Author Archives: admin

Webcurios 07/06/13

Reading Time: 20 minutes

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John Lewis Sale. Rye Lane, London SE15
Garudio Studiage photo of the week

Another week, another 7 days to get reacquainted with the feeling that there is simply too much stuff happening all the time and there is simply NO WAY we can keep up and God it’s stressful I JUST WANT TO SLOW DOWN FOR A SECOND. 

Ahem. Obviously the big thing this week has been Turkey, and assorted issues around the protests there and how they are being received by society and media. It was also the week, though, when we were given a heartbreaking reminder of Bradley Manning‘s continued existence, we learnt that romance REALLY IS now dead (although perhaps less so if you are an anarchist), that American PSAs really do give the best life advice, that you can make surprisingly effective points whilst wearing a watermelon bra, and that some people are REALLY good at YoYoing


Yes, that’s right – from popular protest at the intersection of Europe and Asia to men doing tricks with bits of string and plastic. WHICH OTHER OVERLONG WEEKLY MISCELLANY GIVES YOU THAT, EH???? Whether you want it or not is immaterial. 

Anyway, kids. Strap in, sit back, pour yourselves a stiff drink and prepare for the imminent trepanning that is a trip through Web Curios. ENJOY!

By Andrew Lyman
 
 

THE BIT WHERE YOU GET TO PRETEND THAT YOU’RE READING THIS FOR WORK, UNLESS YOU’RE READING THIS ON THE WEEKEND IN WHICH CASE JUST SKIP IT:

FACEBOOK:

  • Facebook Simplifies Ad OfferingIt’s about time, frankly, given that (as I learned from this news) there are currently 27(!) separate Facebook ad products. There won’t be, by the end of the year – they’re killing more than half of them in favour of a simplified, streamlined system which combines the functionality of multiple ad products to eliminate overlap, etc. Obliquely it’s an interesting insight into the big blue Satan’s iterative design processes when it comes to the stuff that really matters (ie making all of the money).
  • This Is What Verified Pages Look LikeLook, here’s McDonald’s! They have a TICK. AMAZING! I for one am far happier interacting with the vapid, anodyne voice of a brand dedicated to selling me crap food with all the nutritional value of an iPad when I know that it REALLY IS that brand and not a stealthy scammer.
  • It Doesn’t Matter If We Hate It, We’re Stuck With ItInteresting – and clever – piece by Reuters as to why Facebook is not going anywhere, whether or not we like it. Which sort of makes you wonder WHO IS IN CHARGE HERE? There’s a lot of interesting thought-food in there about its service offering and how it may develop in light of recent misstep.
  • But That Doesn’t Mean It’s Not A Bit CrapA great, long, look at how Facebook is effectively edging towards being little more than a spam graveyard, based on the evolution of Open Graph and the gradual prioritisation of algorithmically-preferred content. Actually want to know what it is that your friends have been doing? TOUGH, LOOK AT THIS BRAND’S PICTURE OF A PUG IN A PARTY HAT INSTEAD. Actually this is less of an issue if you just take the simple step of not using Facebook for communicating with commercial entities, although you would obviously be a FOOL and a COMMUNIST to suggest that.

    TWITTER:

  • Lists Get Bigger & More UsefulThis was meant to go in last week, but I forgot about it (which says more about my priorities than it does about the significance of the announcement). Twitter has expanded the functionality of its ‘Lists’ service, to the point where they are now really, really useful (particularly for anyone who’s doing Twitter PROFESSIONALLY). You can now make up to 1,000 lists from a single account, each containing up to 5,000 Twitter profiles. Which really is useful if you need to do stuff with media or INFLUENCERS, although I still hate you for believing that INFLUENCERS is actually a proper word you are allowed to use. 
  • Twitter Gets Into Bed With The ManSuch a big story, this (I think). WPP, the advertising/communications behemoth and, ultimately, the people whose fault it is that this screed exists, announced yesterday that they have entered into a global strategic partnership with Twitter. Details are, at present, sketchy, but this can’t be anything other than a massive databuy, allowing all of Sir Martin’s multifarious corporate tentacles access to a violently large amount of information about what we’re all saying and thinking, which will then be used to try and sell us stuff more effectively. I’m presuming a degree of exclusivity on this, which surely is huge for the advertising / media buying industry as a whole. Or maybe it’s not, and I’m simply still in thrall to the strange charms of a stumpy plutocrat. WHO KNOWS?
  • The Best Vine Person EVERThis is sort of frivolous so probably should go down there (*gestures*), but it’s all about Vine, so sod it. This man works for Twitter, and therefore has almost certainly had more time to play with the product than anyone else, but his use of the platform is BRILLIANT. Brands, LEARN.  
  • Although This Is Also A Clever Use Of VineReally simple and clever, this site uses Vine to collect brilliant examples of UX design from around the web. An excellent example of what it is really useful for, and something that you should think about ripping off. IKEA – timelapse vines showing key points in the assembly of flatpack furniture? Foodie people – vines showing how certain things should look during the cooking process? You get the idea(s).
  • The Most Engaged Twitter Account IN THE WORLD: Someone ran the numbers – more RTs, favourites, @replies than ANY OTHER ACCOUNT. And all it does is tweet intellectually subnormal platitudes. Yep, this is what you need to do to ‘engage’ people. Talk like an idiot who’s read a lot of self-help manuals. This is both funny and immensely saddening. Community managers – go on, tweet like this for a week and watch your (largely meaningless) numbers SOAR.
  • Visualisations of Twitter Use Across The WorldNo London, sadly, but very beautiful nonetheless. 

GOOGLE:

  • No Bongo For GlassGoogle have clarified their developer policies for building stuff on the scary, face-wearable computing device of dreams / nightmares; sadly for the onanists out there (ok, ok, all of us), they have imposed a ban on pr0n-y apps. Which is a real shame for the people behind the brilliantly-named ‘Tits and Glass‘ app, which was announced about 24 hours before Google made this announcement. 
  • Google+ Is The MatrixClever piece of writing by Charles Arthur in the Guardian, which takes a look at what Google+ is actually for; nothing that wasn’t alluded to when it launched a few years back, but benefits enormously from the benefit of hindsight and the more zoomed-out view of the online ecosystem we are afforded in 2013. Basically what it says is that G+ is a gigantic datagathering tool which sits across all Google’s other gigantic datagathering tools. I still reckon there’s a possible future in which everyone is given a Google ID at birth and they ‘own’ the universal login thing. Maybe. Perhaps. 
  • It Can Tell The Future TooI was talking with someone about data analysis, predictions and government this week (because I’m SO ALONE); this ties into that, a bit. Just a bit of info from a Google research project mapping its data against the box office takings of films. We’ve all heard stuff about how social media is remarkably accurate when it comes to predicting 1st weekend box office receipts, but this is quite remarkable – to quote the study: “trailer search volume on Google coupled with both the franchise status of the movie and seasonality can predict opening weekend box office revenue with 94% accuracy”. That’s incredible. No wonder Goldman Sachs are working on scrapers to play the stockmarket based on Twitter, Facebook and Google data. Everything we write on the internet helps make rich companies richer, and this is only going to become more true. 

