By Brian Skerry

LET’S START THE MUSIC WITH THE NEW ALBUM BY TYLER THE CREATOR!

THE SECTION WHICH IS WONDERING AT WHAT POINT FACEBOOK WILL RUN OUT OF WILLING FLESHSACKS TO SQUEEZE MONEY OUT OF: 

Section 1

• The Facebook Live 360 Programme!: To say that this is a ‘slow’ ‘news’ week is an understatement – thus it is that this announcement, about a bunch of camera gear and software which is now OFFICIALLY COMPATIBLE with Facebook’s ability to stream 360 video live, sits at the top of the pseudo-news section. It is what it is. Look, if you work in BIG CONTENT this might actually be quite useful so, you know, pipe down. 
• Facebook Lets Users Pinch To Zoom Pictures In-Feed: Oh God, this is desperate. Still, the fact that FB users can now pinch-to-zoom photos in the feed rather than having to open the individual post in question may well be of interest to…er…some of you, possibly. FFS, dullards, just THINK of the exciting Easter Eggs you can now hide in your EXCITING BRANDED PHOTOGRAPHY, rewarding those users with the curiosity and nous to zoom in. Use your fcuking imaginations. 
• LinkedIn Offers Web Visit Demographic Information: You know it’s slow when nobody’s favourite social network, LinkedIn, features so prominently in this section. Who actually spends time on LinkedIn? Who? This is possibly unfair, but all I can imagine is pinch-faced middle-managers, sitting in service station laybys receiving desultory oral sex whilst feverishly punching out a thought leadership screed as they limp towards a hiccough-like climax. But, er, maybe that’s just me. Anyhow, according to this pretty flimsy report this service is soon going to be available to any and all LinkedIn users with a Campaign Manager account – it will let you plug in some LI analytics software to your website and track information about the professional status of your traffic, presuming seid traffic is logged into LinkedIn when they visit, which is potentially very useful indeed. 
• Google To Start Autoplaying Video In Search Results: At the moment this is only for film trailers and ads, as far as I can tell, but it’s obviously going to roll out more widely and is yet another reason to keep having those tedious ‘no, really, subtitles are important you fcuking dullard’ conversation with everyone you work with. 
• eBay Set To Launch Visual Search: I’m really struggling here; I mean, what does one say about this? Look, it’s happening, it’s great. rejoice, etc.
• Adopt A Seat: This is quite cute, and if you are a certain type of person or are looking to make a certain type of person very happy then this might be right up your street. This is a fundraising campaign for the Paris Opera which lets people sponsor seats in the House; you can wander around a 3d representation of the Opera House, explore its history and, of course, sponsor a few seats for a few grand each. Which, to be honest, is a small price to pay for knowing that a seat at the heart of traditional Parisian high culture is forever called Seaty McSeatface, eh? EH? BANTZ! OPERABANTZ! Christ.
• Park Smart: DATA! DATA WILL SAVE US ALL! I can’t remember if I’ve said this on here before or not – I mean, it’s likely, I’m nothing if not predictably repetitious – but I am sick to the back teeth of people whipping themselves up into a frothy frenzy about DATA. “DATA!”, they cry, eyes rolling back in their heads as they frot at themselves with ceaselessly-counting digits, “DATA! IT IS THE NEW OIL!”. Which is actually truer than they think, what with the fact that it’s messy, dirty and, unless cleaned up and refined, frankly something of a hazard. PITHY, EH?! Oh, please yourselves. Anyhow, this is the Co-Op delivering some VALUE thanks to DATA – using publicly available crime data to show people where in a particular town or city is safe to park. Which is a nice gimmick, although any car thief worth their salt will also be looking at this and thereby targeting those areas marked as ‘safe as houses’, obviously. SEE? DATA IS FALLIBLE. Fcuk’s sake. 
• Stop Overfishing: What, do you think, is the BEST way for us to stop the terrible problem of overfishing? Petitions, perhaps? A concerted lobbying effort? Protests and boycotts and the like? Or perhaps a nicely-rendered website featuring a bunch of little fish, which you can add to with a few clicks so as to set another little CG fish aswim in the virtual ocean, with your name attached to it? Yes, that’s right, the website! I mean, WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?! Well done on getting Chris Hemsworth to lend his name to a fish, but, seriously, does anyone really think that at a certain point one of the world’s decision makers is going to be confronted by an aide saying in hushed tones “Ma’am, the people have spoken – they have created over 10,000 virtual fish in protest at overfishing, and EVEN CHRIS HEMSWORTH is involved” and the decision-maker will blanche and call off the trawlers and there will be some sort of joyous piscine undersea ball in celebration? Well, no. Seriously, what is wrong with an ’email your Eurocrat about this’ button? Jesus. 
• Savor.Wavs: Musicians cannot stay cool forever. Except maybe Prince, and I’m sure even he had some wobbles in the early 2000s, everyone does something stupid at some point – I mean, even Bowie showed the world his coke sweats (and not for the first time) and dad dancing in ‘Dancing In The Streets’. So it came to pass that RZA of the Wu lost the last vestiges of credibility as he acted as ‘musical consultant’ or somesuch for this promo for purveyor of mediocre Tex Mex sludge Chipotle. You, the user, pick the ingredients you want in your carb-missile, and the site spits out some muzak seemingly tied to your selections, all based on samples produced by RZA. It all sounds about as exciting as Chipotle tastes, and makes you think that the 36 Chambers was a very, very long time ago. 

By Lars Stieger

HAVE THIS SPOTIFY MIX OF NEW TRACKS FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT HUH MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL FEELING THE AFTEREFFECTS OF LAST WEEK AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT IS OFFICIALLY TOO OLD TO GO TO TECHNO FESTIVALS, PT.1: 

Section 2

• Tokenize: I know that ‘Magic Smart Rings’ (that aren’t, obviously, magic at all) aren’t a new thing, but this one looks rather shiny if you’re into wearable stuff. It’s got a fingerprint sensor built-in to lock/unlock it when you put it on / take it off, you can use it for loads of different things, and, interestingly, it already seems to have support from payments providers (VISA, Mastercard) and various mass transit authorities worldwide. Obviously having said that it will now turn out to be incompatible with London, but if you fancy swiping into the Sao Paolo metro system with a stylish swipe of a ring then this might be up your street. Seemingly ‘coming in 2018’, though obviously with this sort of thing there is no guarantee whatsoever that your money won’t just vanish into some sort of hopeful tech oubliette.
• Brandless: WHAT IS A BRAND? Actually, no, on reflection I simply don’t care, and I care even less about your over-intellectualised attempt  to give meaning to your professional existence. Ostensibly, the people behind Brandless don’t care either – it’s a new service offering low-cost, purportedly high-quality, ethical goods (household stuff and food at the moment), all delivered in their very own unbranded branding and, they claim, cheaper as a result of avoiding the ‘brand premium’ which you pay on stuff with a recognisable logo. Which is all fine and interesting and nice, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’ve, er, put an awful lot of work into the brand here. You’re, er, possibly trying a little hard here, guys. Also, is $3 for some cotton wool balls cheap? It’s not, is it? LIES!
• Poorly Drawn Cats: A Twitter account showcasing simple line drawings of cats, done poorly. Look, it doesn’t sound like much, but the one of the cat on top of the wardrobe is legitimately one of the best things I’ve seen in an otherwise dark and frightening 2017. These cats are almost certainly better than yours, whatever you might think of it – and yes, I am talking to YOU.
• Spotify Me: There will come a point sometime in the future when Spotify runs out of gimmicks it can do with your listening data – I mean, come on, without somehow linking it to your Fitbit or your bowel movements or something, I’m struggling to see what else they can come up with. Til then, though, they’ll keep on punting out stuff like this – which takes all your listening info and GRAPHS IT and stuff, so you can see pretty pictoral representations of exactly how pedestrian and predictable your music taste is, and that, whatever you might say to people you meet on Tinder, the Chainsmokers are actually your favourite artists of all time. Stare into the (musical) abyss, watch it stare back at you. 
• Slofile: Oh Slack! It’s GREAT, isn’t it? Turning your entire working day into one huge, multithreaded group chat! Making mundane, workaday interactions with colleagues feel less like, well, work, and more like, y’know, just hanging out on IM with your besties! All the pings! All the notifications! That terrifying rolling wall of text and updates and the feeling that when you leave your desk for 20 minutes to go to a meeting or if you shut the window to, heaven forfend, do some actual work and then you reopen it and oh god there is so much there, so many words and they are all useless and you know that it will mostly be Effie from the design department posting those fcuking gifs and it’s probably not really worth scrolling through everything but JUST IN CASE…Yeah, SLACK! Great, isn’t it? Anyway, Slofile is a collection of public Slack channels – just IMAGINE the joy of being able to immerse yourself in Slack communities of complete strangers! They tend towards the dev/programmer-type audience, but there are also ones for writers and editors, and a very lonely one-person channel all about GoT which is just BEGGING for a pile-on. 
• Savee: Hey you! Yes you! You’re a creative, aren’t you, with your beard and your spectacles and your moleskine! You like making mood boards, don’t you, and plastering every available wall with roughly-torn pages from magazines which makes you momentarily think that you’re an art director on a proper magazine rather than a person who spends their life working on a new brand identity for a sub-brand of power tools! Sorry, not that there’s anything wrong with that. Anyway, Savee is a rather nice-looking digital moodboard tool, letting users not only clip and arrange images from anywhere on the web, but to import them from Pinterest and Tumblr, print them to reasonable quality and also ‘follow’ the moodboards of other TOP CREATIVES. Might be useful, might not – I am not a CREATIVE. 
• The Magnum Photography Award Winners 2017: Another week, another photography prize is announced, and again we get a jaw-dropping selection of photos from across the globe. Personal favourites in this selection include the macabre elephant feet and the astonishing colours of the ‘Chroma’ series, but the whole series is generally just wonderful. 
• Ten Years Ago: A really interesting idea, and the sort of thing which I imagine some of you will be kicking yourselves for not thinking of from a BRANDED CONTENT FUN perspective, this takes a bunch of websites (Amazon, CNN, the White House, etc), and with one click shows you what they looked like 10 years ago. Fascinating, particularly Amazon (no, I didn’t want a Roomba then and I still don’t want one now) and the White House – it’s incredible to think that seeing Dubya’s vacant fizzog staring back at me from the Oval Office now prompts warm feelings of almost-nostalgia. 
• Yescapa: Like Airbnb but for, er, CAMPER VANS! I mean, I have no idea at all why anyone would want to shell out the same fee as they’d pay for an actual bed in an actual house for a bunk in a malodorous diesel coffin (yes I do – DOGGING!), but just in case that’s your thing, here you are. 
• Save Snopes: A noble cause. Snopes, as you all know, is an absolutely invaluable resource, not least given its endless utility in debunking the stupid stuff that idiots you know from your schooldays say on Facebook. Or, pehaps, debunking the stupid stuff the idiot in charge of the US is saying. Anyway, the site’s having some sort of unpleasant-sounding wrangle with its old advertising provider, meaning it needs donations to stay afloat; do the right thing and chuck the poor person who runs it a few quid if you can afford it, as Snopes is a genuinely Good Thing. As an aside, I’d forgotten before writing this up what an absolute goldmine of WTFery the Snopes Hot 50 page is – listing the most popular stories on the site at any given time, some current highlights include “Criminals in the U.S. are not using burundanga-soaked business cards to incapacitate their victims” and “Two Burglars Sodomized for Five Straight Days? Reports that a ‘gay sex predator’ repeatedly assaulted two intruders who broke into his home are fake news”. We can’t let this die.
• Tom Yourself: Your chance to put your own face – or, better, that of an unsuspecting co-worker who you REALLY want to report you to HR – on a Tom of Finland drawing (disappointingly, not one of the eye-wateringly NSFW ones). You want to see what I would look like as a pencil-drawn hunk of 1960s clone beefcake? Tough, you’ll just have to imagine it. 
• Cubes: Unsexily self-describing as ‘3d Cellular Automata’, Cubes is basically like that cell game ‘Life’ but in 3d and with cubes, and while I appreciate that STILL sounds hugely unfun I promise you that you can make some REALLY cool-looking cuboid future metropolis-type structures; the way you can zoom and pan around the eventual creations makes it all feel very sci-fi to my mind, and there’s somethingf very pleasing about the maths and geometry behind all this. 
• Disney’s Magic Bench: Occasionally I stumble across incredible Disney projects and remember that the Mouse is one of the most relentlessly exploratory brands in entertainment. This is fascinating – very prototypical, fine, but as a proof-of-concept rendering of what will be it’s mesmerising. The ‘Magic Bench’ is a, er, bench, which users can sit on and which, through some clever multicamera tracking and AR gubbins which I can’t even pretend to understand, will present a 3d character to the sitting participant – said character will apparently be able to ‘know’ where you are, interact with you in rudimentary fashion and even give you the illusion of presence through inbuilt bench haptics – all with no glasses required. In about 10 years, fairground rides are going to be MENTAL. 
• Micro But Many: One man’s (as ever, it’s not going to be a woman, is it?) obsession with his collection of Micro Machines toy cars (in typical Buzzfeed fashion, let me point out that if you now have a high-speed voice screeching ‘Micro Machines come in collections of 5!’ repeatedly at you in your head, you are definitely in your late 30s), all laid out in pleasingly-shot detail on this otherwise utterly pointless webpage. Still, tiny cars!
• Grabient: Yes, I know that MOST of you don’t need a site that lets you create colour gradients and then export them as CSS, but Web Curios is ever conscious of the need to service the most niche of requirements in the hope that at least one of you fcukers will care. 
• The World Bonsai Convention: A whole page of photographs of pleasingly small trees from this year’s World Bonsai Convention, all collected on Bonsai Tonight – possibly the best new website I have discovered this week, mainly for the fact it’s been going 8 years and is obviously a total labour of love and a general peaen to the wonder of very, very small arboreal care.
• An Incredibly Satisfying Gif of Jigsaw Completion: If you are feeling a little…tense, I promise that this will help.
• Liam Foxinator: A Chrome extension which undertakes the simple-but-important task of replacing the words ‘Liam Fox’ with ‘Disgraced Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox’, in case you needed a daily reminder of the fact that he was “forced to resign from the front benches in 2011 after he was caught allowing his friend Adam Werritty to take on an unofficial and undeclared role as his adviser.” 

By Jordanna Kalman

HAVE A TECHNO MIX BY MATT SASSARI WHICH IS STILL GOOD DESPITE THE AGE THING!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL FEELING THE AFTEREFFECTS OF LAST WEEK AND HAS DECIDED THAT IT IS OFFICIALLY TOO OLD TO GO TO TECHNO FESTIVALS, PT.2:

Section 3

• The Vegetables of Lambeth County Show 2017: I was sadly unable to attend this year due to being in the recovery position in Holland, which is a genuine shame as Lambeth County Show is a WONDERFUL South London institution, the smell of weed comingling with that of frying onions, more weed and an awful lot of dung as a very diverse crowd of people get slowly battered and, inevitably, find themselves laughing uproariously at the goats (goats are hilarious). Every year they hold a vegetable sculpture competition, every year the topical entries do the rounds of the web, and every year we get to glory at seeing our politicians faces immortalised in squash. Enjoy. 
• Fireman Sam Plots: I would have watched 100% more Fireman Sam had the plots been anything like those churned out by this Twitter account. Silly, but also the plot synopses are very well-written indeed.
• The Remembrance Project: Beautiful, small stories about little lives, the Remembrance Project is being run by a New England radio station which is asking listeners to suggest people they know who have recently died whose live stories are, for whatever reason, worth archiving for posterity. There are dozens of small stories of ordinary existences, presented as little audio clips; I am a sucker for this sort of thing, fine, but there is something so gorgeous about this as a concept. I’d love to see it extended somehow; I think there’s a lovely project in here for the Alzheimer’s society, or Age Concern or something, maybe, perhaps. 
• BatBnb: My mate Dave’s brother-in-law is a professional bat rehouser; he gets paid to go into buildings before they’re redeveloped and remove the bats – humanely, I probably ought to point out, rather than with a can of turps and a box of matches. Makes being a generic media wnker look, well, a bit pedestrian really. Anyway, tangentially-related to that deadly dull non-anecdote is the BATBNB! Currently getting funded on Indiegogo, this is YOUR chance to purchase a small bat hostel which you can hang in your garden and which will keep your property happily mosquito-free. If you have mosquitos, and quite possibly only if you live in the US. Still, BAT HOTELS! 
• Accurately Titled Novels: These, collected on the Writer’s HQ Facebook Page, are rather wonderful, skewering some of the most common tropes in popular fiction. I’m a particular fan of “The Lesbian Dies At The End – Jumping on the LGBT Wagon with Predictable Disappointment”.
• TomorrowSleep: The internet of mattresses! Yes, that’s right, the unstoppable drive to connect every single fcuking object on the planet to the web continues apace, this time with a mattress which “records your sleep cycles, heart rate, breathing and body movements, and offers personalized suggestions for better sleep.” That sounds great! Except, er, there’s always the possibility that this can be hacked and that someone else could access the data about your sleeping patterns, work out when you’re least likely to wake from your optimised slumber and break in to your house to rob you blind! Fine, yes, hyperbolic, but if I’m not here to think about the worst-case scenarios then WHO ELSE WILL, EH?
• Crossing.US: I don’t imagine that there is ANYONE reading this with a desperate, burning desire to find specifically-named road intersections in the US, but should you have the surprising need to discover, say, whether there’s anywhere in America where a Bongo Lane intersects with a Hummingbird Drive (there is!) then this is the site for YOU!
• Gramfull: I can think of two uses for this site, which lets you see any Instagram photo from a public account as a full-size image and without any of the Insta platform framing around it – to steal images of others’ Instas (for which, I can attest, this works fantastically), or to perv immoderately at some particularly thirst-baiting account (couldn’t tell you). 
• Roman Roads of Britain: You want a map of Britain’s Roman roads, designed in the style of the Tube map? GREAT! 
• Penny: This is really interesting. Penny is software which has been trained to analyse a Google Maps photo image based on select criteria (green space, car parks, building height, etc) and extrapolate from that the likely land value of any area you focus on (OK, so it only works on a couple of areas of the US at the moment, but still). You can play around with the images, adding or removing land types to see what effect that has on the AI’s perception of whatthe neighbourhood’s like. Just a proof-of-concept at the moment, but I spent a few seconds thinking about where this sort of stuff ends up if you extend it semi-logically into the future, and I arrived at a furture where autonomous drone bombers determine which areas are poor enough to launch strikes on using this sort of tech and then ended up in a minor dystopian miseryspiral so, you know, I hope you do too. 
• Learn Philosophy With James Franco: Although to be honest I wouldn’t REALLY recommend it. The world’s worst polymath James Franco – much like the beatboxers seemingly in permanent residence outside Oxfiord Circus tube, proof that just because you can do something really doesn’t mean that you ought to – has decided that he’s going to DO A BIG THINK, or even a series of BIG THINKS and tackle some of the major questions lying at the heart of the human condition. Except obviously what ACTUALLY happens is that Franco and his mate sit around and ask some smarter people some sphincter-clenchingly banal questions (“What is metaphor?” asks James quizzically, wrinkling his brow and simultaneously smirking like the most punchable of stoner teens – JAMES YOU ARE TOO FCUKING OLD FOR THIS, CHRIST ALIVE) whilst a few crap animations wibble over the top. Execrable.
• //www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/sets/72157623083976781/with/4273586455/” href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/sets/72157623083976781/with/4273586455/“>MS Paint Album Covers: In the week in which MS Paint’s demise was sort of announced and then sort of retracted, enjoy this celebration of wonderful, terrible recreations of famous album covers in Paint’s…er…unique style.
• All Things Small: The web LOVES stuff in miniature, and this week I discovered that there’s a whole weird Instagram subculture based around people photographing their dolls’ houses – furnishings, decoration, the whole deal. This is obviously just photos of really, really small recreations of banal domesticity, but I CANNOT STOP LOOKING. Look! Tiny perfection!
• The Arundel Codex: Yes, fine, it’s in Latin, and yes, fine, it’s also in Da Vinci’s trademark mirrored script and so therefore entirely illegible to the naked eye, but LOOK! It’s an actual Da Vinci manuscript, digitised ad online courtesy of the British Library. You won’t understand a thing, but you will simultaneously feel marginally more intelligent just by osmosis. 
• Orii: I should really have chucked this up top with the other smart ring, shouldn’t I? Oh well. Orii is a WONDERFULLY silly idea – a smart ring which basically works as an extension of your phone, letting you take calls by PRESSING THE RING TO YOUR FACE BONES AND USING OSTEO-CONDUCTION TO LET YOU HEAR. I know that it’s sort of scifi to be able to talk to someone on the phone just by touching your ear, but equally you will look like a total tool. Swings, roundabouts. Anyway, this has smashed its target so expect to see face-touching futuremenschen segwaying past you sometime next year. 
• Princess Pricklepants: I mean, she’s no Sugar Bush Squirrel, but WELL DONE whoever curates this site dedicated to ‘hedgehog art’. Until you’ve seen Vermeer’s ‘Girl With A Pearl Earring’ recreated with a hedgehog you cannot claim to know aesthetics. This is FACT.
• Nayan Shrimali: Really impressive papercraft sculpture work and portraiture here. 
• Ivonne Carley: MORE really impressive paper art. 
• South China Morning Post Infographics Library: All of the SCMP’s graphical outputs collected in one place, which is a pretty decent resource if you’re looking for design inspiration (or if you need to be reminded, again, what an ACTUAL INFOGRAPHIC is, Jesus please will people STOP misusing the term). 
• Instead of Brexit: As we continue to rail, Canute-like, against the inevitable tide, even as our toes start to wrinkle from the near-constant lapping of the HORRORWAVES towards us, this site provides a whole heap of stats which show what might be done with the money which the whole sorry Brexit farrago is going to cost. Feel free to share this on all your pro-leave ex-schoolfriends’ timelines to keep this whole tedious us vs them debate going for as long as possible, no, please, do, I NEVER WANT TO STOP FIGHTING ABOUT BREXIT.
• Straw Camera: This is super-cool and should be stolen by a fast food chain which uses disposable drinking straws (so, er, any of them) asap – it’s an analogue camera made from 30,000+ straws, and the pictures it takes are ACE. 
• Veteranas Y Rucas: Collecting photos of 90s chicana culture from LA, this is an awesome Instagram feed for scholars of denim and STRONG eye makeup. 
• LoveFlutter Blue: What’s the BEST thing about having a blue tick on Twitter? The sense of self-importance? The fact the peons can get shadowbanned for swearing at you? The knowledge that you are SO SPECIAL that just a handful of you can start a trending topic in the UK? Nah, it’s the fact that you can now use a dating service which will pair you EXCLUSIVELY with other Blue Tick people! Want to find other self-obsessed narcissists, or just everyone ELSE who works at Buzzfeed/Vice? Go for it! Although judging by Young Journo Twitter these days, I imagine the fcuktree’s already pretty tangled.
• Know No Better: A new video from Major Lazer which does the whole ‘two videos in parallel; click to switch between them!’ thing which is now so played out that I almost didn’t include this but, well, let’s be honest, it’s pretty thin gruel this week and so I’m padding slightly. Also, the twin-track narrative is actually pretty nicely done (I particularly like the blow a kiss/give the finger’ juxtaposition over breakfast fwiw) and the song’s decent so, you know, ENJOY.
• My Most Beautiful Nightmare: A small agency called Road Ends made this; they talk about wanting to work in ‘digital poetry’, and this is a series of small, lightly animated vignettes describing and illustrating people’s dreams. I feel mean saying this, but the prose isn’t quite up to scratch – the idea behind it, though, is lovely, and there’s a really pleasing dreamlike (obvs) quality to the way it’s presented. These people are obviously talented, and I very much enjoy the concept of ‘digital poetry’ as an idea; worth keeping an eye on what they do next. 
• The Evolution of Trust: Last up in this section this week is this BRILLIANT explainer on how trust works in society, taking in the prisoner’s dilemma and lots of stuff about network interactions and things and NO WAIT COME BACK! Seriously, it’s presented BRILLIANTLY as a sort of interactive cartoon game thing, and it does such a good job of taking you through what’s some potentially rather complicated thinking in a gentle and elegant fashion. I can’t recommend this enough – it takes a little time to work through, but it is utterly charming and you will be smarter at the end then you are now, GUARANTEED. 

By Emil Gataullin

WHY NOT ENJOY THE FRANKLY INCREDIBLE SOUNDTRACK TO ‘DUNKIRK’ WITHTHE NEXT LOT OF STUFF?

The Circus of Tumblrs

• Euclase: Pretty incredible photorealistic digital portraits of people, famouses I think although I don’t recogise loads of them. I am particularly a fan of the ones of guys in massively drag-ish makeup.
• Wavegrower: Wonderful animations – geometric oscillations, hypnotic loops and all sorts of wonderful gifs. The person behind this stuff is very good indeed. Has anyone made an ad out of this sort of stuff? I feel they ought to .
• Dndoggos: A comic about, er, dogs, playing dungeons and dragons. Quite possibly the most niche thing I’ve posted on here this year, which is saying something. 
• Code Cartooning: At the intersection of code and art, there’s a whole LOAD of stuff on here from procedural animations to stuff thrown together based on weird maths patterns – I don’t pretend to understand it, but it’s quite pleasingly odd. 
• Why Do Animals Do The Thing?: This is ACE – taking animal stuff from around the web and explaining why the animals in question are doing the thing that they are doing. You will LEARN STUFF, and also see loads of pretty cool animal-related media, which frankly is more than you can probably say for your job. 

