD’S RECENT BBC ESSENTIAL MIX WHICH IS SO SO GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH APPRECIATES YOUR SENTIMENTS OF POSITIVITY AND SOLIDARITY BUT WHICH IN NO WAY WANTS TO READ YOUR 20-TWEET ‘THREAD’ ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK AND FEEL BECAUSE, WELL, YOU ARE NOT THE STORY HERE, PT.1:

• Name Of The Year 2017: One of my very favourite annual traditions, along with European Tree of the Year (on which note, shout out Oak Józef, worthy winner of the 2017 title), is the Name of the Year contest, which plucks the best names found in the media worldwide over the past year against each other in a public vote to determine which is the BEST name. The site’s a bit horrible, fine, but scroll down a bit and ponder whether to cast your vote for Shaft Cubit or H King Buttermore III, Bonjovi Hardeman or Cherish Bloodgood. Imagine being called ‘Cherish Bloodgood’ – WHAT must life be like?

• Resist Bot: When I first saw this I thought ‘wow, what a clever use of bot tech’, and then someone I know in the US tried it and told me it doesn’t seem to work (or at least didn’t earlier this week). Still, a smart concept – an SMS bot which will take text messages a user sends it and turn those into letters sent to the user’s congressperson – easy, simple, and avoids the pro-forma letter thing which apparently is getting less and less cutthrough in US campaigning terms.

• Collective Nouns for Pokemon: In case you’d ever had a burning desire to know what one might want to call a bunch of Magikarp (‘a piteousness’, apparently).

• This Bot Kills Fascists: A Twitter bot which tweets out pictures of stuff, overlaid with the text “X KILLS FASCISTS”. Which, when written like that, sounds rubbish and sort of is, but some of these made me laugh this week which, for much of it, has been no mean feat.

• Tinder Diaries: Ah, men. Men! Lads! What must it be like, I wonder in my more idle moments, to be an attractive woman on Tinder? Or indeed any woman, frankly? Well, curious men of the web, we can now lift at least some of that veil of ignorance thanks to artist Audrey Jones, who in this project creates small drawings illustrating some of the excellent conversations you can have with strangers on dating apps. I would buy these as prints as there is some GOLD in here. “Will you bring me BBQ?”, Audrey asks one potential suitor; “I will bring you whatever you want…”, he replies, “…Including my huge cock”, there conveniently failing to check whether said ‘huge cock’ falls within the Venn Diagram of ‘stuff Audrey wants’. Lads!

• Violence Against Women Online Survey: Amnesty is doing research into the violence experienced by women online, across Facebook, Twitter, Reddit an elsewhere, and is looking for women who will share their experiences as part of the work. I hope you don’t you have anything to contribute, but I imagine most women reading this probably do.

• Breaker: If you listen to a lot of podcasts this might be an appealing (iOS-only) app – Breaker effectively adds a social layer to podcasts, letting you share what you are listening to, browse others’ selections, discuss whole pods or individual episodes, that sort of thing. Oh, on which note, if you’ve a favourite UK podcast you should vote for it in the UK Podcast Awards.

• Oree: I thought this was a joke, but, turns out, NOPE! Ever wanted a wooden keyboard or trackpad or speaker? No, I thought not, and yet here we are. Still, if you aspire to the most Instagrammable of Instagrammable existences, if your home is basically a series of stills from a scandi-inspired Airbnb listing, then a) you might like this; and b) I’d like you to stop reading now, please.

• Elbow: This is sort of brilliant, at least from a design point of view. Do any of you old people remember, in the dying days of the cassette tape, someonereleasing a really small Walkman called the ‘Pebble’ or somesuch, which had a really strange design which left much of the tape casing exposed? I can’t find any evidence of it in the 30 second cursory Google I just did, so perhaps it was a fever-dream. Anyway, this is like that (thing that I just failed to adequately describe and which may not have in fact existed – God, I am good at this!) except even more minimalist – Elbow’s a prototypical tape player which just clips over the cassette itself, much like one of those clips your mate’s mum (who was really organised and had a freezer full of these) used to secure freezerbags. It looks ACE and scifi, despite the absolute pig’s ear I’ve made of this writeup, and if you’re a certain type of hipster you will salivate all over it. Details on if and when it will be available are sketchy, but there’s a survey you can fill in to register your interest so maybe fill it in and hope.

• Two-Inch Brush: After another week which can charitably described as ‘a touch stressful’, this is a very timely website. Two-Inch Brush collects all of everyone’s favourite fuzzy-haired ASMRtist Bob Ross’s painting videos in one place – all 403 of them. I don’t imagine that there’s anyone reading this (ha!) who hasn’t experienced the soothing, soothing sounds and visuals that characterise Ross’s work and which have made him a legitimate internet legend, but, on the offchance, put some headphones on and give one of these a go. Do let me know if you discover yourself to have ASMR as a result.

• Niles: Another really smart bot idea, Niles is a Slackbot which ‘learns’ – that is, you can add to its knowledge corpus through the Slack interface, as well as drawing from a variety of datasources such as Salesforce, Google Drive, etc. This is potentially really rather powerful, and is again a really smart way of using pseudo-AI for practical, tedious drudgery.

• Partnership On AI: An organisation looking at the development of Artificial Intelligence (running the gamut of that increasingly imprecise turn) from an ethical / moral point of view. To quote, “the organization will study the potential societal impact of AI systems, and develop and share best practices. We will also create working groups for different sectors, for example healthcare and transportation, allowing us to conduct research on the specific AI applications in these different sectors of the economy. We will also develop educational resources and host open forums to widely disseminate information about the latest topics in the field and support an ongoing public discussion about the technology.” This is one of the most interesting fields in any discipline in the world right now, imho.

• A(irport)PI: Sorry, that is a truly APPALLING ‘joke’. Anyway, this is Schiphol airport’s (lovely, lovely Schiphol) APIs, all exciting and open and AVAILABLE. Except at the moment the only thing there to play with, and it’s pretty unlikely that any of these will let you do anything TOO wacky, but still, it’s an interesting idea from both an openness and a data security point of view; although the range of interesting products and services that one can imagine being built on something so ostensibly simple as the flight times is already pretty vast, so the opportunities here are rather large I think.

• Passive Aggressive Art Gallery: Artist Justin Cousson has been gently pointing out instances of inconsideracy in public spaces by setting up gallery-style notes and prices around them – so a roommate leaving a spoon in the sink becomes “”Sour Cream-Covered Spoon Left In Sink Before Leaving Town For Four Days,” mixed-media (metal, porcelain, sour cream, filth), 2017 – $3400 – SOLD” You get the impression that Cousson goes through roommates pretty quickly, but this is rather funny.

• Japanese Animated Film Archives: This is an incredible trove of vintage Japanese animation, covering the history of anime and more besides, presented by what I am guessing is the Japanese equivalent of the BFI. I say I am guessing as it’s all in Japanese, meaning there’s a very random quality to the browsing which I quite like (there’s an English-language version coming in ‘a month or two’, so if you’d prefer to know what the hell it is you’re looking at then bookmark this and wait, patiently).

• The Facebookuette Cube: Odd, this – a printable PDF which lets you create a decision die which will help you determine how you should respond to comments on Facebook (if at all). This is EXACTLY the sort of thing I expect to see at Frieze in October – the aesthetic, the copy, the typeface feels VERY artworld of the now to me, which probably means it’s actually ‘artworld of 2014’, but wevs.

• Animista: One for the coders amongst you, this site lets you create CSS animations on demand, which, given that as far as I can tell CSS stuff is pretty close to witchcraft at the moment, is useful.

• Yesterdaynite: Instagram page of US artist Alim Smith who’s filling his feed with brilliant cubist-style images of black memes for US Black History Month. The style on these is ACE – see how many YOU recognise!

• Untitled Serif: Yes, it’s a font, but I LOVE the way it scales when you scroll (look, just click it, it’s beautifully done).

• Catching A Real Ball In VR: This is, admittedly, not the most compelling video you will ever see, but the tech is quite remarkable – this is Disney messing about in their VR labs and creating a setup where a ball can be caught by someone wearing a VR headset – meaning that they have been able to track the object’s movement in physical space and render it in virtual space in realtime, with enough accuracy to enable the user to catch the object in virtual and physical space simultaneously. Which, come on, is AMAZING. If nothing else, your future 5-a-side games will be VASTLY more exciting when you can play them in a VR Maracana with 100,000 screaming fans.

• With Replies: Tweet song lyrics at this bot and it will tweet the next line back at you. Except it didn’t get Momus, always my go-to for ‘how obscure can I go with this’ testing. Still, a cute idea.

• Pixelart Baseball Card Paintings: I am including this not because I have any care for baseball but because I really, really want to see this done for football stickers – I want Panini to commission this for next year’s World Cup. Come on, those would be GREAT (as indeed are these, by artist Robert Otto Epstein).

SHALL WE KICK OFF WITH THE NOW-TRADITIONAL TORRENT OF NEW MUSIC FROM SXSW TO WHICH I ONCE AGAIN WASN’T INVITED THIS YEAR? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH IN CONTRAST TO LAST WEEK IS SOMEWHAT EMBARRASSED BY THE PAUCITY OF ‘NEWS’ HERE DISPLAYED BUT WHICH TRUSTS YOU’LL APPRECIATE THE FACT THAT THERE’S LESS OF THIS STUFF TO SCROLL PAST:

• You Can Now Watch The Facebook Messenger Snapchat Stories Clone On Desktop!: So, er, yes, let’s be clear, there’s something of a dearth of STUFF HAPPENING this week; you’ll get what you’re given and LIKE IT. In the spirit of this ‘quality of news really is NO BARRIER’ ethos, here’s the ‘news’ that you can now experiment with the FB Messenger ‘Day’ stuff, announced last week and as featured in Curios a mere 7 days ago. The main takeaway from this is a) oh god if you thought that Instagram Stories were dull you have seen NOTHING yet, please can we stop telling people that they are creative because it is causing me nothing but aesthetic pain right now; and b) literally NOONE knows this feature exists yet in normieland. Whisper it, but perhaps they don’t want it or care. Maybe it’s popular indifference on the part of the lumpenproletariat which will save us from the inexorable tide of Snapchatism. Maybe.

• Facebook Stories Slowly Rolling Out Worldwide: Or, it turns out, maybe not, given that the bloody Snapchat clone stuff on the main app is being thrust at everyone with increasing frequency right about now. Those of us outside Eire will soon have the opportunity to ‘enjoy’ ephemeral video-based content – such larks!

• Twitter Begins To Offer Guaranteed Viewer Numbers On Ad Buys: Were I feeling less charitable than I in fact am (who am I kidding? The amount of charity I feel towards anyone, frankly, at this time of the morning on a Friday is vanishingly small at the best of times, not least when I’m dealing with a hangover), I’d make some sort of gag about how this would provide INCREDIBLE longevity for your ad campaigns based on how long it will take you to reach a set number of people with your on-Twitter pre-roll. To quote, this is “its first guaranteed ad product, which lets brands order a set amount of pre-roll video ads with certainty that they get seen by a target group of consumers”. Cost? The ‘low six figures’, apparently.

• Alternative Universe Nazi Radio: So in actual fact it’s called ‘Resistance Radio’, but I’m pretty sure that my name is better. A promo for the Amazon ‘BUT WHAT IF THE NAZIS HAD WON???’-alternarealityscifi show, this is a site showcasing faux-radio stations from the programme’s alternative universe timeline, with three (or more?) different stations, DJs and musical styles on show. I am a sucker for this sort of worldbuilding, but can’t help look at this and think Amazon were a bit cheap here; the site design’s functional at best, there’s limited effort gone into the interface and it all feels a *little* bit sub-Fallout in execution. Still, er, Amazon is one of the most powerful companies in human history and I am a hungover man in his late 30s writing about stuff on the internet to an audience of bored office workers, so, er, hm, I WIN!

• I Am Major: This is pretty much an object lesson in how you get burned by memes. So this is a promo site for forthcoming Scarlett Johanssen vehicle ‘Ghost In The Shell’, itself adapted from a popular anime from the 90s, which lets ‘fans’ create their own memes based on one of the show’s tropes, uploading an image of their choosing and overlaying it with some INSPIRATIONAL copy – “I am [INSERT EMPOWERING PLATITUDE OF YOUR CHOICE]”, basically. Except the film’s been dogged by controversy since Johanssen’s announcement as the lead, given that, you know, the original was Japanese, set in Japan, and she’s quite evidently very white; you know the way this goes by now. So the site’s basically offered a free, franchise-sanctioned platform for all the HATERZ to create Scarlett-bashing memes pointing out exactly how un-Japanese and whitewashed the movie looks, all in the production’s own officially-sanctioned look and feel – you can get a nice rundown of all the ‘I am a white actor taking work from Asian actors and an example of cultural appropriation’ memes here; the whole thing is simultaneously a funny ‘HA! Fools!’ exercise in Nelson Munce schadenfreude and a microcosmic example of just how exhausting everything is, all the time, everywhere.

• Somebody Else’s Baby: This is a REALLY small thing, but I thought the design of this site which collects Tweets protesting against the recent statement by US Republican Steve King, in which he charmingly stated that America can’t regain its Chimerical ‘greatness’ by letting in ‘somebody else’s babies’, was simple and clean and easy and cheap and just A Good Thing. That’s it.

• The Most Dad Website You Will See All Week: Look, it’s been slow, fine, but I guarantee that you will get a small frisson from this. It’s a site for those massive, fancy, expensive gas barbecues you can buy and it is an absolute MASTERPIECE of slightly macho and yet quite camp overdesign. Listen to the birds chirp as you imagine yourself outside in a garden GRILLING MEATS! Salivate over the 360-degree navigable CGI render of what is, let’s be clear, A FCUKING BBQ! You can just sort of hear a particular type of man ‘hmmm’-ing appreciatively at this site as they mentally prepare themselves for a nice Sunday BBQ hosting the lads and The Wives (you always capitalise The Wife, it’s A Thing). It’s basically the website equivalent of Basingstoke, this.

NEXT UP, HAVE A BEATS&BREAKS SELECTION VIA THE WONDERFUL ‘MUSIC FOR OPEN-MINDED B-BOYS’!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL AT MIPIM THIS WEEK, THE PROPERTY INDUSTRY SHINDIG WHICH TAKES PLACE IN CANNES EACH YEAR AND IS LIKE THE LIONS BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE SELF-AWARE ABOUT HOW BORING THEY AND THEIR JOBS ARE, PT.1:

• Google Family Link: A really clever idea, this; Google’s new attempt to reassure parents that the internet and technology aren’t going to take their children down the road to perdition and penury lets parents apply specific parental controls to individual Google devices, and apply them remotely via their Google account – to quote, “Family Link lets you create a Google Account for your kid that’s like your account, while also helping you set certain digital ground rules that work for your family — like managing the apps your kid can use, keeping an eye on screen time, and setting a bedtime on your kid’s device.” Obviously it’s not going to stop your 13-year-old son masturbating to the point of friction burns to Brazzers, but it may mean that they’re forced to do it on someone else’s phone. So, you know, SMALL WINS!

• Italian Comments: I’m allowed to laugh at this because it’s MY CULTURE (well, my Mum’s, but) so it’s ok. This is an EXCELLENT Twitter feed featuring screencaps of Italians (or, more accurately, the weirdly obsessive second/third-generation food police Italian community) having a go at people on the internet for the lack of authenticity in their food. SO MUCH ANGER OVER TOMATOES HERE.

• Blackout Poetry Generator: This is rather cool; a little browser plugin which generates blackout poetry from any webpage you happen to be on at the time. Results obviously vary, but there’s a certain beauty to the oddity it produces (which suggests that perhaps blackout poetry isn’t in fact, er, very hard or indeed profound, but hey ho) (oh, and on which note, can I just take a moment to plug A Humument which is still by far and away the most interesting and successful variant on this technique I’ve ever seen? Can I? YES I CAN).

• Every Name: I have NO IDEA why this exists, but it does and the web is a marginally better place for it. This is by artist Andrew Venell, and it’s a webpage featuring a seemingly infinite selection of invented names – long names, short names, all obviously generated by some piece of Excel or Markov Chain or whatever (yes, I know, I am misusing that term but FFS) in the back that produces new ones on each refresh. Don’t YOU want to meet Arno Feldmouth and hear his story? Wouldn’t you like to hang out with Lilian Blamechance? This basically made me fall into a 10-minute reverie about the imagined protagonists of the novels I will, thankfully, never write, and is imagination catnip imho.

• LEGO Tape: Such a smart idea, this – not OFFICAL in any way, this is an already-funded Indiegogo campaign for sticky tape which creates a surface on which you can stick LEGO bricks, meaning you can turn any surface into a building opportunity. There are obviously myriad applications for this, but surely one of the greatest is to ensure that your children never leave LEGO bits on the floor ever again. That, or enabling the construction of elaborate LEGO garotte traps across domestic doorways; either/or.

• Before The Flood SeaThingy: Yeah, fine, so this is a promothingy for last year’s DiCaprio-fronted climate change documentary meaning this is both OLD and BASIC, so, yeah, sorry about that; still, it lets you put in any location you like, pulling the resulting Gmap, and see exactly how banjaxed it will be when the temperature rises by a few degrees. Reassuring for me, less so for those of you living in Plymouth.

• Where’s The Jump?: A database of jump scares in horror films, for those of you who want to know EXACTLY where they are and when – or, alternatively, for those of you who want to pick absolutely the most unpleasant film to watch with your twitchy date of choice this weekend.

• Hearmuffs: A pretty basic gag, this, except it doesn’t feel that funny – Hearmuffs are spoof earmuffs for your Amazon Echo which will prevent the device from listening to every single thing you and your family say and logging it on a server somewhere so that Amazon can sell you more things. Except,  hahaha, it’s a joke, hahahaha, and you can’t ACTUALLY buy it and even if you could it wouldn’t work because you can’t stop this now that it’s started and we probably just ought to accept that we’re just a bunch of datapoints, waiting patiently to be mined, trapped inside a slack, meaty prison. HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE!

• Block The Bully: This is VERY SILLY, but equally sort of A Good Thing; it’s a site which will automatically, when authorised, follow, then unfollow and block Trump’s Twitter account – an entirely cosmetic act of resistance, fine, but equally the sort of thing which you could imagine really getting under his skin. Just think of the reaction should he discover one month that his Twitter following has fallen, or if he becomes the most blocked human on the planet! Imagine the LOLS! Imagine the steely, massed, thermonuclear LOLs!

• Spider Ties: Yes, I know this is just a PR stunt, and yes, it’s a silly gimmick, but equally, LOOK! A tie made from spider silk! I mean, it’s ugly as you like, but still, SPIDER SILK!

• Autonomous Trap: I rather love the idea behind this. Simultaneously, though, I am started to get quite creeped out about how much witchcraft-related stuff I am seeing in 2017, following my confident assertion that the trendhunters’ prediction of ‘NEW WITCHES’ was absolute claptrap. Turns out I know nothing about anything – WHODATHUNKIT?! Anyway, Autonomous Trap imagines how one might use old techniques from the occult to stymie autonomous vehicles in the future – I do love the idea that you might be able to completely fox a self-driving car by pouring salt around it like a slug.

• Charlie vs The World: Friday, yeah, the WEEKEND! The moment you’ve been waiting for to dispose of £60 of your salary in exchange for some lignocaine and a small portion of your self-respect! This is a nicely-designed site which shows you some facts about exactly how bad your occasional weekend gram is for the environment, what with the carbon footprint and all. I am still amazed that noone in London is peddling Fair Trade cocaine; you would CLEAN UP, seriously.

• Cloth Map: A website promoting a hoping-to-be-funded-on-Patreon series in which the presenterbloke (of COURSE it’s a bloke!) travels around the world talking to people about the games they play, and exploring play culture worldwide in documentary style. Absolutely the sort of thing which doesn’t in any way need to exist, but pleasingly pointless and thus worth including. Who DOESN’T want to learn more about Bogota’s Dungeon’s and Dragon’s community? NO FCUKER, that’s who!

• 365 Luncheon Dishes: Turns out I am an absolute SUCKER for old-school recipe books; this one, from 1902, presents a different recipe for each day of the year and is a brilliant culinary time capsule. Fine, I concede that some of the recipes are a touch on the cursory side – I mean, really, WHAT IS THIS? “1½ lbs. of round steak, 2 eggs, salt, summer savory and pepper. Chop the meat fine, season. Beat the eggs well and add to the meat; when well mixed, roll it up closely, put into a dripping pan and bake an hour. To be eaten cold.” – but there are some wonderful oddities here.

• S-Town: NEW TRENDY PODCAST KLAXON! By the people who brought you Serial and This American Life comes, soon, S-Town, which will be momentarily the talk of middle-class media Twitter until the next hot thing comes along. Here’s the blurb – it launches in 10 days, and all the episodes will be released simultaneously thereby making ‘binge listening’ a thing that actual journalists will write actual articles about: “JOHN DESPISES HIS ALABAMA TOWN AND DECIDES TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. He asks a reporter to investigate the son of a wealthy family who’s allegedly been bragging that he got away with murder. But then someone else ends up dead, sparking a nasty feud, a hunt for hidden treasure, and an unearthing of the mysteries of one man’s life.” THRILLING, EH?

• Make America Misogynistic Again: Sexist ads from the 20th Century, accompanied by ACTUAL QUOTES from Donald. He’s, er, SUCH a charming man, and these are brilliantly effective (says the pinko liberal).

• The Maps of the CIA: When they’re not listening into us via our white goods, the CIA also do some international work; this is a selection of maps from the last century produced by the CIA and recently published on Flickr, which, fine, can tend towards the specific (ethnogeographies of the central caucuses, anyone?) but are cartographically fascinating and actually quite cool to browse in a weird, Dr Strangelove, military paranoia flashback sort of way.

• Nuclear Test Footage: Continuing the theme of Cold War paranoia, this is a YouTube channel featuring nothing but recently-declassified footage of US nuclear testing. Mushroom clouds as far as the eye can see; an absolute treasure-trove of FUN APOCALYPTIC FOOTAGE for you to play with, should you be so minded.

• Bumpr: Do YOU use a Mac? Do YOU, like the person I was sharing office space with yesterday, fly into a slightly frothy-mouthed rage at the fact that it will make annoying, arbitrary decisions as to which programme to use to open links, files, etc? This is a plugin which offers a really nice solution – hover over any link or file and it will pull up a clickable menu letting you choose how to interact with said thing. Really nicely designed, this – whilst the application’s a bit dull, I concede, the idea behind it is slickly executed.

• Blue China: Photos from China, taken at the point of the day/night cycle when dusk is falling at artificial lights are coming on and everything is imbued with this slightly odd indigo hue, giving landscapes the look and feel of your favourite cyberpunk narrative. The aesthetic here is gorgeous and SO future.

• Supersonic: As we careen recklessly towards a future in which none of us can read or write and our interactions with the world are entirely defined and determined by the operating systems of the machines we’ve designed to coddle us (yes, fine, hyperbole, but), think of this as a small link in our inevitable decline as a species. Supersonic is a Google-developed Messenger app whose gimmick is that it doesn’t have a keyboard; messages are transmitted via text using a text-to-speech interface which transcribes your utterings and sends them to the recipient of your choice, thus obviating the need for fingers. Obviously this is superclever and not A Bad Thing per se, but I am an old man and mistrustful of change.

WHY NOT GIVE THIS SELECTION OF AMBIENTY, LO-FI HIPHOP INSTRUMENTAL MIXES A TRY? THEY ARE REALLY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WOULD LIKE TO BE A FLY ON THE WALL AT MIPIM THIS WEEK, THE PROPERTY INDUSTRY SHINDIG WHICH TAKES PLACE IN CANNES EACH YEAR AND IS LIKE THE LIONS BUT FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE MORE SELF-AWARE ABOUT HOW BORING THEY AND THEIR JOBS ARE, PT.2:

• Songsim: I like the outputs of this site even if I confess to being utterly baffled at the explanation of how they’re arrived at. Basically it presents a bunch of songs, visualised as geometric shapes based on their lyrical structure – there’s a whole maths-y underpinning to this which explain how it works but I am far too sleepy to make head nor tail of it. Suffice it to say that there’s something rather wonderfully minimal and 8-bit about its visual renderings of the music; all the outputs are available to download, and I reckon these could make nice posters or tshirts if you’re that way inclined.

• The Sideways Dictionary: A really nice project, both conceptually and in design terms, which seeks to provide easily-understandable definitions of tech stuff (two-factor authentification, say, or cache, or HTTP) explained in metaphor. I love the layout and the interface, and think it could be ripped off for all sorts of other applications with a bit of imagination.

• Joto: I WANT ONE OF THESE. Not enough to actually back the Kickstarter, fine, but enough to blart pointlessly about it on the web. Joto is a connected drawing board thing – basically a whiteboard with a robot arm attached to it, which robot arm will draw stuff on which whiteboard based on inputs from an app. So, say, you could draw a crudely-drawn penis on the app on your phone, and an EXACT rendering of the selfsame crudely-drawn penis would be spaffed out by the robotic arm in my house. AMAZING! Obviously the people behind this are offering all sorts of highbrow applications – allow anyone to draw original art on your walls from anywhere! – but, let’s be clear, this is mainly about the crudely-drawn penis potential.

• The Loving Project: A webart photoproject which takes as its starting point the fact that interracial marriage was only legalised in the US 50 years ago, this presents couples whose marriages would have been proscribed. Combining audio and photography, this is a fascinating exploration of something which is very much still a contentious point in the US in a way in which it’s quite hard to understand in the UK.