OTHER THINGS WHICH YOU CAN PASS OFF AS PROFESSIONALLY USEFUL IF YOU HAVE A SILLY, MADE-UP INTERNETTY JOB LIKE ME:

  • Niche Networks ‘On The Rise’This story’s been bubbling around recently, in parallel to the much-exaggerated DECLINE OF FACEBOOK. Anyway, an interesting look at smaller, more specialist social networks, all of which are set to be ruined by brands attempting to co-opt them for their own ends and effectively crushing all the things that made them special in the first place.
  • Internet Usage Trends – Some graphsA whole load of graphs and data looking at how the manner in which we use the web will change over the next few years. Basically it says that video usage online will continue to grow exponentially, particularly on mobile. Unsurprising, but useful if you need to justify a position to a client with 3rd party data and important-looking lines, which you probably will do at some point. 
  • How Digital Is Modifying MarketingThis is a really good presentation. Tells the truth, largely, and you could do worse than have a read and appropriate some of the thinking. It’s by a man called Gregory Pouy, so all credit to him. 
  • Coub – Like Vine But For YouTube VidsThat’s sort of all you need to know. Lets you create 10-second looping videos from any YouTube clips you like (or indeed your own footage). Hugely useful if you need to make a high volume of ‘funny’, ‘original’ content and don’t want to do it all off a mobile device. 
  • Simon’s Dating ChallengeA better-than-expected effort from BT, who’ve created this game to promote…er…some stuff that they do (again proving the questionable utility of this stuff as a campaign marketing tool, but let’s disregard that). It’s retro, it’s fun enough to waste 5 minutes on…hang on, I’m reading this back to myself and realising quite how low my standards are when it comes to this stuff. Basically, IT’S NOT DREADFUL. Huzzah!
  • Etihad x LinkedInThis, though, really is clever. A LinkedIn mashup which lets you see your primary and secondary contacts on a map, look at where you might be travelling to and work out who’s in the area who it might be useful to meet, message them, etc. Actually a potentially useful service, which is pretty rare.
  • Storytime HangoutI really like this. Google+ thingy by Penguin / Ladybird, which does an AR-style overlay on your Google+ hangout allowing you to roleplay the story you’re telling your kids. Although the fact that you’re telling your kids a story over the internet makes me a little sad, now I think about it. 
  • How GE Uses Data VisualisationA good, and comprehensive, look at what GE are doing with their data and how they are making it work in a communications sense. Required reading for any of you who’ve wanged on about BIG DATA in a client meeting without really knowing what you mean. 
  • If This Is Real It’s TERRIFYINGThis road safety stunt (part of the DfT’s THINK! campaign) is PROPERLY unsettling. Or, rather, it must have been for the people in the video, although they all look a little bit too goodlooking for me to 100% believe that they’re not actors. Real people don’t look that good in public lavatories, surely. 
  • The Domino’s Pizza DroneDomino’s gets a PR first (I think) using drone technology to deliver pizzas in this short video. Anyone familiar with the Bill Hicks skit about shooting bananas at hungry people should be getting weird little ‘living in the future’ tracers right about now.
  • The Dollar Shave Club People Do Video Well, AgainI almost don’t mind being advertised at when it’s this well written. It takes a lot of effort to put together something which looks this slapdash.
The hyperrealistic painting of Omar Ortiz
 

 WHY NOT LISTEN TO SOME LOVELY JAZZY DOWNTEMPO BEATS FROM GERMANY WHILE YOU READ THE NEXT BITS? GO ON YOU WILL LIKE THEM

STUFF OF POTENTIAL INTEREST FROM THE PAST WEEK’S INSANE WHIRLIGIG OF INTERNETTING, PT. 1:

  • What Is Going Viral RIGHT NOWFre.sh is built by Buzzfeed and links to the 50 stories / pages which are being most-shared on the web RIGHT NOW. The font size denotes traffic to that page, the ranking denotes how quickly that traffic is accruing. It’s obviously not ALL of the web, just a selection of curated sites, but it’s an interesting snapshot-generator nonetheless. Man, we like frivolous list-based articles. 
  • Making Sense of Large Numbers With ChromeHave you ever been confronted by a large figure in an article and thought ‘Yes, fine, but what I really want to know is how that compares to, say, the size of Wales?’ (it is a little-remarked fact that all spatial size comparisons in the UK are based on the idea that ‘a Wales’ is the most comprehensible large unit of space which exists, hence everything being described as being ‘an area X times the size of Wales’). Lucky you – this Google Chrome plugin will automatically do exactly that sort of thing, translating large numbers into theoretically easier-to-understand analogues. 
  • My Current Favourite 404 PageYou can play Space Invaders on it, which I think should be made standard practice for all these markers of failure and disappointment across the web. 
  • LOLCAT LoansJust an amazingly awful thing. A loanshark using the cuddly LOLCAT meme to peddle sub-prime lending solutions with a terrifying level of vig which will in all likelihood leave poor people penniless, homeless, and generally banjaxed. BUT IT’S OK BECAUSE CATS! A cursory bit of online research suggests that the company’s registered in Panama, along with a whole load of parallel businesses registered to the same parent company which also sells an awful lot of knock-off pharmaceuticals. Who better to borrow money from? Thanks to Chris Owen for finding this one. 
  • Great Photography From This Week in Turkey: A collection of awesome photos from The Atlantic.
  • A Love Letter To The Early Webthink that this is just a search engine which mines the Wayback Machine for old internet results. It’s a lovely nostalgic timesink, though, if you’re a webmong of long-standing. 
  • Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Marijuana StrainsThere’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening in the moment, particularly in the US, as a result of changes in legislation around the legality of marijuana (foreshadowing) – this is the internet side-effect. Leafly is a US startup which effectively acts as a cross between Wikipedia and Erowid and tells you all you could ever want to know about the difference between Black Domina and Bubblegum, and everything in between. I give it less then a year before the weed world has its own Jilly Goolden-style superstar, poncily reviewing different strains on YouTube. 
  • People Laughing Between Takes On Film SetsA lovely collection of candid snaps of film stars enjoying themselves on-set. Makes working on a film look FUN, when I am reliably informed that the reality is in fact a hellish carousel of tedium. 
  • Spoiler SilencerUnhappy at how you don’t have the self-control to ignore people talking about plot details from your favourite overblown US TV production? Oh good, then this is for you. Silencer is a plugin which purports to block mentions of…well, whatever you want, on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. Not a new idea, but they have pre-set bundles that will remove EVERYTHING pertaining to certain shows (so ‘Game Of Thrones’, #got, #gameofthrones, #redwedding, #jesusfuckingchristwhatiswrongwithyougetasenseofperspective, etc).
  • Amazing Pictures Of The SkyJust incredible photographs by a Japanese person by the name of Yu Yamauichi. My lack of Japanese means that this is literally ALL I know about these, but they are lovely and very much worth perusing. 
  • Music Label Logos ExplainedThis is from Red Bull, but I don’t care as it’s actually quite interesting. A look at the logos of a load of classic record labels (mostly US) and how / why they came to be. Music geeks will like this, I think, as may other people (literally the vaguest endorsement EVER). 
  • GIANT DUCKS FOR SALEYou remember that giant yellow duck which did the world tour recently to promote something or other that noone really paid any attention to because LOOK IT’S A GIANT YELLOW DUCK? Well you can now buy your very own, in whichever colour you like. Amazing service by the ever-industrious Chinese manufacturing sector, who will make one which is 20m tall for a mere £16k, which is cheap by anyone’s standards. Seriously compared to the agency and media-buy costs of billboard ads, this almost makes sense. Almost. 
  • US Population CounterNice work by the US Census Bureau, which produced this population clock to track world and US population growth in (projected) realtime based on census data. Nice, user-friendly and interesting (and, obviously, pointless and linkbaity, but still).
  • Photographs of Crisis-hit GreeceBrilliant, and really sad, photography of Greek citizens living through the slow collapse of their economy. Taken by Iakovos Hatzistavrou, who is evidently a very talented man. 
  • Map Your 4sq CheckinsThere will come a point where I stop referencing Foursquare because NOONE CARES, but while I still see people’s checkins appearing in my timeline on Twitter then I’ll keep dropping the odd thing in. This one’s actually nice arty idea, printing you a map of whichever city you’re in with data overlaid about where you checkin; effectively a visualisation of your LIFE (or at least the bit of it which you choose to vaildate through the medium of checking in to Foursquare). Also potentially INCREDIBLY sad for some people (Home-Office-Gym-Home-Office-Gym-Home-Office-Gym-Home-Morgue).
  • Jacques Green Interactive Music Video: Another one of those ‘drag the boxes, make your own EXPERIENCE’ things, but nicely done (and bonus points for the garage-y music). 
Isabelle Wenzel, Objectification, With Céline Shoes And Vase, 2013 © Isabelle Wenzel
 