Long things which are long

• A First-hand Account of Severe Autism: Taken from the second book written by Naoki Hidishida, a young Japanese man with ever non-verbal autism, who communicates using a word grid. Remarkable, not only for the mere feat of having been written in the first place but also for the look inside an otherwise closed mind it affords us. It’s almost entirely impossible to empathise with Naoki’s condition – at least it is for me, you may be less of a solipsist – but the portrait this excerpt paints of a condition which is effectively like emotional locked-in syndrome, is quite incredible. 
• //medium.com/@monteiro/on-my-second-birthday-we-landed-on-the-moon-7e1f93cf7048” href=”https://medium.com/@monteiro/on-my-second-birthday-we-landed-on-the-moon-7e1f93cf7048“>On My Second Birthday We Landed On The Moon: Mike Monteiro recently turned 50, and wrote this essay about his experiences over 5 decades. By an American and largely about America and American history, this is nonetheless a great piece of writing taking stock of a half-century’s accumulated culture in the context of what it means to be American, an immigrant, an outsider and the rest. Very good indeed, this. 
• The Mad Cheese Scientists: This is CRAZY, particularly in the manner in which it lifts the lid on the power of BIG FOOD to shape behaviour in the US. The general point of the piece is profiling the scientists behind some of the innovations in cheese production which enable some of the more outre items on US fast food menus to exist – the impression you’re left with, though, is of the monstrous spectre of BIG BUSINESS effectively lobbying the hell out of retailers and manufacturers to compel the average American citizen to shovel more and more casein into their faces each year. The stats on increased cheese consumption per capita in here are insane, and may make you question (again) whether the US is set to be the first nation in recorded history which eliminates the bottom tier of its society by the simple, expedient measure of letting themselves eat themselves to death. Really a lot more sinister than I was expecting when I started reading it. 
• The Rise of the Insta-Restaurant: I’d naively not considered this at all, but this piece looks at how the rise of INstagrammability as a success-condition for new bars and restaurants is actively impacting the way said spaces are being designed and built; no point having low lighting and moody interiors if it’s all too dark to get you the numbers, right? I hate everything. 
• South Park Raised A Generation Of Trolls: Well, maybe. Still, this is a classic piece of pomo webjournalism, taking a possibly-too-serious look at the effect that the South Park humour style – characterised as peak troll, basically, with the now-ubiquitous ‘fcuk it man, it’s all crap, let’s mock EVERYTHING’ philosophy which is basically now the canonical tone of all online discourse ever. I think it’s that I’m a touch too old to have properly ever gotten into South Park – had it been on TV when I was 14 I imagine I would have licked it up and that this would subsequently have run truer for me – but this strikes me as a *touch* hyperbolic, but then what do I know? Nothing. I know nothing. 
• How Checkers Was Solved: I know that this sounds dull from the title – I know this, but please bear with me here. This is the story of Marion Tinsley, a true eccentric and mathematical prodigy, whose life’s work was to be the best player of checkers (draughts, to us Anglos) in history, and of the man who developed the computer programme that was to finally ‘beat’ the game. This is GREAT – a proper man vs machine obsessional battle with enmity and oddity and all sorts of other stuff besides; the sort of thing which would, I reckon, make a really good Netflix special with the right script. 
• Two Minds: The neuroscientific reasons behind the differences between male and female brains, presented in sober, scholarly-yet-readable fashion. Actual proper science, I promise, on the Stanford University website – no trolling here, honest. 
• New Rules for Making It in Hollywood: Jesus, this sounds exhausting. A series of short profiles of variou young performers looking to make it in a variety of ways in the New Hollywood (TM) – where there are a million ways to earn a living, but each of them sounds, well, sort of awful really. Special mention to the bit where they interview recently-disgraced former Disney channel ex-Vine star Jake Paul, who says something so BEAUTIFULLY stupid about his ability to teach people that racism is, y’know, bad, that it makes the whole piece for me. 
• Surviving Gamergate: A reasonably dispassionate interview with Zoe Quinn, the woman who started / got started on by (delete per your worldview) Gamergate. It’s old news now, but it’s interesting to look back at the whole thing – reading through, you’re struck not only by the truly insane level of vitriol directed at Quinn for, at worst, being a rubbish partner, but also by the way in which the tone and tactics of the scum who congregated around the movement have become sort of a de facto modus operandi for cnuts on the web. Which is nice. 
• The Internet Celebrity Summer Camp: Can YOU imagine how awful an LA-based Summer camp for kids who want to be internet famous might be? No need, just read this article. Maybe I’m just jealous of their perfect teeth and futures pregnant with untold potential (who, me?), but reading accounts of kids concerned with the growth of their personal brand at age 13 is chilling in the extreme. Seriously, the sooner we can get AI to focus on the useful stuff, like replacing ‘influencers’ with automata, the happier we’ll all be. 
• In Praise of the ‘A Bit More’ Button: A brilliant essay about toaster design but also about good design in general, and a really excellent exploration of UX for non-designer-type people. Really very clever indeed, and worth a read if you do…well…pretty much anything to be honest. 
• Sadiq Khan: I am finding that enjoy political profiles of UK figures written by foreign journalists so much more than the domestic equivalent these days. Witness this profile of the London Mayor in the New Yorker – long, involved and in-depth, it looks at Khan’s political rise, his somewhat chameleonic qualities and his response in the face of what can charitably be descrbed as a ‘challenging’ initial year in the job. It’s broadly positive but some way short of being hagiographic, with enough gentle questioning to give a wonderfully nuanced portrait. A very good piece of journalism indeed. 
• Elevator Pitches: A series of elevator pitches for films/shows/whatever by Jonathan Lethem. Wonderful, these, occasionally very funny and almost always something you would watch/read the hell out of were they to actually exist. 
• The Model in these Photos: Finally in the longreads, a short essay on The Hairpin about what it must be like being a beautiful woman in a modelling shot – just brilliant, and a great reminder that the site contains some of the best writing for / by / about women online right now. 

Moving pictures and sounds

1) First up, this is called ‘Down and Out’ and it’s by EMA and I have had this on a loop in my head all week and so frankly I’m posting it here more as an exorcism than anything else:

2) Next, this is called ‘No’ and it’s by Great Grandpa and it’s <2 minutes of Sub-Pop-style punk with a rather fetching papercraft (third time this week) video to accompany it – enjoy:

3) This is a gorgeous short – ‘Plastic Girls’ is a Korean film protesting against the sexualisation of public space in South Korea, and using the stories of future android assistants to do so. This is *so* beautifully shot:

4) It must be quite hard knowing that the first record you made is the best recordyou will ever make. Poor the DJ Shadow, then, who despite the actual impossibility of his ever making anything even half as good as ‘Endtroducing’ keeps on plugging away. I actually very much like this new one, called ‘Corridors’, but, let’s face it, it’s still not the same. Still, great video though:

5) Last up, this VERY sinister little video for ‘Two Man Gang’ by Les Big Byrd; it’s all sung in foreign so I have no idea what the track’s about – the video, though, is creepy and sexy and androgynous and ODD, and fits the outsider indiepop nature of the track perfectly. Enjoy, have fun, take care, and I love you very, very much indeed:

Web Curios is a weekly digest of all things interesting from around the web, released each Friday. Subscribe here to get it, and read some of our choice links throughout the week on the Imperica website.

Two men, inexplicably staring at a wall of packing crates, at a Dutch techno festival (photo by Fat Bob)

LET’S START THE MIXES THIS WEEK WITH THIS LOVELY SET FROM NICK INTERCHILL AT NOISILY FESTIVAL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOKE UP TO LEARN THAT, SEEMINGLY, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WERE LAST NIGHT WATCHING THIS ‘LIVE’ STREAM OF A THUNDERSTORM ON A FAKE NEWS PAGE – A THUNDERSTORM WHICH IS SO EVIDENTLY A PHOTOSHOPPED IMAGE, GIF’D AND SOUNDTRACKED AND SET TO LOOP, THAT IT MAKES ME THINK THAT WE MIGHT IN FACT HAVE CROSSED A RUBICON OF IDIOCY AND PERHAPS THIS IS THE POINT WHERE WE OUGHT TO JUST ADMIT DEFEAT AND SIT IN OUR PANTS, SCRATCHING AND BEMERDING OURSELVES AND NOT TRYING TO FIGHT THE INEXORABLE MARCH OF THE STUPID AND WRONG:

• So, That Google Newsfeed Thing: Let’s be clear and open with each other at this stage – I don’t really know how this is going to work, or what the doubtless MASSIVE implications for content discovery and SEO and publishing and stuff are, vis a vis the importance of your own domain vs FB vs whatever else. Sorry about that. Still, let’s not let that small detail stand in the way of a little bit of good, old-fashioned speculation! What Google has revealed is that, in the coming weeks, the Google homepage is going to be redesigned so as to contain newsfeed elements, with stories presented to logged-in users based on what Google perceives their interests to be in a scrolling manner NOT A MILLION MILES REMOVED from Facebook’s iconic product. The Guardian’s writeup is pretty clear in terms of how it will look/feel for users, and the Google blogposts explains how customisation will function, broadly, but obviously there is no concrete information on how the personalisation and ranking will work – obviously from all the graphics and illustrative gifs, it’s pretty clear that this is going to work in a broadly similar way to search, promoting links from trusted sources (NYT and others feature prominently); what’s very much less clear is the extent to which signals from within one’s own network will be included in the mix, how Google determines that network, and how brands are going to be encouraged to behave to maximise their opportunities to crop up. That, of course, is without even touching upon the advertising opportunities to gain top-of-feed placement for specific types / brackets of people. So, EXCITING TIMES and an excellent chance for you to dust off your SEO snakeoil in preparation for LOTS of slightly iffy selling! 
• Ads Coming To Facebook Messenger Homescreen: You may not have realised that there were parts of the Facebook ecosystem that were as yet unsullied by the commercal taint of advertising; don’t worry, though, soon there won’t be! Brands can now start to target ads at people as they open the Messenger app, with exactly the same sort of products as you can use elsewhere on the platform – you can imagine the sort of CTAs here, right, as you capture users in the part of the FUNNEL where they are about to have a MEANINGFUL BRAND-RELATED CONVERSATION with a ‘FRIEND OR POTENTIAL NEW CUSTOMER’. “Hey, why not tell YOUR friend how much you love Belvita? Why not come and chat to our bot together?’ COMPELLING, isn’t it? 
• Ads Also Coming To Facebook Marketplace: What’s that, Cnut? The sea’s up over your knees now? Yes, per the above, the tide of FB ads continues to rise inexorably towards the point about a foot over our metaphorical heads at which point we will be consuming nothing but branded messages. This is still mooted rather than an ACTUALTHING, and I’m not 100% convinced that the Marketplace product will persist as is, but anyhow – if you’ve dreamed of a world whereby you can target people in Facebook based on the sort of stuff they might be shopping for on Facebook’s own, crappy version of Craigslist then…well, you are almost certainly beyond help, frankly.
• Subscriptions Coming To FB Instant Articles:  Noone I know who works in publishing seems to lik FB Instant Articles very much, but, due to the fact that it’s largely Zuck’s (and Jeff’s, and Sergei’s, and Larry’s) web, people seem to equally have grudgingly accepted that they have to tolerate them, at least from a publishers’ point of view. Anyhow, publishers will at some point in the future be able to apply subscription-gating to the content they deliver through Instant Articles, enabling them to do the same ‘you’re only getting 10 free articles a month’ stuff they do on the web, but presumably without the hugely helpful ‘Chrome Incognito’ workaround which we all use to screw another 10 pieces a month out of the NYT. Oh, and if you care, here’s some information about how Instant Articles perform. You don’t, though, do you? 
• Good Luck Posting That FAKE NEWS: To quote, “Starting today non-publisher Pages will no longer be able to overwrite link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) in the Graph API or in Page composer. This will help eliminate a channel that has been abused to post false news.” Basically, you used to be able to post a link on FB and tweak the copy, image, etc it pulled through into the feed as a preview, meaning anyone could (charitably) A/B test stuff with ease or (less charitably) make the image/headline something totally unrelated to the content you’d be clicking through to. Anyway, those days are GONE. So there. 
• You Might Be Able To Target Ads At People Based On Their Engagement With Your Instagram Business Profile, But Then Again Maybe You Might Not: ‘Technology’ ‘journalism’ here at its very,very finest. 
• Groups For Pages Now Available To All: Yes! Something previously announced is now available to everyone! In case you’ve unaccountably forgotten, “If you are an artist, a business, a brand, or a newspaper, you can now create fan clubs and groups centered around your super-fans.” Yes, YOU! This is, I think, actually a really big and useful idea – motoring’s an obvious category where this would work (Groups for owners of different models, say), as is fashion, beauty, DIY and interiors…there’s even a B2B thing here, and if you’ve spent any time recently having to deal with the nightmarish horror that is LinkedIn Groups you’ll see that there’s an awful lot of mileage in this, potentially. Anyway, you should KEEP AN EYE on this and maybe have a play, is all I’m saying. 
• You Can Now Share Your Facebook VR Experience As A Live: Are any of you using Facebook VR? Are you? No, you’re not, but still, here’s something to throw into a brainstorm to make everyone know that you’re really UP ON THE TRENDS. Tell you what, if you do mention this why not throw in a special codephrase, like, I don’t know, “it really bridges the gap into phygitality” – that way if anyone else in the room reads Curios you can share a small moment of mutual recognition before realising that you must never, ever speak of your shared shame. 
• Better Harassment Filters On Twitter: And yet, still, not good enough!
• Record Longer Snapchat Videos!: Well, not quite, but this is actually a really useful feature; now if you record a minute of video it will break it up into 6 individual 10-second Snaps, each of which can be individually used as a standalone or combined into a story, with each being editable, discardable, etc. Just makes the whole difficult job of being a CONTENT CREATOR that little bit easier, for which we all sitting here on the content farms can only be grateful. 
• Amazon Basically Doing Pinterest: US-only at present, and there’s no guarantee that it will ever become a PROPER THING, but I think the omens are good (for Amazon, let’s be clear; for us, the viscera present their usual bleak portrait of a shopping basket slamming into your teeth over and over and over and over and over again) – this is basically a service they’re making available to Prime customers only (an engaged audience with a propensity to spend, which is nothing to be sniffed at), letting them do all the usual things you’d expect; share content! chat! SHOP SHOP SHOP SHOP! Just a watching brief on this one at the moment as there’s little in the way of detail as to what the brand opportunities are, but just you WAIT as I bet they will be brilliant (deadening). 
• Meet Gout: There are very few things in life I love more than an over-elaborate piece of web design for an ostensibly tedious topic. Step forward, then, Gunenthal Group, whose website ‘Change Gout’ (one of those lovely pharma ones where you KNOW it’s a pill-peddler behind it but you have to do quite a lot of looking/clicking to find out who) is the most pointlessly lovely piece of webwork I’ve seen in ages. From the crystalline design of the figure, doubtless referencing the buildup of waste materials around the joints which makes gout such a painful condition, to the animations and transitions, you sort of get the impression that the only way that the web shop would take the work was if they could spunk an incredible amount of the budget on overelaborate UX. I would LOVE to know the traffic figures on this, but imagine that they are a closely guarded secret, possibly even from the client. On a similar tip, shout out the mad people doing web design at Bloomberg who have once again delivered in spades with this GREAT page on increasingly-lunatic-and-not-very-nice-seeming-billionaire Elon Musk.

By Marta Bevacqua

NEXT, WHY NOT PERUSE THE MOTHERLODE OF APHEX TWIN BACK CATALOGUE HE’S JUST PUT UP ONLINE?

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.1:

• Beautiful In English: One a spate of recent sites using Google data to present niche-but-interesting findings in beautifully-designed fashion, this one looks at the mos translated words into English from other languages on Google Translate. What are the similarities and the differences, and are there commonalities based on other languages’ shared linguistic roots? If you’re in any way a linguist this will be catnip to you, and even if not it’s interesting and well-presented and WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON’T LIKE WORDS? GO ON FCUK OFF OUT OF IT. 
• Twine: No, not the IF programme; this is A N Other of the occasional series of platforms which purport to put brands desirious of CHEAP CONTENT in touch with content creators willing to provide some of that said HOT CONTENT for a fee. Effectively a marketplace in the vein of Fiverr or similar except, one would hope, less nakedly exploitative. If you make stuff, or need stuff making, it might be worth taking a look at. There seem to be quite a few UK-based creators using it already, which seems like a decent sign if you care about timezones and stuff like that.
• Filibuster: Not ACTUALLY a web thing, this, but a really interesting project which a few of you might possibly be interested in applying for. Filibuster is a theatrical performance set to take place at Somerset House  – in fact, I’ll let the artist, Deborah Pearson, explain it: “A series of women will consecutively spend one hour each speaking at a podium, improvised stream of consciousness. They will be responding to a question that is provided on the day and so unable to pre-prepare. The pieces asks what it means for women to be given a platform, what will be said by women who are permitted and required to speak and be listened to, and what happens when women lose their filters and the ability to self-censor or think before they speak? We welcome a broad range of applicants between 12 and 90 years old or older, from all backgrounds, ethnicities, especially women between 12 and 25 and women over 50, and women who identify as differently abled.” I think I know half-a-dozen people who’d be perfect for this; maybe you do too?
• Google Space View: Who DOESN’T want to use Google Street View to have a wander around the ISS and look out of the windows and look at all the buttons and imagine themselves in some sort of infinitely lonelier remake of Silent Runnings and look out at the Earth and cry and cry and cry at the home we are slowly killing? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Look, whatever your thoughts about Google, you can now wonder round a massive space village from your phone whilst on the bus, which – and I know that this is exactly what they want, this, confusing my monkney brain with the space magic so I don’t think about the other stuff, the marketing equivalent of someone going “LOOK! A DRAGON!” whilst simultaneously mugging you – is pretty amazing. 
• Ago Reblink: A nice project by this Ontario Museum, using AR to bring old paintings to life in modern fashion. Visitors looking at the works through the app will see them animate, take self-portraits with virtual phones (yes, yes, I KNOW), that sort of thing – not 100% original, fine, but the execution’s really rather good and shows what you can do with what I am going to start calling AR 2.0 and there’s NOTHING you can do about it. 
• Browser-based AR: Seeing as we’re on AR, this is a cute gimmick demonstrating how much heavy lifting in AR terms can now be done in Chrome. OK, fine, so to play with this you still have to print out an AR marker, but the fact that you can create reasonable effects without the need for a download makes the potential here fairly easy to spot. 
• Women’s Fashion, 1780s-1970s: I have absolutely no idea at all where this Imgur album was sourced from, but this is a fascinating collection of illustrations of representative fashions in womenswear in (most) years over a near 200-year period. So much to look at whether or not you’re a sartorialist, and so many interesting changes; what happened to skirts/bustles at the tail-end of the 19C, for example, is fascinating – why did they suddenly shrink? No, really, does anyone know? Genuinely curious her, and whilst I could Google it I would be immensely gratified for a little bit of human connection here please thanks. 
• The Taxonomy of Humans (According to Twitter): Wonderful, this. Based on Twitter’s famously awful interest categorisation of users for ad-targeting purposes, this webart(? it’s not presented as art, but that’s what I’m going to say it is (just call me Duchamp)) project basically creates a near-infinite stream of Twitter ads based on its interest categories. To whit, “The script randomly selects two behavior categories and one interest category from the ad creation page. It rephrases the descriptions of the categories, putting the statements in the second person. The Infinite Campaign then overlays those statements on top of automatically selected stock footage. Finally, it logs me in to Twitter, uploads the video, and auto-generates a new ad campaign, targeting the same behavior and interest categories used to generate the video. (I’ve limited each campaign budget to $1.)” So good, so bleak, so very much of the now. Ever wanted to feel like you’re nothing more than a series of algorithmically-determined datapoints waiting to be sold to? GREAT!
• Google Expeditions: If you;’re a teacher or ‘just’ have kids, this is potentially GREAT. Google Expeditions was until this week only available to teachers in the US; now, as far as I can tell, it’s open to all. “Google Expeditions is a virtual-reality teaching tool that allows you lead or join immersive virtual trips all over the world – get up close to historical landmarks, dive underwater with sharks and even visit outer space! Built for the classroom and small group use, Google Expeditions allows a teacher acting as a “guide” to lead classroom-sized groups of “explorers” through collections of 360° and 3D images while pointing out interesting sights along the way.” How much fun does that sound? Strap on a few cardboards and spend a rainy morning taking the kids to the Great Barrier Reef, or the Amazon, or the Grand Canyon, show them stuff…this is an interesting precursor to how the real ‘Ready Player One’-style VR education will end up working, so give it a go so you can at least pretend to understand what your grandkids do at school in 2052.
• Dictionary Farm: There’s literally no way in hell I can make a dictionary and spellchecking API sound interesting, but it may be useful to a couple of you. 
• White Spots: An interesting art project which is seeking to map ‘White Spots’ around the world; places where there’s no phone or wifi reception, places at the edges of connectivity. Download the app and it presents you in the first instance with a weirdly scary Neuromancer-style view of all the phone coverage points around you, which in London looks like some sory of terrifying jadded horrorshow JUST LIKE IN REAL LIFE EH KIDS oh god I am even bored of the ennui. You can then navigate around the world looking at ‘white spots’ all over the world, some with their own text/photo/video stories, and, if you like, upload your own (though obviously not from the exact place as, you know, no reception). Worth looking at now before we reach 100% coverage and you have to actually die to escape.
• Skating Visualisations:  I really want these to be copied and used as public installations outside of areas where people skate – come on, South Bank, this is on you. This is a simple idea, but I love the concept behind it – tracking the movement of a skate deck as it flips mid-trick, and then using that movement to create a 3d printed sculpture which can then be cast in whatever material deemed suitable. If you don’t look at these and think ‘Yes, we need one outside the RFH please’ then you are WRONG, frankly. 
• Computed Curation: What do you think a photography book entirely curated by ‘AI’ (not AI) would look like? It would look like this; I’m not sure whether it says more about my lack of appreciation of ART and photography or the curatorial standards oft-applied in the arts that this to me look likes an entirely plausible photobook for which Taschen would scalp you in the region of £90. 
• The Best Book Covers of 2016: Yes, I know what month / year it is, but it’s not my fault that for reasons known only to them the judges of this particular list choose to take 7 months every year to release it. Anyway, for those of you in design/publishing, this is a collection of the best-designed book covers of the previous year; some great work here (even if tardy). 
• Do You Consider Yourself A Feminist?: I appreciate I am obviously not in a position to chat about feminism because privilege and all that jazz, so I will limit myself to saying how odd I find it that so many women I meet will happily self-describe as not being one (yes, I am talking about YOU). Anyway, this is an instagram feed which (mostly) collects screencaps of conversations between its female curator and the men with whom she interacts online, to whom she asks the simple question ‘Do you consider yourself a feminist?’. The answers range from the…er…revealing to the miserable to the frankly hilarious, but the whole is a fascinating portrait of what’s obviously not becoming any less of a fractured concept. 
• Heterotopias: A really interesting website which collects thinking and writing around ideas of space and place in videogame worlds. Obviously of interest for those of you in the industry, but also for anyone interested in how virtual space informs and constrains thinking and behaviour (/pseud) – there’s some great writing in here. 
• Sarina Brewer Taxidermy: It’s fair to say that Ms Brewer’s taxidermy is…unconventional. Whether it’s the blood-red carcasses of skinned cats presented as screaming laminated monstrosities, or a chimera constructed from cat, snake, goat and, seemingly, wombat, there’s somethingin here for every taste (as long as that taste tends towards the toothily macabre).
• ESPN Body Issue (Redux): Yes, I know that this featured last time but that was just an Imgur rip – this is the OFFICIAL SITE, which is beautifully mobile-optimised and means that it’s now even easier to gawp in slack-jawed admiration at the honed, muscular perfection of people who are, by almost any objective measure, simply better than us. 
• Galaxy Magazine Archives: You want 350+ issues of golden-era scifi mags, spanning the 50s and 60s and complete with exactly the sort of Robbie the Robot/Fallout-esque artwork which is always a pleasure to browse? OF COURSE YOU DO! Aside from anything, if you’re a student of genre fiction this is a hell of a resource for classic scifi tropes and themes. 
• My Subscription Addiction: A brilliant site which collects examples of the burgeoning industry providing monthly subscriptions to…stuff. You want to sign up to spend $15 a month on a new collar for your pet? No, of course you don’t, and yet here we are. If you want any proof that the tech/startup bubble is real, the proliferation of stuff-as-a-service services surely ought to serve as one. Look – here’s one selling STICKERS. WHO NEEDS A SUBSCRIPTION TO RECEIVE STICKERS FFS?!? No, you DON’T. Stop it. 