• The Disobedience Award: I am glad that this is a thing, but it says an awful lot – none of it good – about how we see the relationship between us and powerful institutions in 2017 that it need exist. Established by MIT, the Disobedience Award self-describes as follows: “The award will go to a living person or group engaged in what we believe is extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society. Specifically, we’d like to call out action that seeks to change society in positive ways and is consistent with a set of key principles. These principles include non-violence, creativity, courage, and taking responsibility for one’s actions. We’re seeking both expected and unexpected nominees. This could include–but isn’t limited to–those engaged in scientific research, civil rights, freedom of speech, human rights, and the freedom to innovate.” I like to think that my continuing efforts to extract maximum pay for minimum effort from everyone who employs me makes me worthy of a nomination, but perhaps you know someone more worthy.

• Archivio Grafica Italiano: A digital archive of Italian graphic design, which is basically bongo for the aesthetes amongst you.

• Gender Equality in Films: Or, perhaps more accurately, not gender equality in films, as this nice piece of research / dataviz by Google demonstrates, showing exactly how disparate representations of men and women in cinema are. There are many excellent (depressing) facts in here, not least the one about horror being the only genre which features more men than women.

• V For Wiki: The latest in the seemingly-neverending list of projects designed to make Wikipedia look a little less rubbish than it ordinarily does; this is an iOS app for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch (ha!) which makes Wikipedia pretty and a little more responsive – it will, for example, pull entries up based on your location, enabling you to bore whoever you’re with with obsessive amounts of trivia about whichever particular street you’re on or the fascinating manhole covers you can see if you ju…wait! Come back!

• Good, Clean Jokes: Your mileage here will inevitably vary, but if you need a bunch of safe-for-kids gags then this Reddit thread delivers. Sadly doesn’t appear to contain my personal favourite, but I’ll leave it here for you by way of small recompense: What’s red and invisible? NO TOMATOES! Yes, quite.

• Make Words Matter: A small project / provocation seeking to make us look at the language we use in the face of adversity – everything is a ‘fight’, a ‘battle’, a ‘war’, with ‘sides’ – and suggesting that perhaps there’s a useful exercise to be done in minimising this type of phrasing. If nothing else, last year’s referendum and the looming horror of Joxit make this worth a passing thought.

• Live UA Map: This is an ugly site, no question, but there’s something bleakly compelling about this world map with STUFF GOING DOWN plastered all over it. As a way of browsing news stories from around the world, I rather like it – even if the overall effect is somewhat akin to having someone standing next to you and repeating a neverending litany of deaths from every single countrty you’ve ever heard of into your ears.

• Pipes: Beautiful photos of massive organs.

• A Ridiculous Timeline Of Star Wars Videogames: I care even less than you do about Star Wars videogames, trust me, but the sheer insane depth of information here present is simultaneously terrifying and…actually, no, just terrifying.  

• Bees and Herring In Red: A YouTube Live stream of a Facebook Live stream of an Instagram Live stream of a Twitter Live stream. I’m sure this is making some sort of point about something, but frankly this simply strikes me as the absolute logical endpoint of this fcuking insistence on turning us all into broadcasters.

• Supermute: Twitter hack which lets you specificy a word or phrase which should anyone you follow on Twitter have the temerity to mention it will result in them being blocked from your account for a week. Arbitrary, and the sort of thing which if judiciously applied could improve your Twitter experience no end.

• Oddity Viz: Like David Bowie? OH GOOD! “Space Oddity – a visual deconstruction, AKA Oddityviz, is a data visualisation project on David Bowie’s Space Oddity by designer Valentina D’Efilippo and researcher Miriam Quick. The project visualises data from Bowie’s 1969 track Space Oddity on a series of 10 specially engraved records with accompanying posters, plus a moving image piece. Each 12-inch disc deconstructs the track in a different way: melodies, harmonies, lyrics, structure, story and other aspects of the music are transformed into new visual systems.” So there.

• The Dating Game: Back in the day when Google Glass was still looking like it might be a thing, I remember writing something on here about how there was SO MUCH POTENTIAL for interactive dating shows using the tech – livestreaming a dating experience with people making suggestions to Cyrano the poor sap into the affections of their partner (or get them slapped, either/or). Anyway, Google Glass is dead but FINALLY someone has caught up with my visionary blue-sky thinking. The Dating Game is seeking funding on Kickstarter to set up what they term an ‘interactive game show’ where you (either an individual or a team) are granted the power to guide someone through a first date and see what happens. This will almost certainly not meet its target, which is a great shame – can someone else with money pick this up and make it happen? It sounds brilliantly awful.

• Listen To The Cloud: Remarkably relaxing, this – a site which lets you listen in to the chatter of airport communications from around the world, laid over gentle ambient sounds. Kind of white noise-ish, but simultaneously oddly compelling – perhaps I’m just listening in the hope of overhearing a live air traffic controller breakdown, though.

• Endless Night: I could try and describe this (it’s basically a semi-interactive music video featuring a beautiful and well-muscled guy dancing in a studio; press ‘c’ to switch between different versions of the video in the now-hackneyed Honda Splitscreen manner), but I’d rather just leave the actual description here for you to enjoy. Well DONE, copywriter! “Endless Night testifies to the perfect symbiosis between man and their environment. As of the dancer’s wake-up, his body and the décor get animated against a minimalist and airy white background. The dancer injects his own rhythm to the décor that, in turn, comes to life.A human creation that places the human being at the centre of the concept but which, eventually, reveals that the belief of human supremacy triumphing over nature is pure trickery.” YES!

• My Body Gallery: Designed to be an encyclopaedia of the human form, showing all the different shapes and sizes we come in without judgement and giving people a place where they can look at the near-naked bodies of actual, real, non-model people and feel a little better about how lumpy they are. A Good Thing, I reckon, and maybe the sort of thing which Dove might want to chuck some money at because REAL BEAUTY SELLS COSMETICS! You can toggle between men and women at the top, by the way.

• Project 1917: A history project telling stories of those who lived through the Russian revolution, using only primary sources to paint the history. It’s a properly crazy time, if you’ve never studied it, and there’s some wonderful material in here – also, I just learned that on this day in 1917, “Lenin hatched a crazy plan to reach Russia in the guise of a deaf-mute Swede”, which is without a doubt the best thing I’m going to learn all day, hands-down.

• Animal Pants: One of you will buy these, guaranteed.

• The Vachina: Because, equally, one of you will also buy one of these vagina-styled purses off Etsy (of COURSE off Etsy!).

• Purenetics: Finally this week, something which I think has to be a joke but doesn’t in fact appear to be one. Purenetics is a service which purports to help high-net-worth people looking for genetic material to help them have kids source the very best from the very beautiful; the service offers to pay upto £500k for 10ccs of dusty output, or some eggs, if you’re pretty enough. It’s so staggeringly crass that it feels like it should be a front for something, and yet there’s no indication that it’s a marketing campaign for A N Other creepy future film. Am I missing something? Am I being stupid? SOMEONE EXPLAIN.

LET’S CLOSE OUT THE MUSIC WITH THE FIRST, AND BEST, PLAYLIST TO LAUNCH A POETRY BOOK YOU’VE EVER HEARD!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Videogame Powerpoints: Erm, slides from powerpoints about videogames, but it’s all rather nice jagged graphical stuff rather than barcharts so there’s an aesthetic purpose to its inclusion, honest.

• Trains In Games: A further addition to the ‘there is nothing so niche that there can’t be a tumblr of it’ pantheon.

• People Hugging The New Joanna Newsome Album: See above x10000000000.

• Philip Kremer: Absolutely the best weird, creepy, horrifying faces you will see all day. If you are feeling ESPECIALLY ballsy, why not see if you can swap the photos of senior management on your company website for some of these beauties?

• Maps On The Web: Not going to patronise you with a description here.

• TrumpTrump: A new creepy pen and ink drawing of Donald each and every day. These are really quite creepy in a spiky, angular, slightly broken sense.

• Spongebob Closeups: The oddly fine art-like beauty of isolated elements from Spongebob Squarepants.

• We Are The 15%: Companion piece to the project up there about interracial marriage in the US, this is a crowdsourced Tumblr of mixed-race unions and it is just sort of generally charming and not a little heartwarming.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• That One About The Queen Dying: This was EVERYWHERE yesterday, and for good reason – a brilliant piece of writing in the Guardian about the plans in place for when our monarch finally chooses to shuffle off this mortal coil, giving a moment-by-moment account of how the news will travel and what all the different layers of pomp and circumstance will be. Regardless of your republican / monarchist sympathies, this is quite marvellously odd; on the one hand, yes, it will be a major global historicocultural event; on the other, MAN there is some pretty baroque ceremony and pageantry in here given it’s 2017. Still, think of the extra days off work!

• The Venn Diagram Museum: Bit of an outlier, this, but I wanted to include it as it’s an excellent illustration of the potential inherent in VR for exposition and information-delivery. The essay describes how Vi Hart (see Curios passim) designed a ‘Venn Diagram Museum’ using an HTC Vive to sculpt it in VR space. The really interesting stuff here is about how the medium worked to impose a degree of mental order on the concepts that Hart is trying to communicate; really made me think of the potential for this sort of use of VR as a communications tool aside from anything else.

• How 4Chan Punked Shia: I am in no way condoning the sh1tlords of 4chan, but this piece, about how they assiduously pursued Shia Lebeouf’s ‘He Will Not Divide Us’ project (at the time of writing, not currently live) across the country with the express purpose of ruining it, is a neat distillation of all that is mad about that corner of the internet. This is a LOT of effort for the lulz, lads.

• Treating Mental Illness With Psychedelics: All about the trend for treating mental health issues with varying doses of FUNDRUGS! I say ‘fun’ – pretty sure there’s noone out there taking ayahuasca for wholly recreational purposes. Lots of really interesting stuff about the history and conflicting schools of psychiatric treatment, along with some fairly strong reminders as to why I am pretty much entirely disinclined to ever take acid to ‘find myself’ (some things very much deserve to stay lost).

• IKEA For Irish Pubs: This BLEW MY MIND. You know how wherever you go in the world you will find an ‘Irish’ pub, serving a bewildering array of Irish-sounding beers which you’ve never, ever seen on sale anywhere in Ireland and with exactly the same array of ersatz paddymobilia adorning the walls (in much the same way as at certain points during the 90s you couldn’t go anywhere in the world without seeing a bunch of slightly homesick-looking alpaca poncho-clad Peruvians blowing desultorily on a set of panpipes and wishing that Simon and Garfunkel had never written El Condor fcuking Pasa)? This piece informed me that there is an ACTUAL COMPANY which exports them all over the world – they build flatpack pubs in 6 different styles, to be shipped out and then assembled on, say, the Russian Steps as ‘O’Malley-tovs’ taks shape. Globalisation is MENTAL, mate.

• They Are All The Same Banana: Equally mind-blowing was this piece, about the history of banana cultivation. Wait, no, seriously, it’s REALLY interesting. Leaving aside the fact that the banana is the devil’s fruit (it smells slightly fecal, there’s no two ways about it), this piece from Wired explains how each and every banana is basically genetically identical, being derived from cuttings from the same plant – making the world’s banana crop effectively the largest single organism in the world, and making it wildly vulnerable to disease. Hugely interesting about all sorts of things, not least the dangers of worldwide food monocultures.

• My Intersex Body and Me: Arisleyde Dilone grew up tall, slim, tomboyish and flat-chested, before discovering that she was born with male chromosomes and learning that she would likely never develop breasts. This is the story of her growing up, her first boyfriend, her breast implants and her sense of self and identity and femininity, and it’s fascinating (and not sad).

• Escape To Another World: I know I featured one of these last week, but this is another EXCELLENT piece on the whole ‘young men effectively choosing to drop out of life in favour of videogames’ phenomenon; this is a better read than last week’s, and makes a reasonably convincing case as to why there might be a shift in the minds of many young men in the affluent west that there’s simply no real point bothering with much of the trappings of what we generally come to see as ‘life’.

• HP Lovecraft and Robert Barlow: Lovecraft’s attained that position in the popular cultural pantheon that everyone knows a few things about his work – eldritch, tentacles, madness – without most of them (myself included) ever having read a word of the man’s output. This is a fascinating piece examining Lovecraft’s relationship with Robert Barlow, a fan of his whose slightly tragic life is a microcosmic portrait of 20th Century sexual repression (and which contains a throwaway line by Allen Ginsberg which does nothing to dispel my growing feeling that the Beats were, to a man, absolute arseholes).

• The Green Book: Along with the ‘no interracial marriage til 1967’ fact I learned this week, this was this week’s other stark reminder of just how recent a reality racism was in the US. Published in the 30s and 40s, ‘The Green Book’ was effectively an AA guide for black people traveling around the US, detailing the places where they might be able to do things like eat, wash and sleep without getting lynched (not actual hyperbole). Wonderful social history, this.

• The Brain Meme: A far-too-involved exploration/explanation of the ‘4 levels of brainpower’ meme you may or may not have seen doing the rounds. Exactly the sort of over-serious exploration of internet nonsense that I love.

• Mary Beard on Women In Power: Transcript of a wonderful lecture given by Mary Beard for Radio 4 in which she discusses the relationship between women and power through history with customary humour and erudition. I slightly love Mary Beard.

• The Dominos Pizza Empire: This piece by Bloomberg looking at the Dominos business, how it reinvented itself following its mid-00s slump, and how smart its marketing is, is reasonably interesting but I’m including it mainly for the design on the page which is…I mean, I’m all for giving designers free rein, but this is quite…well…silly. Fun, but silly.

• Kellyanne’s Alternative Universe: Because we couldn’t not include something about The Administration, right? This is an interesting and reasonably sensitive and even-handed portrait of Kellyanne ‘SPYING MICROWAVES’ Conway, which despite being pretty even in tone still manages to make the whole lot of them sound utterly mad, and presents the reality of working in the Trump White House as being a little like having to play a constant improv game with someone who is holding a loaded gun and may or may not be on meth.

• Plot 29: This is gorgeous and sad and hopeful – an extract from a memoir by Allan Jenkins, about how he found comfort in gardening after an upbringing in care. Made me do a *bit* of a cry, I must be honest.

• I Don’t Have Cancer (Yet): What does it feel like to learn that you may (in fact probably will) get cancer, that your genes may well already be conspiring with your body to fcuk you up, and to come to terms with the time bomb in your mid-30s? Like this, apparently – a smart and funny and honest and hopeful piece of writing.

• Death Is Real: This is a beautiful interview with / portrait of US singer Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), whose wife died last year leaving him to bring up their small daughter. It’s gorgeous and intimate and sad, particularly on dealing with death through art. You can hear the album that came from the death here – it’s not, let’s be clear, a happy listen, but it’s very lovely.

• Is Intersectionality A Religion: I found myself agreeing with more of this than I expected, about the increasingly cult-like approach to wokeness affecting much of online discource about now. Does that make me a fascist? I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANY MORE!

• The Hofziner Club: This is an extract from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, and it is BRILLIANT. If you’ve not read the novel, enjoy this and then go and buy a copy from your local independent retailer (or, fine, Amazon) and spend the weekend devouring it – you will thank me, I promise.

• The IOU: Published this week for the first time, this is a short story by F Scott Fitzgerald about…oh, just read it, it’s very good indeed and it will take you RIGHT back to the early 20thC.

• Homecoming: Oxford: This, last up this week in the longreads, is beautiful. I didn’t realise VICE were doing a series of these, taking writers back to the towns where they grew up to do reminiscent-y retrospectives; this is Nell Frizzell writing about growing up in Oxford, and it is gorgeous and will make you remember that Summer when you were 16 and EVERYTHING was exciting and possible and you hadn’t yet learned that the glister rubs off of life after a while.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) I’d completely forgotten that Portugal The Man existed after they went through a period of releasing cracking songs and videos about 5-6 years ago. They lurched back into my consciousness this week, though, with this absolutely excellent track – this is called ‘Feel It Still’ and I challenge you not to click your fingers all the way through. This is going to get ruined through overuse in advertising, inevitably, so enjoy it while you can:

2) What do you get if you cross hardcore with hiphop and a healthy dose of social protest? You get this, apparently – it’s by Ho99o9 (that’s how they spell ‘Horror’, you see) and it’s called ‘United States of Horror’:

3) There aren’t enough trailers for poetry books. This is a lovely one, though – bright, clean animations to accompany selected lines from Rishi Dastidar’s forthcoming collection (about which more next week). I would be really interested to see a collection of poetry presented as a series of interactive animations, playing with kinetic typography and stuff, so if anyone wants to make that that would be great thanks. :

4) This is called ‘Dance With Me’ and it’s by Cameron Avery and it reminded me slightly of Leonard Cohen who I realised last week I am still really sad is dead:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! Novelist has been getting ALL the hype over the past year; this Warm-up Session on SBTV is a pretty good primer as to why; it is VERY good:

6) Finally this week, this is by Kid Koala and Emiliana Torrini, it’s called ‘Fallaway’ and it has relaxed me to the point of near catatnia. I hope it does the same to you – HAPPY FRIDAY! HAVE FUN! TAKE CARE! TRY NOT TO DIE!:

7) Oh, no, HANG ON – THIS is the last video this week. It’s by Tommy Cash, it’s called ‘Surf’ and it is simultaneously utterly filthy and totally SFW – ENJOY!:

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LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH THE LEGITIMATELY STELLAR NEW ALBUM BY JONWAYNE – THIS IS RAP ALBUM TWO AND IT IS GREAT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY, GENUINELY SORRY ABOUT HOW MUCH S*C**L M*D** NEWS  THERE IS AFTER A FORTNIGHT’S INDOLENCE, AND WHICH PROMISES TO TRY AND GET THROUGH IT AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE FOR ALL OUR SAKES:

• Facebook Messenger Is Doing Fcuking Stories Too Now: Fingers crossed for PLUCKY LITTLE BILLION-DOLLAR UPSTART Snapchat with its recent IPO; it’s sort of hard to see how it’s going to maintain any sort of competitive position, mind, when this keeps happening. Yes, ‘Stories’-style CONTENT CREATION has now been added to FB Messenger, after its inclusion in both Instagram and Whatsapp – this is a pretty straight clone with some additional functionality around being able to choose exactly who you choose to share your crushingly banal life snapshot with from your friends list. As an aside, there was an almost-sickeningly hagiographic puff-piece on Techcrunch yesterday trailing this update, which took the line that Facebook wasn’t just copying, it was changing the way we interact with the camera function on our phones – which was exactly the same line punted by Bloomberg in a piece on Snap from last year. EXCELLENT WORK, TECH JOURNALISM. Anyway, combine this with some HOT CHAT about how messenger bots are the future for some easy ‘impress your moron novelty-obsessed client’ meeting wins TODAY!

• Updates To FB Messenger: Techy, but if you do this stuff then it’s important to know about. Basically the big takeaways here are a whole load of features which make it easier to share from Bot conversations to the wider world, as well as easier to pull content in from elsewhere on the web to Bot conversations; helpful for Customer Service reasons, among other things. Oh, and there’s some interesting stuff about how the platform can use menus, making it easier to build user journeys through more complex pathways (they’ve sort of accepted that natural language conversation with bots isn’t really a thing yet, which is for the best imho).

• Facebook Messenger Potentially Turning Into Slack: All that waffling about a ‘Dislike’, or thumbs-down, button in Messenger is a red herring; the story here is actually about the addition of line-by-line responses to Messenger conversations, just like you can in Slack. BECAUSE EVERYTHING MUST BE THE SAME. It does rather feel like, if you were Snapchat or Slack or one of the COOL NEW SOCIAL MEDIA KIDS, you could create any totally preposterous new feature and Facebook would clone it just because they can, much in the manner of the kid in the playground who, desperate to be liked, will happily agree that they love the new album by Chimney Factory and that it’s the best thing EVER, only to be told after they’ve spent 10 minutes extolling its virtues that it’s in fact totally made up, at which point their slightly fat face crumples and warps as the tears start. Except, er, Facebook’s the biggest bully in the playground and so that analogy really doesn’t work in the slightest. Sorry, turns out I’m slightly more logorrhoic than usual this morning after the fortnight off; I’ll try and rein it in or we’ll be here all day.

• Love Trumps Like In FB Reactions: Momentous occasion, this – I just typed the word ‘trump’ in a context which has nothing to do with That Man! Anyhow, this is the news that Facebook is now giving additional weight to reactions beyond Like when it comes to the Newsfeed – so, simply put, if you’re a Community Manager then you’re going to start wanting to beg people to ‘Love’ rather than ‘Like’ your posts as you continue to chase the chimera that is ‘organic reach’. Oh, and just so’s you know, this is all feeding into an inevitable ad product which allows targeting based on a range of emotional affinity with a thing. Datapoints, kids, YOU’RE ALL JUST DATAPOINTS.

• Ad Breaks Coming To Facebook Video: Literally this – not here yet, at least not for everyone, but this announcement lets people broadcasting Live on FB to over 300 people insert ad breaks in their shows for ££. They’re also testing the ability to add mid-roll ads into uploaded video – new or historical – which is in NO WAY going to provide an intrusive or upsetting experience, oh no. Actually there are a few interesting / creative ways you could approach a TV-style mid-show ad break on FB, particularly with live broadcast, so if you work with content creators it might be worth spending 10 minutes thinking up some CLEVER IDEAS you can sell in before the novelty wears off and these just become hideously played out.

• Facebook Advanced Measurement For Ad Effectiveness: I’m really sorry, I just can’t bring myself to care about this. I’m just going to lift some spiel from the article – is that ok? It’s ok: “Facebook is launching a new tool called Advanced Measurement that lets advertisers stack up how their Facebook campaigns performed compared with other platforms…Advertisers can soon use Advanced Measurement to assess which platforms — such as Facebook, Instagram, search, or display ads on Google — drove the most purchases on their online store, or had the highest reach among their desired target audience…It works by using a measurement tag to track users as they cross around the web and apps and from one device to another. Facebook users often log into the platform using different devices, so the tool has reliable first-party data about whether people who saw an ad for a product on one device checked it out on another.” Do you care? Good, I am happy for you.

• You Can Now Look At FB Photos & Videos In VR: If you have a Samsung Gear, at least. Christ alone knows why you’d want to, but you can.

• Facebook Job Listings: North America only at the moment, but an interesting development which I think will be great for small businesses; obviously part of the attraction is the targeting options you’ll have when advertising any listing. There will be a brief window when these launch in Europe in which you’ll be able to do some genuinely interesting / clever things with this in terms of advertising (in all likelihood about 8 hours) – really interesting way of recruiting brand fans for stuff, for example (you can imagine something like 2010’s ‘Marmarati’ campaign working quite well through this sort of thing, for example, or at least I can).

• Facebook Adding City Guides: Basically pulling together a whole bunch of data about where people check in, take photos, etc, in cities, including where your ‘friends’ have been, to ensure that you can have exactly the same cookie-cutter experience when travelling as everyone else, that you can take the same selfies in the same place, that you can eat in the same Instagram-friendly eatery and enjoy the same artisanal icecream and generally continue your evolution into some sort of data-driven simil-human with all the rough edges sandblasted off by the irresistible force of the INFORMATION SANDBLASTER that is Facebook. Doesn’t that sound GREAT? Oh, there’s almost certainly going to be the option for venues, etc, to pay for privileged status on these Guides; I mean, it’s not stated but it’s hardly a stretch to imagine it.

• Whatsapp Also Becoming Snapchat: I can’t be bothered to write this up as a) it’s OLD NEWS now; and b) you know exactly what this means/entails, so can probably fill in the gaps yourself.

• Post Multiple Photos/Videos In A Single Instagram Post: Upto 10, in fact. Also OLD NEWS now, but I confess to having been slightly disappointed at the lack of any standout ‘LOOK! WE ARE USING THIS IN A CREATIVE WAY FOR SPURIOUS ‘STORYTELLING’ PURPOSES!’ from brands since this launched the other week. Up your games, kids (or send me examples, I am ‘genuinely’ interested).

• Instagram Launches Geostickers: JUST LIKE SNAPCHAzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Well, quite. Only available in NYC and Jakarta at the time of writing, but inevitably coming to the whole world soonish, this is the standard ‘we know where you are, have some SPECIAL STICKERS to add to your Story!’ feature which Snapchat’s had forever, brought to Instagram with, as far as I can tell, absolutely no difference whatsoever. I imagine they’re currently looking for deep-pocketed partners with which to launch the commercial side of this, so speak to your rep TODAY to get what is doubtless a violently expensive rate card chucked at you with a dismissive giggle.

• Instagram Lanching ‘Tag Partners’ Feature: Timely, given recent rulings here in the UK about disclosure of commercial partnerships on s*c**l m*d**. This is the same sort of thing as Facebook announced last year, whereby an INFLUENCER can post something and tag the brands they’ve partnered with in that post, to connote a commercial relationship and to allow for automated revenue splits from videos, etc. It’s only being tested at the moment, but worth keeping an eye on if you’re in the hideous, soul-crushing business of paying idiots money to grin whilst drinking protein shakes in the name of ‘influencer marketing’ (it’s not too late to stop, you know).