MAYBE NOW YOU WOULD LIKE SOME OTHER MUSIC BY HODGY BEATS OF ODD FUTURE FAME? YOU WOULD? OH GOOD. 

STUFF OF POTENTIAL INTEREST FROM THE PAST WEEK’S INSANE WHIRLIGIG OF INTERNETTING, PT. 2:

  • The Insane Tetris Art AlgorithmAs someone who’s a bit math-blind, my only reaction to the insane mathematics behind this is actual naked fear. I don’t really know how to explain it – someone basically made a programme which works out how to draw using Tetris. Just take a look.
  • Nathan Fielder Messes With People’s Heads AgainModerate hilarity once again ensues. Is this currently being ripped off by a breakfast radio show? It really feels like it should be. BONUS – human STI Hunter Moore rips it off in naked teenager-style.
  • London’s Abandoned Tube Stations, MappedTaking the many lost underground stations of London and placing them on the existing map. Really interesting, and the result of an initial project by the terrifyingly impressive Dylan Maryk, who I have met and confidently predict will be running at least a small part of the world in the next 10 years. Also brought to you by the new Rob Manuel-and-others project Us vs Th3m, which is a really good timewaster-y website, a bit like Buzzfeed but with more lots more brains. 
  • The Starbucks of MarijuanaOr at least that’s the idea. As mentioned above, there is a whole industry waiting to explode internationally – smart people are going to get VERY RICH. These people want to be the world’s largest legal weed brand – read more here
  • Starbucks Vs Dunkin Donuts: SEAMLESS! Well, sort of. This is included less for the content than for the beuatiful page design which I was really impressed by in an odd, geeky fashion. 
  • The Cleverest Sign In The WorldThis is BRILLIANT. A signpost which connects to the internet, meaning it’s dynamic and can be made to display and point to different things depending on user commands. Also, the prototype displayed on the website will show your tweets and point in the direction of where you’re tweeting from if you use a certain hashtag, which is a nice proof-of-concept. 
  • How To Pronounce IKEA Product NamesAnother website which is disappointingly not by IKEA but should be. Pronunciation guides to the more esoterically-named products from the Swedish meatball suppliers with the furniture sideline. Upsettingly doesn’t include any hints as to pronounce ‘Billy’ properly. 
  • Paris Is Getting A New Forest Next YearI WANT A FOREST ON A SKY WALKWAY. Can someone send this to Boris, please? Thanks.
  • Winners of the 2013 Underwater Photography ContestThis is an annual thing by the University of Miami, apparently. Great pictures of cool / weird undersea stuff. 
  • The Recording of Under PressureA great post looking back at the Bowie/Mercury collaboration. You may not be surprised to learn that a LOT of cocaine was involved. As a bonus, there’s also a recording of their isolated vocals embedded in the piece, which is brilliant. From Dangerous Minds, which is a great blog you should all read. 
  • Tennis, VisualisedVery cool, if a bit headache-inducing in terms of the volume of stuff, this is technically a piece of BRANDED CONTENT, but given the fact that I can’t understand why a beer brand has made it I am going ignore the branding. It’s a load of data from a series of ATP matches last year, visualised. The sort of stuff that I imagine tennis coaches use, and, if you play, probably actually really interesting. For the less physically ept (ie me), it’s just a clever example of how to make large datasets accessible. Wimbledon, do this NOW (or, more realistically, next year).
  • Someone’s Designing An ‘Improved’ Version Of ChessIt’s called Chess 2. It’s quite mind-melty.
  • Star Trek WineAfter last week’s Hannibal Lecter vintage comes Star Trek wine. We’ve basically reached the point where we’re all infantilised to the point where chucking some pop-culture references onto literally ANY product will have us clapping and gawping like idiots and reaching for our wallets. Go society!
  • Runed By FansSpeaking of popular culture (SEAMLESS!), this is a website which looks over a (very) wide range of stuff and tries to quantify exactly how much each has been ruined by the rabid endorsement of its fan base. We’re all part of the problem.
  • A 3d Virtual Universe: Sadly this only seems to work on Macs, but if you worship at the Church of Steve then it may work for you. A very cool tool that lets you zoom through space however you want – science geeks should love this. 
  • When 3d Printing Goes WrongObviously 3d printing is THE FUTURE and all that, but it’s not always perfect. This is a collection of pictures of what happens when the machines get a bit confused. Don’t know why, but I found it quite pleasing and oddly poignant. Perhaps its reassuring that our creations are still capable of mechanical imperfection (although perhaps we should be more worried than heartened). 
  • Will Love Tear Us Apart?I love this. A ‘game’, which isn’t really a game, based on the Joy Division song ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Such gorgeous design and animation, and the whole thing really does give you sad, despairing chills. Which sounds horrid, I admit, but it’s very much worth playing with. Just don’t think of it as a game, per se.
     