By Maria Ponce

HERE, HAVE A NEW MUSIC SOTIFY PLAYLIST FROM THE NICE PEOPLE AT ‘HUH’ MAGAZINE!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SURE THAT NONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY THE ALPHABAY THING BUT WHICH WOULD LIKE TO REASSURE YOU IF YOU HAVE THAT, YOU KNOW, THERE ARE OTHER WAYS, AND WHICH IN SEMI-RELATED FASHION IS REALLY ENJOYING THE TODAY PROGRAMME’S ATTEMPT TO ‘DO’ THE DARK WEB IN 45s THIS MORNING, PT.2:

• Explorable Explanations: A brilliant site collecting all sorts of different interactives designed to communicate tricky or hard-to-explain concepts and theories to normies like us. It’s part a repository of good design, and part a call to mae others create more sites / projects like this – whether or not you want something explained at you, there are some really good examples of UX/UI here, particularly in relation to showing off some knotty problems. 
• You Map: A nice idea which I don’t think will go anywhere, You Map is designed to be a lightweight location-based social platform whereby users can share their location and their thoughts/requests/etc, all through a largely map-based interface. I can see the idea, and frankly I can even imagine use-cases for this, but the fact remains that noone’s ever going to use it which means that it’s going to die a sad and lonely death whilst all the cool kids just keep using Snap Maps. 
• About Colours: Yes, fine, this is actually marketing content for online design tool Canva – but it’s quite interesting, so fine, it passes. You type in any colour you can think of, and this gives you some history about the shade, a few matching palettes, and some examples of webdesign in that particular tone; it’s not hugely sophisticated, fine, but it’s actually sort of useful and pleasant enough to spend a few minutes fiddling with, and, to be honest, that’s pretty much all I want from branded content (aside, of course, from LESS OF IT). 
• Likely AI: I think we’re getting to a point where we need a symbol or a punctuation mark which denotes something which claims to be AI which isn’t really any sort of AI at all. Like this, for example, which is a…tool, which will analyse your phone pictures and cross-correlate them with its own database of popular photos to tell you whether it’s one for the public gallery or not. It’s, er, a pretty blunt set of qualities it will be mapping against here, but if you fancy outsourcing your narcissism to a machine then go right ahead and give the free trial a go. 
• Mumbai Run Finder: I was going to say that this is going to be of no use to any of you but then remembered that a couple of you do ACTUALLY live in Mumbai (*waves*) so if nothing else this week, this is for YOU – for everyone else, this is just quite a smart piece of digital work which is quite easy to rip off; the idea is that you plug in your starting place and the distance you want to travel and the site will map you our a looped route covering your chosen distance and depositing you back at the start again come the end of the run. If you could add in a few other variables – degree of prettiness you want, for example, or ‘make sure you take me past at least three coffeeshops because I’m a tedious caffeine bore’, that sort of thing – this could be SUPER-useful. Yet more great digital work from the Hindustan Times, by the way, who are consistently really great at the web so well done them. 
• Folding Houses: I can’t stress enough how much you ought to watch this. This is AMAZING. LOOK! ACTUAL FOLDING HOUSES!
• Pix3lface: You want an Instagram feed of some really rather excellent glitch art, which will make you feel just a touch uncomfortable but which is also, you know, good? YES YOU DO. 
• AI Movie Posters: You know that ‘not actually AI’ symbol I referred to a couple of links ago?Yes, well, that. Still, though, it churns out really quite brilliantly-realised fake film posters – fake image, fake stars, fake tagline, the whole deal, many of which are slightly Scarfolk-ish in tone and others which are just ODD. Have a play. 
• Spooler: Is there a word on Twitter more likely to make you think ‘Oh Christ, what an insufferable self-important tool this person is’ than ‘THREAD’? Look, just to clarify, lots of good and sensible and smart and funny stuff gets written every day on Twitter, and, yes, making blanket condemnations is A Bad Thing, but, come on, I’m presuming you know that Web Curios is ALL ABOUT blanket categorisations and lazy connections, and also I refuse to believe that you don’t know at least one narcissistic jizzrag who thinks their opinions are so VITAL that they can eschew all standards of readability in favour of spazzing out their HOT TAKE on Twitter dot com. Ahem. Anyway, that slightly rantier-than-expected preamble is all to say that this is a tool which pulls the dreaded THREAD into a single-page post so you can actually read it (and then realise that you really oughtn’t have bothered). 
• Serial Killer Calendar: There are a surprising number of bookshops in London which seemingly sell ONLY books about Denis Neilen and The Krays to middle-aged men in scurf-shouldered mackintoshes (guys, guys, hanging out in these places ISN’T HELPING); this is basically the website equivalent of that, seeking to flog copies of SERIAL KILLER MAGAZINE (self-explanatory) and assorted books and trading cards…aside from anything else, it’s the slightly cartoonish style of the magazine covers which got me here; the juxtaposition between the slightly amateurish art style and the screaming headline “JOHN WAYNE GACY ATE THEIR LIVERS!” is, er, well quite unpleasant actually if I’m honest with you. 
• /r/Solipsism: This is one of my favourite subtle gags on the web. 
• Send Me SFMoma: I love this – simple, smart use of the digital archive of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Text them a word, and they will automatically reply with an artwork linked to or inspired by that word. As they say on the explainer page, it’s a way of making the overwhelming catalogue more accessible to more people; everyone else, nick this idea. 
• Spike The Beetle: Depending on how you’re feeling, this is either idiotic or SO KAWAII! Spike is a Stag Beetle who, his owner discovered, wasable to hold a pen and make rudimentary scribbles on a piece of paper. And lo, it came to pass that Spike became a minor Twitter celebrity and that his drawing are now available for purchase and it’s interesting, isn’t it, how in the course of writing these lines I’ve gone from ‘oh, whimsy!’ to ‘ffs make it all stop’? Eh? Oh. 
• Welcome To My Neighborhood: What would a traditionlly-illustrated children’s book look like if, rather than featuring improving stories of anthropomorphised animals learning lessons about sharing and play, it instead featured stories of anthropomorphised animals which are based on the life experiences of young people in the care of the urban scial services. It would, it turns out, look INCREDIBLY FCUKING BLEAK and quite upsetting. Not sure what I think of this – it’s affecting, but I’m also not sure that it’s talking to anyone other than awful internet hipsters like me. Still, made me go and chuck money at Barnardo’s this week so I suppose there’s that. Caveat emptor – this is really not very cheering stuff AT ALL. 
• Fetlife: If YOU were going to set up a social network for the kink/fetish community, what would you call it? Come on, I’ll give you a second, you’ll get there. You would call it KINKEDIN, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Christ alone knows what the founders of Fetlife were thinking (possibly, sensibly, of the lawsuits), but nonetheless here we have “the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community”, on the offchance that’s something you;’ve been missing in your life. 
• Moodmix: I can’t speak for you, but I find London Gramm,ar unspeakably dull; still, whatever your opinion of their musical output, this promo site for their new…thing is a nice conceit; plug in your Spotify, tell it how you’re feeling on an exciting-looking (but probably nowhere near as nuanced as it would like you to think) shaded interface, and watch as it spits out a specially-curated mood-led playlist JUST FOR YOU. Contains, annoyingly, about 100% more London Grammar than I want from a musical selection, but you may like it more. 
• Voluptuous: SIGNIFICANTLY NSFW KLAXON! Not really sure what this is for – I think, though I can’t be certain, that it’s a site promoting a new imprint of erotic classics by some publisher or another, but regardless, it’s a slick piece of webwork which is all heavy breathing and ‘erotica’ – meaning, of course, black-and-white semi-bongo shots, always of women (why are these things never gender-mixed, eh? Particularly as literary erotica is famously the least-masculine of all the bongoforms), interspersed with excerpts from the texts – Lady Chatterly, The Story of ‘O’, you know the canon I’m sure. Pretty much entirely ridiculous, but I rather enjoyed it for all that. 
• Hungry: You wait ages for a new piece of interactive storytelling from NFB Canada and then you get two in one week. First up, this is called ‘Hunger’ and it is SO BEAUTIFUL. All about food, cookery, foraging and survival in Newfoundland, one of the remotest inhabited areas of the planet, this is a wonderful exploration of seasonality in food, about surviving against the elements and how eating permeates culture through history in a peculiar, emotional way. I got a bitteary at points during this, it’s that beautiful – I promise you, if you’re a foodie this is GLORIOUS. 
• Seances: This, though, wins this week. Seances is another NFB project which pulls together a copmletely bespoke 10-minute film for each person who visits the site, assembled from clips and archive footage and words and I know you’ve seen this done before, in music videos and the like, but I promise you that nothing that I’ve seen to date using this technique has been able to produce work with this degree of weight (yes, I know, PSEUD, but wevs mate this is GREAT) that these do; they are CREEPY as you like, and having tried a few times I can also confirm that they are always different. Do give this a try – it’s VERY good indeed. 
   
  

By Alexandra Rubenstein

LAST IN THE MIXES, TRY THIS EXCELLENT LITTLE SCIFI-THEMED HIPHOP ALBUM!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Brittle: “This is the work of motion/graphic designer Constantinos Chaidalis”, so the explainer says, and what good work it is. If you like art which features slightly wrong/messed-up faces then this will tickle your fancy. 
• Letters & Liquor: A blog which may or may not be a Tumblr, but really shall I just drop this tired insistence on mentioning the platform? Yeah? Ok. A blog which illustrates the history of lettering associated with cocktails. Which, if you work in a design agency, strikes me as an excellent excuse to start doing Friday afternoon cocktail sessions based on these blogposts if you ask me.
• Toby Mcguire Looking Constipated: I’ll let you decide whether or not that look is in fact ‘constipation’.
• Medieval Spanish Chef: Not actually a Tumbl…oh balls. Hm, what do you call a running gag which only the author ever really noticed in the first place and which now even they are sick of but which they can’t let go of? Anyhow. This is a collection of medieval Spanish recipes, which if you are a culinary historian or, you know, just like cooking odd stuff, you might really like. 
• Graphic Pr0n: Not actually bongo at all, this, but instead a collection of decent examples of graphic design, collected for your pleasure. 
• Weird Sh1t From Memegenerator: Some of these are just GREAT, and I encourage you to start using as many of these as possible on Facebook and indeed in general email chat right away. 
• Posing DJs: Fine, this is old, but it alsmo reminded me of the ner-ending majesty of DJ CHEF (dot com), so, you know, wind your necks in. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Kafka’s Jokebook: You don’t need to know Kafka to get these, just to have a vague sense of familiarity with the all-pervading sense of existential fear we’re expected to put up with day-in, day-out. Sample: “What’s the difference between a lawyer and a catfish? Nothing after Albert’s inexplicable transformation. Every breath was agony.” See? It’s ACE.
• Shkreli and the Campus Memes: Of all the things in the longreads this week, this is probably the one which would make least sense to your mum; taking in the multifaceted web phenomena that are memes, Facebook groups, wokeness, depression, safe spaces and, most bizarrely of all, the internet’s favourite hatebro Martin Shkreli, this is so horrifically of the now that it might well be obsolete by the time I finish this writeup. It’s a look at how the expolosion in meme-based Facebook Groups in colleges in the US are fulfilling a weird support network role for students, how meme culture can work as a surprisingly emo language for teens and…no, actually, on reflection I still don’t understand what Shkreli has to do with any of this whatsoever. 
• Remembering Minitel: I think I have featured Minitel-related pieces here before, but this is a really interesting look back at the history of France’s hugely ahead-of-its time domestic terminal system, which made our Ceefax look like exactly what it was (a shonky but lovable mess). Minitel was the closest thing to the web that anyone had before the web existed, and was used for everything from public information services to (you guessed it) BONGO! If you’ve ever reead Atomised and been slightly puzzled by a few of the Minitel refs in there this will help – failing that, this is fascinating about a very of-its-time and very French service. 
• Meet The Atlas Twins: This did read quite a lot like a parody, but it appears to be entirely legitimate; meet the Atlas Twins, perennial outsiders and truth-seekers and, as far as I can tell, appalling spoilt rich kids who have glommed on to every trend going with limited success and whose latest scheme appears to have been scamming a ‘digital nomad’ existence in Asia, peddling a load of inspirational startup claptrap to gullible idiots who believe that they can get rich from a hammock in Indonesia. Quite startling, not least when you ask yourself ‘BUT WHERE DOES ALL THE MONEY COME FROM?!’.
• Beggars and Choosers:  An excellent piece featuring interviews with a variety of himeless people in Paris, mainly focused on the articles of clothing which they need most and why, but going far beyond that to paint a detailed, and sad, picture of the lives of the marginalised. The bit about the social workers did, I have to say, take me aback a bit. 
• Don’t Sext Me In The Present Tense: As someone old and whose experience of this sort of thing is minimal at best, I confess to never having given any thought at all to the tense in which one should send messages about the state of one’s mucus membranes. Yet, like all aspects of life in Our Lord’s glorious year of 2017, it turns out that this is something that should be analysed and raked over. Is it ok to type “I am worrying my slack, gamey bunghole’? Should it be ‘I want to worry’? So many questions!
• Louise Mensch and the Conspiracies: It’s funny to think that Mensch was once just a comedy footnote in an old relationship, a woman who an ex of mine had gone to University with and whose ‘novels’ were given away free with Grazia and which we would read, giggling, on holidays. Or to think back to Meshn, the fabulously wrong-headed Twitter clone she launched 7-odd years ago with teen-bothering No10 aide Luke Bozier – whatever happened to him? When now she’s attained a weird degree of mad-person fame with her rants about, er, well seemingly EVERYONE being in Putin’s pocket and Bannon being on a deathlist and – Christ, look, if you’re not familiar with it then just read this piece which is not only a window into a world of crazy but also a beautifully written takedown of an idiot. 
• The Greatest Movie Props of All Time: Each with its own anecdote – cinephiles rejoice, this is GOLDEN. 
• The Greatest Horse: Chances are you’ve not spent much time this week thinking about horse-based sports in Kazakhstan. Remedy that by reading this great piece of writing about the ancient Kazakh sport of kokpar (goat grabbing – come on, that alone should be worth the click), and the horse bestriding the game like a stumpy-legged quadrupedic colossus, the Messi of the sport, one particular horse called Lazer. This is legitimately wonderful writing; you can almost smell the goat. 
   
  
• Who Is The Toriest Tory?: It’s Golby, again, it’s brilliant, again. STOP BEING SO FCUKING GOOD IT IS STARTING TO BECOME ANNOYING. I mean, look at this: “Phillip Hammond, half-hard in the gauzy early AM sun, alone in the bathroom mirror, tumescent at the sheer idea of stealing milk from nursery children. Phillip Hammond is so Tory it is creating bone spurs on him, his skeleton is slowly creaking into a more Conservative shape, if he thinks about dismantling the NHS any more and any harder his body might clench and then explode—” What a BSTARD. 
• Wash You’re Mitts: Curios is, I know, famously typo-ridden, but I promise you that that one’s a [sic]. This is kilometric but brilliant, a reminiscence about working in a run-down, semi-criminal second-hand games shop in a poor part of a poor town in the 90s/00s. I grew up in Swindon (stop it, I WAS BORN IN LONON OK?) and I could almost SMELL the chipfat and disappointment, so other children of mid-size sink towns will probably empathise quite hard here. 
• The Metaphysics of the Hangover: This is great writing about being hungover, and about being drunk, and it contains some truly excellent lines – many of them borrowed, fine, but collected wonderfully – about the extent to which the hangover is less a physical reaction than a psychic one to the rearranging of mental blocks and barriers back to their natural placement after being rearranged during a night on the sauce. Apropos nothing, my favourie hangover line (aside from Amis the elder quoted in the piece) is this by his son, from Dead Babies: “Alcohol-crapulence clogs perception, but drug crapulence flays it”- well, innit though. 
• Necessary Driving Skills: This, though, is just brilliant and my one must-read of the week. It does, I admit, channel early Self to the point of near reverance, but it’s done SO WELL that I will forgive it the tonal similarities to My Idea of Fun or Cock & Bull. The story of a man who works in the model car industry, this is so coldly, bleakly good on LIFE that it will leave you feeling dreadful by the time you finish it; I can think of no greater compliment. Hats off to Nat Segnit whose work it is. 

By Jonathan Wateridge

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS (NEWSLETTER PEOPLE, VIDS ARE IN THE LINKS)

• First up, this is called ‘Perspective’ and it is just WAITING to be stolen for an ad: 

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• Next, Gaslamp Killer’s latest opus, a 7-minute, VERY STRANGE video described as ‘The Instrumentalepathy Album Film’. Not really sure what to make of this, but the aesthetic is STRONG and I rather like the overall effect over the course of the clip.

•  You want 10 hours of footage from Planet Earth 2, all relaxing mountain sounds and visuals in HD? HERE YOU GO THEN!

• This is by Alvvays, it’s called ‘In Undertow’, and it’s another female vocal in 2016/17 that I am sort of slightly mesmerised by

• UK HIPHOP CORNER! Well, sort-of hiphop – this is Mt Kimbie featuring Curios favourite King Krule and it’s hiphopish and the video is PURE artschool perfect. Track’s called ‘Blue Train Lines’:

• MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the new video from Run The Jewels -the song’s ace as you’d expect, and I’m a sucker for stop-motion skeletons so the video gets my vote too. Watch, enjoy, relax, have fun, be nice SEE YOU SOON BYE I LOVE YOU BYE: 

By Sarah Duyer

LET’S KICK OFF THE MUSIC WITH THE LATEST PLAYLIST FROM LOVELY MUSIC NEWSLETTER ‘LOVE SAVES THE DAY’!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT THE 2BILLION NUMBER IS A SIGN OF SOME SORT, AND PROBABLY NOT OF ANYTHING GOOD:

• An Exciting New Set of Facebook Ad Metrics!: Calloo, callay and associated expressions of joy; Facebook has announced NEW METRICS with which to confuse and baffle your clients, and through the use of which you can continue to persuade people marginally more ignorant than you of matters digital to pay you a frankly preposterous dayrate for what, let’s be frank, is little more than glorified database management. Rolling out over the next few weeks, Page managers will now have access to exciting new datapoints with which to track the hopes, dreams and desires of the 2 billion, including ‘the number of people who have previously engaged with an advertiser’s website or app versus new visitors’, and data on the number of people who have ‘recommended’ your Page to their friends. On the one hand, more ways to persuade the client that look, yeah, the campaign’s going really well and engagement is through the roof, right?; on the other, another set of largely arbitrary numbers against which to have yourself judged. So it goes. 
• New Masks, Etc, Coming to Messenger Video Chat: There’s nothing brand-related here yet, fine, but take this as your semi-occasional reminder that if you’re a CONSUMER-FRIENLY and FUN-LOVING brand you really ought to be thinking about how you are going to ACTIVATE (dear God, I am sorry) this sort of stuff in the future when they inevitably start offering a wide-ranging bespoke filter creation service for brands. 
• FB App for ‘Influencers’ Apparently On Its Way: It’s thrilling to be in an age of such progress! Basically this is going to be (at some point in the future) a suite of tools to enable better-quality video production off mobile, aimed at mid-tier ‘creators’ – to quote, ‘the app will feature a Live Creator Kit that enables influencers to more effectively manage live broadcasts by adding intros and outros, custom stickers and frames. The kit will also facilitate communication among the community of users following the influencer, and serve up user data to optimize future broadcasts. Anyone already using Facebook’s Mentions app will be automatically added to new app.’ So there. The idea of a ‘Live Creator Kit’ is a smart one, and I’d imagine a variant will be made available to brands and publishers too at some point.
• Facebook Videos Now Autoplay With Sound: In a move requested by absolutely nobody, you will now be subject to a hideous, mangled cacophony of sound as you scroll through the increasingly video-dominated FB feed. The only reason I’m including this is as a gentle reminder that YOU STILL NEED TO SUBTITLE EVERYTHING, as unless you’re a sociopath you obviously have the volume on your phone right down by default. 
• FB ‘Discover’ Tab For Bots: I think this was trailed a few months ago, but frankly I am finding it nigh-on impossible to keep up with what is news, what is regurgitated old stuff masquerading as news, and what is some sort of unpleasant hallucination born of spending too any hours with my face in the internet. Anyway, FB in the US has added a ‘discover’ button to the Messenger app, which lets users browse and find new Messenger bots with which to interact; which will, eventually, lead to the ability to pay to promote your bot within this section to users of your choosing. You know it, I know it, so start setting budget aside lest your bot fall into the oubliette of forgotten Facebook automata.
• Instagram Testing ‘Favourites’ Function: Interesting, this – Instagram’s apparently trialing the ability for users to share cerain content with a limited list of friends, which list can be pruned ar added to at any time; effectively a sort of ‘inner circle’-type of thing, designed, apparently, to obviate the need for a finsta. I can see this having some nice executional opportunities for brands and ‘influencers’ (sorry) – you know, rewarding people for being superfans by adding them to the EXCLUSIVE CONTENT LIST, creating competitions and mechanics to motivate people to KEEP ENGAGING, that sort of thing. 
• You Will Soon Be Able To Make Snapchat Geofilters In The App: Or if you’re reading this in the US, you already can – LUCKY YOU! Rather than having to go to the dedicated geofilter creation site, US users will now be able to create and buy Geofilters straight from their phones, eliminating the need for photoshop skills in favour of some simple image / text editing software. A really smart move, and yet another reason to consider the Geofilter as part of your YOUTH MARKETING CONTENT MIX (I can’t keep doing this, I really can’t). 
• Custom Bitmoji on Snapmaps: One of the cute/creepy features of the Snapchat Map thing announced last week is its use of phone data to present contextual representations of what users are doing when visible on the map; if your accelerometer suggests that you’re moving fast, for example, you’ll appear in a car – so CLEVER! I’m mentioning this only as it seems unlikely that advertisers won’t get the opportunity to create custom Bitmoji for use when people are in or near their venues – and frankly even if this isn’t in the pipeline, if you throw Snap enough cash they’ll probably consider it because, well, WHY NOT?
• KFC In Space: Can we all now agree that the ‘thing’ whereby stuff gets sent into space and filmed is now done, over, defunct? I mean, even I’ve done one of these, and that was years ago – so please, now that KFC have decided not only to send one of their crap non-food products into the upper atmosphere but have also, for reasons known only to them, bothered to create a whole website and bunch of supplementary ‘content’ around the endeavour, can we all agree that we are never, ever going to do one of these things again? Good, glad we’ve cleared that up. 

By LaLa Chuu

By Kat Toronto

WHY NOT SOUNDTRACK THE FIRST BIT WITH ONE OF THESE EXCELLENT PRINCE PLAYLISTS?