• Twitter Launches Personalised Customer Service Messaging: Not sexy AT ALL, but sort of useful; Twitter quietly launched this the other week, meaning companies can now receive DMs from customers and have their staff respond to the conversation with a named profile; so rather than talking to the impersonal T-Mobile Twitter account, for example, you might instead get help from Hans or Anna or someone. The thinking is that it will allow people to know when they’re dealing with a real person rather than with a bot; it will also save VALUABLE CHARACTERS by obviating the need for CS minions to sign off their posts with their initials. Anyway, this is in Private Beta at the moment, but if you do a lot of this sort of stuff on Twitter it might be worth investigating if you can have a play.

• Analytics For Twitter Moments: Literally just that – you can now see how many people have looked at any particular moment. Which is nice.

• Twitter Did Some Safety Updates: Once again, too little too late – but the ability to mute eggs is a nice touch, admittedly. Might be worth looking at being able to mute anime avatars too, though, and Pepes.

• You Can Now Do 360-Degree Video On Vimeo Too: Expect to see some REALLY nicely-lit artvideowank as a result.

• YouTube Is Killing 30s Unskippable Ads: About time too, frankly.

• Google Hangouts Is Now Copying Slack Too: Really boring, but if internal comms is your thing then this is reasonably big news, offering another reason to move all your stuff to the Google Suite. This announcement is both about its improved Hangouts system for enterprise, called Meet, and updates to Hangouts Chat which is Slack in all but name. The ability to build bots for it is interesting, and I can imagine some really interesting tools you could cobble together pulling data from Gdocs into chat with single commands. Yes, I know it’s dull, but it’s USEFUL. FFS.

• Medium Launches Series: NEW STORYTELLING OPPORTUNITIES!!! Medium – look, guys, IT’S JUST A FCUKING BLOGGING PLATFORM – is introducing something it calls ‘Series’, which is (and sorry, this is going to be a VERY lackadaisical description but it’s 738am and there’s literally 9 pages of links for me to triage here and frankly it’s all I can do not to cry, so bear with me please) basically a way of presenting posts as a series of cards – it reminded me quite a lot of FB Canvas in the way you can combine images, prose and video into a series of swipable slides which let you craft a narrative in some interesting ways. There’s some fun stuff you could do around episodic storytelling here, along with some potentially fun multimedia stuff; worth having a think about ways to use it, I think.

• Pinterest Launches Labs: Doing AI stuff. “Labs brings together top researchers, scientists, and engineers from around the world to work on image recognition, user modeling, recommender systems, and big data analytics. Our researchers are embedded throughout Pinterest allowing our discoveries to affect hundreds of millions of users each day”, apparently. So there. Oh, and they bought Biz Stone’s Q&A app Jelly, too, though fcuk only knows why.

• There’s A Bot For That: A search engine for messenger bots, which is a useful resource if you’re interested in flogging some of these and want to know what’s already out there that you can ‘take inspiration from’ (ha!). Seeing as we’re on bots, this one by Transferwise is really rather smart indeed, letting you move money from within Messenger. By contrast, this one by anti-food brofuel Soylent is wonderfully pointless (also, as an aside, the press release promoting it referred to the bot being ‘coyly named’ Trish; ‘coyly’? Really? FFS you dreadful cnuts) and sort of terrible, and this one by KLM, which lets you send emoji and get travel tips back in return, seems to believe it’s still late 2015 and we are still all excited by pictographic communication. Bless.

• The Gruffalo Spotter: I’m including this as literally EVERYONE I KNOW has children these days and they all go through a phase of loving the Gruffalo and as a result all my friends will, if they’re in the right sort of battered-by-parental-exhaustion frame of mind, occasionally enter a sort of fugue state whereby they just repeat the opening couplet to the original story under their breath like a strange, terrible mantra, and as such I reckon that many of YOU, gentle readers, who I know are unlike me and don’t necessarily view procreation as an horrific and mentally ruinous ordeal, might appreciate this app by the Forestry Commission which will let you do some gentle AR-enabled Gruffalo spotting in the manner of Pokemon Go!.

NEXT UP, HAVE A RECENT RADIO SHOW OF ECLECTICISM BY THE INTERNET ODDITY FORMERLY KNOWN AS SADEAGLE!

THE SECTION WHICH WASN’T LYING ABOUT THE NINE PAGES OF LINKS AND WHICH AS A RESULT IS GOING TO BE DOING QUITE A LOT OF ON-THE-FLY ‘CURATION’ HERE AND SO APOLOGISES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LIKELY SOMEWHAT EMBATTLED QUALITY TO MUCH OF THE PROSE WHICH FOLLOWS, PT.1:

• Texts I Want To Send My Ex: I can’t stress enough how great/terrible this is. I found this somewhere a full 2-3 weeks ago and have been sitting on it since, hoping it stayed live long enough to share with YOU fine folk. This is a Google sheet containing a whole load of text messages the anonymous contributors would like to send their ex partners. Sad, funny, poignant, profane, mad and wonderfully human, I could literally read this for hours at a time; this is why I love the web.

• Tiny Trumps: Funny not least because it’s not hard to imagine exactly quite how upset this would make him.

• Resist Supply: A free resource for protest signs, available to customise and print out, because frankly who’s got time to spend on crafting the perfect ‘guaranteed to go viral’ pithily-worded message which simultaneously conveys your wokeness and your ironic sensibilities? NO FCUKER, that’s who! There’s something sort of terribly wrong about the bland, mass-produced aesthetic here, which seems to be sort of semiotically (META) antiethetical to the whole principle of signs at protests, but, er, wevs.

• Emotional Labour: This is BLEAK. A Chrome extension which works with your Gmail account to add some emotional engagement to your emails with the click of a button. That’s right, you just churn out your standard prose, devoid of any emotional affect and icy as you like, and this will seek to gussy it up with some actual, real human feeling (provided by a computer programme). Obviously a joke, but also a Black Mirror vignette in waiting.

• Snakisms: One of the smartest things I’ve seen in AGES, this is a little webartgameprojectthing which presents a variety of different takes on the classic ‘Snake’ game, each one serving as an example of the characteristics of a particular ‘-ism’; so, for example, when playing ‘capitalism’ you can only eat the apples until you run out of money, at which point you’re told you can’t afford any more apples and starve to death – LOL! Erm, ok, so that’s a bad example, but some of these are genuinely funny – ‘narcissism’ made me laugh out loud, for example. Philosophy students past and present will enjoy this particularly.

• Crafted By My Heart: Turn your heartbeat into a ring! Again! There have been several variants on this theme which I’ve featured here in the past, but here’s another one in case my hunch is wrong and the resulting jewellery isn’t in fact really ugly (I think it might be, though).

• SnooTube: Useful service which lets you plug in any sub-Reddit you like and watch all the videos from it in a carousel format, which is great for killing time and meant that when I found this I lost an inordinate amount of time to Japanese cooking videos. Obviously there may be other subs you wish to explore using this feature; I couldn’t possibly comment. DON’T GO BLIND KIDS.

• Reddit User Analysis: Potentially useful tool which lets you plug in any Reddit username and gives you stats on their posting frequency, favourite subs, most popular posts, etc, which, if you’re in the unfortunate position of having to do influencer work on Reddit, might actually prove rather helpful in identifying people to tap up.

• Passport Collector: A whole LOAD of information about passports from history. No, I don’t know who this is for either, but never let it be said that Web Curios is afraid to explore the very edges of what might be termed ‘niche interest content’.

• Langorhythm: Wonderfully pointless but strangely pleasing, Langorhythm lets you input any text you like and generates ‘music’ from the copy you feed it. The compositions tend towards the minimalist and piano-led, and are obviously dreadful and yet there’s something weirdly near-listenable to the stuff it’s generated for me so far; the sound of Curios is, you’ll be unsurprised to learn, a godawful mess.

• Idiots Win: A GREAT little game which asks you to guess which of 5 options is the top Google Autocomplete result for any given input. Will suck you in whilst simultaneously making you wish for a nuclear-level event to wipe this human cancer from the planet forever – you always think that you can’t be any more amazed by people’s idiocy, and then you see that people do actually search for stuff like ‘Can humans get fleas?’ and you want to burn everyone.

• Go Rando: Randomising your Facebook reactions to FOOL THE MACHINE. Go Rando is a plugin which randomises which reaction you express when you hit ‘Like’ on a FB post – which is interesting from the point of view of attempting to obfuscate the datacollection of the Big Blue Misery Machine, but also from the point of view of how you explain to your friends why you just ‘Loved’ that post about their imminent divorce.

• Code Poetry: To quote the site, “This website displays a collection of twelve code poems, each written in the source code of a different programming language. Every poem is also a valid program which produces a visual representation of itself when compiled and run.” Some of these are more accessible than others, but even to a non-coder like myself there’s some rather beautiful work in here; if you get this stuff more than I do then there’s probably something genuinely elegant about the form.

• eBay Garfield: A Twitter feed showcasing a selection of the Garfield-related tat on sale on eBay. There is a LOT of Garfield-related tat for sale on eBay.

• TNY Poetry: A Twitter bot by the New York Times, which Tweets a poem each day. Small and pleasing.

• Deep Elon: Neural Network Twitter bot trained on Elon Musk’s gnomic utterances which produces some oddly plausible results. “I think we’ll be able to create a species. I think long term.” is pretty much a textbook Musk-ism. Why do I find this man so unsettling?

• AutoEdit: This is HUGELY impressive, and is almost certainly a possible future for video editing. The idea is you upload a video, it does speech-to-text analysis of it to provide a transcript, you edit the transcript (removing bits, swapping bits around) and then the software produces an edit based on your textual changes. Obviously won’t work for anything with sophisticated cuts or multi-camera stuff, but for simple pieces to camera this is absolute genius.

• Everlearners: This is an incredible resource of online learning materials, featuring links to a mind-boggling selection of courses, videos, podcasts, etc, on a huge variety of topics. If you’re interested in doing online learning around…well, frankly almost anything to be honest, this is an excellent place to start and is well worth bookmarking.

• Future Library: This is such a lovely artwork. “One thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, a forest just outside Oslo, which will supply paper for a special anthology of books to be printed in one hundred years time. Between now and then, one writer every year will contribute a text, with the writings held in trust, unpublished, until the year 2114.” The website will over the course of the coming 97 years collect information about each of the selected writers (those so far are Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell and Sjon), essays by them and in response to them, and, eventually, will be a digital record of the forest and the works associated with it. Gorgeous.

• Diamond Route Japan: Yeah, ok, so it’s a tourism site, but it’s SO nicely made. Really slick webwork, and I like the UX/UI very much indeed. Also, contains loads of really pretty and generally fascinating videos about Japan.

• Sony World Photography Awards 2017: This year’s selection of ‘wow, isn’t the world a beautiful and diverse and generally amazing place if you can just ignore all the horror?’ photos, which as ever contains some absolutely cracking entries (and, obviously, a healthy dose of horror in the shape of the ‘Current Affairs’ section which also contains the best images imho).

• Woman Interrupted: Miserable that this even needs to be a thing, but hey ho. Woman Interrupted is an app which uses the mic on your phone to listen to conversations and track how often male voices interrupt female voices in meetings, lectures, or just in general day-to-day life. If you feel that your domestic life is just a bit too tranquil, why not download this app and leave it running in your house this weekend and then enjoy the full and frank exchange of views that the data might engender? Let me know how that works out for you.

• FetchitGo: A smart idea, this, if you’re the sort of person who likes the idea of those programmable buttons which let you order a pizza or some toilet paper with one tap; FetchitGo is seeking to raise money for a customisable, multi-button piece of kit which lets you programme 16 separate buttons to perform automated tasks when pressed and which can be reconfigured when/however you like. It’s all based on IFTTT and so seems pretty simple to set up and use, and could be a reasonably simple and cost-effective way of setting up your smarthome and of automating your condom or milk purchasing FOREVER. What a glorious future this is.

• Cardigan: A service to help you delete your Tweets, simply and quickly and in bulk. Just in case you’re travelling to the US or similarly ‘difficult’ country anytime soon and want to hide some of your more controversial utterances from anyone who might want to check up on you. Oh, and here’s another one in case you want a different option.

• The Supremo Putin: Just in case you’d ever dreamed of owning a lavish Nokia 3310 in a gold and platinum case embossed with the likeness of everyone’s favourite diminutive judo master, here’s your chance! Beautifully, the accompanying blurb lists one of features of the phone as the fact that it’s ‘not cheap’, suggesting that the old Stella Artois adage continues to hold true amongst taste-deficient morons the world over.

• Phil Collins Given The Steve Reich Treatment: You know Piano Phase, right? Well this is the same principle – timeshifting and layering the playback of a piece of music to create interesting layered doppler-ish effects – applied to the drum fill from In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins. It’s MESMERISING. BONUS PIANO PHASE! Here’s the same technique applied to a pair of iPhones – Steve Reich Is Calling.

• The 90s DJ Archives: Spend the weekend reminding yourself of those times when you used to go out on a Friday rather than slumping into the familiar dent in the sofa and praying for sleep to overtake you with this MENTAL archive of DJ mixes from back in the day. There are literally hundreds of mixes on here, so get a Mitsu down you and gurn like it’s 1995.

• Beetmoves: Yes, I know, but I don’t make up the names. This is a COMING SOON innovation which is basically a motion-sensing wristband which makes music based on your movements and which, I am pretty confident in predicting, will not make the sort of cool music produced by the telegenic Japanese youths in the video when it’s attached to the arm of one of your kids.

• 360 Northern Lights: This is rather soothing, in a simple sort of way. Look around and MARVEL AT THE VIRTUAL MAJESTY OF THE ATMOSPHERE!

HOW ABOUT A RATHER GOOD FRIDAY-FEELING MIX BY HORSEMEAT DISCO NEXT? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH WASN’T LYING ABOUT THE NINE PAGES OF LINKS AND WHICH AS A RESULT IS GOING TO BE DOING QUITE A LOT OF ON-THE-FLY ‘CURATION’ HERE AND SO APOLOGISES IN ADVANCE FOR THE LIKELY SOMEWHAT EMBATTLED QUALITY TO MUCH OF THE PROSE WHICH FOLLOWS, PT.2:

• Memebroker: There’s an extent to which discussion of the ‘meme economy’ and the trade in Pepes, rare or otherwise, is the point at which I stop being able to even vaguely get or explain web/chanculture. I mean, really. Still, if this sort of stuff means more to you than it does to me you may well enjoy this app which provides access to a marketplace where you can trade the dankest memes. “Invest in the right memes, use your skills to identify trends and sell memes in your portfolio at the right time to make the highest profit. MemeBroker is a simulation of the meme economy, connected to Reddit so that when a post gets upvoted, the share price of that meme will increase.” Got that? Good. Oh, and there’s now a magazine about meme culture and the meme economy – read an issue here and get VERY CONFUSED about how the world works in 2017.

• Dwitter: One for the programmers amongst you, Dwitter is a neat little riff on Twitter on which programmers show off their skill in creating stuff in <140character codebursts in Java (I think). I imagine some of this stuff is really impressive if you understand more about programming than I do.

• The Hardlight VR Suit: So it’s been a longstanding theory of mine that until haptics become more of a thing VR simply won’t move beyond being a niche pursuit; the lack of feedback mechanisms makes it simply too hard to fool us into thinking there’s a ‘there’ there. Well, here’s a Kickstarter seeking to bridge that gap – fully funded with a fortnight to go, this will theoretically go into production this year. It’s a vibrating bodysuit thing designed to provide physical feedback such as punches, gunshots, etc, to gamers, to better immerse themselves in the experience. Oh, and, inevitably, there will be some sort of slightly depressing and grubby sex application too – the suit’s advertised as being ‘sweatproof’, which presented me with a really rather vile mental image of its use which I now wish to share with you. You’re welcome.

• Seeing Theory: This is just excellent. A selection of visual guides to probability and statistics produced by Brown University, which if you know anyone studying this stuff is just SO helpful and useful. Aside from anything else, the coding on the animations and transitions and stuff is also wonderfully elegant imho.

• Nope: I’m currently doing 4 days a week across two different jobs in two different offices, and I’ve been reminded of the great horror of office working, namely that people actually occasionally want to talk to you. This is a Chrome extension designed to help mitigate that horror – at the press of a button it will call your phone, giving you an immediate excuse to not converse with whoever’s attempting to engage you in small talk. NB – in the unlikely event that any of my colleagues are reading this, I obviously don’t mean you.

• Little Planet Factory: You can buy miniature planet models on Etsy. I mean, LOOK how cute they are! I mean, they’re also £50-odd quid, but still, planets!

• The CIA’s Approved List of Japanese Emoji: Just because they’re the intelligence services doesn’t mean that they’re not into some frivolous online banter! Obviously of vanishingly small import amongst the whole load of stuff revealed this week, but it’s also a very, very strange thing for the CIA to have compiled, no?

• Raildar: All of the trains in the UK! In realtime! On a map! I’ve had to spend quite a lot of time in the past few weeks eavesdropping on the online conversations of rail enthusiasts (it’s a glamorous life, mine), so perhaps when the job’s done I will reveal myself and leave them this as a thankyou for all of the trainlols.

• HiPhi Nation: A podcast exploring philosophical concepts in a really rather nice style – these are very good if you fancy a bit of chewy thinking in your podcast diet.

• 420 Friends: A dating app for marijuana enthusiasts, so you can find that special someone to not have sex with!

• The Wellcome Image Awards: This year’s pick of scientific photography – this is my favourite, but there are some wonderful shots scattered throughout this.

• Enter The Sandbox: Ok, so this is a promo thingy for Audi, fine, but the interesting thing here is the application of the tech; using 3d scanning and VR, this is a toy (really, it’s a toy) which scans an actual 3d sandpit at turns it into a virtual environment for a user to drive a virtual car around. Imagine the possibilities in game design, 3d-modelling, etc – this is really quite exciting and VERY clever.

• Logobook: An encyclopaedic collection of logos, symbols and trademarks in black and white. If you’re a designer or student of branding, this is a fascinating archive.

• The Skittles Sorting Machine: If you work for a music venue then you HAVE to contact the inventor and buy this off him, if only for the inevitable EXCELLENT PR you’d get off the back of the classic rider-nased ‘No Brown M&Ms’ gag. Seriously, DO IT. Oh, in case it’s not obvious, this is a machine which sorts Skittles (or indeed any coloured sweet) by colour. INGENIOUS.

• 400 Ways To Make A Sandwich: A brilliant collection ofsandwich recipes from the early 20C, which includes amongst others the recipe for the fabulously-named ‘Bummers Custard’ (but aside from the childish sniggering it’s also a really interesting piece of food history).

• Incredibly Carved Fruits: Yeah, I know, but just click on this and MARVEL. You will TOTALLY follow this Instagram account, I promise.

• Commonplace: A N Other attempt to break the filter bubble, Commonplace is a Facebook bot which sends you regular links and questions to content from THE OTHER SIDE of the political divide. A nice idea although I personally find the execution a touch shonky; I think, though, that there’s an interesting kernel of an idea here which could be developed; maybe something that sends you a selection of stories each day from media you’d normally eschew, or the most-commented Mail link of the past 24h just so you can see what the others (the WRONG) are thinking, that sort of thing.

• Txt.ify: Ephemeral, anonymous blogging platform – type anything you like into the interface and it will be presented as a plaintext screed with its own url for you to share just like this. You could have some fun with this, I think – the potential for textual treasurehunts and the like is high, and the low-friction nature of it means you could very quickly spin up quite a nice web of CONTENT to direct and misdirect. Obviously it’s also RIPE for use by people who want to be bastards, but WHAT CAN YOU DO? Nothing, fyi, the bastards ALWAYS win.

• The Hypochondriapp: Tell it your symptoms and it will suggest the worst possible thing that might be wrong with you. Worth bookmarking for use with that colleague who insists on whinging about feeling ill all the time but who is never seemingly ill enough to FCUK OFF AND DIE (you can tell I’m enjoying work at the moment, right?).

• Steps To Overcoming Social Anxiety: A little app which presents a series of small tasks, delivered daily, encouraging users to take tiny steps towards tackling their social anxiety. Offering daily goals – go somewhere you’ve never been, make eye contact with the coffee person, that sort of thing – it’s a gentle way of helping people cope with STUFF which I can imagine potentially being useful to people struggling with the basics of social interaction for anxiety-based reasons.

• Renaissance Art In Real Life: Photoshopping figures from renaissance painting into real-world situations with some pretty astounding skill, this is a very impressive Instagram feed indeed (and also, you know, all like JUXTAPOSE-Y and stuff).

• The Robot Pr0n Addict: Making a neural net watch bongo and attempt to describe what it sees. “A man holding an apple”, apparently, which raises lots more questions than it answers. Totally SWF, this Twitter feed pleases me no end.

• Affine Layer: You remember that thing that did the rounds the other week which let you draw an outline of something and then get a neural net to fill it in with its best approximation of what it would look like were it a cat, say, or a handbag? Yes, that. I know it’s a hugely unprepossessing description, but if you’ve not played with this yet then it’s totally worth doing; it’s impressive and points towards how easy it’s going to be in very short order to create AI-generated generic imagery, but it’s also a really great way of drawing some truly horrifying cat beasts without even trying.

• Lab Box: FULL DISCLOSURE – the people behind this are friends of mine, but I’d be including this anyway as it’s SUCH a clever idea. Just over 3 weeks left to go on Kickstarter and funded to the tune of nearly 10x its goal at the time of writing, Lab Box is a super-clever piece of kit which lets you develop film photographs quickly and easily without recourse to a darkroom. Given how COOL analogue photography is these days I imagine that several of you hipsters will have film-based cameras; this is a pretty essential piece of kit if you do, I think.

• T-Rex D&D: Sue the T-Rex is the Twitter account of the Field Museum in Chicago’s T-Rex skeleton. The other day, the account started livetweeting a game of Dungeons and Dragons for its followers to interact with – this is BRILLIANT, geeky, funny and wonderful, and exactly the sort of thing which Twitter is best at; have a read of the whole thing, it’s glorious.

• Lollyphiles: You want to buy wasabi flavoured lollipops? Blue cheese? No, me neither, and yet here we are.

• Gastaloops: 100 days, 100 looping gifs by Nicola Gastaldi. The quality of the work on display here is astounding, as is the consistency; these are really quite beautiful.

• Dull Men’s Club: A community for men (though they are accepting of women, they equally understand that, well, it’s mostly going to be men, isn’t it, who collect hubcaps or want to obsess about Dinky cars?) who are into boring stuff. Charming and, as with all ostensibly boring things, much of this is fascinating (in small doses, admittedly). You can probably get a half-decent ‘Your Da’ joke out of this if you’re part of that corner of Twitter (you know who you are).

• The Smithsonian Photo Contest Finalists 2016: More wonderful shots.

• Tube Patterns: Patterns, on the Tube, on Instagram. Pleasing.

• Pixar In A Box: A pretty astounding series of resources deisgned to teach you how to animate like the people at Pixar (NB won’t actually teach you that, obvs). This is all quite deep and hard, but if you’re serious about learning – or improving – digital animation techniques then this is an absolutely invaluable resource.

• Neverblink: A selection of unskippable web TV channels. Choose where you want it to pull videos from and it will play an infinite selection, one after the other, of whatever crops up. You can’t skip, you can only switch channels or turn it off; probably useless for entertainment purposes, but one of the better ‘This is the id of the web, marvel at the weird horror of who we really are as a species’ things I’ve seen lately.

• Godotify: This is EVIL GENIUS – a piece of code which will add the blinking ‘…typing…’ ellipses to every single conversation you have with anyone on Messenger, keeping them waiting for a message which will never arrive. An exquisitely-conceived exercise in psychological torture, this.

• Tintype Portraits from Afropunk 2016: Beautiful, stylised, old-school-effect photos from last year’s Afropunk festival. Such beautiful people in here.

• Whitman Alabama: A lovely project, taking the stories of Americans from across the state of Alabama and presenting a patchwork picture of the character of the state through the words of Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’, each verse read by a different Alabaman. Human, affecting, and a celebration of diversity which is a nice antidote to That Man and prevailing US political discourse so far this year.

• iSpy: Dropping with near-perfect timing, iSpy is a webdoc in 5 parts exploring the Five Eyes Alliance, “a secretive, global intelligence arrangement between the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States. The alliance represents the largest surveillance program in human history.” Really nicely put together from a webwork point of view – I can’t say that the content makes for anything other than grimly unsurprising viewing, though. But, er, if you’ve got nothing to hide it’s fine, right? Right? Eh? Oh.

• Bear 71: Another WONDERFUL project by NFB Canada – see Curios passim for further explorations of their excellence; if you don’t know their work, do go here and check it out as they have consistently been the best purveyors of ‘digital storytelling’ stuff I’ve seen over the past 5 years from a narrative/design point of view – this time exploring the life of a female grizzle bear over the 8 year period she was monitored by conservation officers. Merging VR, film, graphics and excellent interface design, this is an object-lesson in how to ‘do’ interactive storytelling.

• The i-Con: Lesser curators (sorry) of internet ephemera and weirdness have been referring to this as an ‘internet connected condom’. IT IS NOT! It is an internet-connected cockring! DO YOU NOT SEE THE DIFFERENCE??? Anyway, should you ever have wanted to track every single minute aspect of your inevitably disappointing sexual performances, now you can – simply apply this bit of kit to the base of the penis, to record exactly how many thrusts, etc, you perform during the course of the act. Obviously don’t want to generalise here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that people who are that obsessed with the quantification of their sexual performance are – whisper it – probably not particularly sensitive or generous lovers.