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

  • The Unintentional Poetry Of ZazzleZazzle is an online retailer that sells an unconscionalble number of items of clothing, with image / slogan combinations which are algorithmically generated and therefore almost totally random. This can lead to some odd and occasionally lyrical slogans, some of the best of which are collected here. I basically want a lot of what is pictured on here, but I feel quite guilty about it. Weirdly, I also found this this week, which is another Tumblr doing much the same thing but slightly differently
  • This is Popular PrivilegeCheck your priviliege! YES YOU! Or, er, don’t. I must confess to thinking that this rubbish (because, really) was confined to the insanely twisty world of CIS/non-CIS tumblr arguments, but it seems not. Anyway, the latest iteration of this appears to be the concept of POPULAR PRIVILEGE – that is, the unfair advantages enjoyed by the COOL KIDS. The author of this Tumblr insists that this is not a parody, and its a concept which they believe applicable in the real world, not just school. As a society we really do have too much time and not enough real problems, seriously. 
  • Awkward PintsStock photos of people holding pints of beer in less-than-comfortable fashion.
  • Phones Replaced With SandwichesWhoever’s maintaining this will surely get bored and stop soon. I sort of hope they do, anyway, as if not it suggests something of a lack of other stimuli and interest in their life. 
  • Film GifsI’m pretty sure I’ve featured something very like this before, but here’s a Tumblr collecting a series of nice, hi-res gif-ed film stills. Good work, ready to be spoiled with captions and inclusions in ‘…and then I was all like:’ industry-specific joke tumblrs.
  • Gezi, Minus The ViolenceInteresting. Takes pictures of protestors clashing with police (and each other) from this week’s Turkish protests ad airbrushes out the violence. Decide for yourselves exactly which high concept you want to apply to this. 
  • Gays Of South London: No idea why I’ve not put this in before, it’s AWESOME. Also, South London.
Literally no idea who to attribute this to, sorry.
 

THIS ALBUM IS CALLED ACID RAP AND IT IS BY CHANCE THE RAPPER AND IT IS GREAT  

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (THERE ARE SOME TRULY GREAT READS THIS WEEK, I PROMISE):

  • Profile of a Porn StarMarcus London is, apparently, a big star in the world of bongo. He is also, it would seem, a really odd man and not a particularly pleasant one. This profile of him on NSFW Corp is further proof that they are producing some of the best longform writing anywhere on the web at the moment – I know I keep on saying it, but it’s true. 
  • Italy, Football, Race and CultureSo obviously being half Italian with a mum who lives in Rome makes me naturally inclined to be interested in anything to do with the place, but regardless of your connection (or lack thereof) to the country, this is a stellar piece of writing, and explores some of the oddities of Italian political culture, the country’s uneasy relationship with extreme politics and racial integration, and its football culture. Really, really good. 
  • The Suicide EpidemicThis is very long and not a very cheering piece, but it’s also interesting and important. A look at the people who are investigating the reasons behind why suicide is now a greater killer of people than war, and why suicide figures have risen unchecked year-on-year since 1999. Read it and then go and donate some money to MIND.  
  • What It’s Like Being A Minor Actor in a Cult Film: Bit of light relief – this isn’t HUGELY long, but it’s a cute piece by a man who played an irritating TGI Friday-type employee in Office Space (SUCH A GOOD FILM) and how the one role continues to define him. Interesting to read about what it’s like to be someone who is by no means a superstar in a world dominated by them. 
  • The History of the UK Garage SceneI have a slight author-crush on the writer of this piece, who for my money is head and shoulders above everyone else writing for VICE at the minute (go and read through his other stuff, it’s uniformly excellent). This is an illustrated memory-lane-trip back the days when garage was bubbling under – great photos, too.
  • The Legend of Buster SmithOk, so this one really is epic, but it’s a great example of the sort of journalism that US outlets do really well and which, for reasons I don’t quite get, we don’t seem to produce here. A look at a Chicago icon and ‘the greatest checkers player ever’, it’s a wonderful story about a city and the communities within it, and not really about checkers at all (except it sort of is). Like reading a really good documentary film, if that makes any sense to you. 
  • Reviewing Tao Lin’s ‘Taipei’Tao Lin is an internet phenomenon and possibly the most weird authorial ‘construct’ ever seen. His strange, utterly blank prose is divisive, and the ultra-meta nature of his persona coupled with his other artistic activities / pretensions (delete as applicable) make him a hipster cult figure and an object of derision in equal measure. Whatever your opinion, this review of his latest novel is a brilliant piece of writing, and an interesting exploration as to what a book review can and should be. I think. 
  • Making Sushi for Kim Jong IlAbsolutely the best thing I read all week. The crazy, yet apparently true, story of the Korean dictator’s personal sushi chef. JUST MENTAL.
  • GamesMaster – The Inside StoryIf you’re in your late 20s/early 30s and grew up in the UK (and, probably, a man), this will be like a soothing nostalgiabath for you. A great long-form look at everyone’s favourite shonky games show featuring curmudgeonly racist Sir Patrick Moore. Worth reading if only for having your memory nudged about exactly how innuendo-filled it was.
  • The Annual Kid Rock CruiseEvery year, a bunch of middle-aged white people, largely from middle-America, pay to get on a big boat for a few days and hang out with redneck superstar Kid Rock whilst getting unconscionably drunk. This is the story of that cruise. Quite incredible. 
  • The Silicon Valley of MarijuanaContinuing this week’s theme of a hemp-based future, this is a great two-parter looking at the emergent legal marijuana industry in the States. The money involved is, potentially, astonishing.  
  • The Evolution of the Star Wars LogoHonestly, this is more interesting than you would expect, particularly if you’re into design, typography, marketing / branding or (obviously) Star Wars.