THE SECTION WHICH FOR ONCE ISN’T EVEN GOING TO MAKE A TIRED JOKE ABOUT NOT BEING INVITED TO CANNES BECAUSE, LOOKING AT IT FROM AFAR, THIS REALLY DOES FEEL LIKE A NADIR FOR THE WHOLE THING WHICH REALLY OUGHT TO BE REBRANDED ‘CRAP COSMETIC CSR IDEAS ON SEA’ BECAUSE THAT’S SEEMINGLY ALL THE INDUSTRY DOES TO WIN AWARDS THESE DAYS:

• Facebook Combines Canvas With Collection Ads: Literally the only pleasing thing about this is the alliteration I was able to employ in the headline here; the rest of the story, whereby you can now combine FB Canvas ads with FB collection ads (the ones which, you will doubtless recall, allow you to showcase upto 4 products in carousel under a standard FB ad), thereby letting advertisers create REALLY DEEP content-led advertising experiences for AD THIRSTY consumers (and, snark aside, lets you stretch the Canvas assets further than they might otherwise have gone), is really dull. So, er, let’s move on.
• Automatic Closed Captions on FB Live: Hugely useful, this, although the breezy tone of the release linked to up there doesn’t quite give the whole picture; you need to run your stream through a 3rd party and do some FB API stuff, so not quite so simple for your standard point-and-stream scion of the NEW MEDIA AGE. Nonetheless, broadcasters ought all be aware of this, so, you know, BE AWARE, BROADCASTERS.
• You Can Now Reply To Comments On Facebook With Gifs: Just what was needed to reup your brand’s sense of KOOKY RELATABILITY! Lord, although it’s amply evident with each passing day that you have in fact abandoned us, please consider taking steps to save us not only from hatred, bigotry and ignorance, but also from the whimsical voices of brands who believe that we need and want looping pop cultural references injected into mundane consumer interactions. Thanks, Lord.
• FB Safety Check to Include Fundraising Options: I don’t know about you, but I’m sick to the back teeth of having to see the FB Safety Check stuff; aside from the fact that it serves to show us that the Bad Thing has happened again, it’s also geographically useless (people in Australia getting notifications to mark themselves safe after Grenfell Tower suggests that FB may be overstating its location targeting abilities just a touch) and frankly serves to stir up hysteria as much as it does allay fears. As ever, though, my opinion matters not one iota in the face of Zuckerberg’s vision; so it is that, in the US at least, the Safety Check feature is being updated to allow fundraisers to start collecting for donations within the feature, reaching significant numbers of people in short order. Which, obviously, it would be churlish of me to complain about – particularly as there’s limited detail in the post as to how EXACTLY this is going to work. That said, I can’t be the only person who looks at this and sees a few pretty obvious ways it could be abused to nefarious end (can I? Am I too much of a cynic? HAHAHAHAHA). Oh, and there are a few other bits in here about how the service is going to allow individuals to append their own anecdotes to their ‘I’m Safe’ notifications, presumably so they can add helpful notes like “NO LOOK I WAS IN GRIMSBY THAT WEEKEND GETTING TANKED UP ON JAEGERBOMBS PLEASE NOONE @ ME ANYMORE”.
• How Facebook Counters Terrorism: Of literally no interest at all to brands, but of quite a lot of interest to anyone with an eye on the ‘Facebook as a publisher vis a vis its responsibilities’, this is the first in a series of blogs by Facebook examining some of its processes and how it arrives at some of its decisions. The idea is that each will focus on a different ‘challenging’ area, for example sex and censorship, or, in this case, the propagation of extremist ideology on the platform, and explore the steps Facebook takes and why it chooses to behave in the way it does. Despite my oft-stated dislike of Facebook as a company / platform, I think that this is an excellent idea and this first example is a very good post, not least from a communications point of view; it’s clearly-written, and sets out in simple fashion the main steps the platform’s taking to address the spread of terrorist-friendly content/material. Although then you see stuff like this, whereby FB appears to be effectively give any ‘Group’ on the platform the ability to run online ‘courses’ offering ‘instruction’ on whatever topic they fancy, and you think ‘Hm, you…you…you really do keep on doing a lot of stuff which, frankly, isn’t helping keep the extremists (of whatever flavour, please don’t @ me) at bay at all’. So it goes.
• New Tools For FB Group Admins: Who doesn’t love Facebook Groups? NO FCUKER, that’s who! Increasingly central to the FB platform as the newsfeed becomes an increasingly awful, video-clogged experience (NO MARK NOT EVERYTHING ALWAYS HAS TO BE VIDEO YOU APPALLING MOVING IMAGE TYRANT), Group admins are getting a new suite of tools to provide them with analytics, member filtering options, group-to-group linking and the like. There are lots of opportunities for brands to create Groups, I think, particularly with the ability to affiliate them with Pages. Also, obviously, this is a precursor to being able to advertise at Groups, which is inevitably coming soon to fcuk up the last genuinely useful and unsullied bit of the big blue misery factory. 
• Instagram Launches ‘Paid Partnerships’ Tag For Influencer Posts: Smart move, this, taking the Wild West that is ‘influencer marketing’ and attempting to impose some degree of legitimacy, transparency and order to it – instagrammers and brands who collaborate will soon have the ability to tage a post as being ‘In Partnership With’, making it clear that there’s a commercial relationship linking the two parties, and giving both parties access to analytics on the post. Which also will hopefully put an end to the ability of every two-bit Instagrammer with a reasonably presentable midriff and a kitchen with half-decent lighting to lie about their stats in an effort to get paid (bitter, me? Never!). Interestingly, my Man In China (your man, EVERYONE’s man) Alex told me that Weibo takes a fee from brands and influencers for setting up partnerships between them, which is brilliantly cynical and of which I approve hugely. 
• Instagram Launches ‘Click To Messenger’ Ads: Linking up the Facebook ecosystem even further, you can now buy ad units for Instagram which take users directly into a Messenger conversation, thereby suckering users into the PURCHASING FUNNEL and, you hope, never lettng  them go (or at least not until you’ve sucked them dry). 
• You Can Now Reuse Instagram Live Video: Seismic, eh? To plagiarise the article, because this really doesn’t warrant any effort on my part in coming up with new words, “Now when you finish broadcasting a Live video on Instagram Stories, you’ll have the option to share it to your story for 24 hours before it disappears or discard it immediately. Friends will see a play button on your Instagram Story profile bubble atop their feed if you’ve shared a Live replay.” WOW.
• Snapchat Launches Self-Serve Ad Platform: Except, er, as far as I can tell it’s US-only at the moment. Still, it will come here in relatively short order, I’d imagine, and bring with it the opportunity for anyone to sort their own ad buying, with just a credit card and some poor-quality emoji-style graphics. “It lets clients buy, manage, optimize, and view analytics about campaigns pay via US credit card rather than credit line, spend as little as they want with no minimum, buy via auction with prices set by the market, utilize all of Snapchat’s ad formats and targeting capabilities, manage ad creative assets within the tool, and have ads reviewed by Snap for quality before they appear.” Good, eh? Eh?
  
• The Snap Map: Snapchat users can now see their friends’ activity on a map view, the idea being that it will become easier to see what’s happening nearby on Snap at any given moment. Which means, of course, that you can start coming up with all sorts of exciting activations for your next celebrity-led activation in meetings RIGHT NOW! Look, I’ll get you started: “Why don’t we get celebrity X to post a Snap from location Y and make it visible on the map and then get people to track them as they move around and eventually they will get to a secret location where they will oh god I can’t be bothered with this do you remember when we were doing this stuff with Leo Messi on Hackney Marshes 7 bloody years ago on Twitter and nothing changes, only the platform, and meanwhile we get older and our bodies sag and decay and yet advermarketingpr rumbles on inexorably because IT WILL NEVER DIE”. See? EASY!
• Twitter Looks A Tiny Bit Different!: Be honest, you were really annoyed about this last week but now you’ve forgotten what it looked like beforehand. Notable only for the fact that it looks a bit like Google Plus, and made brands everywhere have to go through the annoying rigmarole of redesigning their avatar image to fit in the new circular format. Don’t worry, though, Twitter still contains your regular, mandated daily dose of harassment, hate, horror and hysteria – phew!
• YouTube Launching VR180 Video Format: The state of what passes for ‘tech journalism’ means that I have had to spend 5 minutes actiuvely searching for an article which actually explains what this means (FYI, it means that people will soon be able to start uploading what are effectively wide-angle videos which allow users to look around inside them as though filmed in 360). It’s not very exciting, though, and I rather wish I hadn’t bothered. 
• VRUK 2017: Seeing as we’re on video, there’s a conference on VR and 360 video and stuff happening in London in a couple of weeks (6-7 July, to be exact), which could be quite interesting, particularly for those of you who do tellystuff (*waves at the BBC*).
• The Facebook Awards 2017: Here’s a whole bunch of work done on Facebook over the past 12 months which the platform considers to be worthy of highlighting as praiseworthy; there’s some nice stuff on here, and plenty you can take inspiration from, but it’s worth mentioning (as is often the case with this stuff on Facebook) that the budgets involved in a few of these things are pretty fcuking astronomical – I had some meetings with FB last year where they were flogging Canvas really hard and showed off some genuinely awesome work, before then forgetting that there were SECRET NUMBERS in their presentation and revealing that the creative spend on the content they’d just shown us was 6 figures, not to mentioned the associated ad buy, at which point we just sort of shuffled out again feeling like right public sector povvos so, you know, BE AWARE.
• All The Best Stuff From Cannes This Year: Actually, no – I hate EVERYTHING coming from Cannes this year, other than the vague noises from people about not doing it any more. Take your brand purpose and FCUK OFF. I mean, look at the state of this. And this. And this. And this. Take a look at yourselves, all of you (and me, fine). 
• OFCOM Media Usage Data 2017: All of the stats you could want, and plenty more that you almost certainly didn’t. Want to know howw many 16-24 year olds don’t feel any more creative at all when they use social media? 36%, that’s how many! God, I love data! Obviously actually really useful, my pathetically predictable snark aside. 
• The Charmin Van-go: Sadly this promotion was only active on Tuesday and Wednesday this week, but don’t feel that you can’t take the concept and run with it to create your own unique variant – someone at the agency obviously thought ‘Uber, but for defecation!’ and lo, the Charmin Van-go was born, in which New Yorkers with a desire to void their bowels gained the ability to order a travelling toilet via an Uber-style interface, complete with a team of smiling…er…crapassistants(? I don’t know what one would call them) to, I don’t know, hose down the walls afterwards, or applaud you on egress. What a world, kids. Apparently this is a pilot as they are considering rolling this service out on a regular basis – don’t people in New York keep a mental map of all pub toilets in their head like Londoners do? No? Madness.

By Robert Lang

NEXT UP, WHY NOT TRY THIS SOULWAX MIX FROM RADIO 1?

THE SECTION WHICH IS FULLY EXPECTING AN ACTUAL CHURCH OF JEZUS TO EMERGE FROM GLASTONBURY THIS WEEKEND, AS SEVERAL THOUSAND PEOPLE BOXED OUT OF THEIR GOURDS ON PILLS AND MDMA HEAR HIS UTOPIAN MESSAGE FOR A SOCIALIST FUTURE, PT.1:

• Be Internet Awesome: The tone’s possibly a touch cringey, fine – I don’t have any kids to hand on which to test it, but I am convinced that there aren’t many for whom the phrase ‘Be Internet Awesome’ wouldn’t elicit a fairly heft eye-roll – but the idea behind this, which is a series of simple games and information about keeping safe online, aimed at young people, is a good one and the presentation’s all slick and Google-y, and the games are reasonably fun; if you have an 8 year old kid, I reckon this is probably quite a Good Thing. 
• Foto Generator: Once again, the gap between Curios means that there is going to be some stuff in here which is practically antidiluvian (ie more than a week old), for which apologies; that said, if you haven’t had a play with this webtoy, which lets you doodle outlines of faces and then autogenerates a whole…er…other face from the outline to largely horrific effect. If nothing else, it’s worth making a new FB profile picture from this just to upset people who will suddenly think you’ve turned into Simon Weston (sorry). 
• The Twitter Debubbler: Do YOU hate the new Twitter design? Do YOU want to go back to better, simpler times? Here’s a Chrome extension which will pander to your designphobic whims. 
• Brutalist Redesigns: Popular web apps, redesigned in the Brutalist fashion. Very much a designers’ joke, this, but I very much like some of the resultant work, in particular the Instagram redesign. 
• Lynching America: It seems somewhat incongruous to say this when the topic is so awful, but this is a really lovely website. Taking a look at the history of racially-motivated violence in the US, and demonstrating how appallingly widespread the practice of lynching was across the Southern states, this presents a documentary, a map of recorded lynchings, historical documentation and a full academic report on the subject in a sober, beautifully-designed shell. It’s obviously all incredibly grim, but it’s also a very well-designed presentation of the material. 
• Weirdbox: You remember a decade or so ago when everyone started making those videos which pulled photos from your Facebook friends into the action, giving a cosmetic veneer of personalisation and making every single advermarketingprcunt working in digita pitch the idea to all of their clients on an almost weekly basis until the world moved on and we took to plagiarising the Tippex bear thing instead? No? Maybe you are too young, children, but I REMEMBER. Anyway, this is basically that, except with Instagram – plug in an Instagram handle, ideally one from an account you sort of borderline stalk, and watch the ensuing film. When I put this on Twitter, several people were quick to point out to me that a) the film is too long; and b) this doesn’t work on mobile and is therefore RUBBISH in 2017. To these people I simply say “WHERE IS YOUR SENSE OF CHILDLIKE JOY, EH? BE LIKE ME, A SIMPLE, PURE SOUL, GAMBOLLING THROUGH THE FIELDS OF LIFE CONSUMED BY AN OPEN-EYED SENSE OF INNOCENT WONDER!”, and then I go and get drunk and cry, alone. 
• Wikiverse: Another Wikipedia visualisation project, this time envisioning all of the Wikidata (well, not all of it as that would be mental, but a part of the corpus) as a galaxy through which one can navigate, seeing connections between entries and generally zooming through the knowledgeverse in amazement. Obviously this is of no use whatsoever when actually attempting to use Wikipedia for anything practical, but as a piece of dataviz and interface design it’s rather beatiful, I think; also, it’s an excellent way of findin, and getting lost down, Wikipedian rabbitholes.
• We Wear Culture: Facsinating new (?) project from the Google Cultural Institute, looking at the history and cultural context of fashion throughout history, and containing archive materials from the V&A and a whole raft of other cultural institution worldwide. This is a genuinely fascinating primer on the cultural history of dress and the interface between fashion and a host of other areas, and if you’re a student or just interested it’s a pretty wonderful resource / timesink. Sadly doesn’t appear to have the long dreamed-of ‘Google, what should I wear?’ function that fashion-subnormals like myself have been clamouring for for an age now. 
• FotoOto: I don’t know quite how good this is as an idea in a practical sense, being fortunate enough myself not to have any significant visual impairments; the concept, though, is fascinating. FotoOto is an app which takes photos and applies a layer of audio to them, with the pitch and tone of the sound produced based on the colour of the pixel(s) that the user is touching at any given time. In effect – and I can already tell as I prepare to type this that this is an AWFUL analogy, so sorry – it’s a bit like audio braille (yep, I was right). The video on the site explains it far better than I ever could, so take a look at that instead and let me move on with whatever shreds of dignity I have left. 
• Bookshelf: This annoys me slightly; it’s basically a site that lets anyone make playlist of books, with whatever title or theme they like, which is a concept so simple and so lovely that I don’t know why noone’s done it before. I certainly don’t know why noone’s done it better than this; it’s SUCH an ugly site, and the whole ‘list’ thing doesn’t really give ou any good functionality, and frankly it just seems like a bit of a missed opportunity and oh God here I am slagging off someone’s project, an actual thing that someone spent time building, and all I do is sit here in my pants in my kitchen spaffing WORDS out, it’s not like I make anything, who am I to criticise after all, I mean I can’t even code, oh God I’m sorry, bookshelf creator, I take it all back. Ahem. Anyway, I guess the point I was trying to make before my id derailed me just then is that the concept is good, the execution is poor, and for publishers or bookshops I think this is an idea very much worth thinking around for ‘inspiration’. 
• Resource Trade: I am a sucker for a well-designed map interactive, and this is just such a well0designed map interactive. Chatham House have pulled together this archive of historical global trade data, showing major trade relationships over the past 15 years and letting you cut the data by sector, nation, etc. On this day in particular I’ve enjoyed looking at the UK specific numbers and seeing that each of our 5 largest export markets in 2015, the latest year for which the data’s available, were EU countries. WELL DONE US! God, it doesn’t feel any better a year on, does it? On which note, here’s some nice interactives from the ONS looking at how stuff has changed economically since THAT DAY. 
• Dating AI: The newest creepy update from the world of online dating is here! Dating AI (I am already SO BORED of the misuse and abuse of the term ‘AI’ – come back, big data, all is forgiven) is an app which lets you plug in a photo of anyone you like and which searches through the dating apps you have installed on your phone so you can then find people who look like that person. Or, one would imagine, that actual person, should they be on said dating apps. There is obviously NO WAY that this could be used for stalky or nefarious purposes, no siree – this has to get pulled soon, no?
• The Ecoalarm: This is a really lovely idea. Ecoalarm, which I think is actually a project by an Argentine NGO, lets you set an alarm for whatever time you want; when it goes off, you’re awoken by the sounds of nature, streamed from Spotify – the gimmick being that the money earned from the Spotify stream goes to ecological causes. Smart, and a neat execution. 
• Slightly Rubbish Instagram Poetry: This account is run by an actual proper poet, I think, but this account is just an experiment in posting crap fragments of non-poetry in an Instagram-friendly visual style and seeing how many likes they can get. Perfect, particularly in the oh-so-teenage way it manages to give every single post the illusion of profundity whilst still keeping each one entirely meaningless. 
• The QR Code Backpack: Obviously a silly PR gimmick by Jansport, and obviously QR codes are RUBBISH (I am increasingly of the opinion that they are not in fact rubbish, but appreciate that I am in a Western minority here and so will wind my neck in on the subject), but this idea, whereby the backpack fabric can be scanned to pull up whatever social media details the wearer wants to associate with said backpack, is really rather cute.  
• London: Park City: Want to spend a few pleasant minutes contemplating how much nicer London would have been this week were it a green expanse rather than the pigeon-infested, binjuice-scented steaming concrete swamp that it has been over the past week? Here you go! These are designs submitted to the National Park City Foundation – to quote, “Artists, designers and architects were invited to imagine and visualise what a future London National Park City could look like in a design challenge set by the newly established National Park City Foundation. A panel of judges reviewed over 50 entries from around the world and picked four winning visions. Making London a National Park City is a large-scale and long-term vision that has the potential to improve life in the capital by making the city radically greener and connecting more people to the city’s remarkable heritage.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? It will NEVER HAPPEN, but it’s nice to dream. 
• The Moving Poster: A site collecting various examples of animated digital poster art; lots of different visual styles and techniques on display here, forming a decent resource if you’re interested in, er, moving posters and the like. 
• CGID: French artist Rahael Fabre recently applied for a new ID card in his native France; he duly submitted all the necessary paperwork, but included in his application an image of ‘his’ face which he’d created entirely digitally – obviously the photo was accepted, and Raphael was in proud possession of what’s possibly the world’s first real-world ID for an avatar. Impressive stuff.
• Precious Plastic: SUCH a laudable project, this one – Precious Plastic is a collection of open-sourced designs which in theory let people create small-scale, individual plastics recycling solutions; a wonderful idea for the developing world, and the sort of thing which frankly any halfway eco-conscious brand could do worse than cosying up to as, you know, these nice people have already done all the hard work. Go on, you know what you ought to do. 
• Kids Listen: A website collating kid-friendly podcasts, from science to storytelling to general silliness. No idea how good any of these are, but if you’re in proud possession of one or more mewling whelps this could turn out to be an invaluable resource. 
• Emma Identify: An interesting idea, still in beta but ‘coming soon’, Emma Identify is an ‘AI’ (not an AI) which claims to be able to identify text authorship with a high degree of accuracy. Give it a corpus to learn from (they say about 8000 words, so roughly a Curios) and it will then be able to judge whether other texts are likely or not to have been penned by the same author. Which has a whole host of interesting implications, not least legal ones – I wonder how long it is before stuff like this becomes admissible in court, say?
• Standard eBooks: Not the first ‘massive repository of out of copywrite written works’ to exist online, but this one differentiates itself by offering the texts in a standardised format, with nice (or at least readable) design and the like – all available for free for your reading pleasure. Two clicks took me to Alice in Wonderland, Candide, The Importance of Being Ernest and many more absolute classics; this really is wonderful. 
• Me3: So this purports to be a friendship-making app for grownups, and entirely platonic; you tell the app stuff about yourself based on a series of questions about interests, etc, and it will then seek to match you with two other people of the same gender in your city which it believes you will have a high degree of affinity with; the idea being that it is HARD to make friends in the big bad city, and that this app will help you find a couple of other lonely people JUST LIKE YOU to hang out with. Several things spring to mind; first, that this is going to quickly become an absolute gay threesome HOTBED; second, that its promise to find you people ‘nearly identical’ to you is a frankly horrific one. Look, mate, I spend ALL DAY inside this head and one of the few positive things about occasionally interacting with other sacks of meat is the brief distraction it affords me from the quotidian horror of BEING ME. Please don’t make me meet anyone else who feels like this; can you imagine the awfulness?

By Damien Maloney

HAVE THIS 30-MINUTE TECHNO MIX WHILE YOU GET INVOLVED WITH THE NEXT SET OF LINKS!

THE SECTION WHICH IS FULLY EXPECTING AN ACTUAL CHURCH OF JEZUS TO EMERGE FROM GLASTONBURY THIS WEEKEND, AS SEVERAL THOUSAND PEOPLE BOXED OUT OF THEIR GOURDS ON PILLS AND MDMA HEAR HIS UTOPIAN MESSAGE FOR A SOCIALIST FUTURE, PT.2:

• Red Bull Illume Winners: The latest in the seemingly enless parade of Red Bull BRAND ACTIVATIONS is this one, the ‘Illume’ photo contest which “invited photographers to submit images of the world of action and adventure sports in one of 10 categories, including Energy, Playground, Sequence, and Enhance (where digital manipulation is allowed)”. Some excellent photos in here; the winner in the ‘Enhance’ category in particular is quite spectacular. 
• Block Bills: Artwork by Matthias Dörfelt, featuring a series of 64 banknotes generated from the Bitcoin Blockchain. HIGH CONCEPT! Also rather cool though. 
• Amazing Japanese Minirobots: No, not the Sumo robots (although those are very cool too and you ought to take a look if you’ve not seen them); instead, this is a prototypical Sony project which, as far as I can tell (which is not very far as the site’s all in Japanese) is designing tiny little modular motorised robot thingies which can be linked together with bits of paper and which you can make do some CRAZY stuff. Click the link and watch the videos and try and see if you can work out what the fcuk is going on, and then please tell me whether I am right to be excited by this or not. Thanks!
• The Fish Hammer: An incredibly silly project whereby this designer hooked up a fishtank to some sensors and a hammer, so that whenever the fish swam past a certain point in the tank, the hammer outside smashed something. Massively pointless and therefore highly satisfying, but also totally repurposable for BRAND ACTIVATION FUN – come on, imagine something like this which dispenses goodies at random based on an animal’s movements; then imagine how you might have two layers to it, a vending machine, say, in a high footfall area which occasionally, seemingly randomly, disgorges something fun, and then an online bit whener people online get to somehow manipulate the animals to encourage/discourage them from triggering the drops (or, you know, something with less inherent animal cruelty built into the mechanic). GOD THIS STUFF IS CREATIVE GOLD WHY AM I NOT A CRAVAT-WEARING ‘HEAD OF’ DRINKING OFF HIS COKE HANGOVER ON A YACHT RIGHT NOW?!
• Poetry on the Shore: I just had an INCREDIBLY emo reaction to the description of this when rereading it just now. It is SO LOVELY I MIGHT CRY: “Poet on the Shore is an AI-empowered autonomous robot that roams on the beach. It enjoys watching the sea, listening to the sound of waves lapping on the beach, the murmurs of the winds, children’s conversing, and the incessant din of seabirds. Most of the time, it roams alone to listen and feel. Sometimes, it writes verses into the sand, and watches the waves wash them away.” SEE?
• Woebot: When people regularly do those lists of ‘jobs most likely to be rendered obsolete by computer automation’, I don’t know whether they even consider ‘counselling’ as an option. And yet, here we are – say hello to Woebot, a chatbot-cum-counsellor who will ‘talk’ to you and ‘listen’ to your ‘problems’ and oh god you actually have to pay for it, this is mental, who in their right mind is going to pay actual cashmoney to have a conversation about their feelings with a fcuking chatbot? Oh, actually perhaps there’s a clue in the ‘right mind’ line there. Fine, it sends you ‘videos and other tools’ to help lift your mood, but really, FFS whoever built this, I am not convinced this is A Good Thing. Imagine having to talk to Woebot, a non-sentient piece of code, about how lonely you are. Imagine how that would make you feel. Christ. 
• Binky: I think this was pretty widely-covered the other week, but in case you missed it – Binky is a fauz-social network, which presents as a real one; there’s a news feed, you can scroll and look and click, but all the content is fake. All of it. None of the profiles are real, none of the people, all the images are stock…this is legitimately perfect, and frankly whoever’s behind it should get in touch with an art gallery stat as this has Frieze installation written ALL over it. 
• Beyond Curie: Posters celebrating the life and work of pioneering women in STEM who aren’t Marie Curie, because occasionally we forget that there were others. Great idea and some very cool designs here. 
• Ki Ecobe: I am often mocked by people who know me for (amongst other things) wearing really bad, often massive trainers – yeah, well, sorry, but they still look better than these. A Kickstarter project to fund a modular, self-assembly shoe which is hugely customisable and which, I am sad to say, looks like a hoover attempted to mate with a cockroach. Still, you might think differently and look at these and think WANT; it’s over halfway there with a month to go, so your wish could very easily become reality. 
• Super Mario in Hololens: The guy in the video who also coded this is SO CUTE. The video shows his recreation of the first level of Super Mario in AR, using the Hololens – see the koopas come towards you! Jump! Catch coins! And, as the other video in the top right demonstrates, look like an idiot whilst so doing! Obviously just a proof of concept and a chance for the man to show off his impressive coding skills, but fun nonetheless – have to say though that at no point does this look like it would actually be anything approximating to ‘fun’.
• Swimsuits: You will, I am sure, have seen those swimsuits doing the rounds online – you know, the one-pieces printed with Trump’s mouth or a hairy chest or other HILARIOUS imagery. Well, this is the place that actually sells them, so put your money where your mouth is or alternatively STOP FCUKING SHARING THEM EVERYWHERE. I do quite like the ‘bikini’ one, mind. 
• Unpaid Intern: Continuing the sartorial theme, these are tshirts which simply read ‘Unpaid Intern’ – 15% of the profits go to Save the Children, so if you want to look amusingly edgy/like an absolute tool (delete as applicable) you know what to do. Bonus points to any agency which actually does unpaid internships and gets a job lot of these in which to dress said unpaid interns. 
• Dog Photographer of the Year: Insert your own tedious commentary about doggos, puppers and 12/10 here, despite knowing full well that it is played out as you like. 
• Loveflutter: The latest attempt to find a novel twist on the dating app formula (doomed to failure, I think); this one’s gimmick is that it hooks up to your Twitter account and uses your latest 10 tweets (or a selection you can curate yourself) to present your ‘personality’ to potential mucal companions. Can you imagine? I could never use this, mainly because all anyone would see is a bunch of links to webspaff interspersed with block-caps swearing, but maybe you’re better at presenting as an attractive, witty human being on twitter dot com.
• The Dutch National Archive: On Flickr. No idea why you’d necessarily want this, unless you’re Dutch or a student of their history, but if you want to browse through a huge archive of photos from the history of the Netherlands then you are in luck. Aside from anything else, there are some cracking moustaches in here which deserve your attention. 
• The Corsairs Project: Quite odd this, like the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland made photographic. Artist Samuka Marinho has spent…Christ only knows how long taking and digitally manipulating pictures of what she imagines pirate life on the Spanish Main. These are a weird combination of beatifully atmospheric and incredibly camp, and there is a LOT of work in here; if nothing else, worth bookmarking for the moodboards when the Captain Morgan repitch rolls around again. 
• Social Cooling: An interesting thesis / manifesto, this, which argues that, as we become more aware of the extent to which what we say online is being tracked and used, we will inevitably become more cautious about what we say / share online which will eventually over time lead to significant changes in how we interact with each other. Hyperbolic, perhaps, but also probably true to an extent.
• After School Satan: The offcial after school programme of the US Satanic Temple, set up as a satirical jab at the rules in the US which mean that no religion can be constituionally limited from setting up after school clubs. No word on what activities are undertaken at said clubs, but I’m pretty sure it’s all above board. 
• Automating Soundcloud: This is SO CLEVER and one of you really ought to steal this asap. It’s a paper on how the author created a Soundcloud file which started off as a distorted mess and which over time became less distorted the more often it played, until finally the actual track was revealed. CAN YOU SEE THE POSSIBILITIES? CAN YOU? Come on, this is golden and actually SO simple (it’s just a Soundcloud upload hack, nothing more). USE IT. 
• Reddup: Reddit, but with a nicer UI. 
• LED Fidget Spinners: Yes, I know, but this is quite fun, potentially – these are fidget spinners with programmable LED lights on them which means you can make them read whatever you want when they are spun. You’ve probably got 2-3 weeks to think of something stunty you can do with this before we all get so sick of the bloody things that we consign them to the fad oubliette for a decade or so. Oh, and please do take note of the company name – that’s…that’s not ok, is it?
• Inspirobot: Autogenerating inspirational quotes, presented as an image macro which is PERFECT for sharing on Facebook or Insta. I strongly suggest that you reconfigure your personal brand this weekend to make it ALL ABOUT sharing these all over your socials and seeing which of your friends fails to call you out about it. 
• A Really High-Res Photo Of A Furry Convention: Just LOOK at them!
• Dark Stock Photos: The best Twitter account I’ve seen in ages. Stock photos, but HORRIBLE. 
• Drug Slang Codewords: Look, if you haven’t seen this then ENJOY – this is the US’ Drug Enforcement Agency’s May 2017 handbook listing all their known slang terms for various narcotics; PLEASE, all of you, spend the weekend using as many of these as possible; I really want to hear your stories about texting your man this evening with a request for a couple of grams of ‘Movie Star Drug’ (no, really, that’s on the list), or a half-dozen doses of ‘speed for lovers’ (words fail me).
• Deleted City: Oh wow. An incredible zoomable map of old geocities sites; zoom in, and keep zooming, and realise how deep this goes and how many there were, and what an incredible archive of a certain part of web history this is. To quote, “This website is an interactive visualisation of the 650 gigabyte Geocities backup made by the Archive Team on October 27, 2009. It depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain. In full view, the map is a data-visualisation showing the relative sizes of the different neighbourhoods. While zooming in, more and more detail becomes visible, eventually showing individual html pages and the images they contain.” Wow, really.
• Kawaiiswap: I grudgingly concede that there’s the kernel of an idea here, but I am grumpy about it. This is a Chrome plugin that analyses what you type on social media and, should you have the temerity to express negativity, suggests that you swap out the sad for some cute gifs instead! Yeah! Sunshine! Rainbows! Even worse, it was created by some dgital agency as a showcase – STOP BEING SO INSUFFERABLY TWEE, YOU CNUTS. Yeah, gif that you bastards. 
• If This Is A Man: Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is A Man’ remains one of the canonical novels about the Holocaust (imho alongside Tadeusz Borowski’s ‘This Way To The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen); this is a live reading of it, presented by the South Bank Centre. It’s a wonderful reminder of just what an incredible piece of writing it is. 
• Digital Forensics Tools: A SUPER-USEFUL Google doc compiling a whole bunch of useful tools and tips for doing digital research (in the journalistic sense) – how to search, where to look up IPs, all that sort of stuff. You may know lots of these, but you’re unlikely to know all of them – if you do anything investigate-y then this is potentially invaluable as a resource. 
• 4d Toys: My experience with this was one of those regular, unpleasant reminders that I’m really nowhere near as smart as I wish I was; this site basically takes you through the concept of 4 dimensionality (in the real sense, not in the Merlin Entertainment sense whereby the 4th dimension is, it seems, being sprayed in the face with water) as a primer for the digital toybox which accompanies the site. This is honestly mind-bending, I promise you, and also very, very interesting indeed. 
• Crystals for the Yoni: Look, why OUGHTN’T you indulge in some crystal-based vulva therapy? Totally sfw, I promise. 
• Moo Party: You can make these ASCII cows say whatever you want in this three-panel comic. I have no idea what use you might find for this, but I trust in your ingenuity. 
• The Apology Simulator: A very clever little Twine project, using the IF format to allow the reader/player to explore various ways of apologising in various scenarios. Exploring questions of privilege, this at times was a very hard read for me indeed; your mileage may vary, but I think it’s rather beautiful. 
• Evert 45: One of several really rather lovely interactive sites to close out this section, this is the companion web project to a Dutch TV Show (I think) which explores one man’s journey in 1945 to find his brother in post-war Holland. The interface is gorgeous, it uses video beautifully and the story is genuinely moving; really very well-made indeed. 
• I’m Your Man: This is equally good – it’s a digital ‘documentary’ to accompany a stage play about Australia’s boxing legends; you play at boxing training and actual fighting while you’re introduced to a succession of famous faces (fists) from the sport’s antipiodean past. This is excellent (and the music’s ace). 
• Tabel: An experiment in 360-degree theatre/filmmaking, this is a short vignette taking place in the garden of an exclusive restaurant – here’s their setup: “Tonight is a very special night and you, the viewer are lucky enough to have found a last minute seat at Tabel Restaurant, one of the most exclusive farm-to-table restaurants around. Unfortunately, Tabel has serious problems in the kitchen. The waiter is exceptional at hiding these problems but the influential patrons of the restaurant are slowly catching on to the ripening catastrophe that is so obviously escalating around them. Will anyone take action to save the restaurant and themselves?” It’s an interesting idea, and the sound design is excellent, but it wasn’t quite a compelling enough story to keep me interested; see what you think.
• Otis: Yes, ok, fine, it’s ANOTHER of these ‘watch a film, switch between perspectives’ video (who knew that sodding Honda ad would have such a long tail, eh?), but this is genuinely seamless and the story of the short is really very good; plus the multiple perspectives really do reward repeat views. Sort of an object lesson in how to do this sort of thing imho. 
• Chardonnay & Adderall: The latest single from Portugal the Man (whose SOUND OF THE SUMMER earworm was featured here back in March, f your i), this is single-serving site which uses multiple pop-ups to tell the story. It’s GREAT. Enjoy, and watch adland do this really badly in September. 

By Kim Leutwyler

LAST UP, GET YOURSELF PUMPED FOR THE WEEKEND WITH REDDIT’S FRANKLY ALMOST-TOO-MUCH PLAYLIST OF ‘HYPE’ SONGS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Tabletop Whale: Infographics, illustrations and animations by the exceptionally talented Eleanor Lutz who you ought to commission (no, I don’t know her, I just think the work here is very strong).
• Probably Bad RPG Ideas: Your appreciation for this almost certainly maps pretty much exactly onto your appreciation of Dungeons & Dragons (DON’T JUDGE ME). 
• Dank Doggos: Canine-based memery, compiled in one easy-to-bookmark location. Exactly the sort of intersection of weird Twitter, memeland and normie culture that I love. 
• Je Me Trouve Ici: My friend Tassos is on a journey (literal AND metaphorical, YEAH!); this Tumblr is a selection of clues as to where he might be at any given point. You can try and solve them if you like, and drop him a line to tell him how you’re getting on. He’d like that, and there would probably be some sort of small reward in it for you. 
• Neo-Brutalism: I’m a sucker for this stuff, really. 
• Lesbian Separatist Cottage Fantasy: Sadly this is just an interiors blog, but the title is absolutely wonderful. 
• Glitchp0rn: Bongo, but all glitched out and fcuked up. Actual, proper bongo, mind, so even though it’s a bit fuzzy it’s still the sort of thing someone might do a doubletake at should you decide to fullscreen it in the office. Still, it’s ART so fcuk them and their pr…pr…no, sorry, it’s gone. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Dispatch From Grenfell: If you’ve not already seen this, do read it; the accoung of a firefighter who attended to the blaze last week, talking about their experience and the work they do and how it felt being in the middle of it. Incredible, visceral piece of writing, this. 
• Talking To The King of Musical.ly: You saw that incredible lipsyncing video last month, right? The one with all the crazy edits and transitions, all made with Musical.ly?  Well if not click the link, watch the clip and the read the kid talk about how he made it. To be clear, this is sort of interesting from a cultural point of view, but mostly because of the very useful practical tips he gives on how to achieve the sort of jaw-dropping effects he manages. 
• A Typical Day In A Blockchain World: A day in a blockchain-enabled future, in the company of, for no discernible reason, Crowley the Crocodile. Leaving aside this slightly baffling conceit, this is a really interesting evocation of some of the real-world applications of the blockchain, taking in touchpoints across the course of Crowley’s day. It’s…odd, but all based on possible applications of the technology (although I think the pizza conveyor belt is possibly a touch fanciful).
• My Body Doesn’t Belong To You: We really oughtn’t need another piece written by a woman about the ownership men seem to feel over her body, and yet here we are. Heather Burtman’s piece in the NYT says little new, but it says the same sad things very well indeed. 
• Reviewing The Reviewers: Starting out as an obviously slightly facetious tissue-thin pitch and developing by the end into quite a weird journey into darkness, VICE’s Oobah Butler goes on a quest to meet the people who leave THOSE reviews on Tripadvisor; you know, the joyless types who you sort of always expect to be Reader’s Digest readers who complain about the lighting and the wobbly table and the waiter’s supercilious sneer and I said to Janice, I said, who DOES he think he is, that’s his tip gone, I don’t mind telling you I’ve a mind to NAME him, Janice, to NAME him on Tripadvisor, those people. It’s GREAT.
• The Sex-Positive House: Imagine living in a house with a bunch of other people who are all SEX POSITIVE and love TALKING ABOUT SEX and DEMONSTRATING SEX TECHNIQUES and stuff, who are all polyamorous and pansexual and oh God it sounds ghastly, doesn’t it, exhausting and grim and like it might be somewhat akin to a weekend with scientologists or something. This article introduces the residents of a ‘sex-positive’ dwelling in the US, and, as you’d expect, manages to make the entire experience sound about as sexy as an enema (not sexy, in case you were wondering), and the description of the ‘squirting workshop’ is, er, wow. 
• Pr0nhub and the American Sexual Imagination: A really interesting exploration of what Pr0nhub data says about what American’s are into sexually, and how its existence is changing sexual appetites and mores; not just in the ‘bongo is ruining our teens’ sense, but in the more general ‘people are finding out about kinks that they would never have known existed without this stuff’, which isn’t per se a bad thing. Contains absolutely nowehere near enough about the inexplicable rise in searches for ‘giant’ last year though, which I am still higely curious about. 
• Oxbridge Wine: An excellent portrayal of the very strange world of Varsity wine tasting, in which teams from Oxford and Cambridge compete to see who are the best winetasters (you can’t really imagine, say, Manchester and Portsmouth doing this, can you?). Peopled by some pretty strong eccentrics, this is not only really interesting but a reminder of quite how…weird Oxbridge can look. 
• The Vagina Whisperer: A profile of Dr. Amir Marashi, a US surgeon who’s made a name for himself performing vaginoplasties. Interestingly  the piece’s author starts being pretty ready to give the guy a kicking, but over the course of the narrative comes to th conclusion that vaginal surgery has been unfairly stigmatised for a whole variety of reasons; there’s a lot of really interesting stuff here about gender politics, quite aside from all the chat about yoni-reshaping. I imagine if you have a vagina this might make you feel a touch squeamish, what with the surgical descriptions, so caveat emptor – no photos or anything though, so very much SFW.
• The Sociology of the Smartphone: Thanks to Josh for pointing me at this – a GREAT read about the smartphone and how it’s changed society. Really well-considered, this is an extract from a forthcoming book which, if this is anything to go by, will be worth reading. It’s hardly a revelatory observation, but it’s quite astounding the pace at which it has reconfigured so many aspects of human life in such a short space of time. 
• Smaller and Smaller and Smaller: In another week in which the US establishment continued the legitimisation of the murder of black people by police officers, Marlon James (Booker winner for A Brief History of Seven Killings) wrote this on his Facebook Page, about being big, and black, in America, and how black people seem to need to constantly make themselves smaller and to take up less space to avoid being seen as a threat to society. Excellent, angry and sad. 
• Mapping Choose Your Own Adventure Stories: This is SUCH a wonderful way to map branching narratives, and I would like someone to make an easy wayto produce diagrams like these thankyouverymuchindeed. 
• Meet The Ball Boys: This is…wow. The story of Lavar Ball, a man who had a dream that his three sons would all play in the NBA and who has dedicated seemingly his whole life – and that of his wife, and indeed those of his kids – to that end. There is single-minded focus, and there is Lavar Ball; there is pushy parenting, and there is Lavar Ball. This man is DRIVEN. Poor the kids, though I guess if the make the Show then it’ll all have been worthwhile. Probably. 
• The Blathering Superego at the End of History: This is a very good if somewhat miserable essay, positing that liberalism has lost – or at least the triumphalist version of it which appeared unstoppable in the early 2000s – and that we need to work out why. This is the final sentence – it’s a nice representation of the overall style, and the whole piece is a very smart look at contemporary political discourse (or what passes for it): “In the face of these epochal changes, the superego of managerial liberalism is impotent. On some level it knows that. But it cannot simply abdicate, and it will take a while yet for it to wither entirely away. In the meantime, all it can do is blather, make empty threats of guilt and shame, issue fact-checks and explainers, shout from the roadside to an indifferent planet as the whole world goes libidinal and mad.”
• The Ken Doll Reboot: Because you need to know everything about man-bun Ken, the week’s REAL big story. 
• Hell Is Empty and All the Hedge Fund Managers Are At The Bellagio: A brilliantly angry, slightly ranty, in-no-way-objective account of the SALT conference in Vegas, where the very rich, and the people who move money around on behalf of the very rich, go to discuss how to continue being very rich. Having spent a bit of time in and around this space recently I can only stress quite how accurate this feels, and quite how much I really don’t want to ever have to spend time in this sort of space ever again, ever. 
• The Answer Is Never: On being comfortable in the knowledge that one doesn’t want to have children, and the difficulties that society seems to have in accepting that, particularly when the indivdual making the choice is a woman. So, so good – I can’t recommend this highly enough. 
• Meet Poppy: Poppy is one of my favourite things on the web at the moment. Whether you consider her a popstar, an art project, or some sort of trapped hybrid of the two, the metanarrative around her persona coupleed with the absolute cast-iron oddness of the project makes the whole thing particularly compelling to me. If you’re unfamiliar with who Poppy is, take 10 minutes to read this and familiarise yourself; there’s some new ish dropping later today (Friday 23) I think, so maybe now’s a good time to enter the bubble. 
• Oh James, You’re FILTHY!: I’d always known that Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle were on the fruity side, but I don’t think I’d ever seen them reproduced in full and MAN is there some smut in here – Joyce was a man of what I believe might euphemistically described as ‘earthy tastes’, and this selection of prose written by him to Nora over a few December days show quite how sexually obsessed with her he was. The acts here described may not be to your taste – it’s, er, a touch extreme in places – but there’s no denying the fabulous vitality in the writing. Also, let’s be honest, it’s never not funny reading people talk about being turned on by farts. 

By Joseph Bsharah

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is by Aldous Harding who I’ve featured already this year and whose album, Party, is honestly superb. I’m featuring this in part because it’s a great song, and, I have to admit, because I fnd her absolutely spellbinding in the video. It’s called ‘Blend’:

2) Next, this isn’t new but I have been obsessed with this record for the past two months and I can’t not share the video; this is called ‘No Halo’ and it’s by Sorority Noise and it is devastating to me:

3) This is by ‘Death From Above’ and it is the best video featuring godlike bodybuilders watching the world burn that you will see all year. It’s called ‘Freeze Me’:

4) Have you ever wondered what the exact aural equivalent of the way that this year has made you feel so far is? Wonder no more – it is THIS. ‘Thot’, by Icauna (great visuals too):

5) UK HIPHOP CORNER! This is by Web Curios favourite Manga St Hilare, from his excellent recent album Outbursts from the Outskirts – it’s called Young, and it’s ACE; hugely underrated, Manga, imho:

6) This is called ‘Time for Sushi’. Just watch it:

7) Last this week, a short film by the reliably odd Die Antwoord – it’s called ‘Tommy Can’t Sleep’, and it’s possible that after watching it you might not be able to either. BYE IT’S SO GOOD TO BE BACK I HAVE MISSED YOU ALL SO MUCH BYE BYE BYE:

Publisher’s note: This week, we remember Clare-Marie Grigg who was the first editor of Imperica and has sadly passed away. Our thoughts are with Clare’s family and friends at this very sad time.

By Evgenia Arbugaeva

4 HOURS OF SMOKY JAZZ? YOU’LL NEED IT TO GET THROUGH THIS LOT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS WELL AWARE OF THE CHALLENGE FACING IT IN RUNNING THROUGH A MONTH OR SO’S S*C**L M*D** NEWS IN ONE GO BUT WHICH IS CONFIDENT THAT WITH A DECENT RUN-UP IT CAN JUST ABOUT MANAGE IT:

• Facebook Making Canvas Ads Easier To Make: Noone really seems to like Canvas as an ad product, mainly due to the fact that they are such a colossal pain in the backside to put together and require loads of ASSETS and stuff to populate them. Now, though, you can autogenerate much of the content required to make them just by plugging in a url  – the ad-builder will automatically pull all images from the webpage into the ad editor, in theory at least making it really easy to create a Canvas from them. Except, of course, this relies on the images actually being good, and the right size/shape, and all sorts of other things, but points to them for at least attempting to take the pain out of the creation process.

• Facebook Rights Manager Gets Better: Christ, it’s only when you’ve not done this for a few weeks that you truly realise quite how stultifying much of this crap which passes for ‘news’ is. Still, this is probably quite important to those of you who are tasked with the VITALLY IMPORTANT task of ensuring that your branded content isn’t misappropriated by unscrupulous videopirates – I could keep writing, but let’s instead take Facebook’s own word(s) for it: “With Rights Manager, rights owners can find matches of their video content on Facebook; these matches are surfaced on a dashboard. Previously, the rights owner would review these matches in the dashboard to take action. To help make management more efficient for rights owners, we’re now enabling them to automate more of the process, and providing more options for what happens to matched content. This means that the rights owner can decide to set an action to happen automatically when a match of their content is found on Facebook, simplifying the process”. GOOD, EH? Oh.

• You Can Run Ads For Your Newsletter Through Facebook Now: Mailchimp lets you buy ads through Facebook now, which is exactly the sort of thing I would do if a) I had the money; and b) I thought there was an actual audience for this crap out there; and c) if Mailchimp hadn’t suspended Imperica’s account for reasons they don’t seem keen on divulging, the bstards.

• Reactions In Facebook Comments: Yes, you all know about this, I know; I am mainly doing this section so that I can clear the insane backlog of links in my head and commit this stuff to memory (it doesn’t seem to work if I don’t write it down). Anyway, this is mainly interesting in terms of the way it extends the number of data points that FB is collecting around users’ interactions with content; I’ll be AMAZED if before too long brands aren’t being offered the opportunity to target ads at people based on which reactions they most use on posts, in comments, etc.

• Facebook Groups Can Now Set Admission Questions: So now your public Group all about the brilliance of cranes can establish some questions to determine whether or not an applicant for membership has the requisite cranepassion. Obviously mainly of use to, you know, ACTUAL PEOPLE rather than brands, but the combination of this and the ability to attach Groups to brand Pages makes me think that there’s some quite interesting stuff you could do with focus groups here, although to be honest I am too bored to think on that any more.

• FB Rolling Out ‘Deliver Food’ Function in US: In partnership with a couple of US Just Eat equivalents, as far as I can see; will over time inevitably come to the UK, as we move ever closer to a world in which you need never, ever leave the safe, blue-tinged walled garden that is Facebook. Why are there spikes and broken glass atop the walls? Oh, to protect us and definitely not to keep us inside? Oh, great, ok then!

• Facebook Fundraising Rolls Out To All (In US): I…I don’t know about this. On the one hand, fundraising is GREAT and philanthropy is WONDERFUL, and all of us fortunate enough to have some spare pennies should where possible give at least some of said spare pennies to assist those less fortunate. Totally. Erm, but, I get the horrible feeling that the ability for people to set up fundraising for themselves on Facebook is, in pretty short order, going to lead to some pretty egregious trolling of the system, not to mention some SPECTACULAR online fights and stuff. Actually, on reflection, this will be ACE, bring it on. Oh, really bad news if you’re JustGiving, obvs.

• Facebook Live Social Chat Is Here: If you’re one of the people who actually enjoys watching livestreams of exceptionally mundane things on Facebook, rejoice in that you can now open a chat window to discuss it separately with your FB ‘friends’ as you do so. Oh, and the ability – previously only granted to famouses but now available to peons like us – to do a side-by-side livestream with a friend is also rolling out, so expect to see your most BANTEROUS mates doing their two-header hot takes on the news SOON. God this all sounds awful, doesn’t it?

• FB Apparently Testing Video Cover Images For Pages: Because everything must be video, it is the will of Zuckerberg. This seems relatively fine and benign until you begin to consider the future reality of your banking client demanding that you make them a ‘really sexy’ video header – because that is exactly what will happen.

• Instagram Adds Lots Of New Features Which Makes It More Snapchatty: Face filters! The ability to make video in reverse! Hashtag stickers! Whilst the face filters thing has limited relevance to brands, unless of course you’re a brand so plutocratically rich that it can afford to negotiate with Facebook around building you your own variant, I think the hashtag stickers thing could be rather useful – much like the feature Twitter launched last year, which noone seems to use, this works as follows: “Just tap the sticker icon at the top right of your screen, select and customize the hashtag, then add it to your story. As with mentions, you can also add hashtags using regular text. People watching your story will be able to tap the hashtag sticker or text to visit the hashtag page and explore related posts.” It’s potentially a nice, easy way of encouraging and collating/curating UGC around a brand campaign if that’s the sort of dreadful thing that floats your professional boat.

• Instagram Testing Direct Response Ads: Literally this. Testing. Direct. Response. Ads. Christ alive. You know, when I was a little kid I briefly wanted to be in the RAF; imagine kidMatt’s disillusionment were he to know that instead his future self is writing ‘content’ about the possibility of a new type of advertising platform being introduced on a social network he doesn’t even use. Poor kidMatt.

• TWELEVISION!: YEAH THAT’S RIGHT. Twitter has seen the future, and the future is, er, telly! Yes, Twitter’s planning on bringing 24/7 broadcasting to the platform, because there isn’t enough utter crap being pumped into our faces ALL THE FCUKING TIME; early announcements suggest Bloomberg are on board, as are a whole host of other partners; it remains to be seen whether anyone actually wants to watch tv on Twitter (oh God, calling it ‘TV’ is going to become a really old person thing, isn’t it? Are we just going to start to have to refer to this stuff as ‘video content’ all the time?), but there’s obviously a huge potential boost to them in terms of ad revenue when they start selling in-broadcast inventory.

• Twitter Now Lets You Promote Your TwitterChatBots With DM Cards: If anyone’s actually using Twitter bots to any extent I am yet to see it – which may explain why they’re taking another punt at improving uptake with this new feature, which lets brands promote their bots at users through DM cards. These create promoted Tweets which prompt users to start a ‘conversation’ with said bot, which then slides right into their DMs like the SLAG it is. “The cards are not about pushing people to bots that help solve customer service issues or encourage purchases from the brand in question, as is the focus of many Facebook chatbots. Instead, they’re about getting people to interact with the brand through a private messaging experience that’s meant to be fun, not transactional”, witters the article. Does that sound like something that any sentient human being would actually want to do? No, no of course it doesn’t, and yet here we are.

• You Can Now Search Twitter For Emoji Use: This serves no actual purpose whatsoever, but it is quite interesting to see what comes up if you plug in some of the really obscure, technical-looking ones.

• Twitter Lets You See Which Advertisers Are Targeting You: …and, by extension, shows exactly how appalling its ad targeting options are. Oh Twitter! I wrote this for ANOTHER PUBLICATION (bonus points to anyone who can guess/find out which) and so am going to reproduce it here as, frankly, I am feeling incredibly lazy and getting through the rest of this is currently looking like my own personal Everest, so: “As confusion continues to reign in the mainstream media over how social media ad targeting works and what effect it can have on democracy, credit to Twitter for injecting a welcome dose of transparency into the debate. In an unusual move, the social network recently updated its privacy settings to grant all users with an account the ability to see the information advertisers can use to target them (something which Facebook, for example, doesn’t offer with anywhere near the same degree of clarity), as well as a list of all those advertisers who have targeted an individual. Laudable in its transparency, this move had the side-effect of exposing how…er…esoteric some of Twitter’s assumptions about its users can be, and therefore how accurate – or otherwise – its ad targeting is. Although it affords advertisers the opportunity to target by age, most Twitter users seem to be categorised as ‘between 13-54’; hardly the laser-guided targeting some might expect. Interest categories available to advertisers include such insightful, granular options as ‘Politics’, ‘Politics and Current Events’ and ‘Political Elections’ and, er, ‘Politics’, with no indication as to what, if anything, differentiates each from the other. UK users were in many instances bemused to find that they were grouped into categories suggesting they might be interesting in purchasing financial services products from brands such as Geico, Aetna and Suntrust – none of which in fact operate in the UK, and who would find the ability to market to people here useless. It seems clear that, on Twitter at least, the promised ability to apply ‘laser guided’ targeting of customers hasn’t quite manifested itself. There may be a reason Facebook is less than keen to avoid a similar degree of transparency…”

• LinkedIn Now Lets You Do Matched Audiences Like FB & Twitter: You know that thing where you can give FB or Twitter a list of email addresses or website visitors and target them with ads on the platform? Yeah, you can now do that on LinkedIn also, which is thrilling.