• OCast: More teledildonics news! This is…blimey. OCast is a gimmick from some camgirl outfit which lets users record a unique vibration pattern using their phone’s touchscreen which can then be downloaded and used to power a sextoy. Anyone want to try this out and let me know how it works? No? Thought not.

• HTML Marquee De Sade: The major works of the most famous deviant in history, presented online with Marquee html markup making them look rather a lot like random MySpace pages, in what is the best single-note literarygeekgag I have seen in AGES.

• Girl Talk In A Box: Finally this week (THANK FCUK), this is absolutely the best ‘play at being a remixer’ toy I have ever seen. It’s ugly, fine, but you can do SO MUCH with it. Take any track you like and just mess with it – seriously, you’ll lose HOURS with this, I promise.

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY THE SOUNDS  OF THE WU MIXED WITH THE SOUNDS OF NEW ORLEANS – WU ORLEANS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS WHICH IS GOING TO HAVE TO BE PRETTY TERSE ON THE DESCRIPTIONS THIS WEEK IF WE’RE EVER GOING TO FINISH HERE SO, YOU KNOW, APOLOGIES:

• Minus Garfield Plus Lying Cat: Garfield strips in which Garfield is replaced with 2017’s mascot, Lying Cat.

• Ugly David Tennant Fan Art: Yep.

• Twin: Collecting photos of, and exploring ideas around, twins and twin-ness.

• Life In Hell Archives: Before Matt Groening did the Simpsons, he wrote Life In Hell. This is basically every single strip ever, and they are great and have aged surprisingly well.

• The Smithy of my Soul: I stumbled across this the other week, can’t recall how, and I was really impressed. Poetry and occasional thoughts – but mostly poetry – by….er…someone, no idea who. Very good, whoever it is.

• Scifi Covers: Pulpy, pulpy scifi.

• #Faketoys: Imagining the current crop of horrors infesting the upper echelons of politics and media as action figures. The Murdoch one is ACE – if these were real, they would sell out in seconds.

• Lushie Peach: A tribute to food with eyes.

• HeaderXs: A series of beautifully-drawn header images for social platforms, (I think) freely available to download. Some of these are gorgeous.

• B416: Highlighting parallels between contemporary hiphop culture and renaissance art, of which there appear to be a surprising number.

• Positive Doodles: Because sometimes it’s nice to see nice things.

• Get Out Of There, Cat!: Photos of cats putting themselves in places they shouldn’t be.

• Signs from the Near Future: Imagined signs from public spaces of the future, which are about exactly as heartwarming as you’d expect and will IN NO WAY fill you with mild futurefears.

• Cars That Never Made It: Concept vehicles that never came to production (ie most of them).

• Hamilton In Sunnydale: Stills from Buffy with Hamilton captions, because there’s apparently no two pieces of pop culture that can’t be smooshed together.

• Bad Furry Tattoo: I mean, you say ‘bad’…tattoos of people’s fursonas which are about as excellent as you’d expect.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH AGAIN APOLOGISE FOR THE BREVITY OF INTRODUCTIONS TO EACH PIECE THIS WEEK BUT WHICH HOPES THAT THE QUALITY OF THE SELECTION MAKES UP FOR IT:

• Where Music Is Going 2017: Once again the New York Times produces an EXCELLENT longread taking a look at 25 tracks and what they say about the the state of (Western, mostly pop) music in 2017. Great writing and a decent breadth to the selection makes this a very good read indeed.

• What It’s Like To Lose Your Short-term Memory: Brilliantly lucid piece of writing about how it feels to all of a sudden have no short-term memory at all, to have to reappraise situations, people, feelings, desires on a minute-by-minute basis, and what it does to one’s sense of self and identity. Not as depressing as I have just made it sound, I promise.

• Leaving North Korea: Told in comic strip format, this is a beautifully-drawn (and thus told) account of what it takes to escape the DPRK and how it’s becoming ever harder to do so without outside assistance.

• My Freecell Win Percentage Is All I Have: McSweeney’s capturing perfectly the everyday sensation of futility and lack of agency that, let’s be honest, is pretty much the defining characteristic of the year so far.

• A Normal Person’s Guide To The Alt-Right’s Vocab: This is interesting, and funny, and Katie Notopoulos is as ever spot-on on web culture, but it’s also increasingly impossible to separate this stuff from parody, isn’t it? I mean, this could literally ALL be a Brass Eye sketch and we’d be none the wiser. Chris? Is that you?

• The Redpill Right: The few of you who actually read and remember the words I write between the links may recall me opining on the links and intellectual red thread which can be drawn between the meninist movement and the Alt-right; here’s a decent explanation of exactly that thread.

• Laurie Penny on Milo, Again: So this got absolute pelters from Woke Twitter when it was published, not least because of a couple of ill-advised lines making comparisons with young black kids which got people most angry. Leaving that aside, if you can, this is actually an excellent piece of writing about the sort of weirdly childlike way in which Milo did his schtick, and the equally childlike manchildren who are his followers and entourage. I thought at the time – and still do – that there’s an interesting line between this and the manchildren on the tech and startup world, which after all is where Milo got his first sniff of notoriety and which, as far as I’m concerned, is far more culpable for the cnut’s rise than it seems to want to accept.

• Videogames Are Better Than Life: On why, and how, increasing numbers of young men (in the States, but also elsewhere) are pouring more of their emotional energy into games than anything else. Add this to the file marked ‘datapoints on the way to Ready Player One becoming actual, real life’.

• Solo Disneyland: Reflections on going to Disneyland alone as an adult. The author of the piece is, it’s fair to say, a Disney superfan – it’s very well-written and absolutely not a sad piece, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of absolutely intense and crippling loneliness between every single word here.

• The Power and Purpose of PMQs: Wonderfully observed vignette of how PMQs works behind the scenes and what, if you’re the government, it’s *actually* for.

• How The World’s Heaviest Man Lost It All: This, though, really IS sad – what happens when you’re the world’s heaviest man, and you decide to lose the weight? I really wanted to give him a hug at the end of this.

• And Then The Strangest Thing Happened: A really interesting breakdown of the signature, singular Adam Curtis style, how it’s evolved, and how it’s made his documentaries arguably less effective. I always find watching Curtis that it’s terribly convincing while I’m in the moment but a few days afterwards I can’t help but think of it as an example of the clever propagandising he himself decries.

• Second Life For The Disabled: One day I will stop posting stuff about Second Life – it continues to fascinate me, though, particularly it’s use case as a community for marginalised groups. This is a genuinely uplifting report about disabled people from around the world coming together in virtual space with a freedom their physical impairments mean will never be afforded to them in meatspace. Seriously, made me very happy, this.

• Meet The Mole Catchers: I had NO IDEA it was such a divided world, frankly. This is great and wonderfully, beautifully British in its eccentricity.

• 20 Questions With Peter Singer: Still, to my mind, the most interesting moral philosopher of the 20th Century, this is eminently readable even if you don’t have a background in the discipline. There are few people better at making you think about hard answers to unpleasant questions, imho.

• The Commis Chef: This is a VERY technical look at the role of the commis chef in a Chinese restaurant kitchen – if you’re interested in food, though, and the restaurant business then I promise you it’s a fascinating read.

• A Tribute To AA Gill: Wonderful writing about a wonderful bastard of a writer.

• The Wait: This is about having a miscarriage; it’s obviously not a happy piece of writing, but it is very beautiful indeed.

• A Season Under The Gun: This is BRILLIANT journalism. A 5-party series (the link goes to pt1, all the others are linked to from the bottom of the piece) about teens playing basketball in downtown Chicago, against a backdrop of all the sort of classic urban issues you’d expect, from drugs to guns to organised crime to grinding poverty and all the stops inbetween. If you watched Hoop Dreams (and if not, why not? HERE YOU GO!), you’ll find a lot to love in here.

• Europe’s Child Refugee Crisis: In a week in which the Dubs amendment got given its marching orders to little-to-no outcry, it’s worth reminding ourselves of exactly what kids across the Middle East have been going through to get to some place of safety, and exactly how badly we’ve been letting them down. Still, jokes in the Budget!

• Gay Loneliness: A really interesting essay examining what the author perceives as a fundamental loneliness at the heart of the gay male experience. I can’t speak to the truth or accuracy of this, but it was a really interesting read.

• You May Want To Marry My Husband: Finally this week, I warn you that this made me absolutely bawl my eyes out and it may do the same to you; still, it’s a truly beautiful little essay and it deserves your attention. You might want some tissues handy, though.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is called ‘The Future of Shopping’ and is an interesting look at the future of retail; what’s notable about it, though, is that it’s all drawn within Tilt for Oculus, and as such offers a really interesting look at how you can use the tech for effective exposition. Worth watching, honest:

2) This is by Cosima, it’s called ‘Build a House’ and it is the best vocal I have heard in an age. WHAT a voice:

3) Ok, if you accept the fact that large parts of this are a straight rip of ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan, this is a legitimate dancefloor BANGER. It’s called ‘Give Me A Reason’ by Ibibio Sound System:

4) This is by a young man called London O’Connor, it’s called ‘Nobody Hangs Out No More’, and I adore it immoderately (it has elements of Kevin Abstract, which may be why):

5) HIPHOP CORNER! Can’t stress how good this one is – it’s called ‘Back Up’, it’s by Clipping, and the whole package – song and video – is unsettling and claustrophobic and nervous and slightly comedowny and generally ACE:

6) I can’t quite work out if this is utterly dreadful or sort of genius, which equivocation suggests it’s probably the former; still, in the 3 weeks since I first heard it I keep coming back to it, which suggests…well, that my taste is possibly dreadful. Still, see what YOU think – this is called ‘Cruel’ and it’s by The Rhythm Method:

7) Last up this week is this beautifully-shot promo for Serpentine by Oyinda; simultaneously warm and glacial, the track’s rather good too. Enjoy, take care, and HAVE FUN! Anon, webmongs:

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

Matt Muir

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LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST MIX FRESH FROM THE DECKS OF AKIRA THE DON IN LA!

THE SECTION WHICH, YOU CAN IMAGINE, HAS NEXT TO NO INTEREST IN REPORTING NEWS ABOUT S*C**L FCUKING M*D** THIS MORNING:

• Better Facebook Ads For Retailers: If your job involves promoting ACTUALY PHYSICAL SHOPS (how retro of you), this is BIG NEWS. New Facebook Ad units were announced this week, which will allow retailers to point Facebook users to the store nearest to them within a specifically-designed map-advert – effectively a user will see a little map in their timeline with a big arrow saying “GET YOUR CORONARY-INDUCING MEAT BOMB HERE!” or some other suitably enticing exhortation. Combine this with a carousel format which shows you an enticing, glistening picture of said meat bomb and BANG! FOOTFALL! More impressively / scarily, Facebook’s also going to start tracking user movement so as to be able to determine the efficacy of these ads – they are light on technical detail here, but you might want to turn location services off if you’d prefer not to let Facebook know exactly how susceptible you are to photos of glistening meat.

• Enhanced Messenger: More of a thing for people than brands (“But Matt!”, I hear you cry, “Brands are people too!”), this is a host of new features which will be cropping up in Messenger including birthday reminders, prioritisation of your most used contacts and the like. It’s surely only a small step from this to the ability to, say, promote specific deals from specific retailers in the app, with the ability to buy direct.

• The Snapchat Adpocalypse is Coming: OK, so perhaps a touch hyperbolic, but the fact is that as things stand Snapchat is a relatively ad-free place to hang out. NO MORE! As of the next few weeks, Snapchat’s introducing ads inbween Stories – so as you flick between the deliciously vapid windows into your friends’ lives and LOL at their funny puppy ears, you’ll be presented with a variety of slick, full-bleed ads for a variety of exciting commercial opportunities; these ads will let users skip them (thank Christ), but will also include additional links to external websites or MORE CONTENT if said users swipe up. This isn’t quite going to create a free-for-all – much in the manner in which Instagram started, ads are only available through a selection of Snapchat’s accepted creative / commercial partners, which should at least maintain a temporary veneer of quality; I give it 6 months before any old agency twat can start creating hideous, invasive branded content, though. Anyway, if you’re a brand which wants to sell to children then a) I hate you; b) you probably should get on this. Oh, if you’re interested there is a MUCH longer breakdown here.

• Twitter Introduces Emoji Targeting: What, let me ask you, is the ‘good’ thing about emoji (the inverted commas are my own and you can hopefully imagine the tone that they are meant to convey)? Yes, that’s right, it’s their innate context dependence and utter subjectivity, which makes them a hugely flexible (and MASSIVELY INEFFICIENT) means of communicating. Which is why Twitter’s MASSIVE NEWS that you can now use emoji use as another ad targeting variable is such a silly gimmick; unless you make condoms or bongo, in which case fire that CONTENT at anyone using the taco, aubergine or any of the dozens of other ‘comedy’ genital signifiers, you’ll be targeting people who are using a symbol whose potential meanings are so broad that it is in fact no sort of worthwhile targeting at all. Still, look forward to a bunch of brands doing stuff with this and Twitter talking about how ACE it is, because, you know, GIMMICKS. Christ’s sake.

• Twitter May Promote Moments In Timeline: MAY being the operative word here. That said, this strikes me as a move towards expanding the potential commercial opportunities for moments – if they are appearing in timelines then they are necessarily going to be more appealing a prospect to advertisers, and they can be targeted at specific users more easily. Not using emoji, though, please.

• Everyone Can Now Periscope Straight From Twitter: As I wrote that, I had a sudden moment of comprehension that this is a sentence which would have meant literally nothing a few years ago. Weird. Anyway, now all users of Twitter on iOS and Android can do this, should they so desire, making it even easier for people and brands to LIVE STREAM THEIR LIVES (or whatever simulated version thereof they wish to present). Great.

• You Can Now RT Yourself If You So Desire: Remember that FIRE Tweet you posted back in 2011? No, neither does anyone else, and nor indeed do they care, but don’t let that stop you from re-upping all your greatest 140-character hits to a totally disinterested audience. Lucky, lucky us.

• Pinterest Doing More To Track Offline Behaviour: Or at least it will, using a partnership with Oracle Data Cloud. This is more a general ‘this will happen’ thing, but is also an opportunity for me to once again say how underrated I think Pinterest is in the marketing mix, and to point you at this rather interesting interview with its Chief Executive on the occasion of the opening of its London office. If you’d like to debate whether the term ‘social network’ is now dead, feel free to do so (but a long, long way out of my earshot if you don’t mind). Hang on, I just scanned that again and the bastard is 33. 33. You absolute shitbag, Ben Silbermann.

• A Decent Guide To The New Google Map Ads: You know the whole ‘you can now buy advertising pins on Google Maps’ thing from last week or whenever it was? Well this is a 101-ish rundown on how they, and the whole general advertising on Google Maps things works. Useful and helpful.

• YouTube Director: One for the small business people out there, this is a potentially really useful app from YouTube which helps you make professional-looking video ads for whatever it is that you do, using a surprisingly flexible series of templates, fonts, etc, delivered via a bespoke YouTube app. Obviously the end goal of this is to get you to buy pre-rolls on YouTube (OBVIOUSLY), but, you know, still.

• Bumble Integrates With Spotify: Not technically about advermarketingpr, but I find the principle interesting. Dating app Bumble is now integrating Spotify data into its profiles, meaning you can add ‘taste in music’ to the list of superficial criteria you use to decide whether to let someone inside you. I reckon there is LOADS more interesting stuff that can be done by brands with Spotify data, but I’ll let you clever people in the agencies work it out.

• Oh, Yes, Microsoft Bought LinkedIn: A union of two of the most tedious companies on the planet, there’s no actual NEWS here beyond the frankly HUGE price they paid; this is a really smart (and occasionally surprisingly funny) piece listing 9 things that Microsoft could do with everyone’s least favourite social network. It’s hard not to see this as being eventually part of Office and overall a great big hedge against Facebook at Work, but TIME WILL TELL.

• The Cheetos Museum: Included more because I desperately need some sort of frivolity this morning than because it’s particularly great, this is the website for a promo by purveyors of potentially toxic cheese dust Cheetos (NB – WEB CURIOS WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT THAT IT DOESN’T ACTUALLY THINK THAT CHEETOS ARE POTENTIALLY TOXIC, HONEST) which is offering a series of prizes of $10,000 (the world has gone mad) to the people who upload photos of the oddest looking corn snacks they’ve found in their packets. Silly, but I would love a major food manufacturer run something like this across their whole range – “WE ARE OFFERING A MILLION QUID TO THE BEST JESUS FOUND IN ONE OF OUR PRODUCTS”, for example. Take a look at the gallery, and look at how many people have uploaded photographs of misshapen, nuclear-orange snack-foods, though. LOOK. To the one person reading this who I know for a fact spends most of their life covered in a fine haze of orange cheese dust, SORT YOUR LIFE OUT MATE.

• Snapchat Filters for Charity: A nice idea from W Hotels in the US, whereby users Snapping in the vicinity of a few of their hotesl across the country can use a rainbow filter in support of Pride Month, and by so doing date $1 to LGBTI charities. Simple, smart, and the sort of thing which should become a no-brainer for charity partnerships all over the place.

HOW ABOUT SOME ANGULAR INDIEPOP FROM WEAVES’ SELF-TITLED LP? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.1:

• Score Assured: Seeing as everything is so utterly, utterly banjaxed, let’s kick off with a website-stroke-service which encapsulates much of what is horrible about 2016. Score Assured is a charming site which will, if these reports are anything to go by, mine Facebook data of potential tenants and employees to allow landlords or potential employers to determine whether or not they should be given houses or jobs. The idea is that it’s part of the background checking process – employers or landlords ask prospective tenants or employees for access to their social media accounts through the site, which then analyses EVERYTHING on it and ‘works out’ whether or not they’re a safe bet for employment or a roof over their heads. Yes, that’s right, an algorithm is going to start determining whether or not you should be allowed to live somewhere – spend too much time talking about getting all messed up at the weekends in your Messenger conversations? ACCESS DENIED! Dystopian present, how do I love thee? Let me count the wa…no, actually, let’s not bother.

• Dango: How will we know when machines have reached sentience? Balls to the Turing Test – emoji are obviously the new benchmark of AI comprehension. Dango is “a floating assistant that runs on your phone and predicts emoji, stickers and GIFs based on what you and your friends are writing in any app. This lets you have the same rich conversations everywhere: Messenger, Kik, Whatsapp, Snapchat, whatever.” The intriguing part here is the idea of its being able to predict which visual signifier is most appropriate at any given time – maybe if this takes off, we can move towards a proper, defined taxonomy of emoji, as defined by machine learning, thereby making Twitter’s ad targeting thing above less preposterous than at present. Maybe.

• The IKEA Museum: Opening on June 30 in Älmhult, Sweden, this is going to be several thousand square feet of flat-pack furniture and meatballs and domestic arguments, celebrating the history of what is simultaneously one of the most convenient and most infuriating retailers in history. Do you think it will have the same sort of intense effect on visiting couples as visiting one of the actual stores will? Actually, there’s quite a fun (I use the term advisedly) art project in this; get a load of couples to reenact arguments based in different eras from IKEA’s past in different areas of the museum. IMMERSIVE THEATRE! Go on, someone, do this.

• Live From A Moon-Shaped Pool: If you’re reading this on Friday 17 June 2016, Radiohead are doing all sorts of interesting livestreaming stuff on this website today. If you’re not, YOU’RE LATE. Oh, and if you’re seeing this on the CurioBot then let’s just agree to ignore it and move on (though they may have archived it, actually, so maybe click on the link just in case).

• Ebooks_goetia: Just in case you wanted a mildly occult Twitter bot to follow. “The Lesser Bot of Solomon offers you endless pages from a text in the style of Ars Goetia and the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum.” – it’s all sigils full of DARK PORTENT. Friday Fun! Why not take some of these and print them up – maybe A5 size – and stick them in unexpected and hard to find places in the office (maybe at the bottom of the paper drawer in the printer), and then send HR an email asking if they know who the Satanist is?

• Make Barnes Dance: In the time-honoured tradition of every single football tournament since 1990, we must hark back to World In Motion and John Barnes. This is a toy which lets you make a little dancing John Barnes doll, which is totally pointless but included because it’s still better than any other brand stuff I’ve seen over the Euros this year (seriously, has anyone seen anything good? It’s all dreck, isn’t it?).

• Green Screen The Queen: God, do you remember the Queen’s Birthday? How full of innocent patriotic hope we were then, before seemingly everything went to tits. Anyway, this site, built by FRIEND OF CURIOS Shardcore, lets you superimpose any YouTube video you want onto the Queen’s helpfully greenscreen-hued dress. Works particularly well with any of the Deep Dream stuff, imho, though frankly anything’s good here.

• Google Hands-free Payments: These are actually live RIGHT NOW in Southern California – Google’s now letting users pay for goods in certain outlets simply by SCANNING THEIR FACES. It’s not quite that simple – there’s another layer of ID and security which involves Google knowing that your phone is in the store, along with your face – but it’s the closest I’ve seen to magic this week. ETA to rollout worldwide? I reckon 2018, if it works in the pilots.

• Good Finds: Another website which proves to me that there is a market in piggybacking on Airbnb, Good Finds offers a regularly-updated selection of ‘curated’ (BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS CURATION NOW – am I allowed to call this curation? Probably not if I don’t want to sound like a total prick, on reflection) Airbnb listings a few hours from New York City and (eventually) San Francisco, promising TRENDY VIBES and suchlike. This seems like a natural brand extension for someone like, say, Mr & Mrs Smith, or even a Net a Porter (if you squint) – is anyone doing something like this here?

• Club Soda: As a man whose relationship with Casillero del Diablo ranges on a spectrum from ‘deep, abiding affection’ to ‘worrying degrees of dependency’, I’m always agog at people who are able to take a responsible attitude to their boozing rather than simply emptying it as much of it down their gullet as is humanly possible every evening. Club Soda is a website designed to help people who want to drink a bit less, or even stop at all, by giving encouragement, tips, suggesting meetups and the like. Effectively like the sort of resources which have existed for ages for people looking to kick the tabs, this is a great idea and is ripe for sponsorship by one of those ‘sophisticated fizzy drinks you can theoretically order instead of wine in the pub but noone ever really does because, well, they taste like pop’ such as Schloer or somesuch.

• All The World’s Fictional Holidays: A calendar plugin which, if you wish, will add every single (well, maybe not EVERY SINGLE, but) fictional holiday to your diary. If you’ve ever wanted to chance your arm with your employer and demand time off for, say, Katniss’s birthday, here’s your chance. Again, such a great idea for a publisher which you can probably get away with ripping off if you’re smart about it – maybe let people pick their favourite characters in literature (Gatsby, Hal, Baldini, etc) and have those birthdays appear in-calendar, perhaps with links to resources about the characters or something. Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Do it, Penguin.

• Hello Jarvis: Not, sadly, the now-legendary personal assistant which Zuck’s purportedly constructing, this is a far simpler messenger bot which can be set to give you reminders about stuff in the future. Simple and not very useful, it’s included here more as a nudge to remind you how easy these things can be to cobble together – i refer you back to that flowxo botbuilder from the other week.

• The NYC Drone Film Festival: Now in its 3rd year, the NYC Drone Film Festival is a celebration of…er…films made with drones (what did you expect?). You can see a load of them on the Festival’s official site; this one’s my favourite, but you should check the whole site as there’s some truly inventive cinematography there.

• The First Law: Brilliant and deeply sinister idea, this. You remember Asimov’s First Law of Robitics? In case you don’t, it’s “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” This is a robot which can choose to ignore that edict – to cite its creator, “The first robot to autonomously and intentionally break Asimov’s first law, which states: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The robot decides for each person it detects if it should injure them not in a way the creator can not predict. While there currently are “killer” drones and sentry guns, there is either always some person in the loop to make decisions or the system is a glorified tripwire. The way this robot differs in what exists is the decision making process it makes. A land mine for instance is made to always go off when stepped on, so no decision. A drone has a person in the loop, so no machine process. A radar operated gun again is basically the same as a land mine. Sticking your hand into a running blender is your decision, with a certain outcome. The fact that sometimes the robot decides not to hurt a person (in a way that is not predictable) is actually what brings about the important questions and sets it apart.” Brilliantly sinister.

• Hemingboard: A keyboard for desktop or mobile, helpfully designed fro seemingly every platform out there (apart from Windows Phones, obvs), which acts as something of a poetic assistant, making suggestions as to rhymes and synonyms and stuff. Download this and see whether it improves your chances on Tinder, Grindr or whichever tailchasing app you prefer – but be aware that you will effectively be letting a machine play Cyrano for you, which is pretty much as pathetic as it gets, romance-wise.

• Joachim Time: MASSIVE WOODEN CLOCKS! A whole range of designs, many of which are pretty cool, and they will plant 100 new trees for each one you buy, which seems like a pretty good deal. If you work in a COOL OFFICE and you need a new timepiece, or if you want your flat to look like something out of Oh Comely magazine, this might well tickle your fancy.

• Wholi: Currently in private Beta, Wholi is a service which offers itself as person-finding tool par excellence; effectively Google for people (professionals, specifically), designed to be a way of building networks within specific areas of expertise (for example, UK software development). Its utility will stand and fall based on the quality of its database, but it could be a pleasing alternative to the horror that is LinkedIn search.

• Keyboard AR: Using augmented reality tech to teach the piano. Light on tech details, but a rather cool proof-of-concept if nothing else.