A SHORT SELECTION OF VIDEOS WHICH ARE NOT EMBEDDED BUT INSTEAD LINKED TO:

Calvin & Hobbes – SECRET AGENTS! By Coran Kizer Stone
 


NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) After all the attention being lavished on the stupid EDL racists in the past few weeks, this is a lovely counterpoint. A few months old, and it’s got over 1million views so apologies if you’ve already seen it, but this is a great piece of spoken work by Hollie Mcnish, called ‘Mathematics’, all about the mistaken assumptions behind the ‘coming over here, taking our jobs’ rhetoric often spouted by the aforementioned stupid racists:

2) I reckon some of you will love this (and some of you will be bored to tears by it; sorry about that). This is effectively an animation / art piece to accompany Midnight Juggernauts’ latest single ‘Memoriam’, which tracks the history and evolution of CGI technology. If you’ve been a computer geek for a while, this will hit a lot of buttons:

3) This is such a good animation. Stop motion work for Professor Kliq’s song ‘Plastic and Flashing Lights’. The use of wire to make the figure is inspired, and allows all sorts of cool flourishes. Really slick:

4) People imitating animals off the internet! Better than it has any right to be, though the song leaves me COLD – the attention to detail on some of these is brilliant, though. ‘Humanity’ by I Am Un Chien:

5) Don’t really understand why this doesn’t have more views. Another one of those videos made from animated collections of stills (LIKE ALL VIDEOS BASICALLY ARE) – the craft that’s gone into this one, though, is crazily impressive – it was all shot over 1 24h period, which logistically is pretty punch. Also features Kelis, which is a pleasant bonus. Dan Black, with ‘Hearts’:

6) UK Hiphop corner! This week, have the fantastically named Stig Of The Dump, with ‘One’. Great sample – you’ll be humming this one, guaranteed (BONUS UK HIPHOP – I discovered this this week, it is brilliant. Skittles – Poor With £100 Trainers):

7) This is Marika. I think she is going to be FAMOUS. This is the video for her song ‘The Bath is Black’ and it is ODD, but beautifully shot:


8) A pleasing touch of whimsy to follow, with the latest video and single from The Boy Least Likely To, who are LOVELY and underrated. If you like Belle & Sebastian you will like this, and the video’s really cute and beautifully shot. WATCH:

9) Bruton Strouse are, I think, some sort of video agency. They are going to get SO MUCH BUSINESS as a result of this slomo showreel. So, so good:

10) Portugal. The Man are shooting up my list of ‘bands who I am expecting huge fame for which basically means they’re destined for anonymity’. Consistently good songs and videos; the faces here are great. This is Atomic Man: 

11) Finally, this, because it’s scarred my dreams this week and so I see no reason why it shouldn’t do the same to you. BYE!

 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 31/05/13

Reading Time: 18 minutes

[image missing]

Snail Heaven. Glengall Road, London SE15
Garudio Studiage, photo of the week

HELLO WEBMONGS! Things are somewhat more cheery this week, helped in no small part by the 4-day week. God love the 4-day week (admittedly I worked on Monday, but you get the point). Anyway, it’s been a decent few days – I went to Field Day and saw some bands, along with several thousand people who ALL LOOKED THE SAME, I saw THEATRE, did really, really badly in a pub quiz but redeemed myself with unexpected knowledge of the lyrics to this masterpiece, and found this great little video of an amorous giraffe. Nobel Prizes have been awarded for less. 

In less solipsistic news, we learned that London is really quite odd sometimes, that apparently this is considered to be a job in 2013 (I am so overqualified), that people do this on the subway in New York, that romance is finally dead and that the internet killed it, that we finally have the cross-dressing superhero we’ve been calling for, and that The Guardian’s now beyond parody…AND A LOT MORE BESIDES. Gird your loins, loosen your limbs, regulate your breathing and RELAX as we submerge ourselves into the blood-warm infoliquid that is this week’s Web Curios…

Image by Mark Kilner
 

STUFF FOR PEOPLE WHO MIGHT LIKE TO REFER TO THEMSELVES AS ‘MEDIA PROFESSIONALS’ (A PLEASINGLY SMALL SELECTION):

FACEBOOK

  • Facebook and Misogynistic ContentSo I’m sure you already know about this, what with it having been MAINSTREAM NEWS and all over the past week or so. Facebook are making appeasing noises at people, promising to do more to eliminate ‘hate speech’ from the site. Obviously this is A Good Thing – but can we all just be clear that it wasn’t popular protest which led to this, but instead the threat advertisers made to withdraw their spend? Will be interesting to see the extent to which this works and how it’s implemented – at the very least, watching people try and define the slightly grey and fuzzy boundaries of what constitutes hate speech will be interesting. Also, is this some sort of a mini-watershed in terms of the unregulated internet? Oh, I don’t know. 
  • Facebook Offers Verified PagesErm, that. Taking a leaf out of Twitter’s book, and pandering to the desire of brands and celebrities to be defined as a SOMETHING by the faceless internet behemoth du jour. It’s unclear as yet what perks beyond a smug feeling of validation this will give to Pages; and of course if you’d like a TICK then be prepared to shell out on ads (just like Twitter). Here’s a fun game – try and work out what Facebook can sell next! The options, terrifyingly, are near-infinite.
  • Facebook Music Data VisualisationOh look, here’s a thing! This is actually a rather nice idea, taking information about what people are listening to on Facebook over time. Currently US-only (although I don’t think there’s any reason why this couldn’t be extended elsewhere), and the ability to watch the spread of a track’s popularity over a geographical area is oddly compelling; you can imagine how artists and labels could use this to target promotions, etc, geographically (in a weird, unpleasant future). 
  • Target Adverts by Recency of ActivityThis should have been in last week’s. SORRY. Anyhow, another flavour of Facebook ads is now available, allowing brands to target users based on when they last did a certain thing on the site. So, for example, if you want to target people who are technically fans of your Page but who haven’t visited it in over a year with a message which says ‘WHY DON’T YOU LOVE US ANYMORE?’, you can. Actually, someone should do that. 

A Selection of Other Things Which Have No Real Commonality Other Than That I have Chosen To Group Them Together:

  • Slowmo YouTube Videos Automatically: You can now turn any video you upload to YouTube into a slowmo version. Which is a nice thing in theory, but in practice will lead to a whole load of brands making interminably tedious shorts which they attempt to ART UP by making them reeeaaaaalllllly slooooooooooow. I reckon food brands will be the first ones to really, really overuse this – O LOOK IT’S A CREME EGG CRACKING IN SLOWMO OMG AMAZE *stab stab stab*
  • Look! It’s The First Trailer for ‘Pornography’ On Glass!Totally SFW, but utterly creepy; raises the horrendous question of whether EVERYONE you are speaking to in the future is only half-listening to you and instead devoting the remainder of their attention to watching people in various states of undress rubbing mucous membranes with each other. Basically in the future we will all only be able to devote at most 40% of our attention to anything at all, due to the ruinous amount of hardcore we’ll all be able to consume, in secret, 24/7, beamed direct to our eyeballs. There’s a gag here about Google Glass turning you blind, but it’s not funny.
  • Google, Big Data and TV AdvertisingInteresting thinkpiece exploring what Google could do with all the data at its disposal to ‘disrupt’ (hate that word) TV advertising and TAKE OVER THE WORLD (more). Basically what it’s all about is a greater degree of data-driven contextual advertising, targeting you with sales-messages in between episodes of whatever mind-draining crap it is that you choose to watch. Everything you search for will be used to serve you EVEN MORE advertising. GREAT! 
  • Buzzfeed Partners With CNNI’m sort of amazed that more people aren’t squawking about Buzzfeed’s seemingly inexorable (but quiet and stealthy) ascent to the top table of ‘news’ media, and the inevitably deleterious effect that this is going to have on the quality of what is often-laughably called ‘reporting’ in the 21st Century. This deal is all about Buzzfeed producing videos for CNN which are designed to be ‘shareable’ – or, if you want to put it another way, designed for people with an IQ in double-figures to gawp at in slack-jawed, like-clicking amazement. You want to watch ‘7 Reasons Why Genocide is Bad – IN KITTENS!’? I hope you die. 
  • Mary Meeker’s Internet TrendsMary Meeker is a bit of a hero to a lot of people who work in advermarketingpr, what with her annual gift of helpful statistics packaged in an authoritative-seeming slide presentation. This year’s set of data is upon us, and as ever it’s a combination of the interesting, insightful and soul-shatteringly banal. If you want a bunch of peer-ratified numbers with which to justify your campaign, though, you need look no further. Oh, FYI, I was saying the ‘sound’ thing 18 months ago – and yet here I am sitting in my pants in my kitchen, writing a blog to literally TENS of webmongs, whilst Mary is an internationally respected expert in her field. WHY, GOD, WHY??? If you’re interested in this sort of stuff (the stats, not my own professional failure), you could do worse than watch her presentation here.
  • Hyperbolic Adidas VideoI saw this on Twitter, being touted as THE FUTURE OF ONLINE VIDEO, and I got almost sort-of excited (in a very low-key way). Imagine my disappointment when I saw that it was just A N Other branded video but with the addition of embedded in-vid links to external sites. I mean, really, no wonder Nike is winning.
  • Ford Branded Content: Whoever it was first started that whole ‘content marketing’ bandwagon, I do not thank you. Thanks to you, we now have stuff like this – Ford spending God-knows-how-much to badge a regular live online broadcast from Sports Illustrated. WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS??? Either it’s going to be the online equivalent of brand sponsoring TV shows, with an ‘amusing’ ident to open and close the show, or it’s going to be a hideous mismash of poorly executed brand-focused links designed to ‘place the brand at the heart of the viewer’s sporting experience’. Either way, will it make anyone buy more car? Oh I don’t know, leave us alone
  • Korean Flying Online ShopsThat’s a really crap description, for which apologies. Once again via Robven comes this rather nice execution from Korea, encouraging people to buy stuff through online shops via the medium of floating, roaming wifi signals. That doesn’t really make any sense, I realise, but take a look at the video and let PROPER STORYTELLERS explain it to you. It’s smart. 
  • The Book That Made MeThis is a really nice project by Waterstones, inviting people to discuss books which had an impact on their lives. No more, no less – just a lovely use of digital to enable people to have conversations about stuff they care about, in a loose, brand-affiliated sort of way. To be honest, if this were anything other than books I would probably hate it, but I’m a snob like that. Sorry. 
  • Free Storyboard IllustrationsNeed to sell a creative idea to people who won’t understand anything unless you’ve drawn them a pretty picture? This may be a useful resource, in that case.
  • The 90s R&B Guide To SEOI’ll be honest with you, this might be the worst advice in the world – but it’s all delivered via the medium of 90s music, and it ticks a massive nostalgia box, so in it goes. If you ever had your own dance to ‘Two Can Play At That Game’ by Bobby Brown that you used to perform at Cairo’s nightclub in Swindon when you were 14 (oh, what, only me and my mate Phil?) then this will make you very happy. 
Image by Manuel Alvarez Bravo
 

WHY NOT LISTEN TO SOLID STEEL’S ‘AUDIO DOCUMENTARY’ TO CELEBRATE THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF DE LA SOUL’S 3FT HIGH AND RISING? GO ON!

AN ASSORTMENT OF ‘INTERESTING’ MISCELLANIA, PT.1:

  • Beauty Recovery Room: South Korea is one of the plastic surgery capitals of the world (along with Venezuela, fact fans). This is a photoseries capturing images of women post-surgery (not in a creepy way), and is both an arresting collection and a really compelling argument for not wanting to ever go under the knife (until I get fat, at which point I am totally having liposuction). 
  • The Fast FTAn interesting move from the Finanical Times, who’ve created this version of their site which takes a Twitter-style approach to the moving news agenda, with live breaking stories updating in short-but-expandable form. It’s really nicely done, and a clever service – now can everyone else in news launch a similar service, and can we aggregate all the feeds onto one page? Thanks, everyone!
  • The Disney ‘Magic Band’Another week, another bit of wearable tech. This week it’s Disney’s turn, announcing the MAGIC BAND which will, apparently, track your progress around Disney parks, allowing you to sign into rides, buy food, etc, with contactless stuff. And, apparently, they will also somehow alert the staff at Disney resorts as to what your kids are called, allowing Mickey and his permagrinning chums to address your LITTLE ONES by name. Er, hang on, what? How? Anyway, this is all very weird and future, but becomes sort of interesting if you extend it a bit and imagine the way in which this can be applied across Disney’s entertainment propertiies; expanded benefits at Disney resorts for people who, say, have played a certain number of Disney XBox games, or who’ve sat through Finding Nemo more than 30 times with their children without killing either themselves or their offspring. Welcome to a future in which brand loyalty can TRULY be rewarded. Isn’t it nice? Eh? Oh. 
  • Recovering The ClassicsA wonderful project which seeks to crowdsource new, original cover art for out-of-copyright ebooks which are no longer owned by publishers. There’s some great design in there, whether or not you’re of a literary bent. 
  • Bicycle Wheel LED Display Art ThingyThis is very cool indeed, or at least it will be when the Kickstarter gets its funding. Using the same tech which you can see on these high-tech pois, this will let people display LED art on the moving wheels of bikes. There’s all sorts of very cool performance things which could be done with this, leaving aside the inevitable advertising applications.
  • Someone In Brazil Made A Judo FontNo idea why, though. 
  • Chrome RollitAnother in the long line of clever, technically astounding Chrome experiments – this time a game that seamlessly crosses from your computer to mobile and back again. Have a play (if you can – you obviously need an Android phone) and marvel at how well-made this is. Kind of like the same sort of concept behind the Wii-U, except something that people might actually one day use
  • The Mood Recognition LampSO CLEVER! Using a combination of face recognition technology and an IKEA lamp, this piece of design/art takes a standard light fitting from the ubiquitous Swedish retailer and couples it with a camera to make a piece of furniture which responds to how happy/sad you are. Smile, and the light becomes more pink; frown, and shades of blue dominate. Obviously this is incredibly simple, but I can’t help but see it as a first step on the road towards the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and lifts which make small talk with you and react to your moods. God, that sounds ghastly now I come to think of it. 
  • Twitter Exquisite CorpseTwexquisite corpse! AHAHAHA. Ahem, sorry. This is taking place as of tomorrow, as part of the London Literary Festival, and is a nice experiment in online storytelling and interactive narrative. Taking the base premise of exquisite corpse (‘consequences’ to the uninitiated) – or at least a variation on it – this will see Twitter users given a daily starting point for a story which they can then take wherever they want – these daily collaborative stories are then massaged into coherence by a team of professional writers and  placed on Storify. There’s a nice combination of the crowdsourced and structured here; will be interesting to see what the output looks like.
  • Vertigo Pictures of Hong KongRemarkable photographs, gazing up at the sky through the urban jungle of Hong Kong. You will get a small crick in your neck looking at these, but it will be worth it – vertigo-inducing and very cool.
  • The New Rijksmuseum WebsiteThis got a lot of love online this week, and rightly so. It’s not so much that it does anything spectacular, but rather that it doe everything it needs to do so damn well. Clean navigation, great visuals, the opportunity to create a personalised museum experience online…it ticks all the boxes. Not flashy or showy, just really, really good. 
  • Dual Purpose JewelleryHave you ever wanted to buy a ring which also doubles as a masturbatory aid? OH GOOD! Now, I’m obviously not a woman (OBVIOUSLY) but I must confess to being a little confused by these. I mean, really?
  • Most Shared Pictures on WeiboA clever website scraping Weibo for the most-shared posts containing images over the past 24h. An interesting look at what is occupying the minds of the Chinese people at any given time (or, at least, the stuff that they can share online without fear of reprisal), although obviously my lack of even a passing understanding of Madarin or Cantonese means that I have no context whatsoever for any of the stuff on there. I am particularly puzzled as to why, at the time of writing, a picture of Margaret Thatcher is the 99th most shared picture of the day. Anyone?
  • My PrivacyFederico is a New Yorker. Like many of us, he has realised that there is an awful lot of his personal data on the web, which other people are making an awful lot of money from. Federico has therefore decided to try and monetise his own data – you can buy all of it directly from him. Information about where he’s been, the websites he’s visited, everything you can quantify – all available. He’s compiled all of this into a truly lovely series of web projects – go ad check them out, they really are beautifully crafted (it may not surprise you to learn that Federico lives in Brooklyn). 
  • What’s My Startup PitchHave a startup? Need a pitch? This may help.
  • The Abandoned SanatoriumAbsolutely the creepiest set of photographs you are likely to see today, these are of an abandoned TB sanatorium outside Berlin. Hitler was once treated there, apparently – in any case, it’s the greatest setting for a videogame I’ve seen in ages. Oh, and here’s a whole other set – again, creepily impressive with some rather nice effects applied. 
  • The Giant Kinder Egg Birthday SurpriseThis is what happens when you attempt to make your girlfriend a giant Kinder Surprise for her birthday, but don’t really have the adequate skills or equipment.
  • Nike Ballet ShoesI was sceptical as to whether these were a real thing, but I’m assured that they are – really gorgeous design from Nike, although I’m in no position to judge their quality when it comes to performing a perfectly-executed pas-de-deux (as obviously I perform all my ballet barefoot like a purist). 
Image by Sayaka Maruyama
 

AN ASSORTMENT OF ‘INTERESTING’ MISCELLANIA, PT.2:

  • Who Wore It BetterDepending on your point of view, this is either ‘an ongoing visual research project presenting associations and common practices in contemporary art’, or a really interesting look at the massive degree of plagiarism inherent in the art world. Quite incredible at points. 
  • The Social RadioHave you ever wanted to have your tweets read back to you by a disembodied robotic voice, while tinny muzak plays in the background? No, of course you haven’t. And yet, now you can thanks to this bafflingly-pointless-yet-endearing little web project. What would make this better would be the ability to select voices – I personally would like to have Beyonce’s tweets, for example, read to me in the style of the lead singer of Napalm Death
  • Glitched Google MapsA collection of Google Maps images which are glitched so as to show contradictory seasons within the same frame. Someone really should do an exhibition collating all the examples of accidental art created by Google (OR IS IT ACCIDENTAL??? Jesus, it’s so hard to tell. Maybe it’s all just one big conceptual art project, like some sort of infinitely wealthy, all-knowing Gilbert & George).
  • One Mexican Town’s Fight Against The CartelsA great series of pictures depicting the Mexican town of Cherán, which a few years ago threw out its council and police and opted to stand up to the drug cartels independently. An astonishingly ballsy thing to do, well-documented in this great piece of photojournalism in Wired.
  • You Think Your Favourite Bar Is ‘Cool’?It really isn’t. This is something SO hipster that there isn’t even a name for it yet. The most secret bar you will ever see, from NYC. This will doubtless be replicated in Deptford within the year, except our version will have more dead pigeons and will almost certainly be accompanied by a bloody pop-up chicken shack because those are the RULES in 2013 London. 
  • Matches With Faces Drawn On ThemI’m sure that if you’re Japanese this makes some sort of sense, but I’m baffled. Someone appears to have made a whole website featuring images of books of matches with tiny faces. THIS IS SOMEONE’S LIFE, RIGHT HERE.
  • The Perfect Present For Your Loved OneHave you ever wanted to suprise your partner with a gift which speaks to the unique romantic bond you share, and which acknowledges the coruscating passion you have for each other? Have you considered putting pen to paper and writing your very own piece of erotica dedicated to them, but are unsure where to start? HELP IS AT HAND! This is a remarkable service which will, for a nominal fee, produce one of a series of cookie-cutter ‘erotic’ novels featuring the names of you and your significant other. There are so many things wrong with this, not least the fact that a cursory explanation of the site suggests that you’re not even getting proper bongo for your money – at best there will be a few heaving bosoms and perhaps a desultory reference to ‘his firmness’. Disappointing, but almost certainly comedy gold for the right couple (you’re out there somewhere). 
  • A Pinterest Board Collating Crap Quotes People Post on PinterestErm, that. If you have any stupid and annoying colleagues who are fans of the meaningless, inspirational aphorism, this will keep them happy and distracted for hours while you fetch the waterproofs and the flensing knife. 
  • Beautiful Pictures From The Upper NileA blog collecting pictures from an aid worker’s trip to the Upper Nile. Some gorgeous photography.
  •  La Petite MelancholieA blog collecting pictures of vintage (and not-so-vintage) nudes and other assorted ephemera. NSFW, but, y’know, it’s ART. Tell them that as you’re escorted from the building.
  • #なぜ描いたかわからないイラスト晒So this is a Japanese hashtag trend, apparently. The characters to the left apparently mean something like ‘Stuff I drew for no reason that I can adequately explain’ – searching for this throws up some baffling examples of Japanese doodling, some of which is really impressive and others of which make you want to go and have a bit of a lie down as you contemplate the mysteries of the inscrutable orient (not a euphemism). 
  • I Haven’t Been Fully Honest With YouWhat would you do if some random famous person on the internet suggested that you text this to your significant other and then not respond, whatever they do / say, for an hour? You’d do it, of course, and hang the consequences! The responses are occasionally funny, but you do wonder at what sort of people will do things just because the internet told them to. These people, amongst others
Le Dernier Homme, by Francois Bard
 