• Snapchat Launches Custom Stories: This is a really interesting idea (which I seem to recall reading this week that Instagram has already basically ripped off, but I can’t find the link to that right now); Custom Stories lets any Snap user create a Story, and then invite any number of Snap users they like to contribute to it – effectively making it a collaborative storytelling platform (sorry). You can also geofence the stories, meaning this is PERFECT for doing stuff at concerts, festivals, conferences, etc; in fact, this is potentially hugely useful to broadcasters in terms of pulling together Stories from multiple reporters covering one particular event. LOADS of options here if you could only be bothered to THINK about them.

• Snapchat Basically Adds Photoshop: Well, sort of – this is its new ‘Magic Eraser’ feature which basically lets people erase stuff from images and video shared on Snap and which also does some really clever stuff around replacing all the background imagery after you’ve erased something, which, I can confidently predict, is going to lead to both some excellent Vine-style creative work and also at least one news organisation with poor image-checking skills being absolutely taken in by some FAKE NEWS.

• Pinterest Launching Visual Search Ad Targeting: Or at least they will be, soon. Their clever tech which lets users take photos of stuff and then use said photos to search Pinterest for similar-looking things will soon let advertisers target people based on the things they’re conducting visual searches for; so you can, for example, target people taking photos of red hats with Pins linking to the purchase page for YOUR red hat. This is also going to come to Google, with all the announcements around Lens at the recent I/O Conference, at which point this will become REALLY interesting. Oh, and Facebook will almost certainly do it to because THEY DO EVERYTHING, eventually at least.

• Pinterest Launches Autoplay Video Ads: I have literally nothing else to say about this.

• Google Launching ‘Exciting’ New Tools To Track Offline Spend Against Online Ad Exposure: In case you didn’t feel that enough of what you do in your day-to-day existence is being monitored by sinister agents of the gigantic capitalist superstructure, welcome to a new series of services from Google which will enable advertisers to track exactly how exposure to ads correlates to purchase behaviour, OBVIOUSLY this will all be anonymised – don’t worry, kids! – but it makes me feel distinctly uncomfortable, much like nearly everything else so far this year.

• Quora Launches Ads: Quora’s an odd place, seemingly populated exclusively by really Alpha valley-type people, slightly strange monomaniacal single-topic experts and a LOT of swivel-eyed loons (these audiences often overlap). If you want to advertise at people like that, GREAT! The ad offer seems pretty standard, although the targeting is limited to location, topic interest and platform which is pretty shonky when compared to almost everything else out there. Still, my facetiousness aside, the user profile is interesting enough that it might be worth considering.

• Telegram Launches Chatbot Payments: Telegram’s pretty niche, fine, but this is interesting if only in terms of an indication as to how this will work on every single other messaging platform under the sun. Potentially a reason for brands to take an interest in Telegram too, though I imagine that the audience in the UK is so vanishingly small that it’s not quite worth the hassle (oh, and also the payments thing is, as ever, US-only as yet, so, er, probably not even really worth talking about. Sorry).

• Dominos Does IFTTT: This is a simple idea but such a clever one, and SO on-brand when it comes to their whole ‘we are the masters of tehnology gimmicks’ PR schtick.

• IPSOS Global Trends: ALL of the bullsh1t trend analysis essays you could want, in one place. It’s actually presented pretty poorly, but there’s a lot of useful stuff in here which those of you who have to pull together planning stuff might find useful for the preparation of your TISSUE OF LIES.

• Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2017: I bet, as you limp tiredly to the end of this section of Curios, you’re thinking “God, what I’d REALLY like now is to wade through 355 slides of internet trends data”. YOU LUCKY PEOPLE! This is Mary Meeker’s annual datadump, as comprehensive and ugly as it always is; as I type it was only published yesterday, so there’s no decent deep analysis of it online yet, but I’m sure by the time you’re reading this there will be LOADS. Haven’t read it all yet, but the stat about voice search was interesting to me; does anyone know what voice recognition tech is like at identifying gender and regional accents? I reckon that sort of tech is going to be HUGELY useful in ad targeting around this – you know, targeting ads at people doing voice searches for a certain thing, and attempting to hit, say, men from the North of England. Hang on, this is an ACTUAL great business idea, someone go off and become a billionaire and chuck me some monies.

• The Airman Challenge: Last this week in the boring section noone really wants to read but which I know some of you do and I salute your indefatigability, this is a really shiny and well put-together site for the US Airforce, all about persuading young men and women that a life in the skies is FUN! And, er, presenting you with a series of chillingly entertaining little games about killing, basically. Makes you feel excited and really guilty at the same time, like the EXACT instant of masturbatory orgasm.

By Frank Hertford

HAVE AN EXCELLENT HIPHOP MIX ON SPOTIFY!

THE SECTION WHICH, GIVEN THE HIATUS, IS NOT SO MUCH ALL-NEW WEBSPAFF AND INSTEAD IS MORE OF A SELECTION OF SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PAST MONTH AND WHICH IS GOING TO DO ITS VERY BEST TO APPLY SOME SORT OF QUALITY CONTROL FILTER TO THE FOLLOWING SELECTION OF LINKS AS AT THE MOMENT IT’S RUNNING TO 5 PAGES OF URLS WHICH IS SIMPLY TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THIS GODFORSAKEN MESS OF A BLOGTHING, PT.1:

• The Lyttle Lytton Prize 2017: So this is REALLY old – a whole month or more – but it’s too good not to kick off with. In case you don’t know, the Lyttle Lytton prize is given each year to the person who can come up with the best, worst opening line to an unwritten novel – cliches are encouraged, mixed metaphors abound, and each year it’s one of the most joyful celebrations of creative writing you will see. I shan’t spoil the enjoyment of reading these yourself and finding your favourites, but my personal one is the following GEM: “Thornmill Greyeyes was a proud elf. His ears stood proud, his cock stood proud, but most of all his heart stood proud as he watched his bride mince down the isle with her ravishingly good looks.”

• Webby Awards 2017: The latest batch of award winners from the annual celebration of good stuff on the internet, this is a useful place to check out some decent webwork and ‘get inspiration’ (nick other people’s ideas and pass them off as something halfway original). Lots of this stuff has already featured in Curios, turns out, which suggests either that I have an eye for GREAT CONTENT or that I spend far, far too much time on the web.

• THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET: Hyperbole sort of justified here, as Yahoo! Japan presents the whole history of the web and the tech and culture around it as one, immense, vertically-scrolling animated illustration. It’s VERY dense and if you, like me, are some sort of web culture aficionado you are going to find a lot to love in here. You can click on bits of the image to get popup explainers, but it’s all in Japanese so I am no wiser as to knowing what much of this stuff is. WHO WAS GREE??? Anyway, this is ace and really quite fun, do check it out.

• Mail Me To The GOP: Er, are you allowed to do this? This website, created in protest at the Republican Party’s work to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, is designed to help people pull together the correct paperwork to have their ashes mailed to a Republican congressperson on death, the message being “YOU KILLED ME BY YOUR ACTIONS, NOW STARE AT MY DUSTY REMAINS IN GUILT”. It’s, er, a strong message, not going to lie – it’s quite tempting to set this up in the UK, even as a joke, just to watch the Mail get into a frothy tizz.

• BotBot: Smart little tool which lets you quickly and easily make rudimentary bots on Facebook based on a few basic templates – answering questions, selling stuff, ordering food, etc. Uses integration with Zendesk et al, so may not be for everyone, but it’s a nice illustration of how simple these things can be to put together. Oh, and as we’re doing chatbots, this is a service building them specifically for music artists to ‘interact with fans’ and, more importantly, push notifications at them about tickets and merch. SO AUTHENTIC!

• Twitch Does Investment: Remember Twitch Plays Pokemon, where a bunch of people on Twitch tried to collaboratively play through Pokemon using crowdvoted commands? Well someone’s doing the same thing with $50k of REAL MONEY, letting Twitch viewers vote on what to buy or sell, one transaction every 5 minutes. Quite mental, not least because if you described how this works to someone 5 years ago they would likely have just BOGGLED at you.

• Pipes: The geekier among you (ha!) will recall Yahoo! Pipes, a rare instance of Yahoo! doing something genuinely innovative and useful which they obviously then went and killed. Pipes was basically a really smart way of filtering information and data from all over the web in a variety of ways; it let you do all sorts of clever things in terms of pulling info from a range of sites and then fiddling with it and spitting it out elsewhere – which is a really dreadful explanation, but anyway it’s sort of been resurrected and oh god it turns out that doing all this writing is really HARD when you’ve not been doing it for a while, eh?

• Fireflies: This is an interactive simulation of fireflies, and how their lighting systems work – it is simultaneously REALLY relaxing and also revealing as to how incredibly fireflies operate, and I could basically stare at it for HOURS.

• The Rosetta Wearable Disk: Ignore the appalling webcopy here – the upshot of this is that, for a donation to the Rosetta Project of $1000 or more (the Rosetta Project, in case you don’t know, is devoted to the archiving of human language in perpetuity), you can get a TINY LITTLE NANOFICHE which you can wear around your neck and which is covered in 1000 pages of microscopic information in hundreds of languages. WHY NOT, EH? If anyone has a spare grand they’d like to give me so I can get one of these that would be ace, thanks.

• Where’s Wallace?: Where’s Wally?, but redone with characters from The Wire. It is HARD.

• Dog Names of NYC: See, THIS is what public data is for. In New York you obviously have to register your dog with the City; they’ve taken all the registered names and mapped them by frequency, so that you can learn that Max, Bella and Coco are the most popular, and that there are some very, very strange choices lurking when you get down to the low frequencies. Shout out in particular to the wonderful idiot who has chosen to name their dog ‘Playboy’, and for whom I slightly fear a life of perennial singledom.

• Talk Obama To Me: Type in anything you like into the textbox and watch as it’s spoken back at you by the much-missed ex-POTUS Barack Obama, in a word collage stitched together from his speeches and TV appearances. It’s a touch shonky but pretty impressive, and I personally got more enjoyment than I probably ought admit from getting Barry to tell me he wanted to ‘woof me right in the dirtbox’.

• Cold War Simulator: Looking a LOT like 1980s classic War Games in aesthetic, this little site lets you model a two-combatant nuclear conflict complete with missiles and bases and, cheerily, with little mention of any of the pesky side effects like ‘fallout’ and ‘a ravaged planet’.

• WebVR Experiments: Google’s collection of little WebVR toys, all gathered in one place for you to enjoy. There are some lovely ones here – you’ve probably seen the ping pong game before, but it’s worth exploring all of them as there’s some glorious design there and some really clever executions and explorations of what you can do with the (really impressive now) tech in Chrome. One of my favourites is this one, which uses speech recognition to let you tell the programme to take you wherever you like in the world using Google maps – SUCH fun and the sort of thing I imagine it would nice to play with with your kids.

• Lighthouse: Lighthouse is ‘the interactive digital assistant which tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on at home”; or, as a less-optimistically-minded person might have it, a home surveillance system for the evil or paranoid. It’s an always-on, always-recording camera which uploads footage of what it sees to the Cloud and which can report stuff to you based on what you ask it – so, at least it claims, it will be able to answer ‘was the dog walked today?’ by recognising the question and then scanning that day’s footage to ‘see’ whether anyone took the dog out. Or, maybe, “did my teenage son leave his room today?”, or “what time did my husband get home last night and was he drunk?” and oh god this is going to be the end of so many families, and will lead to so many parents seeing their kids masturbating, won’t it?

• A World Without People: A beautiful collection of photographs of places abandoned by people. Stuff’s often so much better without us really, isn’t it?

• Night Lotion: I’d not noticed that this was a thing, but apparently there’s a TV/film trope about women applying lotion to themselves before they go to bed; this is an Instagram account collecting those instances. Hey, Dove, why not do something fun with this sort of thing rather than making increasingly patronising wishy-washy noises about physical diversity which are nothing more than an increasingly transparent attempt at woke marketing? Eh? Oh.

• The Pregnancy Pause: This is a brilliant idea. Pregnancy Pause is a US initiative looking to address the issues surrounding maternity leave in the US and the fact that CV gaps are often used to stigmatise working women on their return to the workplace; the simple gimmick here is that the campaign has set itself up as an employer on LinkedIn, meaning now mothers can have an official-looking ‘Pregnancy Pause’ entry on their CV covering any maternity gap, which then links back to the campaign and explains its objectives. This is SO SMART, and has the benefit of being easily translatable across other experiences/issues – if you’re a charity reading this, you ought to think on your own variant as it is CLEVER. MIND for mental health, perhaps, or anyone really. GO!

• Amazing Style Transfer Video Thingy: Yes, ok, fine, but YOU try describing this in 6 words. Anyway, watch the video and be STAGGERED – there’s no sound for some reason, and this is still very much theoretical as there don’t seem to be any details about how it actually works, but if it’s real it’s incredible; this is basically a video of a bloke talking; as he does so, some software applies a visual effect to his face in realtime based on a variety of sources – paintings, a statue…it’s genuinely astounding, take a look.

• Make Your Own Data Gifs: Neat little Google tool which lets you automatically make gifs comparing different datasets. It’s VERY simple, and if you’re some sort of datageek you can almost certainly do better than this in your sleep, but for those, like me, who are crap at both numbers AND making stuff, this is a godsend.

• The Infinite String Quartet: This is a very, very soothing little webtoy. The spheres at the top correspond to different strings; where you place them on the landscape determines pitch, etc. Just play and listen to what happens and imagine that you are somewhere far, far away from all the electioneering and madness and despair.

• Searching For Syria: It’s important that we occasionally get reminded just how fcuked much of the world is, and that it continues to be fucked even when we decide to ignore it because we’re doing a democracy. This site, put together by UNHCR, is a nicely-built and tells the story of the conflict and its impact in simple, clear fashion; it’s also obviously a bit heartbreaking, as you’d expect.

• Virtual Cities From Photos: I am pretty much entirely baffled by how this works, but nonetheless. It’s basically tech which, although it’s obviously in its infancy, works to stitch together 3d models of cities from photos of said cities, automatically modelling features like road width, building height and even traffic density through interpretation of images. So, in theory, we’ll soon be able to point it at all the photos on Flickr tagged ‘London’ and BOOM, hello virtual capital. Or at least that’s what I imagine will happen; perhaps someone with a better grasp on actual real technology can correct me.

• The Paleobiology Database: It’s a resource for people interested in paleontology, OBVS – it’s also, if you click on the ‘Explore’ button, an interactive map of where all the known fossils in the world are, which if you have a small, dinosaur-obsessed child is probably a pretty wonderful thing to let them play around with.

• Neural Network Illustrations in Allo: Allo, which you will recall is Google’s messaging app which has all the fancy (creepy?) Google Assistant stuff built in, recently launched this feature which noone really picked up on but which I think is sort of amazing; you give it a photo of yourself and it uses Neural Network tech to spit out a series of cartoon stickers of yourself; seriously, this is REALLY impressive and were I a cartoonist would have me looking nervously over my shoulder.

• The Manhoff Archive: I’m just going to quote the site here: “Major Martin Manhoff spent more than two years in the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, serving as assistant army attaché at the U.S. Embassy, which was located just off Red Square at the beginning of his time in Moscow. He took full advantage of his post, using his gifted photographic eye to capture hundreds of images of everyday life in Moscow and across the U.S.S.R. When he left the country in 1954 amid accusations of espionage, Major Manhoff took with him reels of 16 millimeter film and hundreds of color slides and negatives he shot during his travels – including of one of the Soviet Union’s pivotal events, Josef Stalin’s funeral. But after his return to the United States, the trove of rare images lay forgotten, stored in cardboard boxes in a former auto body shop in the Pacific Northwest until its discovery by a Seattle-based historian.” This is a really wonderful collection of photography and a proper timesink.

• 100 Days Of Secrets: 100 secrets, one a day for 100 days, illustrated by Filipino designer/illustrator Terence Eduarte.

• The David Rumsey Map Collection: You want maps? HE GOT MAPS. All the cartography you could ever want.

• Scrb: Autotranscription service which lets you upload an MP3 and get back a transcript in what they promise is a matter of minutes. Which, frankly, even if it’s a tiny bit shonky is basically miraculous and so useful and oh, what’s that, another industry being slowly crushed by the advent of machine learning? OH YES INDEED! Sorry, transcribers.

By Raymond Depardon

WHY NOT ENJOY SOULWAX’S RECENT ESSENTIAL MIX, WHICH IS ACE! 

THE SECTION WHICH, GIVEN THE HIATUS, IS NOT SO MUCH ALL-NEW WEBSPAFF AND INSTEAD IS MORE OF A SELECTION OF SOME OF THE HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PAST MONTH AND WHICH IS GOING TO DO ITS VERY BEST TO APPLY SOME SORT OF QUALITY CONTROL FILTER TO THE FOLLOWING SELECTION OF LINKS AS AT THE MOMENT IT’S RUNNING TO 5 PAGES OF URLS WHICH IS SIMPLY TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THIS GODFORSAKEN MESS OF A BLOGTHING, PT.2:

• Airwaybill: This is a really smart idea. Airwaybill basically lets people use airline passengers as couriers – you say what you want taking from where to where; and the system matches you with someone willing to take it with them for a few quid. Obviously this isn’t designed to be used to ferry kilos of cocaine across the Pacific – that still needs to be hastily swallowed inside a condom – but for small things (gifts, documents, etc) it’s a really useful concept which I would totally use.

• Moments: A series of small, pointless webtoys which I absolutely adore. Just look at this cat! Look at his little face as he plays with the string! God, I could die.

• The Best Time To Visit Anywhere: If you’re a travel brand, STEAL THIS. Plug in your desired temperature range for a holiday destination, when you want to go and press the button – the site will spit out a list of places where the average temperature for that time of year suits your requirements. It doesn’t take a genius to work out how you could link this to sales, right?

• VR Gluv: Stupid name, but a cool piece of kit – I have banged on for ages about how I think it will be the haptic accessories that make VR as a tech; these are the first gloves I’ve seen which seem to offer the ‘grasp a virtual object and it will feel like you’re actually holding something’ experience which is crucial to giving the illusion that there’s a ‘there’ there; sadly, though, their line about being able to feel things that are ‘hard, or soft, or somewhere inbetween’ took my brain straight to the creepy techsex places it tends to go when confronted with stuff like this and I had to stop looking at the page, but maybe you’ll fare better.

• YouTube DJ: Plug in any two YouTube urls and this site lets you mix them on virtual turntables, crossfader and all. Fun, but I can personally vouch for the fact that it is impossible to create a pleasant-sounding mashup of Diamanda Galas and Miley Cyrus however hard one might try.

• 100 Million Books: I LOVE THIS. Publishers, please take note – a really simple Chrome extension which each time you open a new tab suggests a book you might be interested in reading. The books are plucked at random; there are no genre filters or anything like that, just pure, unfiltered BOOK. Let me repeat, I LOVE THIS. Oh, and there’s another thing just like it but for art from the Europeana project, if you prefer images to words. CHROME EXTENSIONS ARE ACE MORE PEOPLE SHOULD DO THEM.

• Lost & Found: Striking collection of photos by Michael Joseph of kids in the US living their life on the freight trains which cross the country. It’s worth selecting the thumbnail view as there are lots of these; some of the faces are just beautiful, captured as though through tintype photography.

• The Positive Lexicography Project: A lovely idea, this, presenting an “evolving index of ‘untranslatable’ words related to wellbeing from across the world’s languages.” Browse words relating to joy, aesthetics, tastes and much more, from all around the world. I have just been reminded of the word ‘Petrichor’ which has made me inordinately happy; if you’re any sort of linguist this is going to be like catnip for you.

• Women Who Design: A filterable directory of women working in design (in its broadest sense) across the world, with links to their Twitter profiles, etc. Literally NO excuse for having an all-male team anymore, really, in pretty much any industry.

• This Is Your Jam: Pick a song, and then see whether you can remember all the lyrics within the time limit. Simultaneously really annoying and startlingly addictive, and the co-op play element is a nice touch.

• The Searcher: I love stuff like this. Did you know that there’s a dedicated magazine for metal detection enthusiasts? OF COURSE THERE IS! Explore its wonders here.

• Fonts From The 90s: Yes, ok, so this is a marketing thing for some font platform or another, but tell me you don’t want access to the fonts used on the Fresh Prince.

• Every Single Word In Icelandic: An intensely lovable and very Nordic Instagram account, presenting simple illustrations of every single word in the Icelandic language, one by one. If you don’t want to learn stuff like this: “Remember the word for earth, jörð, from yesterday? If you add the word for berry to the end you get jarðarber, meaning strawberry” every day then frankly you are a MONSTER.

• Cheeky Exploits: Another Instagram feed, this time of photos of people flashing their bottoms. Not exactly erotic unless you have some sort of latent exhibitionist tendencies, more sort of cute and slightly whimsical (can bottoms be whimsical? They can, yes).

• [email protected]: I don’t have a better way of describing this than ‘Shazam for plants’. So, er, that’s it – Shazam for plants. Such an excellent idea/project/resource, and the sort of thing that would make country walks for city idiots like me who can identify literally NO nature whatsoever.

• Down and Out in Los Santos: GTAV was an excellent game though I think I’m done with the series’ ‘edgy’ humour and fratboy ‘satire’; what’s been amazing, though, is its longevity through its online incarnations, and the number of art projects which have spun off out of it. This one documents the ‘homeless’ characters within the game, presenting photos of them as if from a real-life documentary; it’s ace, and if you can be bothered to think of it this way raises one or two interesting questions about our relationship to actual, real life homeless people.

• Trollcakes: Sadly this is a US-only service at the moment, but definitely deserves recreating over here; Trollcakes lets people submit a mean tweet they were sent, which content gets iced onto a cake and delivered to the troll in question. They also do all the donkeywork of tracking down the postal address of the troll in question to deliver it, which is the most impressive part of the whole thing imho.

• Subtle Dildo: ANOTHER Instagram account, and another thing that’s like Where’s Wally? – except here, every photo has a dildo artfully hidden within it which you have to find. Well, you don’t have to, but frankly what the fcuk else are you going to do with your time on this planet other than look for veiny, sculpted cocks on Insta?

• Pictooptics: No idea why this exists but it’s rather nice; type in any word you like and it will spit out a weird kaleidoscopey pattern-thing (my descriptive powers, it would appear, have survived the hiatus unscathed) made out of icons associated with that word. Trying it with ‘penis’ yields some interesting results.

• The Guggenheim Archive: A load of old exhibition guides from the Guggenheim, digitised and online for all your art historical needs.

• Crytch: This is a BRILLIANT way of sending encrypted messages online, and it’s fun. I can’t be bothered to explain it, but I promise you it’s really good, honest.

• Spellfcker: The MACHINES read everything (even Web Curios). They read the web, they read your emails, they will soon read your minds if Zuck has his way. Small cheers, then, for stuff like this – Spellfcuker takes any text you give it and scrambles it in such a way as to make it impossible (or at least very hard) for machines to read whilst still letting humans have a reasonable shot at working out its meaning. Yew kan unnahstannd this, ckan’ed yu? Told yew ead whohrked.

• Orphe: SMART SHOES! Actually these are more of an art/music/dance project than practical footwear, but – Orphe is footwear which contains LEDs in the sole which are programmable, which tracks your movement, which can be used to create music using in-built motion sensors…frankly it looks mental. They seem to be claiming that they can be bought, and there are store links to Amazon, but nothing in stock…HM. Still, looks cool even if it might just be vaporware.

• Fontmap: “This interactive map of more than 750 fonts has been organized using machine learning”, burbles the website. Yes, it has! Really interesting to see affinities between different font design; you get a real feel for the way designs evolve from each other looking at it this way.

• Vinylpost: SUCH a nice idea, this. Subscribe to this service and each month you’ll receive a floppy vinyl postcard, each etched with a playable song from that month’s featured musical artist, and designed by that month’s featured graphic designer. Fine, OK, it is, I concede, almost beyond parody in terms of its hipsterness, but it’s lovely and cute and so I don’t care (also, as an INFLUENCER MARKETING gimmick this is super-stealable imho).

• Highlight: This is basically magic. These people have invented tech which lets you highlight, clip, copy, etc, text from ACTUAL PHYSICAL BOOKS. I mean, it will never take off, at least not in this incarnation, because the unit cost of each book must be absolutely insane, but it’s an incredibly interesting idea. Actually you could probably do something like this with smart glasses recognising text and using gestural interfaces to track your finger moving along a line, so perhaps this isn’t that smart after all and will be totally redundant. WHO KNOWS? Certainly not me, I’m just some webmong.