• Kristina Lechner: Kristina Lechner takes photographs of small things that aren’t food arranged to look like actual food in miniature. Which clunky description suggests that last night’s insomnia is catching up with me, and we’re starting that long, slow slide into what regular readers will know is the low point of Curios (there are highs? I hear you all ask, incredulously. Fcuk off, you ingrates); don’t worry, I’ll power through and this will be behind us soon enough, honest.

• FastDocs: Dull-but-useful, this – a webpage which contains icons which take you direct to new Google Docs with a single click. Pleasingly, these are also customisable so that you can add one-click shortcuts to your Google Apps for Work – workplaces using Google Docs should consider this as a standard browser homepage, or at least until Google sort their shit out when it comes to the Docs UI.

• Startup Breeding: All idea for new companies are “It’s like X for Y!”, or “It’s like A + B!”. Eliminate the tedious process of coming up with your own ideas for new companies by using this handy websites which generates these constructions for you. Just, you know, remember where you saw it first when you’re a multimillionaire holidaying on Necker with laughing Rich.

• Addressable: WORTHY and DULL, but actually pretty smart and the sort of thing that you could reasonably rip off to useful effect for the right brand. Addressable is a service (I think) by or in conjunction with the US Postal Service, which effectively guides you through the process of updating your address when you move home, helping you tell all your utility providers, etc, and ensuring you don’t forget to tie up any loose ends. If you work for an estate agent then you’re obviously scum, but you may also find this the sort of thing which you could present to customers as ADDED VALUE or somesuch crap.

• Zungle: I can’t work out whether this is a cool idea or something a little akin to a mobile phone holster in pleather – YOU DECIDE! Zungle is a Kickstartable project, nearly funded, which will bring to market sunglasses which double as bone-conducting headphones, bluetooth-enabled so you can stream straight from your phone to…er…your cranium. Which creeps me out something chronic, but then I am basically uncomfortable with the concept of sunglasses (I know, I know, but they make me feel like everyone is looking at me, which I appreciate is odd, but) so probably not target audience.

• CalendarBlocker: Another Euro 2016 thing, and another Calendar app, and another example of something a brand should have done but didn’t (Carlsberg, I’m looking at you – this is a supercheap extension to that full-page ad you took out yesterday around the England game); this automatically fills your calendar with fictitious apppointments which happen to coincidentally coincide with England’s games in the tournament. Could be more comprehensive, but it’s a nice idea and an opportunity missed. Which is easy for me to say, as all I do is sit here in my pants and snark from the sidelines; I should probably shut up and get a real job or something. Sorry.

• My Script Font: Make a font out of your handwriting. Ugly and vain, but I would like at least one of you to do this and then set it as default on all your workplace machines as an act of supremely narcissistic digital vandalism. Thanks. Also, if you’re a famous I reckon you could TOTALLY get away with using this to make a font of your handwriting which you could then sell.

LET’S GO BACK TO 1977 AND A SELECTION OF TUNES FROM JOHN LYDON’S PERSONAL COLLECTION!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD PLEASE LIKE YOU ALL TO SPEND THE NEXT FEW WEEKS JUST BEING NICE TO EACH OTHER AND MAYBE NOT SHOUTING AND ARGUING SO MUCH ON THE INTERNET IF YOU DON’T MIND, THANKS, PT.2:

• Vigils for Orlando: Photographs from vigils which took place the world over to commemorate the victims of Sunday’s shootings in Florida. Every time I look at these they absolutely ruin me.

• An Interactive Map of Voting Patterns In The US: Not only a lovely and mesmerising piece of dataviz, but a pleasing and timely reminder that psephology is against Trump.

• Unspeaking Likeness: These are chilling. I’ll take their description, as it’s better than mine would be: “Unspeaking Likeness is a series of photographs of forensic facial reconstruction sculptures. These sculptures are commissioned by various law enforcement agencies and used for the purposes of establishing the identity of victims of suspected violent crime whose soft tissue facial features have been obliterated by either trauma or the passage of time.” Incredible, and quite incredibly creepy.

• The Internet Creators Guild: An interesting idea, born out of the fact that there are now hundreds of thousands of people worldwide monetising their creativity via the web, whether that be minor YouTubers pulling in a few k a month from ads, or the vapid, dead-eyed teen stars filling your tween children’s every waking thought. The idea is that this will be a loose network looking to represent these creators, giving them a collective voice and sticking up for their interests – you can read the pseudo-manifesto here, but it seems, broadly, like A Good Thing.

• Kanye’s Making A Game: Or, more accurately, this studio is, under his doubtless close instruction. I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by revealing the premise to you: “You’ll play as Kanye’s mom, Donda, flying [ON PEGASUS!] through the gates of heaven.”. Yep.

• Bumpers: Really rather cool and very, very easy to use audio recording and editing app; this makes it very easy indeed to make relatively polished-sounding audio output, whether it be your own voicenotes or something morepodcasty – it’s worth a try if you’re into that sort of thing (and remember, kids, that as Shingy said, “Audio’s going to be big in the future”) (he really did say that, you know).

• Behind The Scenes Polaroids From Blade Runner: Yep, that. Some of these are excellent, though; in particular, I’m in love with this shot.

• Flugjefellet: This is all in Norwegian, and so I can’t really tell you anything about it, other than a) it’s about the Northernmost tip of the country; b) there’s a lighthouse there; c) it appears to be a guide to the area’s birdlife; and d) it contains a really, really rather beautiful 3d model of a Norwegian island, and quite a lot of footage of puffins, which given the week we’ve all had I think we should celebrate as the generally positive thing it is.

• Circulation Zero: You’llhave to download these as they’re not available to broswe as embeds on the site, but this is a great collection of the collected runs of three seminal punk magazines from the West Coast of the US in the 70s and 80s – Damage, Slash and No Mag. If you are into the scene, or just like looking at design and typography and photography from that era, these are some great respources.

• Draw With (On) Bob Ross: Continuing with the general theme of ‘Matt’s soothing antidotes to the Week of Horror™’, this is a site which plays a seemingly neverending selection of Bob Ross vids (you know Bob Ross – the beafroed hippy with the most soothing voice in the world who is catnip to the ASMR community, and whose mission to gently teach everyone in the US to paint made him basically the slightly less camp Tony Hart of across the pond), which if you so desire you can paint over with your cursor. Don’t do that, though – just put on your headphones and let Bob paint the pain away.

• Curtsy: Interesting idea, this. Curtsy is a peer-to-peer clothing rental app, only in the US at present, which lets you hire hipsters’ dresses for an evening at knockdown rates. Could totally work over here were anyone minded to port it over.

• Peanuts In The Desert: First of two links for the comic book (THEY ARE GRAPHIC NOVELS DAMN YOU) aficionados amongst you, this is a brilliant project which takes French cartoonist Moebius’s strip ‘40 Days In The Desert’ and redraws it using characters from Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’. Some familiarity with the source material helps here, admittedly, but the art style is nailed on.

• The Neu Jorker: This is SUCH a labour of love. A full edition, start to finish, of the New Yorker – except this is a satirical parody taking a very well-aimed shot at all the things that make the New Yorker the New Yorker – cartoons, pretence, preposterously long, self-indulgent articles, the whole nine yards. I can’t recommend this enough – there’s loads of it, but it’s consistently funny, and you can print it off while you’re at work and then take it home to enjoy over the weekend.

• Memions: It’s hard to think of an adequate response to how fcuked everything seems this week, so I’m not even going to try. Instead, I’m just going to leave this here – a website which collects hundreds, maybe thousands, of cripplingly lame and generic and unfunny and INSPIRATIONAL Minions memes in one place. Maybe by communicating solely via the medium of these we can restore some sense of balance and order to the crazy, messed-up world in which we live. Maybe. Alternatively, just spend the next few days communicating solely via these, to the increasing irritation of everyone you know.

• Marky: This got right on my tits earlier in the week, but I’m finding it hard to get quite so exercised about it now. Still, let’s try. Marky is basically like Graze or any of those ‘pay a premium to get some ingredients or small things delivered to you, which would be loads cheaper if you just bought them yourself but you are too busy and important to even contemplate doing so’, except it’s for craft materials you can use to have INTERACTIVE PLAYTIME with your kids. You sign up, and every X number of weeks they send you a box with a bunch of, say, beads and pipecleaners and other assorted crap, along with instructions on HOW TO BE CREATIVE with your child. If there’s anything that says “carving out some precious time with your offspring!” and “creativity!” it’s having a bunch of tat delivered in a fancy box for $50 a pop so you can follow the instructions on how to BE CREATIVE and then put that creativity back in a box til the next mandated CREATIVE PLAYTIME, right? Oh, look, it annoyed me again.

• Netcees: One of the odder online communities I’ve found in recent times, Netcees celebrates the weird world of text-only rap battling. You know “Don’t Flop” and all those other now-infamous rap battle nights? Well this is like those, except, er, these people just type stuff at each other. Some of these are truly DREADFUL – there’s a real rabbithole here, as there are literally millions of words on this site.

• Smile Vector: Photos of famouses, digitally manipulated to either give them the creepiest smiles you ever did see, or to remove the smiles that were once there. All done by algorithm, this Twitter feed has given me some of the more unsettling imagery I’ve seen this week.

• The Most German Thing I Have Ever Seen, Possibly: I mean, can you imagine any other nation having one of these as a tournament tie-in?

• Free Cerebus: This week’s other BIG THING for comic fans (GRAPHIC NOVELS), you can now download the first two Cerebus books in their entirety, for free. For those of you who don’t know, Cerebus is the longest-running graphic novel in history; it started out as a weird sort of swords and sorcery pastiche featuring a talking aardvark, but evolved over its lifespan to become one of the most interesting explorations of power and politics ever committed to the page (no, really, it did). Sadly it also descended quite far into misogynistic lunacy in its later years, as creator Dave Sim battled with drug addiction, mental health issues and the breakdown of his marriage, but the work still stands overall as a hell of an achievement (and in Jaka’s Story presents one of the most beautifully-rendered love stories I’ve ever read in the medium). Anyway, if you like comics (GRAPHIC NOVELS) then check these out, they might appeal.

• NIMB: This week’s ‘Christ, I wish this didn’t have to exist’ thing, NIMB is an internet-enabled ring of reasonably pleasing (if chunky) design which will, if pressed in a certain way for a certain amount of time, send an automatic alert to a predetermined set of individuals based on a user’s preferences. Not yet in production, but you can sign up to be alerted when it goes on sale.

• Luxoperon: Have YOU ever wanted to navigate prehistoric seas in a weird sort of browser-based game in which you search for fish and explore the depths? No, I hadn’t either to be honest, and yet this game proved a pleasing distraction for 10 minutes or so.

• 51 Sprints: This is really rather cool. Taking as its starting point the idea of the sprinter as an athletic ideal, this is part documentary and part interactive tool which lets you pit sprinters from the past and present against each other in your own version of the 100 metres, letting you apply equalising filters to different variables (gender, ethnicity, social class) to see how these were – or were not – factors in athletic performance. Feels more like an academic / sociological study than anything else, but it’s a fascinating project and rather well realised.

• Mass Migrations: Generate your own weird little 3d robot insect thing, and set it to play in its own little weird 3d virtual playground, soundtracked by some rather nice music. No reason why, just give it a go.

• Recently: A gift for the biggest narcissist you know, Recently is a service which, for $9 a month, will turn anyone’s INstagram feed (or the best thereof) into a monthly magazine, printed and shipped to them so they can have an actual coffeetable lifestyle magazine to house all their coffeetable lifestyle magazine shots. I hate EVERYTHING about this, and yet am forced to concede it’s pretty smart and there’s a whole load of obvious things brands could do along these lines. Still, though, if you desire this in any way then I actually hate you, just FYI.

• The New Tate: This is GORGEOUS, as you’d expect from a collaboration between the Tate and Sigur Ros. To celebrate the opening of the extension to the Tate Modern this week (well this week at time of writing, at least), they released this videomusicwebtoything, which lets you view different video representations of the new gallery; four different perspectives are available, which you can switch between at will, each revealing a different layer to Sigur Ros’ weirdly claustrophobic soundscape. This is beautifully done.

• An Deiner Seite: This, though, is my favourite thing of the week. A truly WONDERFUL interactive music video for German…er…rapper, apparently, Kontra K, this uses the same technique as the ‘switch between two videos’ Honda ad of last year, and invites you to help a fisherman find the clues to what happened by a sinsiter lakeside. This is SO SLICK and the song is SO GOOD – I cannot recommend it highly enough. Press and hold space to switch narratives and just enjoy.

LET’S FINISH THE PLAYLISTS WITH THIS SPOTIFY MIX  BY MOFGIMMERS OF GOOD, HAPPY TRACKS TO HOPEFULLY WASH SOME OF THE WRONG AWAY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Women Burning Things: For when you really, really need some gifs of women setting fire to stuff.

• Ruby, etc: Wonderful little cartoon vignettes from London-based artist Ruby, who draws small but perfectly-formed cartoons exploring depression, loneliness, anxiety and, you know, LIFE. Not in any way miserable, despite the subject matter – these are lovely.

• Fuck Yeah Studio Porn: Photographs of recording studios, the more pimped the better.

• They Can Talk: Small, slightly whimsical comics imagining what animals might say if they could in fact talk. This sounds like a range of really shit greetings cards, I’m aware, but I promise that they’re better than that.

• Barbie Movies: A Tumblr celebrating the VERY PINK world of the CGI Barbie cartoons. I had no idea these things even existed, possibly unsurprisingly, but if you have small children and you have no problem with the whole GIRLS=PINK PRINCESSES thing, then they might be into this. Alternatively, there’s something sort of seapunk/vaporwave about the whole aesthetic here (yes, yes, I know) which might be ripe for ripping off, maybe.

• Panini Cheapskates: This week’s “Not actually a Tumblr” comes in the shape of this, which I have probably featured before on reflection but which is worth reupping as THE FOOTBALL IS HAPPENING. Panini Cheapskates is basically a load of really rubbish drawings of footballers, all being done to raise money for good causes. Funny and worthwhile.

• CL Terry Art: Great little animations in a sort of 2d Pixar-ish style.

• Watermelon Prices: Sadly inactive for a year, I PLEAD with whoever is behind this to bring it back. We’re having an awful Summer – for some reason I think that this would make it marginally better (no, I can’t explain why). This is a Tumblr recording the variety of prices of watermelons in the rubbish local shops of London, and I want it back.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• What Are The Odds We Are Living In A Simulation: A piece sparked by Elon Musk’s comments in an interview the other week in which he stated it was statistically improbable that this was the ‘top level’ universe, based on the pace of improvement of computational power, this takes a good long run up at the classic Cartesian questions (“But how do I know I’m not a brain in a vat?”), swings and…well…sort of misses. Interesting enough, but I was a little disappointed at the lack of depth here. Though after this week, I’m sort of with the Gnostics on this one.

• In Praise of Latin Night at the Queer Club: A short, poignant essay about being gay and Latino and going out, and what places like Pulse meant to members of a community who found it harder than some others to embrace their non-heterosexuality. This is really rather beautiful, and captures (one of the many reasons) why last Sunday was such a sad event.

• Carrozo Gets Mad: More on Orlando and associated things, this time from Matthew Carrozo, whose Twitterstorm earlier this week he kindly collated for me into this Storify and which you should all read; it’s brilliant, on all sorts of things including opinions and social media, gay identity and belonging, how we define ourselves publicly and privately, and how events and the tenor of conversation are always, always shaped both by a prevailing narrative as well as all those things left unsaid. Made me a bit weepy, I’m not ashamed to say.

• Kris Kristofferson: By way of light relief, this profile of Kris Kristofferson paints a picture of a truly remarkable man and life. I had no idea he had done SO MUCH. Blimey, I feel quite small by comparison (not uncommon tbh).

• -ass as a Modifier: Students of linguistics – or, you know, anyone who reads or listens to the Englis language, pretty much, will be aware of the evolution of the suffix -ass as a modifier. This is a brilliant and brilliantly straight-faced, exploration of what it MEANS and how it works, and why, for example, “…while you can say “I run quickly” you can’t say “I run quick-ass”. I love this stuff.

• Reviewing Flume’s New Album: Which analysis segues rather nicely into this, which is hands-down one of the oddest music reviews I’ve ever read anywhere, not least in the pages of the Independent. Is Justin Carissimo a real person? Is this performance art? Whatever, he can…er…sort of write (although I’m pretty much certain he misuses the -ass suffix at least once here). Want a taste? “To be frank, this is the type of music that fuels interracial relationships, cause when the hook sinks and the beat drops, hundreds of years of oppression, and your bigoted parents completely fade away for a moment.” It’s safe to say he likes it. Oh, just FYI, Flume’s latest track was on last week’s Curios if you want a taster.

• On Icons: On icon design, and why we use them instead of labels. Yes, I know it sounds boring, but I promise you that you don’t have to be a designer to find this interesting – all about communication and language and visual signifiers and STUFF, this is really interesting (particularly w/r/t the rise of the emoji, imho).

• The 10 Biggest Gun Manufacturers In America: If you want something to make you actually angry today, can I recommend this? A rundown of the finances and business operations (and NRA-enabled lobbying activity) of the ten biggest gunmakers in the US. The sums of money being bandied about here are astounding, not least those being spent on buying politicians – let’s not beat around the bush, that’s exactly what it is – to support whatever position the NRA deems most advantageous to the manufacturers. Absolutely filthy, the whole thing.

• Satyricon: A portrait of this weekend’s Roman mayoral elections, in which it’s at the time of writing) likely that the candidate from the ‘outsider’ party (the Movimento 5 Stelle, or 5 Star Movement) will emerge triumphant. You don’t need to know or care about Italian politics to find this interesting – it’s a good overview of a democracy which has been pretty fractured for half a century, and a country where, despite nothing working and everything being a corrupt mess, things still just about limp along regardless. Until yesterday I was going to make some crack about ‘and we think we’ve got it bad!’, but that’s not really funny any more.

• The People’s Republic of WeChat: A really comprehensive (and, I’m told, accurate) overview of how WeChat (China’s catch-all social media /messaging platform which basically does EVERYTHING) works and is built in to every facet of Chinese society. You want to see what Facebook wants to become with this year’s Messenger updates? Read this and then project forward 4 years.

• The Dystopian Future Of Silicon Valley: What happens if DeLillo and others are right and cryogenics are actually going to work? This essay takes a look, and sees a future which is dominated by the same old white men as right now – a pretty chilling (no pun intended, but, y’know, LOLS) extrapolation of what will almost inevitably occur if you grant longer and longer life to those at the top of the tree who can afford to pay for it. Watch as today’s elites entrench themselves into perpetuity!

• Minnesota’s Meat Raffles: Apparently in Minnesota, a decent evening’s entertainment can consist of going to a bar and buying a raffle ticket which might entitle you to win some meat. This is just sort of weird, and I’m including it mainly because I find myself laughing to the point of distraction at the repeated phrase “Who doesn’t love a good meat raffle?” Who indeed?

• My Heart Belongs To Daddy!: If you’ve spent any time on Twitter of late, you’ll have seen the almost unstoppable trend of any male celebrity of a certain age being bombarded with exhortations from thirsyty kids of all genders to “choke me, daddy!” or similar such constructions (even the Pope wasn’t immune, although I imagine Francis secretly probably rather enjoyed it). This (not entirely serious) piece looks at the semantics of the ‘Daddy’ meme, and the issue of daddy sex in general. PROTIP – if you have teenage daughters, maybe don’t read this one.

• Sad!: This is a great read, if you’re a little bit of a politicowonk. Campaign managers of three of the Republican presidential candidates discuss with a reporter from the Huffington Post what it felt like to lose to Trump, why they think it happened, and how the campaigns worked behind the scenes. Genuinely fascinating, whether or not you’re into the US Presidential race.

• Before Kanye Was Kanye: A portrait of the geeky, enthusiastic kid with the slightly shonky flow who would grow up to be the self-proclaimed GOAT. Awesome reminiscence here.

• More Seduction Than Friendship: A brilliant, beautiful piece of writing about the sort of intense friendships that people form in their 20s and which can with surprising ease vanish just as quickly as they are born. The whole piece is a startlingly good piece of writing, but the final paragraphs got me right *here*. Fiction, but you’d never guess – this is wonderful.

• A Brief Catalogue of Minor Sex Scandals: Equally superb writing, this, on being white trash and all that goes with it. I missed this when it was published last year, but it’s beautiful and demands a slow, attentive read.

• The Panel: The final long read of the week, read this before you go and vote on Thursday. Read it all, out loud in your head. It is by Luke Wright and it is a brilliant piece of poetry. It was written for last year’s election, but it bears up for this year’s referendum. READ IT.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) Let’s start with a video featuring some mesmerising, beautiful, mo-capped CGI dancing. This is gorgeous:

2) More dancing! This is less mesmerising and more sort of weird, like if you were able to turn yourself into a videogame character. It’s by Cumhur Jay and the track’s called ‘Dyschronometria’ and it’s got GREAT synths:

3) Ghostbusters, done in LEGO, just because it’s cheering and nostalgic and HOLD ME TIGHT SOMEONE:

4 A girl I went to college with (shout out Ivana, you will never read this but I hope you’re well) once got off with Iggy Pop onstage at a gig of his in Belgrade. She said he was an aggressive kisser, fwiw. Anyway, this is his latest, called ‘American Valhalla’ – I think the video’s rather good:

5) No hiphop selection this week, just this rather beautiful slow jam by SilentJay and JaceXL. This is called Rockabye, and the video’s rather beautiful in a slowmo backwards kind of way:

6) Another in the very occasional series of ‘if you’re having a really druggy house party this weekend, try throwing this onto the telly as the backdrop to whatever’s going on at about 4am’ videos – this is Megaplex, the final in a series of longform spliced videos combining 80s classics to massive, disorienting effect. This is ACE:

7) Next, in case you’re yet to see it, the ‘Weird Japanese-style Trump video’ that has been EVERYWHERE in the past 24h – made not by anyone in Japan but by LA artist Mike Diva. Bafflingly, there are people on Twitter nhim if this is anti-Trump; he literally blows up the world, kids, it’s not exactly a pro message:

8) Finally this week, the best video I’ve seen all week. You HAVE to watch this on your phone – yet another example of how vertical vids, when done right, are just brilliant. By spoken word artist Max Stossel, this is called ‘Stop Making Murderers Famous’. See you on the other side, kids.

I KNOW MASHUPS ARE IN NO WAY COOL, BUT THIS SELECTION OF OLDSCHOOL PUNK VS HIPHOP TRACKS ARE JUST INSANELY GOOD, HONEST!

THE SECTION WHICH FOUND ITSELF GETTING GENUINELY SLIGHTLY EXCITED ABOUT AN INSTAGRAM UPDATE THIS WEEK, WHICH SUGGESTS IT REALLY DOES NEED TO TAKE A LONG HARD LOOK AT ITSELF:

• Instagram Business Pages Are Now HERE In The UK: You will, of course, recall exactly what this means – the ability to boost existing Instagram posts through ads rather than having to create new ad units, halfway decent analytics, that sort of thing. Not got access to this yet? It’s because Facebook hates you.

• Instagram Introducing Event Channels: Because EVERYTHING HAS TO BE VIDEO NOW (see Curios passim), Instagram is rolling out a new way of categorising video on the platform – users will soon see suggested channels under the ‘Explore’ tab, collecting video from particular events in one place. Imagine a Glastonbury tab, collecting all the on-the-ground and behind-the-scenes footage, for example, or one for Wimbledon – this is going to be BRANDED CONTENT CENTRAL in next to no time, so talk to your Facebook rep TODAY about the exciting opportunities to spend your clients’ cash LEVERAGING THEIR SPONSORSHIP to a highly-engaged, content-hungry audience! Dear God.

• Facebook Messenger Lets Bots Do Promotions And Stuff: This is part of a wider update to Facebook Messenger’s policies around what bots can and can’t do on the platform – see a full breakdown of the policies here (which really is worth a read if you’re interested in making these things). Now, for example, you can build bots which will send people links to promotional vouchers in a chat, for example, enabling you do do all SORTS of fun things, not least do some pretty accurate conversion-tracking from social through to purchase. Users can now also subscribe to bots, giving said bot the right to ping them messages as and when – which, to my mind, is a gentle kick in the direction of email marketing. Oh, in additional bot news, they have also made code to train your bot to learn language better available on Github – for the techies, here, but if you’re on the build/make side of this then this is probably rather useful.

• Snapchat Now Doing 360-degree Video Ads: Christ alone knows how much these cost, but welcome to a world in which you no longer just have to worry about shooting in vertical, but also about making it a 360-degree interactive experience. FUN TIMES, CONTENT MONKEYS!

• Snapchat Expands Opportunities For Advertisers: As in, they’ve opened up the ‘ads between snaps’ format to more brands. Exciting, eh? MAYBE YOUR BRAND COULD BE ONE OF THE LUCKY ONES.

• App For Snapchat Geofilters: This is both brilliantly opportunistic and sort of angry-making; I mean, Snapchat is a horribly convoluted beast to use, fine, but the setting up of Geofilters is an admirably simple process. Nonetheless, here comes an app which guides you through the whole process of making one, and which will, if you pay an additional premium, take you through the buying and approval process too. Potentially useful for small businesses, etc, who maybe don’t have the time or the skill to spend hours perfecting the millennial-friendly image which will make their filter FLY.