• The Real Story: “The Real Story is a writer development project and journal devoted to promoting the form of nonfiction writing in the UK.” It publishes work and supports writers – if you do this sort of thing, it’s worth a look.

• The Food Memory Bank: This is a wonderful collection of short stories, memories, vignettes, whatever, all centred around people’s memories of food. Long, short, happy, sad, there’s a whole world of human life in here, all of it underpinned by that Proustian idea linking food, powerfully, to memory. There’s some great writing too; a lovely site.

• Privat: Launching soon on Indiegogo, this is a really interesting-looking smartphone for those concerned about privacy and surveillance. You can read a full list of features on the site, but the ability to have the camera and microphone disabled as the default setting is interesting, as is the inclusion of a second, separate camera which in theory would prevent anyone spying on your pics. If you are a VERY paranoid person this is your new top-of-wishlist toy.

• Learn Music With Ableton: This is a simply brilliant series of tutorials by Ableton on making electronic music – from the basics of how grid-based music programming works to more complex elements, all presented in simple, friendly fashion. Would be perfect for kids just getting into the idea of making music, digitally or otherwise.

• The RompHim: I first found this hideous thing right back at the start of its crowdfunding journey, before over 3000 IDIOTS decided to back the project and contribute over £300k to making a male romper suit a reality. WELL DONE LADS WELL DONE YOU HAVE JUST PAID £100 FOR SOMETHING WHICH, AT BEST, YOU WILL WEAR ONCE AND WHICH WILL MORE LIKELY ARRIVE A YEAR LATE BY WHICH POINT YOU WILL BE TOO FAT TO FIT INTO IT ANY MORE BECAUSE OF ALL THE CRAFT BEER YOU CONSUME AT YOUR IRONIC BANTER SESSIONS OH CHRIST I HATE YOU sorry but.

• Skinmotion: Have you ever thought “You know what I’d like? I’d like a tattoo of a waveform which I can scan with an app and which when I do so will cause my phone to play a particular piece of audio, up to a minute long, associated with that waveform”? No, of course you haven’t, YOU ARE NOT A FCUKING MORON. Well DONE, Skinmotion people, you have invented a very specific, very pointless variant on the QR code! Jesus.

• Unsung NYC: This is a very nice project indeed which I would love to see replicated in London in some way. “Immersive soundscapes compare today’s urban cacophony to the island Henry Hudson encountered in 1609. History unearths wonder in the green heart of New York”. A really gorgeous audio history project, this.

• Amputee Love: In 1975, this comic was published to attempt to break down prejudices against amputees; in the words of its author, “ We are probably all crooked or bent in some way. Limited is what I mean. We all have limitations.” He attempted to break down these prejudices by, er, producing a really rather racy comic about having sex with amputees. Which gives me the only excuse I need to link to this EXCELLENT song.

• Dank Big Meme Hunter: A game by the ever-excellent Adult Swim, which basically rips off Duck Hunt and lets you use your phone as a controller to shoot stuff on your desktop. Reasonably fun, but it’s the phone/controller execution I really like here.

• The Service Droid: THE worst thing (I mean, not the WORST thing, but certainly the worst thing I feel comfortable sharing on here) that I saw in the whole month of downtime was undoubtedly this; now, revisiting it, I am not only horrified by the premise but also by the fact that some 30 people have seen fit to back it on Indiegogo to the tune of £6k. WHY? WHAT SORT OF MONSTERS ARE YOU. The Arlan Service Droid will, the man behind it claims, be “the first robotic droid sex toy capable of recreating intimate human oral interaction”. Now, take a moment to think about that and (sorry, but it’s worth it) to imagine for a second what a blowjobbot might look like. Got that probably distasteful image in your head? Hold it there a second. Now click on the link – I’ll wait ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….SEE?! IT’S WORSE THAN YOU COULD POSSIBLY HAVE IMAGINED! Why is it designed in the foetal position of someone being beaten? What is wrong with the faces? WHO HAS BACKED THIS HORROR. Seriously, men, however lonely you are THIS IS NOT THE ANSWER.

• Stained Glass: A beautiful interactive music video to finish with, which will hopefully cleanse the palate after that last horrorlink – colour it in as it plays and make something beautiful and soothing to share with the world.

By Honey Long

LAST UP, FRIEND OF CURIOS AKIRA THE DON HAS LAUNCHED A RADIO STATION!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Is It Better Than Emotion?: Tracking review scores of supposedly good albums on Pitchfork and comparing them to their review of Carly Rae Jepson’s album ‘Emotion’ with often surprising results.

• Sonic The Hedgeblog: All Sonic, all day.

• From Another Room: “A blog dedicated to the “from another room” effect: an auditory recreation of music that sounds muffled as though it were playing from another room. it can have one or multiple contexts, depending on the listener (examples: wandering through an apartment building, being upstairs from a party, or getting murdered behind a club)”

• Marvel NYC: Where Marvel Comics and New York City intersect.

• Buble Raptor: Michael Buble being stalked by a velociraptor.

• Pubcats: Cats! In pubs! Pubcats! Not technically a Tumblr but I DON’T CARE.

• Goths Up Trees: Largely self-explanatory tbh.

• Sh1tty Car Mods: All nicked off Reddit, but reasonably funny if you understand anything about cars (I don’t).

• Subject-28: Original production art from Akira. Awesome stuff in here.

• James Curran: AMAZING gifs and animations by this very talented designer.

• Find The Woman: Dedicated to pointing out the fact that adland is often really, really bad at gender diversity. FFS, adland!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH THIS WEEK I AM LIMITING TO 10 (TEN) CHOICES BECAUSE, SERIOUSLY, OTHERWISE I WOULD BE HERE ALL FUCKING DAY:

• The Loneliness Of Donald Trump: We’ve not exactly been short of long takedowns of THAT MAN, but this, by Rebecca Solnit on Litbub, is an astonishingly good piece of writing, as enjoyable for the prose as for the way she deconstructs the manchild.

• I Didn’t Want A Parrot: I unexpectedly found this on Reddit a month or so ago and was enticed by the title, and then got sucked in – this is a genuinely great tale, about finding a parrot and, in part thanks to said parrot, stopping being a raging alcoholic. A really good piece of writing, if an unusual one.

• When Your Child Is a Psychopath: Like ‘We Need To Talk About Kevin’ but real and therefore infinitely more chilling, this is a look at methods used to treat kids who display psycopathic tendencies. I’m sure your kids aren’t psycopaths, though, honest.

• When KISS Went To Moscow: KISS are a ridiculous band in almost every sense, more marketing machine than musicians; this is a brilliant profile accompanying them to a gig in Moscow and touching on the oddities of personality required to be in a world-famous rock-and-roll band for several decades, what the makeup means, Gene Simmonds enormous tongue, groupies and all the rest. It’s ACE, and makes being a superstar musician seem exactly as strange as it ought.

• The Amazing World of London Clerks: Brilliant peek into the very, very odd and intensely traditional world of the clerks of the legal profession, who keeps the wheels of justice oiled and spinning and effectively act as brokers between barristers and the legal profession. Fascinating, and an excellent reminder as to quite how queerly anachronistic the legal profession seems in 2017.

• Meet Missy: Superb piece for the cover of this month’s Elle, chatting with Missy Elliott about her music, her life, her peers, black culture and identity and loads more. A really thoughtful piece, talking to a really thoughtful artist who’s largely kept out of the public eye.

• How To Murder Your Life: I featured an excerpt from Cat Marnell’s memoir ‘How To Murder Your Life’ a few months back, and described it thusly: “I found the style to be a huge Easton-Ellis-pastiche, and the ‘I’m so crazy and damaged yet living in NYC and somehow amazingly successful despite being a total carcrash of drink and drugs’-style narrative a touch on the cliche side, and yet it has stayed with me all week in a manner little else has done, which suggests either that my subconscious has terrible taste or that it’s better than I at first gave it credit for.” This is a profile of Marnell herself, and whilst I’m no less ambivalent about her as a person, I now really, really want to read everything she writes.

• Who’s The Real Cunt?: On the Daily Mail. It is WONDERFUL – seriously, you must read this piece for lines like this: “In my weeks of reading the Mail in the wake of Addison’s book, I found no real humour but many hundreds of sneers, which is what passes for humour in that whispery world of frightened men who don’t know how to talk to women and wish they knew bigger words.”

• A Nasty Name for a Nasty Thing: Segueing nicely on from the last piece, this is an excellent history of the word ‘cunt’ – it’s etymology, usage and position as the worst word in the English language. Scholarly and exhaustive, this is a wonderful read for people who like words and the politics of language.

• Why I Don’t Trust Batman: Finally in this section, a brilliant short story written from the point of view of one of Gotham’s nameless denizens, a blue-collar everyman who doesn’t quite feel as warmly about the mildly-sociopathic caped crusader as perhaps his creators might have expected. Superb subversion of your standard comic book hero narrative, this.

By Alina Cara Oswald

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is absolutely the most relaxing this I was able to find over the past month; I suggest you watch this pretty much on a loop between now and the moment when you have to come to terms with the crushing reality that the wrong people won:

2) Next, an INCREDIBLE piece of black and white animation called ‘Caverna’ – this really is exceptional, and very clever indeed:

3) This is by the fabulously-named Otoboke Beaver. It is called ‘Love Is Short’ and it is short and shouty and Japanese and it is GOOD:

4) This might be terrible; in fact, I’m 99% certain it is terrible, and yet I really, really quite enjoy it. No idea why at all, maybe it’s a mid-life crisis. Anyway, it’s called ‘Meow’ and it’s by Cherie and Renno – ‘enjoy’:

5) CHINESE HIPHOP CORNER! This is called ‘Made in China’ and it’s by Higher Brothers x Famous Dex and it is ace:

6) This is beautiful. It’s by Francis & The Lights, I think, and features Chance The Rapper, and it’s like something from the closing scenes of an 80s movie, in the very best way. It’s really gorgeous, I hope you like it – it’s called ‘May I Have This Dance’:

7) Last this week, a truly OUTSTANDING vocal on this track by Algiers; it’s called ‘The Underside of Power’ – enjoy! BYE ENJOY THE ELECTION I HOPE YOUR FAVOURITE TEAM WINS AS LONG AS IT’S NOT THE BLUE ONE SEE YOU SOON(ISH) BYE!:

Web Curios will return. That is all.

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A LIVE MIX FROM BRIXTON ACADEMY BY JAMIE XX!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT NOONE IS PAYING QUITE ENOUGH ATTENTION TO THE FACT THAT FACEBOOK IS DEVELOPING MIND-READING TECHNOLOGY, BUT WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE THAT THERE IS NO WAY THAT WE ARE AMBLING TOWARDS A FUTURE IN WHICH WE ARE SERVED ADVERTS BASED ON OUR DEEPEST SUBLIMINAL HOPES AND FEARS AND WANTS, OH NO SIREE:

• FB F8 – ALL THE VIDEOS: WHY do the fcukers have to make all these bloody announcements in one of those weeks where I’ve got a fortnight’s internet to write up? Damn them. Anyway, these are all the videos from Facebook’s F8 this week, which are techy and obviously massive puff-pieces for how awesome Facebook is but which are, the few bits I’ve watched, actually pretty interesting if you’re into all this stuff (and if not, really, please do skip this section as it’s likely to wang on a bit).

• FB Goes Big On AR: So the BIG news (apart from the fcuking mind-reading, let’s be clear) was the Facebook Camera Effects stuff – ripping wholesale the line Snapchat peddled about its software putting the lens front and centre of the user experience. You can read all about the featureset in the TechCrunch piece linked above, or in this Buzzfeed piece here – the main things to note, as far as I can tell, are: 1) This is the biggest thing for AR since Pokemon Go! last year and marks a significant step on its journey to mainstream ubiquity; 2) This is a HUGE opportunity for agencies to set up shovelware shops for all this crap, much like we all did when FB apps were a THING that we could charge clients for – seriously, each and every one of you will be pitching your clients branded AR layers every single sodding week for the next two years, because why wouldn’t you? This is basically opening up Snapchat-style brand overlay stuff to EVERYONE, eventually at least, so expect to be bombarded with opportunities to slap a fcuking AR layer onto anything and everything, regardless of utility or use case. So, you know, go wild!

• FB Messenger Chat Extensions: This is basically a whole load of updates to the Messenger platform software which enable Messenger to function a little more like a series of plug-in apps; so you can now, say, call up a collaborative shopping list when in Messenger chat with friends to which everyone in the conversation can contribute, or “a photo bot that lets people create shared albums that live in the thread”; or “a flight-reservation bot whose main interaction is in a person-to-bot thread, but that lets people share itineraries and flight status in threads with their friends.” Effectively this is going to increase the utility of chatbots (we should really stop calling them bots; they’re apps) and make it easier for them to propagate – it’s not clear how the whole ‘you can advertise to anyone who’s interacted with your bot in Messenger’ permissions thing is going to work with this, which makes it LOADS easier for a bot to get thrown into your conversation without your sayso – if someone I know introduces the Ocado bot to our conversation about our middle-class picnic planning, does said Ocado bot then have permission to occasionally pop up to try and sell me more halloumi? HM.

• FB Messenger Discover: It’s only 7:03 and I am already SO BORED of this Facebook stuff. Let’s just C&P this: “Discover is a new section in Messenger where people can browse and find bots, nearby places and businesses to message. As a developer, Discover allows you to showcase your messaging experience to the more than 1.2 billion people who use Messenger each month.” The thing to note here is that you have to submit your bots for inclusion in this section – so, er, DON’T FORGET. Interestingly it is also possible to limit discoverability and prevent your creations from showing up here; I quite like the idea of building an exclusive, in-the-know-only Messenger concierge service for an exclusive elite of Facebookmongs, but maybe that’s just me.

• QR Codes In Messenger: I think this might be the point when we all have to stop laughing quite so hard at the idea of the QR code – now that it’s baked into Facebook Messenger, expect to see them being used a LOT more (admittedly the base is LOW here, but). You can generate a code which, when scanned through the camera with Messenger, will launch a specific chatbot within the app for the user to engage with. Again, this is a very smart move for marketers – because of the aforementioned ‘talk to the bot once and it will advertise at you FOREVER!’ nature of how Messenger ads (currently) work, inducing people to use your Messenger QR code basically gives you tacit permission to sell them stuff in perpetuity on the platform. Great!

• Group Payments Available In Messenger: This wasn’t an F8 announcement, but I am trying to be neat. Anyway, you can now send payments to people you’re having a group chat with. Not exciting, but satisfies my need for thoroughness.

• Facebook Launches Spaces For VR Fun!: Look, I know you invested all that money in Oculus and that you need to push this stuff, I get it, but NOONE WANTS TO EXPERIENCE FACEBOOK IN VIRTUAL REALITY. NOONE. You can get a feel for what it’s like in this Mashable (sorry) piece and accompanying video, but you can sort of imagine – disembodied hands, weird Mii-like avatars, the ability to do all the stuff you currently do on Facebook with a clunkier interface and slow graphics. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt that some variant on this sort of stuff is The Future in some sort of sense, but it’s just not quite here yet. Obviously the technology is hugely impressive, but I can’t see this as anything much more than a gimmicky tech demo.

• Facebook At Work Adds Features: Basically filesharing, Slack-style bots and some compliance stuff. It’s REALLY boring, this, trust me.

• FB Launches Calls-to-Action Within Instant Articles: If you have Facebook Instant Articles set up, you can now add “Page Like and Email Sign-Up call-to-action units, prompts for readers to like a publisher’s page or sign up for an email newsletter from within an Instant Article.” So there. Although given the fact that noone appears to like Instant Articles or indeed see any benefit from them as publishers, your mileage here may vary.

• Facebook Releases Canvas API For Advertisers: This is, I think, rather a big opportunity (although word is that Facebook is now downplaying Canvas as a platform opportunity, so maybe this is another example of my backing a horse that is destined for the knacker’s yard) – basically this means that it’s even easier for agencies to offer Canvas as a service to clients. Given the fact that we’re all going to be making stuff that looks a bit like Canvas in the future – full-screen, mobile-first (only, frankly), I’d suggest that making this sort of stuff is a pretty smart move for agencies, as if nothing else it’ll prepare you for the future in which everything is shiny images and video and we have all forgotten what these funny symbols you’re looking at right now are.

• Facebook Improves Video Metrics In Page Insights: Basically a whole new, more granular, set of numbers that you can baffle clients with. DATA! BEAT THEM TO DEATH WITH DATA! What does any of it mean? FCUKED IF I KNOW, BUT DATA!

• Pages Link To Groups Now: This is really quite interesting – Pages can now point users at particular Groups from a ‘Groups’ tab in the left-hand sidebar, meaning they can now designate, say, official communities to send fans to – “As part of the new features being tested, brands can also create groups and link to them from their Pages. So, if a nonprofit has a brand page, its administrators can create groups specifically for certain causes, like helping children or disaster relief.” You could do quite a bit with this, I think, in terms of creating fan communities or campaign organisation and the like.

• New Features for Instagram Stories: Sort of superseded by the F8 stuff, this, but this is another host of Snapchat-ripped functionality for Instagram’s Stories platform, offering users the ability to add tracking stickers to video and the like. Again, brand options here are unclear but you can bet your life they will be myriad because Mark’s not an idiot. Oh, and seeing as we’re doing Instagram, here’s an announcement about how all your messages, the ephemeral ones and the standard ones, will now all go to the same inbox – huzzah! And another, where you can organise your saved posts into folders so that you can conveniently return to all the thirstiest shots from the people you stalk whenever you like.

• Snapchat Introduces World Lenses: I mean, they did this on Tuesday and then literally a few hours later Facebook announced all its AR stuff and OH SNAPCHAT! It’s all getting a bit awkward, really. World Lenses are basically Snapchat’s own version of the FB camera stuff up top, except without, as far as I can tell, the open developer platform underpinning it all – it lets you drop virtual 3d objects into the real world and then record them in your Snaps to share with people. Really impressive tech, again, and it looks fun, but if you had to bet on one company monetising this sort of stuff successfully and making it mainstream and ubiquitous and stuff, it probably wouldn’t be the yellow one.

• Snap To Store: Although they have launched this ad product, in the US at least, which lets advertisers track which customers who saw a promotional campaign on Snapchat then went on to visit physical retail locations, which is obviously pretty useful. There’s also some stuff in this story about future ad products which will see users on Snapchat divided into interest groups, etc, for better ad targeting, which is crap for users but good news for advertisers – still, lads, might want to get a move on with this monetisation stuff because, er, time’s a wasting.

• Pornhub Launches AR Stickers For Your Naked Photos: Silly, but an example of really smart (silly) PR.

• LinkedIn Launches Lead Gen Ads: Harvest email addresses from the besuited dullards who interact with your branded content on the world’s most tedious social network! My predictable and increasingly unfunny snark aside, this is a very useful addition to the product suite imho.

• Periscope Launches Custom Hearts On Live Video: Oh Twitter! It’s almost quaint quite how un-zeitgeisty this feels after the tsunami of future which everyone else hit us with this week, but hey ho, here we are. Brands will now be able to pay to have  custom image replacing the ‘hearts’ which pop up when users interact with a video on Periscope – so you could have your logo appear all over the stream, for example, or a custom graphic depicting something pertaining to a particular campaign. Why would you want to do this, particularly giving the eye-gouging amount of money this is likely to cost? NO IDEA!

• Google Analytics Is Getting A Bit Easier To Use: I find GA a horrendously unfriendly service, so this is pleasing. You’ll basically get easier-to-customise dashboards, and the whole thing looks like it’s going to get a little less ugly. It’s not exciting – is anything anymore? It’s now 747am and I am in some sort of weird, social-media-news-addled fugue state – but it’s useful.

• The VR Press Centre: WHY? I know, fine, it’s not meant to be a real, useful thing – it’s a proof-of concept, a gimmick, I get it – but it’s just SO RUBBISH. This is built for KLM, and it’s a VIRTUAL PRESS CENTRE! Look! It’s a 3d-rendered KLM cockpit, which you can look around and, er, READ SOME PRESS RELEASES! LOOK AT SOME TWEETS! There’s so much that’s confusing about this, not least the question of why the newsroom is in the cockpit of a plane, or indeed why anyone bothered to make it. Still, marks for effort at the very least – I am going to confidently predict that this is not the future of the press centre.

HAVE YOU EVER LISTENED TO CHIPTUNE SYNTH METAL? MAYBE YOU OUGHT TO TRY!

THE SECTION WHICH, FOLLOWING THAT HORRORSHOW, IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR CONTINUED ATTENTION AND PROMISES YOU THAT THERE ARE SOME CRACKERS IN THE NEXT SECTIONS, HONEST, AND THAT THAT WILL PROBABLY MAKE UP FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PRECEDING FACEBOOK RUBBISH, PT.1:

• Google Earth In-Browser: To be honest, lots of you can stop at this link – if you never bothered to download Google Earth back in the day you will absolutely lose yourself in this. You can now do all of the amazing stuff you used to be able to do within Google Earth on desktop in your browser – you can zoom literally ANYWHERE and check out the incredible 3d renders of EVERYWHERE ON THE PLANET. I just did a little narcissistic zoom down onto my road and had a proper “oh my God isn’t the majesty of nature amazing” moment; seriously, just go and play with it.

• Every Noise At Once: I know for a fact that I have featured this before but it was YEARS ago, possibly in the H+K days, and it surfaced again this week and it’s still good and not everything always has to be new and I should probably just get on with telling you what it is. It’s a map of EVERY SINGLE musical genre possibly imaginable (no, really), developed by a Spotify engineer and which, to quote the site, “is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1524 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier” You can listen to examples of all of the genres, and what’s really nice is that if you scroll all the way to the bottom there are about a dozen more links taking you to different cuts of the data, in terms of popularity by geography, say. This is just wonderful, basically.

• Mike Boyd: Truly beautiful tattoo work. Really, really lovely Instagram account, this.

• Postepic: I’m sort of torn on this – on the one hand, I’m all for sharing stuff from / about books; on the other, I find the styling here almost nausea-inducingly twee and ‘inspirational’. So it goes. Postepic is actually a really smart idea which could / should be co-opted by publishers (or, more likely, by fcuking Amazon) – it’s an app which lets users take a photo of a page in a book they’re reading, isolate a particular passage and then turn said passage into an image with the selected quotation included on it, o you can create your own slightly cliche quotepics to share with your SOCIAL NETWORK. I am personally slightly tempted to get this and then create a series of beautiful, contemplative pictures featuring sunset scenes accompanied by some of the more colourful passages from American Psycho, but I can’t imagine anyone else would enjoy that as much as I would.

• Stumbl: Another excellent portal through which to experience the avalanche of HUMAN LIFE that is YouTube. You tell this website how long you want the videos it serves you to be, how many views they ought to have, whether they need to be in a particular category or tagged with certain keywords, and then it basically creates an infinite playlist of CONTENT based on the parameters you select. Fascinating, and potentially a near-fatal timesink if you let it get its claws into you.

• Cabana: A new app from Tumblr which lets you watch videos with friends (up to five of them) and do video chat. It’s simple, no frills, and will probably find a small, dedicated audience amongst the fandoms; you may find a use for it. Although actually this might be quite a useful way of getting feedback on work-in-progress stuff, come to think of it. Oh, I don’t know, YOU come up with a reason it exists.

• FindFace: Another one of those in-no-way-creepy services which lets you plug in a photo of someone and then spits back at you what it believes to be their Twitter profile (presuming of course the image they use as an avatar vaguely looks like them). Not suggesting that you all ought to not use your faces as avatars, but, er, maybe you shouldn’t actually all be using your faces as avatars. Is this paranoid? I can’t even tell any more, frankly.

• Autodraw: More witchcraft (YES, FINE, I KNOW, WITCHES ARE DEFINITELY A THINK IN 2017, I AM SORRY JWT) from Google – Autodraw is a frankly crazy platform which lets anyone – even someone as artistically inept as I am – scrawl some stuff on a canvas, at which point the system tries to guess what it was you were trying to draw and lets you select from various templated ‘best guesses’ to drop onto the canvas. So, to give a practical example, you could use this to do INCREDIBLY quick and easy diagrammatic representations of stuff – just draw some lines and shaky squares and circles and this will make it look significantly less sh1t. Or, alternatively, draw a crudely-drawn penis and giggle childishly at what Google thinks you might be trying to create.

• AI On Twitch: This is…weird. A 24h Twitch stream hosted by some sort of AI (it’s not an AI, it’s a chatbot, but frankly these terms are all so weirdly mixed-up that it’s moot whether anyone currently has working mass-market definitions for any of them – although, actually, the description does make some mention of it learning from interactions so there must be a neural network back there somewher…oh, hang on, you don’t care about my internal monologue here at all, do you? Sorry!) which lets anyone ask it questions and have a bit of a chat. It’s rudimentary and not that compelling, but there’s something quite…future about this, and weirdly sort of sad. Particular props to the developers for saying, prominently, that trying to make it say sex stuff is boring and people should be more imaginative.

• The Global Jukebox: An incredible repository of folk music from around the world, the Global Jukebox, to quote, “explores connections between families of expressive style. One can travel the world of song, dance and language through the Wheel Chart and the Map. Thousands of examples of the world’s music, dance and other expressive behavior will now become available. The Global Jukebox is presented as a free, non-commercial, educational place for everybody, students, educators, scholars, scientists, musicians, dancers, linguists, artists and music fans to explore expressive patterns in their cultural-geographic and diasporic settings and alongside other people’s. By inviting familiarity with many kinds of vocalizing, musicking, moving, and talking, we hope to advance cultural equity and to reconnect people and communities with their creative heritage.” This is VERY deep, and whilst it’s not going to provide you with material for your next house party playlist it is a fascinating collection of musical and ethnographic history.