• Pinterest Introduces Promoted Video: Every time there’s a new Pinterest update I write some rubbish about how ‘Pinterest is such an underrated tool in the marketing mix, you know’ (except probably with more overwrought shouting in capital letters, and a greater sense of predictable, jaded ennui), so imagine that that’s exactly what I’m saying now. Video ads on the platform are REALLY interesting if you do food, design, DIY, etc – these are available in the UK RIGHT NOW, at least for those with an account manager on the platform. WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?

• Twitter Introduces Promoted Stickers: When I wrote about this on launch, WAAAAAY back when we were still reeling from Brexit and everything was dreadful – what a difference a(n admittedly sizeable) handful of shiny metal coins makes! – I said “you’re an idiot if you don’t think Twitter is RIGHT NOW talking to brands and events about a pricing model for creating bespoke stickers for them to use around calendar events and the like.” AND LO IT CAME TO PASS! I am intrigued to see what sort of moderation options are here, as the whole ‘stickers work like visual hashtags’ thing would, depending on the sort of troll you are, motivate a LOT of people to jump on the branded sticker bandwagon with, almost certainly, some pretty DARK stuff. Let’s see shall we?

• Twitter Does A Small Thing To Limit Abuse: There’s a longread at the end this week about Twitter’s persistent abuse problems which is well worth a read; the platform just announced that it was introducing the opportunity for users to mute mentions of themselves by people who don’t follow them; meaning that you won’t have to see @mentions by random folk who decide to dogpile you. Which is fine, as far as it goes, though it’s sort of a bandage on an axewound if you in any way care about mho.

• YikYak Does A Pivot: I joined YikYak about 18 months ago as I thought it might be interesting to see what people nearby were doing; what I discovered was that, according to YikYak, they were mostly maintaining a pretty shocking attendance record at college and complaining about morning bus halitosis. Compelling stuff. Anyway, the famously anonymous app for local chatting is no longer going to be anonymous, basically – christ alone knows whether it will pull it back from the brink, but I still think there’s interesting stuff you can do with this if you want to talk to THE KIDS, particularly on a hyperlocal level.

• The Pizza Hut DJ Box: We’ve had the pizza box as projector to watch films on; now the pizza box as playable DJ setup. Classic piece of ad work which will appear in approximately 12 actual pizza boxes in total, but which will nonetheless get entered into 100000001 awards as an example of innovative ways of engaging customers because that’s how this stuff works; I mean, it’s really clever kit, no doubt, but a) how the fcuck is this going to work when it’s covered with a 3mm slick of Pizza Hut grease; and b) I have no idea how much they were paying DJ Vectra to front this video, but even he couldn’t seem to muster any enthusiasm at all for the kit (seriously, watch the video). Still, well done on the idea.

THE SOUNDTRACK TO NO MAN’S SKY IS GLORIOUS, YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO IT!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.1:

• Google’s Olympics:  So obviously I am WELL late to this, for which apologies, but in my defence it’s obviously aimed at locals in Brazil and it’s all in Portuguese, and I’m working a 5-day week for the first time in about 5 years (yes, yes, I know, NO VIOLINS), and frankly I’m knackered. Sorry. Anyway, this is a lovely piece of webwork by Google, pulling together all sorts of information about what is happening TODAY in the ‘Lympics, all with a lovely UI and some nice little animations, and generally all the sort of high-quality design you’d expect from Google.

• Chatbottle: Horrible name, but a useful site if you’re interested in bot building and checking out what other people are doing (and we must all be interested in bots now; Zuckerberg has decreed and his word is LAW). This ranks all the bots it can find, based on a variety of metrics (ranking on ProductHunt, number of features, retention of users, that sort of thing) and is a pretty good way of checking out what’s new and what’s good in botland. What this comprehensively proves at the moment is that most bots are basically shovelwear at the moment – there are a lot of real opportunities for people to make something (anything) that isn’t total rubbish. Maybe one of those people is YOU! It probably isn’t, though.

• Instagram Scheduler and Themer: Probably of most interest to advermarketingpr drones, but there are enough of you now presenting carefully aesthetically curated lies about the quality of your existence on Instagram to make me think that there’s a market for this outside of the hideous professional hell which I inhabit. Unum does a lot of things other apps do – particularly the scheduling of Instagram posts – but the gimmick here is that you can preview how your ‘grams will look on Instagram, letting you arrange and curate them to create a seamless and artificially-lovely vibe. Actually pretty useful if you have some sort of overall DESIGN GOALS thing going on, or if you’re attempting some sort of Pantone-related artistic endeavour (or, you know, if you want to ensure your whole feed accurately reflects your carefully-curated personal palette. You monster).

• Wovns: First of the inevitable Kickstarters this week – Wovn is raising funds to create a bespoke textile sales platform, whereby you’d be able to design…er…some fabric or something in Photoshop or Illustrator, and they will weave it for you and send it to you. Obviously the details are a touch sketchy (and, er, I obviously haven;t read everything on the page, because, well, time is short and frankly I don’t quite care enough about fabric design), but if you’re someone who wants to make their own clothes, say, or who dreams of giving up your tedious wageslave existence in favour of a career making expensive teatowels to flog at farmer’s markets, then this could be right up your street.

• The Best Video Timelapse I Have Seen In An AGE: HOW CLEVER IS THIS? Obviously the quality’s a touch shonky, and it’s not a polished and professional HD cut, but the way the creator has combined timelapse and gifs is all sorts of astounding. Expect to see this being replicated in shinier fashion by some brand or another anytime soon (you can see how you could do an amazing shot of a football stadium filling up over time, for example, with this sort of technique).

• Yes Child Free: Are YOU somehow not interested in having a complete and fulfilled life? Do YOU look forward to growing old with no prospect of support in your old age? Do YOU have some sort of deep-seated personality issue that means that you’re incapable of or unwilling to undertake the base-level activity required of you as a functioning member of the human race? Are YOU some sort of a monster? In short, do you not want kids (because it does sort of feel like that’s what people think sometimes)? Well WELCOME TO YES CHILD FREE, a dating app designed for misanthropes like YOU who have no desire to inflict their progeny on an uncaring, ambivalent universe. No idea how good this is, but it might eliminate at least one of the awkward conversations which torpedoes relationships in your 30s.

• VoteGif: A nice little project presenting a series of gifs designed to encourage people to vote in the US – one animation per State. Simple, cute, clever – rip-offable.

• Dropbox Paper: Do you remember Google Wave? No, of course you don’t; it was weird and impenetrable and noone used it, and it was quietly dropped into the Google oubliette. Apparently, though, it was actually sort of good – a decent co-working app which allowed for seamless sharing of information in persistent fashion between project teams collaborating on a job. Combine that with Slack and you get a vague idea of what Dropbox Paper feels like – there are a lot of rather cool features in here, including in-project collaborative editing, chat, file and linksharing, and a coding interface – if you’re looking for something to use as a collaborative platform this is probably worth a look. Yes, that was dull, I know, sorry, but it’s not all bongo and cynicism round here. I mean, mostly it is, but.

• Photopea: Pretty powerful-looking in-browser photoshop-type tool; it’s not like there aren’t a lot of these out there, but this one looks pretty good I think.

• My Text In Your Handwriting: There are SO MANY brilliantly creepy (and, er, hugely illegal) applications for this. This script by Tom Haines is (to quote) “a method that allows us to replicate the handwriting of anyone for whom we have a sample. Any scan will do – nothing special is required at capture time.”; just imagine what you could do with that. Aside from anything else, there are some lovely potential use cases for, for example, people who have lost the ability to write by hand to enable them to retain the weirdly unique part of their identity that is one’s own cursive script. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• GoGoGrandparent: This is a really nice service and concept, I think. You know those online concierge services which have proliferated in the US over the past few years – you know, where you use a chat interface or similar to order a bunch of stuff that you just happen to need at 3:30am (“what’s that? 2 bottles of vodka, 80 Marlboro lights, 6 packets of Extra and, hang on, another 40 fags? Yep, no problem. No, I’m not judging AT ALL”)? This is like that, except it’s designed to be used by people who for whatever reason aren’t comfortable using smartphones and who’d rather use a nested phone menus to order things. There are so many nice features here, including the ability for individual users to customise the menus to ensure that stuff they will need most regularly sits at the top of the conversation tree; obviously once the Amazon Dash button concept becomes embedded everywhere then this becomes obsolete, but I think there’s something lovely about the extension of this sort of service to the less tech-enabled.

• Ghost Browser: This is a smart idea for people who do stuff across multiple accounts; a browser which lets you sign into the same platform from multiple accounts within one browser session, so for example you can be logged in to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram as several different accounts simultaneously within one browser. Obviously Hootsuite et al still offer the best solutions for multi-account management, but for more specific work – ad buying across multiple accounts, for example – you can see how this might be useful. Oh, and massive, massive fraud, obviously.

• Penmanshipporn: A Reddit community dedicated to sharing examples of particularly beautiful calligraphy, which, in case and advermarketingpr drones from the exciting world of high-end pens are reading, is RIPE for sponsorship by…er…who makes fountain pens these days? One of that lot, anyway. SEE? THIS IS FCUKING GOLDEN, MATE. This is what you come for, isn’t it? This sort of free creativity. Jesus wept, even by my own low standards this is bilge, isn’t it? Sorry, I’ll try harder after another cup of tea.

• Brexit Haikus: A selection of 50 haikus, written daily since The Day The World Went (More) Wrong, by James Ross-Edwards. These are lovely, and a nice sort of light-touch time capsule to travel back through the various stages of post-Brexit emotion we all went through (and which, frankly, we’re still just sort of trying to deal with). I particularly like this one: “On Shoreditch High Street / Two men in shorts and leggings / Hope Corbyn resigns”; find your favourites!

• Snapcut: Another cool toy to make stuff for Snapchat (or Instagram Stories, obvs) – Snapcut lets you customise an animated screen in portrait which you can add text, images and different flashy backgrounds to, which you can then record and use as a title screen to your next Story. Which is, as per the ‘fake yourself having fun’ Snapchat thing from last week, is totally ripe for BRAND APPROPRIATION. Here’s a thought – charity-type folk trying to engender THE NEXT ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE – why not consider making something like this for the Snapchat/Insta kids, to let them join in whilst making their own personalised title cards for their participatory videos with your branding on it (or something – obviously this is a crap idea, but if you can’t do better then SHUT UP AND STOP JUDGING ME).

• Explain To Me: Lovely webtoy – plug in a link to an online article and this will deliver you a summary of the content, in a sentence and then in 10 sentences. It’ll also pull all the metadata from a page, should you desire. Christ knows what it would make of Curios – probably about as much as the rest of the world tbqhwym.

• Hovercards: Rather clever Chrome plugin which pulls in information about any url when you hover your cursor over it; so it’ll pull you a preview of the page in a little hover-over window, say, or if you point at an Instagram or Twitter user it’ll pull up details about their account, their followers and the like. Slick.

• Guide To Computing: Beautiful photos of old computing equipment, taken against gorgeous pastel backdrops. Really gorgeous 50s feel to all these shots.

• The Bauhaus: Wonderful online collection by the Harvard Art Museum of Bauhaus works, giving you not only a brilliant overview of the movement but also access to thousands of digital representations of the school’s work. Art / design-types will find SO MUCH to love in here; this is a pretty amazing treasure trove of early 20C design.

• Steem: I confess to being a touch sketchy on the practicalities here, so forgive the slightly wooly writeup I’m about to give you here (plus ca fcuking change, eh kids?) – Steem is, as far as I can tell, basically a Reddit-type community whose distinguishing feature is that users can receive cryptocurrency payments for posting stuff; this currency (the titular ‘Steem’) can then be exchanged for Bitcoins further down the line, and thereby converted into actual cashmoney. It sounds a little too good to be true, and I’m not 100% convinced its not in fact some sort of smartly techy pyramid scheme to entice people into supporting a nascent blockchain-based currency for the benefit of a few people at the top, but what do I know? NOTHING.

• NYPL Emoji: Simple, lovely, clever twitter bot – you tweet at it with an emoji, it responds with a work from the New York Public Library which ‘matches’ that emoji. Simple, but such a smart/cute way of opening up archive content on Twitter in a frivolous way. Take a moment to go through its replies, and marvel at how subtly well-made this is; whoever did the tagging here has done an excellent job.

• Fake Flag: I love this – take any world nation’s flag and mash it up with the design elements of the flags of any other nation to create your very own bastard-nation hybrid symbol. Any of you married to / in relationships with people from a foreign land, I suggest you spend a morning together making your very own hybrid national emblem and then spamming the fcuk out of it on Facebook, along with possibly an invented name for your new country, in a heartwarming demonstration of your love and a slightly terrifying example of your inherent megalomania.

HOW ABOUT AN ECLECTICALLY WEIRD MIX BY THE BLOKE FROM CABARET VOLTAIRE? YES? OK!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS PERHAPS HANDING OVER CONTROL OF THE COUNTRY TO THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE RUN THE CYCLING, PT.2:

• Verifly: On-demand drone insurance. Yes, fine, scoff all you like, but I think this is a great idea; fire up the app, tell it where you are and where you’ll be flying, and it offers you an on-the-spot quote for insurance covering you if, say, your drone plummets from the sky and its rotor blades carve interesting patterns into someone’s skull. US-only, I think, so AXA et al have about a month to rip this off before some pesky startup does it. RUN, INSURANCE BEHEMOTHS!

• Smartshot: Yes, fine, there’s nothing exciting about a Chrome extension that’s really good at letting you clip and annotate and easily share screencaps, but it’s USEFUL, OK?

• Icon8: You know Prisma? OF COURSE YOU DO. This is basically Prisma but as a Messenger bot – give it a photo and then select one of several filters to fcuk with said picture in visually interesting ways. Not groundbreaking per se, but a good example of how to create a simple, fun, bot interface from existing tech – this stuff is EASY AND FUN.

• Search Photos By Colour: Except that description, lifted from the site, sort of does it a disservice really. It’s not just about plugging in a shade and getting a bunch of stock photos featuring said shade back; this, far more cleverly, lets you do some scrawling to suggest where in an image you want said colours to be, and then pulls photos with a similar set of colour blocks. You can probably do something VERY clever with this sort of thing – I rather like the idea of a ‘find and replace images in news stories with images which have a similar colourblock profile for potential comedy effect’-type thing, but YOU think about it and see what you can come up with. No, go on, put some fcuking effort in for a change.

• GoGo Stand: Smart little wallet-sized smartphone stand, which would make some slightly less rubbish than usual branded swag for the right company, maybe.

• Morbotron: An awesome site which collects a truly mind-flayingly large collection of gifs and clips from Futurama into a searchable database, which is some sort of crazy labour of love and what, in the future, will exist for every single TV show in the world so that as a species we can communicate solely in perfectly-chosen gifs from each and every single Big Brother ever screened (think Newspeak was frightening? THINK AGAIN).

• Consume Pop Culture: Excellent-if-bleak artistic representations of contemporary pop culture by artist Hal Hefner. Available to buy, some of these, though not really sure what your flat would look like with some of this on the walls (on reflection, actually, like a Supreme store; your mileage may vary).

• Slow Dance: Another Kickstarter, this time for a lovely little art project which is effectively a photo frame which isn’t in fact a photo frame; instead, slow motion encourages you to put a small, light object (a feather, a flower, etc) into the frame, which object gets gently set in very, very slow motion. Which is wanky as you like, but also sort of great imho.

• 10k Apart: One for the coders amongst you – there are PRIZES on offer here for the best and ‘most compelling’ (no, me neither) website which can be built in less than 10kb and without using Javascript. Obviously I can’t code for toffee, but this strikes me as an interesting creative challenge and a pretty fcuking tricky one to boot. NB – if any of you end up entering and winning this as a result of seeing it in Curios, a courtesy bottle of Casillero is always appreciated.

• NES On Hololense: The latest in the line of ‘oh, wow, blimey, this Hololense stuff, eh?’ videos showcasing the most amazing future tech which noone has seemingly actually seen in action yet. Ever imagined what it would be like to play Super Mario in some sort of weird 3d floating projection in your living room? It would be like this, apparently. This is SO MENTAL AND FUTURE I have no words.

• Soundswap: A service which lets users record footage of themselves playing a musical instrument and then share it with ‘professional music teachers’ who will offer feedback and critique on your technique, etc. Lovely idea, and I really like their use of a faux-messenger interface as the explainer tool on the site.

• 7am-7pm: A photoproject which takes photographs of people at 7am when they rise and again at 7pm, presenting contrasting pictures illustrating the toll the day takes. There’s a pretty obvious lift for an ad campaign for a series of brands here which I’m not going to patronise you by explaining further because I really believe you can get there yourselves, go on!

• A Good Book: A supersimple site/project which collects photos of books which have a particularly strong design aesthetic. Literally nothing else – if you like book / catalogue design, you will REALLY like this, but if not then you’ll probably want to skip to the next one which is funny and stuff (Jesus, philistines).

• Bulwer Lytton 2016: Another year, another selection of winners of the annual Bulmer-Lytton contest which annually seeks out the worst imagined first lines from nonexistant novels. So many to love in here – my personal favourite from the 2016 selection is the following gem: “She walked toward me with her high heels clacking like an out-of-balance ceiling fan set on low, smiling as though about to spit pus from a dental abscess, and I knew right away that she was going to leave me feeling like I had used a wood rasp to cure my hemorrhoids.” Who wouldn’t read the sh1t out of that? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO.

• Inflorescence City: I’m not 100% sure what this is, as the site’s got next to nothing by way of explanation, but it seems to be a couple of collections of digitally/ algorithmically created text/image art – oh, no, hang on, here’s the description which actually makes the whole thing make total sense; what a cool project: “this project is by katie rose pipkin and loren schmidt in collaboration with various algorithms and code snippets. the publication is generated live using a variety of different approaches. each time you refresh your browser, it will rewrite itself. the illustrations are visual mirrors of the text: as the document is written, sections of the document are passed to a program which translates them into visual form.” Take a look, it’s rather cool in a strange, otherworldly sort of fashion.

• The Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Amazing piece of old school spykit, this – the CIA’s very own field operative’s guide to messing up a supply chain from the inside. Contains all sorts of amazing tips on how to disrupt your workplace, many of which are weirdly applicable to us as 21stC wageslaves; the section on white collar stuff is particularly illuminating. “Insist on the written delivery of orders”, say the CIA, predicting the organsiation-destroying power of the phrase “can I just have that in an email” a full 30 years in advance of the mass-uptake of electronic communications.

• Funklet: A great selection of drum parts from funk and soul tracks, each with a playalong set of tabs and (and this is the fun bit) the ability to change the BPM of the drum track, which lets you hear the majesty of I Feel Good whacked up to 180 BPM (seriously, try these out, they all sound AMAZING at fast speeds and will make you feel temporarily like some sort of genius music producer).

• Mousetube: I think this exists for the animal testing community, which makes it A Bad Thing, but equally it’s a site which collects mouse sounds in one place, which is sort of weirdly, brilliantly odd. No idea WHAT you would use this for, but there’s got to be some application – maybe to drive your housemates slowly mad in fear of an invisible rodent infestation or similar.

• Haylo: Is this a joke? I went to Catholic school as a kid (Italian, innit; left me with a healthy agnosticism and an almost fetishistic penchant for high church incense, along with the uniquely helpful attitude towards authority figures my employers continue to enjoy to this day) and I was never under the impression that cumulative prayer was a ‘thing’, but it’s not like I was paying that much attention to be honest. Haylo (NICE NAME GUYS!) is basically like Craigslist for prayers – you tell the app what you want other people to pray for you about, and then…er…people pray, I guess. No details on whether there’s a Reddit-style up/downvote system for prayer requests, but I REALLY hope there is.

• Marine Traffic: You’d think that there would be few things more tedious than watching all the world’s ships move slowly around the world in realtime, and yet (whilst it’s noone’s idea of high-octane entertainment, let’s be clear) this is so soothing I can’t quite describe it.

• NouTube: Horrifyingly addictive and compelling site which, each time you refresh it, presents you with the newest video it can find from YouTube – no other criteria, just the freshest video content from…somewhere. This is one of the most incredible tools I’ve ever seen for showcasing the baffling range of stuff posted on there every second; since I started writing this entry, I’ve hit refresh three times and seen a GTAV livestream, some baffling Japanese mood video, and some homemade middle-eastern pop, and frankly I’d be quite prepared to sack off the rest of this newsletter in favour of watching more of those were it not for my legions of adoring reade…ah, yes.

• Someone’s Making A Real-world Pokeball Controller: For those of you still riding the Pokemon hype train, this looks like it would make the game totally unplayable, and make any user look like penis, but I’m guessing the Pokefandom couldn’t give a flying one.

• Tony Greenhand: I’ve featured some pretty insane joint building on here before, but I think Tony Greenhand may well take the (hash) biscuit; these…I mean, I hesitate to use the word ‘spliffs’ here, maybe combustible sculptures is more apposite, but they’re just crazy. MARKETING FOLK! Get him to make you a joint in the shape of YOUR PRODUCT for stoner-friendly competition swag!

• Permanent Records: Each day in August, a different tattoo design is being posted on here by a different artist, each with an accompanying song. Lovely work, lovely idea.

• You As A Star Wars Figure: You know someone who would REALLY like to be immortalised as a 3d-printed Stormtrooper? You think they’re worth spending about £1800 on? GREAT, as that’s what this will cost you. Frankly INSANE given that you could just hire a stormtrooper costume and then go to A N Other 3d printing shop and get the same thing done for a fraction of the price, but WEVS.

• Cronzy: Do you remember that pen on Kickstarter? The one which promised to be able to capture any colour in nature and instantly mix ink to match that colour, so you could pluck hues and palettes from thin air and draw with them on the fly? Remember how it turned out to be total bollocks? Well LOOKY HERE, there’s a new version! No information whatsoever as to whether this is any less vaporwareish than that one was, but maybe hold on to your readies until this is a little further down the line, eh? Still looks like absolute witchcraft to me, this.

• Dicklatte: Whoever’s running this Instagram has a simple but clear mission – to take photographs of penises drawn in coffee foam. That mission is, so far, proving a resounding success.

• Hikea: I stumbled across the first video in this series the other week, but it now appears that it’s a series of some sort – Hikea is a series of videos of people on various drugs (so far acid and mushrooms) attempting to assemble IKEA furnishings; the amount of joy you get from this will entirely depend on how funny you find it to watch other people laughing like idiots whilst boxed out of their trees on hallucinogens; expect this to spark a slew of copycat series, though, as people attempt to get some short-term fame from, say, popping to Homebase on PCP (that I’d actually quite like to see, at least until it descended into snuff).

• Picture This Clothing: Your kids are GREAT! You know what’s especiallly great? Their artwork! So much so that you can now have it made into clothing that your kids can then wear, inflicting their unique aesthetic sensibilities on the wider world rather than just your kitchen. The resultant clothes on show are as shonky and twee as you’d expect; though now I think of it I rather like the idea of this being used as punishment “You call that a drawing? THAT??? Let’s see how proud of it you are when you’re forced to wear it as a dress and everyone mocks you, eh?” Christ, I must never breed.

• Wikiverse: This reminds me so, so much of No Man’s Sky in a weird way – this is Wikipedia presented as an explorable galaxy of topics and the relationshsips between them, and it’s just sort of dreamily wonderful to navigate and explore. It’s all pretty beta, and rather confusing, and totally useless in terms of actually finding anything out, but it’s also BEAUTIFUL and dizzying and sort of glorious, all at the same time.

• Castles Made Of Castles: Intensely headfcuky little webtoy which lets you build shapes out of shapes which are the same shape as the whole shape. Look, I know that that makes no sense but just click the link and you’ll get it soon enough. Quickly becomes mindbending and a little frightening, like you’re being sucked into an infinitely recursive mirrorworld (just me? oh).

• The Seinfeld 2000: An entire series of bits and pieces from online magazine thing ‘Extremely Good Sh1t’ presented as a navigable experience inside Jerry Seinfled’s computer from around 2000. No reason at all why, just a fun thing to do. Click EVERYTHING, there’s some great stuff buried in there.

• Adult Swim Tracks 2016: Adult Swim is once again presenting a new track each week for 25 weeks, with accompanying little web animation and posters and tshirts for each; good music, good webviz stuff, and as all the tracks are downloadable it’s an excellent way to get some new music from some rather cool artists (this week’s is Earl Sweatshirt, for example, and it’s a great song).

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt1: This is both a music video and a promo for the French Yellow Pages (no, me neither), which at each point in the video lets you explore all the different artists (makeup, costume, video, etc) who were involved in its production, see their details, etc…the gimmick being that they’re all in the Yellow Pages! Really no idea how this came about, but I really like the interface and the whole project’s sort of cutely laudable.

• Clever Music Video Interactive Thing Pt2: Except on reflection it’s not actually that interactive, but hey ho. What it is, thought, is brilliantly clever – it takes the lyrics of the song and for a certain number of key phrases plugs them into Giphy to pull gifs associated with said key words and phrases and stitch them into a video, meaning that each time you watch you get an entirely different experience. I wish I had thought of this – it’s BRILLIANTLY smart and very well executed, and I very much like the song too, not least for its pithy line about having ‘cum on my jeans’. TELL IT HOW IT IS, MATE. This is excellent.

LET’S FINISH THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY DOWNTEMPO CRATE–DIGGING SET FROM ARGENTINA’S PABLO GROSSI!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Discarding Images: Seemingly infinite selection of clips from medieval manuscripts, featuring a LOT of strange animals and little devil things, which might be useful for something though I can’t in all honesty think what that might be.

• Nietzsche Ralph Wiggins: The best pop culture / philosophy mashup since the still-excellent Kierkegaardashian account.