• Vulgar: Oh I LOVE THIS! Vulgar is a made-up language generator which at the press of a button will spit out a completely fictional fantasy language, with a name, vocabulary, sentence structure, phonetics, the works. If you like language this is beautiful and a bit compelling.

• Nikita Golubev: Instagram account of an artist who uses dirty cars and vans as his canvas, and which I can absolutely guarantee you are going to use in a pitch deck (NOT A FCUKING DECK) or moodboard at some point in the next few months.

• Oldschool Mac Emulator: Before Macs were cool, they were just these weird, ugly machines with crap graphics which odd people had (look, it’s true, trust me). This, from the remarkable folk at the Internet Archive, lets you hark back to those days, with a motherlode of old Mac programmes you can play around with, including some truly dreadful but weirdly compelling games – the art direction on Mac titles was always very distinct, so if nothing else it’s worth checking out for the visual / aesthetic cues.

• DISCO!: The Getty Images archive of old photos of the disco era (and, actually, clubs in general)  is legitimately wonderful and absolutely mesmerising. You just know that if you were to lick any of these people your tongue would go numb within milliseconds – there is a WHOLE lot of cocaine knocking about here. Have a dig – it’s a mixed bag, but there’s so much gold in here if you look.

• Songsleuth: This is LOVELY – Shazam for birdsong, basically. Not really sure I can describe it any more than that, but it’s a glorious idea and the sort of thing it might be nice to download next time you go on a countryside walk or something, presuming any of you detach yourselves from the web long enough to undertake one (I am obviously projecting here, aren’t I?).

• Zero Likes: Cracking art project which, to take the description from the page, “is a meditation on the aesthetics of nothingness. I trained an AI to create images in response to over 100,000 Instagram posts that received zero likes.” The images are abstract but have the quality of degraded daguerrotypes and are rather beautiful I think.

• The Hyperrealistic Donald Mask: Ebay. 3 days left. $4300 at the time of writing. Just in case any of you weirdos is interested.

• Forest: I don’t really go in for ‘mindfulness’ as a thing, to be clear, but I rather like this app – Forest is designed to help people concentrate and ignore their phones, the idea being that each time you want to be incentivised to PUT THAT FCUKING SCREEN DOWN, you open the app and it starts to grow a little tree. The tree will only grow for as long as you keep the app open; closing it prematurely will kill the sapling DEAD. Over time, you build up a forest based on all those moments you’ve spent focusing on stuff that isn’t THAT FCUKING SCREEN – a forest which will look WELL rubbish if it’s full of dead trees, so there’s your incentive. Cute.

• USA Facts: Dull-but-actually-interesting, this – backed by Steve Ballmer of Microsoft fame, this is an independent service which provides an easy, open repository of verified data from US government agencies in one place. There is a LOT of information here, pulled from over 70 different sources, and it’s no mean feat – it’s telling that, whilst this is the sort of thing that Government would LOVE to be able to do itself, it takes private income and freedom from bureaucracy to pull it together. Those of you who read this and work in public sector digital, do check it out – it’s really very impressive.

• Kevin & Friends: An Instagram account sharing short comic strips about ‘Horribly Optimistic Kevin’. It’s a one-note gag, but it’s a good note.

• Hololems: I confess to getting a little fanboy excited at this. This is a demo of what Lemmings – you remember Lemmings, right? LET’S GO!, etc – would look like if played on a Hololens, with the Lemmings using your living room furniture as their course. This is really, really smart – obviously the gameplay looks janky as you like, but the object recognition and stuff on display here is really impressive.

• Tweetstorm Generator: If YOU want to be one of those irritatingly hubristic people who decides to write 32-tweet threads about STUFF, then why not try this iOS app which takes any lump of text you feed it and automatically breaks it up into a series of numbered tweets for you so that you don’t have to. I am sort-of tempted to plug a Curios into it and kill my miserable Twitter following over the course of 37,000 tweets. I bet that poor sod who vowed to Tweet the entirety of Potter at Piers Morgan wishes he’d known about this.

• The Nasa Image & Video Library: Newly made available online, this is basically the spacey motherlode – all of the photos and videos you could ever want of NASA stuff, from launches to moonwalks and everything inbetween. Wonderful archive of great things (and, it seems, quite a lot of photos of NASA staff socials, oddly).

• Feminist Ads: A project creating a different feminist advert for a major brand each day for 100 years. Some of these are really excellent; kudos to LA-based copywriter Eileen Matthews whose work this is.

NOW WHY NOT TRY A PLAYLIST OF NEW TRACKS COMPILED BY HUH MAGAZINE? IT’S GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH, FOLLOWING THAT HORRORSHOW, IS GRATEFUL FOR YOUR CONTINUED ATTENTION AND PROMISES YOU THAT THERE ARE SOME CRACKERS IN THE NEXT SECTIONS, HONEST, AND THAT THAT WILL PROBABLY MAKE UP FOR AT LEAST SOME OF THE PRECEDING FACEBOOK RUBBISH, PT.2:

• Chaos of Delight: I confess to not really having that much of an idea as to exactly what soil mesofauna actually are (In the unlikely event you care, “In soil science, the mesofauna are usually defined as invertebrates, sized between 0.1 mm and 2 mm, although some references increase this to 10 mm.”, but from what i can gather from these amazing photos they are very, very small insects, here presented in some rather wonderful close-up photography.

• SCUMM-8: There are only a couple of you to whom this is going to be of any interest, but if you’ve ever wanted the opportunity to be able to build your own Lucasarts-style point-and-click adventure then this tool, which presents a cobbled-together version of their SCUMM interface for the Pixel-8 development platform meaning anyone can, in theory, make their own Secret of Monkey Island.

• Stranger Love Songs: Butcher Billy (see Web Curios passim) returns with his latest pop-culture riff, this time taking classic love song titles and illustrating them as though they are paperback horror novels from the 80s. Great design work.

• Waitchatter: Christ, this is depressing. I mean, it’s sort of a clever idea and I get the application, but are we REALLY not allowed to waste any time any more? Must we fill each and every minute of every single fcuking day with ACHIEVEMENT and SELF-IMPROVEMENT and GROWTH and Christ alive JUST LET ME STAY MEDIOCRE YOU SLAVE-DRIVING FUTURE-BAST4RDS. Ahem. Anyway, sorry, this is a Chrome extension for Gchat which will, while you’re messaging someone on the platform, fill the seconds while you’re waiting for your interlocutor to respond to your scintillating conversational gambit by asking you to translate foreign words so you can LEARN WHILE YOU WAIT. I mean, it’s A Good Thing but I am so tired and I don’t think I can improve any more.

• Slime Queens: Not, it may surprise you to learn, anything filthy at all – instead this is an Instagram account which features videos of people playing with slime (that is, a home-made mix of glue, borax and soap which goes all gloopy and sticky and satisfyingly tactile) to really pleasing effect. If you’re at all ASMRish you might find this triggers you rather pleasingly; oh, and here’s a guide to making your own, which if you have kids would, I think, be a pretty fun rainy day activity (look, see the wholesome tips Web Curios provides? It’s not just for childphobic misanthropes, honest!).

• The Iron Maiden Cover Art Gallery: An exhaustive look through the cover art of Iron Maiden, from Eddie’s first appearance to his increasingly camp later outings. I remember going into Our Price in the 80s and staring mesmerised at the Maiden covers – there’s something really bleakly hopeless about the art style employed back then which is so redolent of the Thatcher years imho.

• Pasted: An iOS app which lets you easily create arty collages from your photos – simple tools, but they work to pleasing effect (though the aesthetic is exactly the sort of slightly bland airbnb/wallpaper-style of anodyne Scandi minimalism which has become ubiquitous over the past couple of years). It’s by one of the blokes from the Shins, which may or may not influence your decision to interact with it.

• Svaha: A US clothing website which ships internationally, Svaha designs clthes for geeks – specifically, for women and kids who want to show off their geekery whilst maintaining some sort of veneer of fashionability (I refer you to previous caveats as to my inability to work out what looks good and what doesn’t). I think some of the kids’ stuff on here is lovely, though, particularly the tshirts with code on them – see what you think.

• Science Posters: There are marches happening tomorrow and next weekend in the US to protest against cuts to science funding and raise awareness of climate change this site is collecting poster designs for people who want to print and brandish something a little more pro-looking than they might be able to come up with themselves. Some lovely designs here, and the sort of thing which is repurposable for whatever local pro-science thing you may or may not be getting up to.

• LOT2046: I am pretty sure that this is an ARG (remember those?), but I am baffled as to what or how. The blurb says it’s a clothing store – “LOT is a subscription-based service which distributes a basic set of clothing, footwear, essential self-care products, accessories, and media content. The clothes are dispensable: as they wear out they can be bundled and returned, eliminating clutter.” – but there’s a lot of stuff on there that seems like a nod to a wider mystery or story beneath the surface. WHAT DO *YOU* THINK?

• GeoVisual Search: Pretty amazing, this. Select an area on Google Maps and this will search the world for other areas that look like it – so, for example, you can show it a football stadium and it will pull up all the other places where it has recognised a football stadium. I mean, no idea at all what you’d do with this right now, but it’s incredibly impressive.

• The Great Language Game: Geeky-but-great, this plays you a short snippet of someone talking in a MYSTERY LANGUAGE and asks you to identify which language it is. Look, fine, I know it sounds dull but it is surprisingly ace, I promise you.

• Parihug: Just-funded Kickstarter for a soft toy which lets you share hugs from across the world (SO CUTE!) – the toy has a pair which, the idea is, a parent takes with them when travelling and which is connected to its ‘twin’ online. Parent hugs their toy, kid’s toy hugs the kid. Which is quite lovely, and I am really struggling to find anything cynical to say about it all. How queer.

• Dawn Chorus: Alarms on phones are HORRIBLE, aren’t they? Either horribly jarring or falsely saccharine (STOP TRYING TO CONVINCE ME WAKING UP TO GO TO WORK ISN’T HIDEOUS), there’s a dearth of good options out there (or at least I’ve not seen any). This, though, I love – and it’s a really nice piece of marketing for The Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, which has launched this app for iOS allowing you to be awoken each morning by the sound of birdsong from its digital archives. I mean, obviously most of us live in concrete dystopias and so perhaps the idea of being awoken by nature is just too cruel, but I quite like it.

• Feral Horses: Nice idea, this. Feral Horses is a soon-to-be-launched art investment platform, which promises to let anyone invest in an artwork, or a fraction of one; the artworks are then rented out and the profits divided among the shareholders. Potentially a hugely interesting idea, although I was made irrationally angry with jealousy when I scrolled down and saw how young, attractive and rich its founders look.

• Cheese or Font: Is it a cheese or a font? WHO KNOWS?

• Inert Products: If you’ve ever wondered ‘Where can I get my hands on an incredibly realistic replica of a car bomb?’ WONDER NO LONGER! Inert Products sells this stuff, presumably to organisations who train people for deployment in warzones and the like – there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on who can buy this stuff other than cost (fake mines don’t come cheap, turns out), so if you fancy causing a major terror alert this Summer, or alternatively really upping the ante next time you go to a fancy dress party hilariously costumed as a COMEDY TERRORIST then fill your boots.

• I Don’t Give A Seat: Celebrating the upholstry of public transportation networks worldwide, because this is exactly what the web is for.

• The Smart Bra: The internet of breasts! Nearly-funded with three weeks to go, this is called Vitali and is fitted with sensors and stuff to track your breathing, posture and  heart rate – creepily, the blurb suggests that if it notices that you’re breathing erratically or demonstrating symptoms of stress, the bra will encourage you to regulate your breathing (“Why are you breathing like that?” “Oh, my tits are vibrating; they’re telling me I need to centre myself”). As a non-bra wearer I’m not sure what to think about this – can any of you imagine this being a useful or necessary thing?

• Things Full of Beans: …that really shouldn’t be full of beans. Oddly really quite upsetting.

• Self-reflected: Beautiful images of brains, sliced and coloured and oh so glorious. Sadly not available to buy, as far as I can see, but I am totally going to email the person behind this and ask about prints because I WANT.

• Paper Sizes: All the standard paper sizes from around the world, in one place. Yes, I know, it’s STAGGERINGLY dull, but probably useful to a couple of you, maybe, perhaps. LOOK, I AM TRYING TO BE HELPFUL FFS.

• Ultimate Dream Life Abroad: The latest iteration of THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD EVER, this one doesn’t appear to be a marketing thing for any particular place – instead, it’s the chance to win the rights to a bookshop in Laos, currently owned by a Quebecois expat who wants to hand it over to the ‘right’ person, along with, apparently, $10000. It’s all being documented by a US filmmaker, so I presume this will all become a documentary at some point, but if you fancy having the opportunity to give it all up to sell battered copies of ‘On The Road’ to opium-addled gap year stereotypes then this is your DREAM CHANCE. There’s a $50 entry fee, FYI, which makes me think the current owner’s got this figured out pretty well.

• NYC Taper: An INCREDIBLE resource, this, providing recordings from recent New York gigs. It tends towards the hipster indie end of the musical spectrum, fine, but the archive here is astonishing and rewards careful perusal.

• 1001 Roguelikes: Browser-based roguelike game which you will enjoy if that sentence means anything to you and which if it doesn’t you can probably skip.

• Seedship: A lovely little story game in which you play the AI in charge of a ship full of colonists fleeing Earth for a new home; you play through as you attempt to find another planet to inhabit, with decisions you take during the playthrough shaping the evential fate of the civilisation you eventually create. Short playthroughs – about 5 minutes a time – which leave you with a lovely set of persistent stories and imagined worlds at the end. Gorgeous, really, I can’t  recommend this enough.

• The D1ck Code: This was EVERYWHERE over the weekend, so apologies if you’ve seen it – if not, though, ENJOY! The D1ck Code (sorry for the silly spelling, but I don’t have enough readers to absolutely ignore firewall compliance) is designed, apparently, to enable men to share information about the size, shape and, er, ejaculatory performance of their wang without having to go so far as to share a photo or video. Which, er, is all well and good, but I’m not sure that people share pictures of their cocks (ach, FIREWALLS BE DAMNED and screw the reader numbers) for purely informative purposes. Ah well. You can obviously use this for WHATEVER reasons you like, but I think it would be a fun way for teams of girls to speculate as to what THEY think the penises of their male colleagues look like. Go on, live a little!

• Words Hurt: Yes, OK, it’s ANOTHER single-serving site for a music video. BUT this one’s all interactive and the branching narrative works really, really well, and I like the interface and the song’s actually pretty cool, and there’s quite a lot of cool UX/UI stuff with the controls that you could rip off, so CLICK THE LINK.

• The Reddit Bongo Categorisation Motherlode: Finally this week, there is SO much wonder here. This is a Wiki featuring some 10,000 subreddits, ranked by number of subscribers, all about sex. Whether it’s places where people share clips and gifs, or images, or just chat, this is one of the most incredible examples of rule 34 I have ever seen. Technically SFW until you click into the Subreddits (though obviously there are some BAD WORDS on the page) the joy here is in scrolling down and thinking “What? There’s a whole community for people who are into *that*, and it’s *how* big?!”. The top of the list is pretty vanilla, but scroll down long enough and you start to hit some pretty esoteric stuff. I don’t want to click on ‘predicament bondage’, for example, because it’s too much fun speculating as to what the fcuk it might mean. WONDERFUL, more from an anthropological than sexual point of view (honest, guv, I buy it for the articles, etc etc).

FINALLY IN THE MIXES, HERE’S AN INCREDIBLE SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF HARUKI MURAKAMI’S HUGE JAZZ COLLECTION – ENJOY!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Grauniad Highlights: Laughing at the middle-class stereotypicality of the Guardian is a bit easy, sure, but that doesn’t stop this from being funny. Seen in isolation, a headline reading “I ordered 50 tiny tambourines online, then wept” is too, too beautiful.

• Precious Possessions: A small student art project inviting people to submit photographs of their most treasured material possessions along with a short piece of prose explaining why they were chosen. Predictably I love this and got WELL emo when I came across it.

• Relatable Pics of New Labour: Do you know what the Labour Party’s lead in the polls was around this time 20 years ago? 20-odd %. Mental. Anyway, remember the days when they were a credible political force / shake your fists at the people who killed the dream (delete per your personal belief system).

• Dumb Birds: A Tumblr collecting pretty decent sketches of North American birds with insulting captions and descriptions. Silly, but I quite like the futile rage.

• SASJ: A Dutch visual artist studying in London (she doesn’t state her name) has been making one digital work a day since 01/01/15 – this is where she collects them. Lovely, soothing gifdesignwork here.

• Pixels In The Wild: Collecting examples of pixel art and typography and stuff; a potentially useful design resource, maybe.

• Cheeky Mooning: Very gently NSFW, the blog description alone was enough for me to include it: “The number one daily source for cheeky straight lads mooning and flashing their arzes”. Number 1? There’s competition?

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Pulitzer Winners: NOt exhaustive, but a decent list of links to some of this year’s winners across various categories. Special mention to this piece on PTSD post-Afghanistan, which is an absolutely stellar piece of journalism and one of the most emotionally-affecting things I’ve ever read about the experience of war.

• American Strongman: Wildly entertaining (and, yes, VERY Foster Wallace-ian (sorry, not a word, I know)) piece looking at the competitive bodybuilding landscape in the US, all oiled and mahogany and MASSIVE, but taking in wider US cultural issues, the Donald, modern masculinity and all sorts besides.

• From Somerdale to Skarbimierz: This is LONG and a bit hard, but it’s very much worth it – ostensibly the story of how Cadbury’s shifted production from the West Country to Poland, this (very, very long) LRB piece sort of morphs into one of the best explanations of how global capitalism and supplychains work, EU protectionism and subsidy and how everyone at the bottom is likely to just keep getting squeezed harder as we dive into the future. Not, as you might have gathered, a hugely uplifting read, but one which will leave you feeling smarter than you were before.

• Notes from a Nuclear Tourist: One of those pieces which, when it was commissioned, probably didn’t feel as teeth-janglingly contemporary as it currently does (thanks, Donald!), this is a look at the people who, should it come to it, have responsibility for actually pushing buttons in the US nuclear control centres. I don’t think I’d enjoy the responsibilty tbqhwym.

• The Guy Has A Point: A really interesting essay looking at the furore caused when the artist who designed the bull statue outside the New York Stock Exchange complained that the addition to the area of the ‘Fearless Girl’ sculpture alters the meaning of his work and should be removed. Briefly, the piece attests that the original artist is entitled to the opinion because Fearless Girl was, lest we forget, an advermarketingpr stunt as as such that impacts its status as an artwork. BIG QUESTIONS here, but presented in a thought-provoking and engaging way.

• A Hipster in Syria: This will probably make you quite angry – it certainly did me. The story of Brace Belden, Brooklynite and archetypal hipster, who decided that he wanted to go to Syria and check out some war. Maybe I’m being unfair on him, but the man sounds like a tool.

• The New Hirsts: One of the big draws at this year’s Biennale in Venice is the new stuff from Damien Hirst – this is an excellent overview of it, from high-concept to execution, which also talks to Hirst about his work, the market and the money. I’ve never massively liked Hirst’s work, but the scope and ambition of this stuff is just startling, and I’m a sucker for the imagination behind the backstory (which, if you’re unfamiliar with it, positions the works Hirst’s showing in Venice as salvage material from a shipwreck uncovered by the artist and here displayed for the first time)..

• The First Decade of AR: Timely, this, from Ben Evans, given F8 this week – this is his look at AR so far, how likely we are to be moving towards mass-adoption, and where the tech’s going to go next. I’d be interested to know whether Evans thinks any of this needs revising in the wake of all the Facebook stuff, but in any case this is a smart, as ever, exploration of some of the potential extrapolated consequences of AR getting a foothold within the mainstream.

• The EVE Fanfest: I occasionally post stuff about EVE here – EVE, for those of you unaware, is a heinously complicated virtual spaceworld game, with the most evolved and frankly insane-sounding virtual politics, economy, media, etc in-game – and even though I have never, and probably will never, play the thing, I find its stories endlessly fascinating. Here a journalist goes to its annual fan convention and tries to explain how it all works – he fails, totally, but it’s a wonderful evocation of exactly how seriously its players take this, and the extent to which in a weird way it’s almost a full-scale permanent work of digital performance art (yes, I know, sorry).

• Civil War In The White House: Team-by-team breakdown of the factional wars breaking out in the White House as Kuchner and Bannon (apparently) vie for power behind the scenes. Brilliantly soap opera-ish, but also just a little bit scary – er, lads, SHOULDN’T YOU BE WORRYING ABOUT RUNNING A MASSIVE COUNTRY? Lads?

• Dropped: A wonderful profile of Anthony Gatto, widely acknowledged as the best juggler ever seen, who stepped away from it to, er, run a concrete business. Less about juggling – though there’s quite a lot of juggling, fine – and more about what it feels like to attain mastery of something, how that feels, and why one pursues that status in the first place and why one then bothers carrying on (or not). Brilliant writing, this.

• Aadhaar: I had no idea that India had instituted a universal ID system where everyone is effectively issued an ID number at birth (they have) – this is a really interesting at how it’s working and what it means, and what some of the slightly creepy and Orwellian (an overused term, I know, but really apt in this case) use cases for it might be in terms of social control and the like. Shades of Kafka, too, in the bureaucratic hell that not having a number could unleash upon someone.

• Winning and Losing in Modern China: Fascinating look at the culture of ‘losers’ in China – ‘Diaosi’ is apparently a term used by young men in China to describe themselves. To quote, “they are predominantly men born in the 1980s, the large majority play online games (82.5%), and finally, by self-identifying as Diaosi, it means that they do not see themselves as Gao Fu Shuai (tall, rich, handsome, 高富帅). This seemingly innocuous combination of commonalities—masculinity, technology, and class—has in fact situated these so-called losers as one of the most politically dynamic social forces to have emerged in contemporary China.”

• Ray Davies Speaks: A BRILLIANT interview with Ray Davies of the Kinks, who reveals himself to be a brilliant eccentric and curmudgeon and which leads to one of the most entertaining interviews I’ve read in ages. Regardless of your knowledge of the Kinks or the 60s, this is an excellent read.

• Margaret Atwood, The Prophet of Dystopia: A brilliant profile of one of modernity’s best-loved literary figures, Atwood’s imagination and writing continue to be exemplary, and, as this proves, she’s got a hell of an eye for a pithy one-liner. I would give my right arm to be able to come up with stuff like this: ““The pen is mightier than the sword, but only in retrospect..At the time of combat, those with the swords generally win.”

• The Donald Trump Style Guide: Oh, McSweeney’s, how do I love thee. This is brilliant and savage.

• The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump: Attempting to get inside the head of the first lady through analysis of the photos she’s posted on Twitter, this is a far better piece of writing than that description would suggest. Very smart, well-written and fascinating on the semiotics of photography both generally and specifically.

• Superbabies Don’t Cry: Finally this week, a wonderful essay by Heather Kirn Lanier about her quest to optimise her pregnancy and how she coped with the reality of her failure to produce a ‘superbaby’. Beautiful and sad and hopeful and I loved it even despite being emotionally barren. Read this, it’s great.

AND NOW MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this is called ‘Imagining My Man’ and it’s by Aldous Harding, and I love it immoderately. It is a glorious song, and her album’s out soon and you should all buy it. Melancholy beauty ALL OVER THE PLACE here:

2) Next up, though I have NO TIME for Pharrell and not much for Cassius either, this is a hell of a use of splitscreen in the promo for their song “Go Up”:

3) This is by Maier & Erdman and I am going to let them explain it: “The video shows a landscape created synchronously with the music. The generation of the visuals is based on the sound spectrum. The diverse frequency bands have been used to algorithmically define the visual parameters such as geometries, materials and lightings. Through this sonic analysis and spectral decomposition each element and texture of the track has been visually processed. The whole sequence has been created in a procedural way where the definition of every part has been based on mathematical integrations.” It is GOOD:

4) The best 8-bit-style animation I have seen in ages, this – it’s by Mozuya, who I think I have featured on here before, and it’s called LV5:

5) THRASH METAL HIPHOP CORNER! This is H09909S (Horrors, OBVS) with ‘City Rejects’. They are VERY ANGRY YOUNG MEN, and this is very cathartic to blast loud:

6)MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is, lyrically, SO smart – I’m not 100% about the production, but lyrically this is spot-on. It’s by Open Mike Eagle and it’s called “Dark Comedy Late Show”:

7) EVEN MORE HIPHOP CORNER! Last up this week is this – look, I know it’s 10 minutes long but I promise you that it really is worth it. I laughed SO MUCH watching this, it really is worth paying attention to and persevering with. The first 50s are a bit NSFW, fyi, but after that it’s pretty vanilla and once you get into the swing of it it is legitimately hilarious, I promise. Anyway, BYE ENJOY YOURSELVES I HOPE WE DON’T ALL DIE IN A NUCLEAR CONFLAGRATION BEFORE I NEXT GET TO SPEAK TO YOU BYE BYE BYE!!:

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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).