• McMansion Hell: Exploring the peculiar stylings of the McMansion, those massive, ugly new build properties for the nouveau riche across the US which sprang up from the 90s onwards. Whoever writes this knows their architecture.

• Raven Kwok: Excellent little black and white gif animations involving geometry, generative art styles and a whole load of talent.

• Ugly Belgian Houses: Don’t think too hard about what happens within them.

• Captcha Comics: Captcha requests paired with images or used in comics to make weirdly effective gags. Some are better than others, but these are mostly pretty funny (FAINT PRAISE!).

• Critical Hand Gestures: This is WEIRD, Collecting a series of gifs of people using sign language to engage in critical discussion, this feels like I’ve stumbled across a weird academic in-joke. Beautifully, though, these gifs all seem to be available as those weird lenticular rulers which show looping animations via some sort of magic trick – for at least one of you, this is Christmas, SORTED.

• Vintage Girlie Mags: Not a Tumblr, and sort of a bit NSFW (but only a bit, honest), this is a collection of covers of bogo mags from the 50s and 60s – mags with names like ‘KNAVE’ and ‘CAVALIER’ and quite possibly ‘SERF’ and ‘OPPRESSED PAWN OF THE FEUDALIST SYSTEM’. What’s remarkable about these is quite how many of the women on the cover look quite frankly smashed on booze – is this what was considered a woman’s most alluring state half a century ago? Bit troubling, that.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• I Ate My Own Tooth: Kicking off here with a piece which is basically guaranteed to really, really freak out anyone with dental anxiety issues. So, er, be warned. The rest of you, though, this is a very funny journey of misadventure involving a tooth, its replacement, and how one deals with said replacement’s journey through the digestive tract. Enjoy!

• Sex, Lies and YouTube: Stories about the NEW STARS OF NEW MEDIA (in particular YT and Vine) being, occasionally, dreadful, predatory arseholes who abuse their position of fame in egregiously sexual manner are nothing new; this is a slightly broader look than normal at the issue, though, which raises some interesting questions about the weird effect that this sort of fame – this ultra-HD, close-up, forged-on-contact-and-personal-connection fame, far removed from the teen idol status of your Beatles and Biebers – has on those whom its visited upon. It sounds, as I’m sure I’ve said before, hideous, and there’s not really any manual orset of guidelines telling people how to cope with it.

• Meet Joanne The Scammer: Semi-companion piece to the above; Joanne the Scammer is the SO HOT RIGHT NOW alter-ego on YouTube of Branden Miller, a young gay guy in the US who invented the persona of an ultratrash thief (basically) and is now living out his 15 minutes in the internet’s field of vision. Interesting on the mechanics of this level of stardom – Joanne is a BIG DEAL in certain sections of US online culture – but also on the fact that Brandon is obviously a pretty nervous, not hugely sophisticated kid who’s navigating all this quite alone; there are several points in this where you sort of want to give him a hug and maybe make him eat some vegetables, and just sort of be his friend a bit.

• Twitter and the Troll Problem: We all know that Twitter’s got a problem with abuse – I took a quick look at the @messages field for a few of the BBC accounts this week and my days is there some material on there, and that’s just a bunch of nutters shouting at a corporation – and this Buzzfeed piece is a decent look at how that’s been allowed to happen. Perhaps the most interesting element of it, though, is the light it sheds on the extent to which Twitter’s failure to have any sort of actual corporate philosophy or overriding ethos (as opposed to Facebook, say, which whatever you think of the actual concept has always been pretty clear than ‘connect the world’ is its thing); I usually can’t stand the idea of ‘corporate philosophies’, but this is an interesting argument for their importance.

• Meet Benjamin Kickz: What were you doing at 16? If you were anything like me, you were smoking a lot of week with your mates and wondering why this wasn’t helping you get laid; if you’re like Mr Benjamin Kickz (not, you may be amazed to learn, his birth name), you were building up the largest trainer resale empire in the world. Fascinating piece of voyeurism into the world of business and branding as practiced by DJ Khaled et al – it’s not so much having a thing, it’s having a thing around the thing. ‘Boomin!’, as the kid might well say.

• Every Type Of Female Character In An Action Movie: These are depressingly spot-on, and very funny. BONUS MOVIE SEXISM – this piece, on all the gender-swapped films that the author would like to see and what they might be like, is ace.

• Why We’re Post-Fact: There have been several essays written on the post-Brexit, post-Trump, post-fact world in which we now seem to operate, where ‘truths’ are more malleable and less necessary in popular discourse than ever before; this take, in Granta, is the smartest I’ve seen to date – basically, it’s all postmodernism’s fault. So that’s ok then.

• A Brain Without Fear: This is just crazy. When you or I see something scary, we have a direct response from a particular part of our brain which causes the typical symptoms; nausea, sweaty palms, increased heartrate, etc. When insanely good free climbing nutter Alex Honnold experiences stuff that would give normal people the howling fantods he gets…nothing. Literally nothing – the bits of his brain which in normal people light up upon fear-led stimuli simply don’t register. This is a truly fascinating read about climbing and neuroscience and fear and all sorts of other things besides.

• This Is Your Life In Silicon Valley: A lovely short piece of writing, skewering the endlessly aspirational and nowhere-near-as-clever-as-it-thinks culture of the latest dotcom boom. No matter if you’re not acquainted with the culture it describes – you will recognise enough of this from general metropolitan modernity, trust me.

• Genius On Hamilton: Bear with me here – Todd Van Der Werff, a critic from Vox, wrote an almost painfully hagiographic piece on the musical Hamilton the other week, describing it as something akin to a religious experience. Then the community at Genius got hold of it, and went through annotating each and every single hyperbolic piece of purple prose with a savage hivemind pen; the resulting document is BRILLIANTLY funny, and weirdly shows the great potential for narrative storytelling inherent in the annotations medium – there’s definitely some sort of belletristic (sorry) game you could employ here if you were so minded. Anyway, read this – whether or not you know the first thing about Hamilyon, this is ace.

• On Kik and Anyonymity and Sex: Good piece by Chelsea G Summers on the beauty and pain of anonymous encounters, and how KIK works, and lots of other stuff besides; think I’ve featured her stuff on here before, but she’s a really excellent writer.

• Becoming the Chipotle of Pizza: How people are vying to turn pizza into a fast-turnaround fresh-made fast food option, in the same vein as burritos. If you have any sort of shred of love or affection for pizza, this ought to appal you (but if you’re interested in food and the business of its production and sale, this is all kinds of interesting). Still, though, I don’t care what the shape is – if the base sauce you use is fcuking barbeque, it is not pizza – it is an abomination. THIS IS CURIOS CANON.

• David’s Ankles: On Michelangelo’s David, and his fcuked ankles – also, though, on the unique status of the David in sculpture and the particular effect it has on those who see it (particularly, it must be said, Americans on European tours who seem to universally view it as the ne plus ultra of art in absolute, which frankly seems a touch hyperbolic to me – but seriously, read the comments), and (most interestingly) the history of the piece through the ages. Rather beautiful overall, if you can endure the slightly tortuous “WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN I HAD A FLORENTINE EPIPHANY” under(over)tones.

• Learning To Love In French: Lauren Collins writes about taking French lessons to fit into her new life in Switzerland, and how by so doing her relationship with her husband is brought into new light as she discovers how his language has forever shaped their communication. Beautifully written, and if either you or your partner is conducting your relationship in your second language, this is a truly essential read – it’s SO GOOD on the weirdly idiosyncratic way in which language confines expression and hence thought (the ‘word prison’, as football manager Jurgen Klopp rather beautifully calls it).

• My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton: Gloriously written personal memoir of the author’s experiences growing up queer and Southern, and how Dolly Parton’s music has soundtracked her life. Formally really interesting – the way the narrative jumps around through time is unusual in this sort of piece – and really personally affecting; this is really very good indeed, whether or not you care about Dolly.

• The Most 2016 Thing I Have Ever Read: And from the same site as the last piece comes THIS. It’s sort of hard to explain, but basically: There is a film called ‘Sausage Factory’, out now in the US, which is a crude cartoon about talking foodstuffs. It contains a character voiced by Salma Hayek – a (female identifying) taco which expresses attraction during the movie towards a similarly female-identifying hot dog. This film was reviewed on the LGBTQI-interest website Autostraddle. People found the review ‘problematic’ and complained. This is the Autostraddle editor’s apology. Look, Web Curios is not about to get into discussions of privilege and ownership and offence as, frankly, I don’t care enough about this stuff to deal with the rage. But can we just take a moment to acknowledge that RIGHT NOW, we live in a world in which the following sentences can be written without any sort of apparent irony: “We heard from readers who questioned the consent of the sexual encounter between the taco and the hot dog bun”. and “I was blinded by my own whiteness existing inside a system of white supremacy.” IT’S A FCUKING STUPID ANIMATED FILM ABOUT TALKING FOOD HAVING SEX WITH OTHER TALKING FOOD! I mean, I get the whole ‘apres moi le deluge’ thing, and obviously bad intentioned bad stuff is bad regardless of context, but really?

• Why Am I So Fat?: This essay, by comedian Sarah Benincasa responding to a question online, is probably the best ‘FCUK YOU TROLLS’ response I have ever read, ever. Read this and LOL, and then do a small applause as she totally deserves it – this is actually laugh-out-loud brilliant.

• Hanging with the Mensans: What’s it like visiting a convention of the super-clever – not only the super clever, but the particular category of the super clever who felt the need to have their supercleverness validated by a third party organisation so that they can advertise their supercleverness to others and join an elite community of other superclever people? Sounds FUN, doesn’t it? This is a lovely – and gentle, honest – look at a Mensa convention in the US. There are some characters in here, I promise you.

• Summer Camp For Adults: US Summer Camp has a sort of mythical air to it not quite matched by any teen right of passage in the UK (other than maybe the first time you’re sick in a park from too much cider); this piece looks at the recent trend in summer camps for adults, replicating the experience except with people in their late-20s and a lot of booze. This sounds DREADFUL – not least because of the massively rapey undertones of much of the thing, but also because of the people. As the author points out in a line which you may be unsurprised to know resonated with me A LOT: “If you, like me, made friends by being sarcastic and unwilling, these are not your people. These are the people who love participating so much that they’ve made it cool.” ACTUAL SHUDDER.

• Enjoli: Finally, the best piece of the week. Enjoli is by Kristi Coulter, and is about women and drinking and sobriety, but also so much about modern living and pace and STUFF. It’s truly excellent, and will probably make you take a bit of a little look at yourself (and maybe really make you want a booze too).

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, yes, fine, this has 1.5million views, but if you’re a man and you have not yet seen this then you need to watch it NOW. A GoPro, on a HotWheels car, on a track. I appreciate that the appeal of this will be largely impossible to understand for those didn’t play with toy cars as a kid but this is basically what you were imagining in your head every time you played. ACE.

2) It’s been a while since I’ve featured a bit of musical spoken word, so let’s rectify that – this is the talented Omar Musa, with freedom, halfway between soul and hiphop and poetry, this is rather good:

3) Another week, another band I had never heard of (there are a lot of them out there, you know) – this time it’s Weyes Blood. This song absolutely blew me away – it’’s reminiscent of so many things and yet totally it’s own thing; it’s ballad and pop and folk and hymnal, and it’s totally uncool, and it’s had me mesmerised for a few days now. It’s called ‘Seven Words’:

4) This is also just a lovely slice of indiepop, with what sounds an awful lot like a young Rod Stewart on vocals. This is called ‘1000 Times’, and it’s by Hamilton Leithauser + Rostam:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! New Loyle Carner – you know how I feel about Loyle by now, he’s just BRILLIANT. This is called ‘NO CD’:

6) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,2! Now something a lot more STREET; this is from Giggs’ new album, which is excellent by the way, but the real standout on this is the guest part from Cas – it is EXCELLENT. It’s called ‘501’:

7) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,3! Last track in what’s not been a vintage week for music and videos – this, though, is the much-appreciated return of London MC Rinse, with an excellent SBTV session. It’s rare you get someone with as unique a style as this – it’s properly distinctive, and genuinely excellent, ENJOY BYE HAVE A NICE WEEKEND BYE!:

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LET’S KICK THIS OFF WITH A RATHER EXCELLENT D’N’B-FLAVOURED FIRE IN THE BOOTH!

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THE LABOUR PARTY DISCOVERING SNAPCHAT FILTERS AND REALLY ELEVATING ITS ALREADY LESS-THAN-EDIFYING LEADERSHIP FARRAGO:

• Facebook Live Video Gets (Another) Update: “MAKE MORE VIDEO ON FACEBOOK!”, screams Zuckerberg’s big blue misery factory, hurling violent sums of money at publishers everywhere until we reach the video singularity in which we all have our hands amputated and replaced by livestreaming cameras (yes, it sounds fanciful, but JUST YOU WAIT). Facebook Live Video now allows recordable streaming upto 4 hours (I simply cannot think of a use case for this, but that’s probably a failure of imagination on my part). More significantly, broadcasters (and viewers) can switch to ‘video only’ mode, which will hide comments and reactions from the livestream; probably a wise choice if you’re a brand (or not a straight, white man – thanks, internet!).

• More App-action Ads on Facebook: I was about to start this with a lame, observational “Hey, so who uses appas anymore, right? RIGHT?” riff, and then the Today programme just told me that more people are banking using apps than ever before, so what do I know (as ever, rhetorical)? Anyway, there are now a host of new ad units available on Facebook designed to target people who take actions in-app, such as purchases, or to showcase apps in more appealing fashion through Canvas, or to retarget people with app install ads after product views (so after you’ve looked at some trousers on ASOS you might be targeted with an ad suggesting you download the ASOS app, which would on-install let you directly buy the trousers you were looking at). App people, this stuff is pretty useful.

• Twitter Offers Verification For All: Except it’s obviously not for all – anyone can apply, but the much-coveted (by whom?) blue tick will remain the preserve of ‘creators and influencers’, and it will be Twitter who determines whether or not you have a sufficient enough level of fame and notoriety to warrant having your ego digitally-stroked. This is obviously part of its response to the increasing trollhorror – making it harder for online mobs to impersonate others, for example – though imho it’s not going to make a blind bit of difference and is simply going to end in a bunch of egowanking for a certain subset of webfamouses. So it goes.

• Google Lets Users Suggest Places To Add on Maps: This could be problematic if you’re a physical business. Google Maps will now let users suggest additions – places and things – from both the web and app versions; it will also allow people to submit ‘additional details’ for existing places, with a peer review-style system designed to work to approve accurate comments. Or, you know, to really screw with a business’ listing on Maps if a bunch of people want to collaborate to get inaccurate or reputationally unhelpful information added to a map. Google’s announcement on this is technically sketchy on how exactly this will work and what checks and balances are in place to prevent people messing with it too much – you’d expect there to be some – but it’s worth keeping an eye on what Maps says about your company outlets just in case.

• Draw Your Own Snapchat Filters: OH THE FUN YOU WILL BE ABLE TO HAVE. Oh, and they added Bitmoji integration too, which is nice. Actually, the filter thing has some pretty interesting creative applications, but it will mostly be used to scrawl crudely-drawn phalluses (phalli?), I’m pretty sure.

• Clinton Uses Snapchat Geofilter At RNC: It’s childish, and it’s totally playing to the peanut gallery, but it’s also reasonably smart (well, smartish) and a clever PR move. As mentioned in Curios passim, the potential for light-touch trolling of competitor brands with this tech is huge – if no football team uses this on their rivals’ ground on the first day of the season (I’m looking at you, Spurs/Arsenal/MUFC/Man City) I will be very disappointed (I won’t actually care one iota).

• Yelp Pokestop Integration: Smart from Yelp – it’s now letting users tag locations on the platform as being Pokegyms or Pokestops. Small, simple functionality which is a nice piece of reactive PR as well as being sort of useful for the 4-5% of people currently playing Pokemon GO who will still be playing it in a month’s time. The blogpost announcing it, though, is unforgivable (no really, try and read it without grinding your teeth slightly).

• Getty Endless: Lots of nice corporate webwork this week, starting with this site by Getty which beautifully demonstrates the flexibility and wide range of potential uses of its archive in this site, which collages together photos of famouses out of photos of other people, with a very slick interface and all sorts of nice bells and whistles. Click the link – it will make much more sense when you see it, honest. Sorry for the mangles prose.

• IKEA Passport Challenge: Supersmart case study from IKEA here, combining Skype integration, banner ads and some clever creative; the idea being that Skype users were served banners asking if they wanted to win a £450 holiday; if they clicked, they were given 30 seconds to find their passport and get a photo of themselves with it via their webcam, with those who managed it winning the trip. The whole idea, obviously, is designed to promote how tidy your house is with a full complement of faceless, Scandi sort-your-life-out-boxes; simple but clever.

• Netflix Mixtapes: SUCH a lovely idea. Netflix is letting users package together ‘mixes’ of films from the platform, complete with personalised description and cover image and the like, which can then be shared with other users for them to watch. Doubtless based on the ‘insight’ that ‘films can have deep emotional resonance for people’ (!), it’s a very cute service indeed, and one which I’d like to see nicked and used for iPlayer or something – imagine making a playlist of the best 6 episodes of Red Dwarf to share with a potential partner to check if you’re compatible (don’t imagine it, it’s a terribly sad idea)?

• Meet Graham: Superb PR of the week, this Australiancampaign to promote safer driving in Victoria has been everywhere thanks to its excellent CGI depiction of Graham, the terrifying monster of a man who they have dreamed up to show exactly what we’d need to look like if, as a species, we were designed to survive car smashes. The reason this has done so well is solely the CGI – if this had been cobbled together on the cheap, noone would have given anything resembling a fcuk. The accompanying site is cleverly made too, with just enough of a hint of body horror to keep you clicking round in mildly-Cronenbergian fascination.

• Responsive Lookbook: Neat little idea from Diesel – resize your browser window to show models wearing…er…some jeans and stuff contorting into different poses to demonstrate the way in which the clothes will look when you’re…er…standing on your head. Look, the interface is nice, OK?

• Tantale: I think this is the third or fourth nice piece of webwork promoting French TV I’ve featured in the past few months – well done, the French! From what I was able to tell, this is effectively some sort of French version of House of Cards (yes, a lazy description – you’ve come to expect nothing less) – this website lets you play Choose Your Own Adventure with it, using your phone as a decision-making remote while you get the high-quality FMV experience. The production values on this are high, and the control by phone is a nice way of not breaking immersion with the show you;’re watching. Obviously it’s in French, but isn’t it time you made use of that GCSE?

NEXT UP, TRY THE RECENT LATE-NIGHT, CHOPPY, ECLECTIC MIX BY GRIMES!

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE UBER-FOR-DOGPOO THING, IS OFFICIALLY DECLARING THE UNITED STATES A POST-SATIRICAL COUNTRY. PT.1:

• Pokecrew: I’m going to front-load this section with Pokecrap this week, so if that’s not your area of interest then skip the first few and you will be FINE. First up is Pokecrew, one of a series of Pokemon maps which lets you see which Pokemon are likely to be around in any given area; the nice thing about this is that it represents each with a little cartoon pokemon, meaning that the UK is basically one huge teeming mass of weird multicoloured Japanese monster oddities. Runs on audience submissions, unlike…

• PoGoMap: Programme which apparently pulls data from Pokemon GO servers to display realtime information to your phone, tablet, pc or whatever to tell you what’s nearby should you so desire.

• Pokevision: Whereas this does the same thing, pulling info from Niantic servers, except it does so in-browser with no downloads required.

• Pokemon Reviews: If you ever doubted the weird, obsessional nature of Pokemon and its status as a neverending pillar of popular culture (IT WILL NEVER FCUKING DIE), witness this stunningly labour-of-love-ish site in which its author offers entirely subjective, fanboyish ‘reviews’ of EVERY SINGLE FCUKING POKEMON EVER. Christ alone knows how many hours of work this took, or how many words are on here – I know you think this crap is long, right, but Curios has nothing on this. Quite remarkable, in every single possible sense of that word.

• The Pokemon Theme, Remixed: You want a PEAKWAVE remix of the Pokemon theme? OF COURSE YOU DO. This is actually very good indeed, regardless of your appreciation for tracking down virtual beasts.

• The Pokemon Liability Clause: Apparently there’s a clause in the Pokemon GO Ts&Cs which effectively waives your right to ever claim damages against Niantec at any point in the future (Christ knows why you’d need to, but). This page lets you send an email opting out of this clause with one click, which is probably worth doing just in case (although tbh if you get run over whilst attempting to snare a Charizard on the A106 then good luck suing them you idiot).

• Puck: No more Pokemon now, promise. Puck is a now-funded Kickstarter project and is a Bluetooth beacon for the home; effectively programmable to do whatever you like, communicate with whatever you want, and internet-enabled for all your eventual Internet-of-Things needs, if you’re techy builder-type person there is a lot of interesting potential in this, I think. It will work with Raspberry Pi, it has a lovely, simple, drag-and-drop GUI to program it, and generally looks like a pretty useful tool in the ‘teach yourself about THE MASSIVELY CONNECTED FUTURE’ panoply.

• Automicrofarm: You wait your whole life for an autonomous farming robot and then two come along in a fortnight. Following on from the one I included last week, this is Automicrofarm, an aquaponics farm for the home – it comes as a kit which you can install in your back yard (or wherever, really), comprising a pond for fish who form a sustainable ecosystem with the plants kept nearby. The idea is, to quote, “your plants are automatically watered and fertilized. The fish feed the plants. The plants clean the water for the fish. You get vegetables, fruit, nuts, beans (whatever you plant) as well as fish for your harvest.” This sounds sort of great, but it also sounds like the first step in the post-apocalyptic race for survival; I don’t imagine it’s any coincidence that this is being sold in the US – North Carolina, to be precise – a country increasingly looking like the sort of place where it might be an idea to start thinking about what to do when civilisation breaks down completely.

• Fishes: 3d scans of an absolute metric fcuktonne of fish. Included almost entirely, I’m not ashamed to admit, because the description on the page reads, simply, and succinctly, “The aim of this project is to scan ALL the fishes”, which is something I reckon we can all get behind in principle.

• Mind Drones: What do those two words put you in mind of? Might it be FLYING DRONES CONTROLLED SOLELY BY THE MIND? In which case well done you, and welcome to part n of the scifi future that is the now. Obviously this is hugely rudimentary and prototypical, but there’s a bit in the voiceover where they talk about eventually being able to control multiple units autonomously using only the power of thought which, frankly, has to be the first indication of the coming psychic robot wars which will engulf us all.

• Autocolourise B&W Pics: Interesting use of neural networks here to apply colouring to existing black and white photos. The effects come out looking, like all recoloured images, slightly retro and sepia-ish and washed out, but that’s no bad thing – I applied it to one of myself like the sickening narcissist I am, and it got my jaundiced pallor just right, so well done it.

• AI Beer: Unsurprisingly this was written up in the Standard yesterday – it is the most hipster thing I’ve seen all week. Brewed in East London, available in secret locations where men with beards and tattoos and fundamentally irresolvable self-esteem issues gather, the gimmick is that drinkers can submit feedback on any given batch of brew which then determines the nature of the next lot; the idea being that their PATENTED ALGOBOLLOCKS will create ever-improving hooch. Two problems with this – a) there’s no need for this to be AI, is there? I mean, they could just have a bloke reading the feedback and adjusting the ration of hops, barley or whatever himself; and b) based on prevalent beer-drinking trends in East London over the past few years, what they eventually end up with will be so hoppy as to basically be fizzy, alcoholic grapefruit juice.

• Language Evolution Simulator: Techy, academic and in-no-way-visually-appealing, I still rather love this. A web project which attempts to simulate the manner in which language might evolve across three separate islands based on contact, interaction and usage; you can see a scrolling realtime list of how the words are evolving and changing on the page, which is poetic and hypnotic, and some of the invented terms and strangely beautiful and just demand definitions; to whit, ‘zelere’ – perhaps that should mean ‘(adj) the quality of being simultaneously eye-catching and yet totally unmemorable, eg “Did you see the latest Kardashian photoshoot? It was totally zelere!”. Try it yourself, it’s FUN.

• Pineapple TODAY: Or, based on the email I received yesterday telling me that, due to unprecedented levels of demand, they were running 5-10 days behind schedule, Pineapple Sometime Next Week. Still, if you’d ever wanted to have someone you know receive a pineapple from you at work, this is the website for YOU. I am utterly confused why the subletting company whose idea this is thought this was a clever idea – I would love to know exactly how much time they have spent this week messing with pineapples rather than, you know, making their startup work.

• Paletteable: It’s not like there aren’t a host of palette-choosing tools out there, but this one’s got a rather lovely interface (I was going to say Tinder-like, but I got told off last week for lazy comparisons between things so NO MORE. Until I get to the poo thing later, where it’s sort of inevitable); you simply tell it whether you like or dislike a colour and it suggests others which fit with your selections. Simple, clever and surely destined to be totally ripped off by B&Q or Dulux of Farrow & Ball or somesuch decorating brand.

• The Tshirts of the Republican National Convention: You want a quick overview impression of the totally fractured nature of political discourse in the US? Take a look at these beauties, photographs of tshirts worn by people in and around the RNC in Cleveland which happened this week (see this comforting Tweet for details!), and take a moment to try and comprehend the level of absolutely insane disconnect between people and the mechanics of government which has led us to a point where this is the popular face of politics in 2016 in the self-styled greatest democracy in the world.

• Anzac Archie: This is, to my mind, a really smart use of bot technology as part of the commemoration of Anzac day. Archie is a FB Messenger bot which simulates the memories and experiences of Australian WWI hero Archie Barwick in chat form; you can talk to Archie about his life, his experiences and his view of the war in an admittedly limited but still impressive piece of interactive tech. The possibility for this stuff is huge – imagine what you could do to augment TV narratives, for example, with evolving character bots designed to create deeper backstory interactions between, say, characters in EastEnders and their fans. Very nicely done.

• Anzac Live: In fact, the whole web experience for the Anzac Anniversary this year is really rather beautifully done and worth spending a bit of time going over; some really good examples of storytelling and narrative and interactivity here, along with a nice interface. Shame it’s by NewsCorp, but you can’t have everything.  

• Split Flap Display: It sounds wrong, this, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, it’s totally SFW, I promise. This is a set of instructions on how to make one of those…er…flippy letter things, you know the ones, which look a little bit like old-school alarm clocks with displays made up of bits of plastic which flip round to display the time. Oh, Christ, this is really hard to describe; basically, just click the link and then imagine how awesome a big one of these would be, mounted somewhere, which let passers-by randomly generate phrases or words on a gigantic clicky-clacky boards. It would be very awesome, is how awesome.

• Glif: Tripod mounts for smartphones are obviously nothing new; this, though, having doubled its target on Kickstarter looks to be a pretty impressive take on the standard-issue version. If you do a lot of smartphone filming, etc, this might be worth backing.

• Beyond Pricing: Are you lucky enough to own a home, in London or anywhere else? Are you putting it on Airbnb to squeeze every last penny out of it? Do you worry sometimes that you’re not absolutely rinsing EVERY SINGLE IOTA OF VALUE from your investment? Welcome to this charming service, then, which analyses prices of comparable Airbnb properties in the vicinity of yours and tweaks the price of your listing to best reflect the rest of the market – effectively surge pricing for rentals, which is CHARMING, I’m sure you’ll agree.

• Bubble: Attempting to ‘disrupt’ babysitting, Bubble works by leveraging the Facebook Knowledge Graph to let parents select prospective sitters by rating and their degree of connection to them – so you can see whether or not you and the person you’ll be entrusting your PRECIOUS LITTLE HUMANS have any friends in common so you can send them a quick FB message to ask how likely they are to leave sex stains on your couch and neck all your Casillero in your absence.

• Bots Talking About Dance Music: Slightly weird, this – when I discovered it earlier in the week they were talking about hiphop, now it’s moved on to (what is laughably referred to as) EDM. In any case, this is a few AI bots chatting to each other about dance music and linking to playlists, and is a pretty good way of finding a wide range of different dance music mixes, etc; Christ alone knows what the parameters for the chat are, but it’s sort of weirdly mesmerising.

• Modern Brands in the Soviet Style: You want to see a bunch of 20/21C brands redesigned as though they were born in the USSR? OH GOOD!

• The Time Magazine Data Dump: No idea at all how long this will be up for, but a bunch of enterprising hackers have made available the entire archive of Time Magazine over the past century available for download. You’ll need to torrent it, but it’s a hell of a resource (if it’s still there by the time you read this).

• The London Picture Archive: Oh I LOVE this! Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery, collected and mapped to the relevant locations across the capital. Historians, welcome to the rest of your afternoon (and, if the weather doesn’t pick up, quite possibly your weekend too).

• Shop The Stolen Art: Following in the proud tradition of Accessorise and others, this week it was the turn of major international fashion retailer Zara to shamelessly and egregiously steal someone’s design for profit. This is a small attempt to redress that – this webpage collects examples of designers  whose work has been lifted by the big boys with no payment or credit, shows up the comparison and offers you the opportunity to buy the original idea rather than the sweatshop-manufactured copy, thereby supporting indie designers and giving an (infinitesimally small, but) fcuk you to THE MAN (TAKE THAT, THE MAN! What’s that? You make so much money every second that small acts of protest such as this don’t even begin to make a dent in your thick, protective carapace of cash? Oh). I think this ought to have been an official Etsy or eBay initiative, except they almost certainly have to keep the big boys sweet because collaborations and suchlike. Still.

• Demolition Day: A great collection of photos of stuff getting blown up around the world. No more, no less – weirdly therapeautic, and if you’re the sort of dreadful digitard who needs an image for a presentation to explain why digital thing X is disrupting analogue thing Y then a) this will serve your purposes; and b) I wish you nothing but ill.

• Musical Shadow Pavements: Look, I know that this is lazy, but their descrition is better than mine would be. To whit: “The installation is made of custom fabricated tiles that are integrated into the Mesa Arts Center’s pavement, and that react to the shadows of passersby by playing sounds of singing voices. Visitors to the site are welcomed by a moment of surprise and an invitation to engage with the piece, and through it, interact with other visitors and passersby. Shadows cast on different tiles trigger different voices, all singing in harmony. Length of shadow is dependant on the season, the time of day and the weather; meaning a visitor may never quite cast the same shadow twice. The sounds themselves also change with the angle of the sun, making playing with the installation a dynamic experience: entirely different for a visitor encountering it in the morning, the midday, the evening, and at night.” Steal this for your next outdoor experiential execution thingy, it’s a glorious and fun concept which the Southbank Centre should totally rip off if noone else does.

• Draw Your Own Emoji: Go on, I’m not going to judge you (although others might, if there’s any sense left in the world).

• Skylift: An art project which effectively lets people virtually Tweet from Julian Assenge’s gaff at the Ecuadorian embassy, “by broadcasting WiFi signals that exploit a smartphone’s reliance on using nearby MAC addresses for location services” (I confess to really not understand much of what that means at all, but hey ho – I do software not hardware, lads, and not even that if I’m totally honest with you here), installed at the Zoo Gallerie in Nantes. There’s got to be an interesting way in which you can use this tech, I’m sure, but I’m buggered if I can think of one at 9:04am. Sorry. Perhaps you’ll have more luck.

WHY NOT TRY THIS MIX OF PLEASANTLY UNPLEASANT, WOOZY TRAP-RNB BY ORANGE CALDERON?

THE SECTION WHICH, BETWEEN THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE UBER-FOR-DOGPOO THING, IS OFFICIALLY DECLARING THE UNITED STATES A POST-SATIRICAL COUNTRY. PT.2:

• Superfly: Want to get involved with the EXCITING WORLD OF LIVE VIDEO SHARING, but don’t want to do it with all your Facebook friends, or everyone on Twitter / Periscope, or you find Snapchat a frightening and alien primary-coloured ADD horror? Perhaps, then, you’ll like Superfly, which is basically like Whatsapp groups for live video – select your friends with whom you want to share your broadcast and there you go. Aimed at shy narcissists, I’d imagine.

• Basslet: You know that feeling when you’re at a gig or a club and you’re right in front of the speakers and your whole body just sort of resonates with the bass to the point where you might actually void yourself or be sick, and oh christ I need to sit down and drink some water and hug someone please stroke my back no my eyes are always like this honest why do you ask? Have you ever wanted to recreate that feeling in your day-to-day life? No, me neither, and yet here we are. MASSIVELY overfunded on Kickstarter, with just over two days left to go at the time of writing, Basslet is a wrist-mounted subwoofer which transfers the bass to you through your body, for use with music or games. I await with eager anticipation the first ‘I soiled myself after a 12-hour Cheetos, Mountan Dew and COD binge” reports when this ships.

• Test Your Book Smarts: Nice little quiz for bibliophiles asking you to match the title with the author. I found this hard, in part because I’m a classics-eschewing ignoramus but also because it skews American, but it’s pretty satisfying nonetheless.

• Shiftwear: Since Wilson had this idea last year, I’ve seen about half a dozen variants on the concept, proving either that he’s a visionary or, you know, the opposite. In any case, these are the most impressive of the prototypical “LED screens on trainers” designs I’ve yet seen; the screens are fully animated and full-colour, designs will eventually be available on a marketplace allowing anyone to upload and sell their own…to be honest I have a healthy degree of skepticism about whether these will ever see the light of day, but if you’re a more trusting soul than me then get involved.

• LuvByrd: A truly hideous name, this dating app is based on the idea that you might want to find someone who likes hiking as much as you do as opposed to someone with the etiolated physique of one of Wells’ Morlocks. Only in the US at the moment, but I can’t see why it couldn’t find a market over here – why don’t the Ramblers’ Association rip this off? IT WOULD BE ACE. Call it ‘Ramblove’ (actually, on reflection, really please don’t; that sounds hideous).

• Photos of Vietnam, 1969: Wonderful selection of photos, taken by draftee Lance Nix. Focusing on the downtime rather than the wartime, these are excellent.

• Johnny Slack: A collection of strange, disparate and rather lovely graphical WebGL art experiment things for you to play with.

• Dead Air Space: Would you like to make a music video for Radiohead? Of course you would, so here’s your chance. They’re offering anyone the opportunity to submit visuals for their track Dead Air Space; the closing date is 30 July, and the winning entry will be featured on their website and, one would presume, all over the rest of the web, so amateur videographers should get RIGHT ON IT.

• This Summer Bot: A Twitter bot which is constantly churning out imagined lines from the trailers to Summer blockbusters – you know, the ones where that gravelly voice sonorously intones “THIS SUMMER, JOURNEY TO A WORLD WHERE LOVE HAS NO FEAR AND FEAR KNOWS NO LIMITS” or somesuch guff (actually that one would probably work, on reflection), pulled and combined from actual lines from actual trailers. The way it autogenerates the videos for these is rather nice, aside from the output being eerily plausible.

• Mad Lads: A subReddit mocking lad culture in rather beautiful, understated fashion – highlighting all those instances where, if they took a long hard look at themselves, the lads in question aren’t being quite as mad as they think they are. Contains amazing highlights such as the CRAZY BANTS when MAD JONNO gets WRECKED and, er, really rather sensibly decides to tidy the kitchen. “YES MATE BUT HE’S WRECKED, YOU SEE”. Hm, well, yes, but everyone who went to university in the 90s almost certainly cleaned the kitchen when they left their student accommodation whilst on speed, so there’s nothing new to see here LADS.

• Low Poly Scenes: Scenes from popular films, recreated as small, low-poly animations. No description can quite do justice to how utterly, utterly lovely these are – there are nowhere near enough of them, and I would play the fcuk out of a game done in this style throughout.

• Through Your Eyes: This is a great project, giving disposable cameras to the homeless in Spartanburg, South Carolina USA, and using the resulting photos to document and raise awareness of the experience of homelessness in the area. Some of the photographs are beautiful, and all are, as you’d expect, poignant as.

• Utopian Visions of Menswear: To quote, “As a cross-cultural collaboration between British fashion stylist Ibrahim (IB) Kamara, originally from Sierra Leone, and South African photographer Kristin Lee-Moorman, ‘2026’ was conceived to challenge heteronormative attitudes to self-expression through fashion. It imagines what menswear might look like in 10 years’ time through the use of fabrics rescued from rubbish skips and thrift shops in Johannesburg and customised into new garments.“ When I’m reincarnated, I want to come back as someone cool enough and beautiful enough to dress like this.

• Ubeen: Not sure how long this is going to be available – it’s not an official Uber thing, so no idea whether they’ll be happy about this use of the API – but there’s something oddly compelling about seeing all your Uber ride data visualised and crunched. Hook the site up to your account and it will tell you how long you’ve spent Ubering, where you go most, when you go there and all that sort of STUFF. Totally pointless, other than to make you think ‘Christ, I have spent an awful lot of time sitting in cabs over the past few years’, but sort of cool nonetheless

• Pooper: So you’ve all obviously seen / read about this already this week, but it’s worth clicking on the link to explore the site in full and marvel at how it’s literally impossible to tell if this is a gag or not (Snopes says it’s real, fwiw). You know the deal – it’s Uber for the dogsh1t economy (aka the WHOLE economy ahahahazzzzzzzzz), where you can sign up to be paid in almost-certainly-tiny increments for picking up after other people’s dogs. I think my favourite (read: ‘least favourite’) bit of this is the ‘work for us’ section, which extols the virtues of being able to ‘work on your own terms’. Mate, I’m not sure whose definition of ‘your own terms’ it is that you’re using here, but in what world can you imagine someone operating with complete autonomy and economic freedom of choice actively choose to pick up the dog eggs of those wealthier than them in exchange for an income which will almost certainly equate to far less than minimum wage when factored hourly? Well quite.

• Turn URLs Into Emoji Links: I have literally no idea whatsoever what the point of this is or why it exists, but EVERYONE LOVES EMOJI, RIGHT? Christ.

• Vinylify: This, though, is EXCELLENT and should be snapped up by a big player ASAP for cool kudos points. Vinylify lets you upload a bunch of tracks, create some cover art for your compilation, and then have a bespoke dubplate cut JUST FOR YOU (or whoever the intended recipient is). Obviously the major issue here is rights – which is why, if I were Amazon or similar, I would buy the fcuk out of these people right now.

• Arkade London: This week’s ‘fun-if-pointless music visualiser’ by a couple of London coders. I’m a sucker for these things.

• Southern Rail Simulator: Satire! Except I imagine that if you’re at the mercy of Southern Rail then this is not funny in the slightest. HEY HO!

LAST UP FOR THE MIXES, REVEL IN THIS WONDERFUL COLLECTION OF DE LA SOUL SAMPLES, RARITIES AND OUTTAKES!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Architectural Models: You want a whole load of photos of architects’ models and dioramas and stuff? OF COURSE YOU DO!

• Synthetic Imagination: You know how I said ‘No more Pokemon’ up there? Yeah, I lied, sorry, but come on, this is Tumblr stuff and Pokemon is UBIQUITOUS there. Anyway, this is a fan art site collecting all sorts of interesting rendered mashed-up Pokemon characters which I confess to not really understanding but which display quite a lot of skill so here you are.

• Rappers With Pokemon: Cartoon depictions of rappers with Pokemon. No more, no less. How can you not love Rick Ross hanging out with Snorlax (you can’t)?

• Pokemon of New York: The inevitable Pokemon vs Humans of New York mashup, this is actually properly funny and nails the HONY style perfectly. Very good, although obviously a passing knowledge of the Pokeverse (I am so sorry) will amplify your enjoyment.

• Ladies By Ladies: Not a Tumblr, but I don’t care and nor do you, this collects artistic representations of women by women. Wide range of styles and subjects and artists here; occasional nudity, but, you know, ART.

• Mattis Dovier: Excellent, sinister black and white pixel art animations and gifs with a seriously rather dark dystopian techbodyhorror subtext. Really very, very good.

• My Lovely Cars: Photos of old sports cars, mostly from the 70s/80s, which are obviously a niche interest but which I know my editor will get disproportionately excited by. These are for YOU, Paul. Bonus points for the autoplay music on there which is ACE.

• List Oriented: Someone who for reasons known only to them has decided to play through every game in their Steam catalogue in alphabetical order, documenting what they thing about them. Not noteworthy as a project per se, but there are far more prosey flourishes and stylistic switchups going on here than you might usually expect, which makes it worth a click if you’re a gamer.

• The Love Journals: A collection of romantic quotes and vignettes from literature; suggest if nothing else you set a different one of these as your email signatire every day just to imbue your working interactions with a mild-but-palpable sense of discomfort.

• Citilegs: A project collecting photographs of the legs of New Yorkers. Shows a wide range of VERY colourful leggings, awesome tights and footwear and a pleasingly diverse range of bodyshapes and sizes. This is going to be a book, I think, but feels like a campaign waiting to happen…

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

• The Elle Cover Takedown: This is really interesting, not just for the issues it raises around race and gender and appropriation and understanding and STUFF, but also in terms of the way in which it involves Elle taking a critical, dispassionate and in-no-way-exculpatory look at its recent cover featuring FKA Twigs and some unfortunate accompanying copy. Would that more media outlets were so open in discussing their cultural missteps.

• Jeff Bezos and World Domination: A look at the Amazon empire and the man behind it; the telling line in here for me is about Bezos not caring one iota about being liked, which struck me as analagous to that other famously-cuddly darling of the tech industry, one Mr Jobs. You want to imagine the future? Imagine being crushed under the weight of brown cardboard packaging forever.

• Unsung Heroes of Streaming: A truly fascinating piece exploring the role of human curation in the streaming wars; with Apple, Spotify and all the rest now offering some degree of human-curated playlisting service, this looks at the people who do the curation and explores how they work and how they determine what flies and what dies. When I was a kid I used to think being the person who soundtracked films and documentaries was the best gig – this is the modern-day analogue. SUCH power at the gatekeepers’ fingers, here.

• On Kawaii: ‘Kawaii’ – the Japanese concept best loosely translated as ‘cute’ – is one of the main cultural tropes we in the West all sort of know about Nipponese culture; this is an excellent piece looking at what the term means, what it defines, and the role it plays in a culture where face (and facades) are of constant importance.

• My Dad Harold Ramis: Amidst this week’s instalment of the liberal/alt-right culture wars, it’s rather nice to read a piece about Ghostbuster’s that not hysterical. This, by Harold Ramis’ daughter Violet Ramis Steel, talking about her memoriesof the film as a child and her thoughts and feelings around having such an integral part of her childhood and her upbringing and, to an extent, her familial identity, reimagined. SPOILER: she doesn’t, you may be amazed to know, make any claims at all about her CHILDHOOD BEING RUINED BY SJWS AND FEMINAZIS. Whodathunkit?

• The Best Time I Pretended Not To Have Heard Of Slavoj Zizek: I read this and thought it was GREAT, and then I have a horrible moment of realisation that I have probably been this bloke at least once in my life. Hey ho. Anyway, this is a great essay about the joy in pretending to intellectual or cultural obsessives that you simply have no idea who/what their favourite hobby horse or quotable intellectual is. Try it yourself, it’s genuinely great.

• Zadie Smith on Brexit: The ever-excellent Smith gives her view on Brexit – particularly good in terms of its self-awareness of the oddity and the lack of representativeness of the London liberal bubble, and the uniformity of discourse, and the way in which despite the City’s diversity we (meaning those born/raised here) are in many ways more insulated from the realities of the movements of people than people elsewhere in the UK where immigration may be numerically less of an issue. Smart, smart writing.

• Lanchester on Brexit: This, though, is the best thing I’ve read about the whole sorry mess to date. Lanchester on form is blisteringly good, and this from the latest LRB is smart and bitter and ANGRY and all of the good things; it’s full of quotable lines, this one in particular: “We’re used to political analysis based on class, not least because Britain’s political system is arranged around two political parties whose fundamental orientations are around class. What strikes you if you travel to different parts of the country, though, is that the primary reality of modern Britain is not so much class as geography. Geography is destiny. And for much of the country, not a happy destiny.” You really ought to read this.

• Hotdogs In Zion: You ever wondered what it would be like to visit a evangelical Christian theme park? Wonder no more! It sounds MENTAL, particularly the Jesus vs Satan boxing match (no, really) which I was sadly unable to find video evidence of.

• The Accidental Chinese Movie Star: This is ODD – another despatch from the weird frontier of Chinese cinema, telling the story of an American guy who’s found an unexpected degree of fame as a filmsrat in China. For those of you who read the piece a few months back about that massively overbudget delaed Chinese fantasy epic, this is an excellent companion piece.

• The Encyclopaedia of Matt Damon: Ordinarily I don’t ever see famouses and think “I’d like to be friends with you” (much, I am sure, to their chagrin), but reading this hagiography of Matt Damon by the rest of the Hollywood A-List I did get a bit of ‘I wish you were my mates’ envy. Fcuk knows what we’d talk about, but maybe they’d just let me sit in the corner and pretend they liked me. This is a sort of oral history of everyone’s pick for ‘nicest man in the business’, and much as I profess not to care about famouses this is a genuinely interesting – and funny – read.

• Big Sam – England’s Brexit Saviour: Joel Golby goes in on Big Sam’s appointment as England boss; as usual, this is excellent, and the image of him and Bruce wrestling for the job is genuinely one of the funniest most awful things my mind’s eye has had to see all year.

• The Tamir Rice Story: You may not remember the exact case of Tamir Rice amongst all the other young black men killed by police who hit the headlines in the past 24 months; he was the kid who was shot for having a toy gun in public, and this is the story of how the US judicial system did everything in its power to ensure the officers responsible for his killing were never prosecuted. You want a chilling portrayal of exactly what ‘justice’ means when you have the full force of the state arrayed against you, this is it – bleak, bleak, bleak stuff. Let’s be clear about this, again – this, amongst other reasons, is why you can fcuk right off with your ‘All Lives Matter’ rhetoric.

• The Work of a Hospice Nurse: If you’re my age (late 30s, in case you were asking), you’ve probably seen a few dead people by now, or people in the late stages of death; you’ve seen bodies looking like skeletons dipped in tallow with sunken eyes and vanishing wisps of hair and you’ve known that you are watching someone decaying from the inside and it’s hard. Christ alone knows how people do the job of end-of-life care; this is a portrait of some of those who do. I found this quite hard to read in places, but if you can get through it then it’s sort of beautiful. Should you be minded to do so, the Trinity Hospice is a nice place to donate money to, FYI.

• How The Haters Made Trump: Each week I tell myself that I’;m going to avoid the Trump thinkpieces, and every week I come across a better one – sorry for the overkill, but this is another excellent dissection of how we got to this preposterous point; McKay Coppins takes us through the journey of Trump, from spurned, ridiculed Republican hanger-on in 2012 to his crowning at the RNC last night. This is the best account of the insanely unlikely rise, shot through with the thesis that the whole exercise is an example of an insecure man waving his dick at everyone who’s mocked and doubted him and who, should the American electorate give him the chance, will ram their mockery back down their throats so far that they prolapse. Which will be nice.

• A Jackass Got Booted From Twitter: It’s quite odd to think that 4 years ago when I was working on the comms for No.10’s Tech City initiative Milo was just an oddity, an irritant on the fringes of UK tech journalism; someone who made my life a professional misery on a daily basis and who I would have happily punched were I not a total wimp with the muscletone of an elastic band. Everyone had Milo stories – some funny, some angry, some pretty unpleasant regarding his (even then) pitbull-like unwillingness to let go once he’d started savaging your leg. He ruined a couple of people I know’s lives, at least temporarily, and when he bankrupted the Kernel we sort of thought he’d gone away. Then Gamergate happened, he saw an opportunity, and, well, here we are. This piece is a good takedown of why everyone saying “Oh, no, but freedom of speech” can frankly do one – my line on this is that yes, you might have the right to say whatever you like, but as soon as you lose the ability to determine when it is not appropriate or OK to exercise that right then you pretty much abnegate it. There is never, ever an excuse for being a cnut just because you think it’s fun. This isn’t about freedom of speech, it’s about curtailing the unpleasant power of an unmerited bully pulpit; Twitter is late to this, their response is inadequate, and Milo will obviously be back in some form or another soon, but the principle maintains.

• Laurie on Milo: Same topic, different take – Laurie Pennie was with Mr Y when news of his Twitter ban broke; this is her take on being in the belly of the beast. This is pretty depressing on many levels, but she totally nails it; in particular her line about being unable to best him in debate, because she cares. The ultimate superpower of the true troll is simply not giving one; not caring makes them untouchable.

• Unclench Your Yoni: Finally, after all the bile, some light relief – journey with Harpers Bazaar to what they call ‘The Chicest Cult in America’, to discover a world of expensive holistic therapies and goddess worship and yoni cleansing and…well, if you find the Paltrow/Goop-schtick unbearable, you will love (read: really, really hate) this.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1)First up, the best animation involving iron filings and ferrofluid you will ever see. This needs to be co-opted for an ad or an ident soon, it is GORGEOUS (if very short). It’s called, unsurprisingly, ‘Ferro’:

2) Vertical video is being used in some wonderfully creative ways at the moment – this, by the BBC’s Media Action department, is just brilliant. Simple, but does a truly awesome job of explaining why a smartphone is the best single object a refugee can have at their disposal. You need to watch this on a phone – please do, it’s GREAT:

3) Video of NYC, neural networked and looking gorgeous. BONUS: Here’s one of China, done in the oh-so-now Prisma app:

4) What with all the Japanese, I have no idea whatsoever what the song is called or who the artist is, but the video, done in sort of 90s-style Another World-ish pixellated animation, is GORGEOUS and the song’s not bad either in a chiptune sort of way. WATCH IT NOW:

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT.1! This is a Fire In The Booth (coming thick and fast at the moment, the good ones) featuring perennial Curios favourite Mange St Hilare, Rapid, Scorcher and a host of other grime MCs – it’s a promo for some UK urban gangster flick or somesuch, but ignore that (unless that sort of thing’s your cup of tea) and instead enjoy nearly 30 minutes of pretty awesome MCing:

6) UK HIPHOP CORNER PT,2! So much grime is all screwfaced, with videos featuring people looking all ANGRY and surly; this, by Paper Aero Planes, is pretty much the opposite  – LOOK HOW MUCH FUN THEY ARE HAVING! Seemingly recorded in someone’s hallway with a pretty refreshed crew, this is just a lot of fun (also, great track):

7) A touch of contrast now – this is called Rae Spoon and the song’s called ‘I Hear Them Calling’, and the video’s really rather fun with a SERIOUS MESSAGE:

8) Finally this week, probably the best marketing for a digital agency I have ever seen. This is a video promoting the services of #1 Best Boy, and it’s called HELP ME. ENJOY AND SEE YOU SOON, BYE!

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

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!!!:

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