NOW WHY NOT LISTEN TO THIS MIX BY DIPLO AND IMAGINE THAT IT’S NOT REALLY MISERABLE IN THE UK EVEN THOUGH IT’S NEARLY JUNE OH GOD I WANT TO EMIGRATE

The Circus Of Tumblrs:

  • You Were HereA nice idea by creative agency Creature in the US, posting pics from a photobooth direct to this Tumblr. I sort of think that there’s a nice tourist promotion thing to be done with something like this, maybe on the banks of the Thames opposite Parliament or something. Maybe.
  • Animated AlbumsAlbum covers, animated.
  • Awkward Poses: People posing, awkwardly.
  • Cat TongingCats being prodded (gently) with tongs. Definitely not tongues. The cats don’t seem to mind, although you do wonder whether they are simply biding their time to exact some sort of terrible revenge (of course they’re not; they’re cats, for crying out loud). 
  • Bad AdviceTerrible (but in many cases strangely honest and true) responses to real letters to magazine advice columns. 
  • Screenshots of DespairA series of existentially bleak screenshots / pictures of the blankly unemotive utterances of machines. Guaranteed to  empty your soul.
  • Cops & NobbersOn the one hand, this is a one-note gag stretched to paper thinness which also makes light of some unpleasant instances of extreme police force against protesters. On the other hand, it may be puerile but it did make me laugh. 
  • Local People With Their Arms CrossedRemarkably consistent selection of photographs from local newspapers. From the same series as angry people, grumpy councillors, etc.
  • Just Another IKEA CatalogueNB THIS REALLY ISN’T SAFE FOR WORK, UNLESS YOUR EMPLOYERS HAVE A LIBERAL ATTITUDE TO WORKPLACE BONGO CONSUMPTION. I really, really wish that this was official marketing by IKEA – after all, they are Swedish and therefore obviously have no problem with pr0n. I don’t think it is, sadly. Anyway, this is a blog collecting gifs from pr0n movies in which IKEA furniture features in the background. Is there a piece of furniture in the IKEA catalogue called ‘bongo’? There should be.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG:

  • Do You Ever Listen To Full Albums Any More?: A short piece on the NPR website posing the question as to whether anyone really sits down and listens to whole albums from start to finish any more. The comments, though, are where the meat is – interesting comments on how people listen to music nowadays, along with a host of recommendations of music which deserves to be listened to in a single sitting. 
  • In Defence of Small TalkFascinating look at what it is that small talk actually means, and why we as a species sort of need it, mentally and emotionally, and what it means in terms of commonality of terminology and therefore communication. It quotes Heidegger and everything, so it must be smart.
  • The Transformational Power of SpiceIf you’re into food, this is brilliant. An in-depth look at spicing and cuisine, and how proper spicing can have a transformative effect on flavour. Will make you want to go and have a really, really good dinner. 
  • The Final Days of ‘Macho Man’ Randy SavageThis one’s probably only worth reading if you know who Randy Savage is. If you do know (Hulk Hogan! Legion of Doom! Ultimate Warrior! RIC FLAIR!!!! (OH MY GOD I HAVE JUST FOUND HIS WEBSITE IT IS AMAZING CLICK ON THIS NOW), then this will be an awesome trip down memory lane. He had a very weird life, did Savage, and this is a rally interesting look at the oddity of the wrestling scene in the US at about the point when it started getting really big. 
  • The Oddly Poignant Story of 3d-Printed Sad KeanuThis is obviously really silly, but perhaps I’m feeling a bit hormonal or something as it made me feel a little bit *funny* (not in a sex way). 
  • How The Internet Is Using Us AllA piece from the London Review of Books looking at the central theses of the recent books by Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier. A nice, gentle introduction to a couple of texts which it really is worth reading if you have even a passing interest in internet culture (sorry, Evgeny – ‘internet’ culture. 
  • Behind The Lines With The EDLReally interesting blogpost by a woman who, attending an anti-EDL protest near Downing Street, found herself in conversation with an EDL member. She recorded the conversation and transcribed it – makes for fascinating reading, if obviously a little unsettling. 
  • Twi-FiSORRY! This is a great little short story about a Twitter bot. Read it. 
  • How Social Mobility Got StuckSo obviously I like and agree with this because I’m a pinko liberal leftie. Nonetheless, this is an interesting-if-obviously-partial look back at the growth in income inequality in the UK since the Thatcher years, and the quiet emergence of an underclass who, whilst not on the breadline, are increasingly economically incapable of engaging with society in a manner which might be described as fulfilling.
  • The Unexotic UnderclassIn what almost sort-of works as a segue, this piece looks at that very section of society (from a US perspective), and asks why it is that entrepreneurs seem unwilling or incapable of focusing their innovative efforts on solving problems which apply to anyone other than reasonably privileged people (clue: MONEY!). 
  • Spine-chilling Reddit Thread: Reddit users share anecdotes and reminiscences about the scariest things they have ever experienced. Don’t have nightmares (you might, though). 
The beautiful work of Alana Dee Haynes
 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) We kick off with some unusually high culture (don’t worry, we’ll get back to smut and oddities shortly). Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of the premiere performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, apparently – below is a gorgeous visualisation of the piece. Whack it in fullscreen an relaaaaaaaaaaax:

2) I have just learned that ‘rapper’ in French is spelled ‘rappeur’, which made me very happy. Anyway, this man is called ‘Flynt‘ – his latest single is called ‘Mon Pote’, and I have literally no idea whatsoever what it’s about. I hope it’s nice and not about murdering people or anything. The reason it’s featured is that the video’s a wonderful selection of classic film clips into which Mr Flynt has placed himself. Slickly done – see if you can name them all (and watch it now before the inevitable copyright police clampdown):

3) As part of my continuing commitment to bringing you ODD THINGS OFF THE INTERNET, I feel sort of compelled to include this; can I add, though, that I’m not 100% sure about this one, and it just strikes me as a little gratuitous and bottom-heavy, without the wit it needs to properly stand out. The first minute, though – WEIRD. Major Lazer – Bubblebutt:

4) As I’ve been writing this I’ve started to realise that there’s quite a lot of smut in here this week. Sorry about that. Continuing the theme, though, here’s a great little video – real lesbians watching lesbian pr0n. Totally SFW (everyone is fully clothed) though the audio isn’t, and very, very funny – you may be surprised to learn that what’s peddled as lesbian pr0n is *whispers* actually just made for men! I KNOW!!!:

5) I absolutely adore this. Lipsynching and choreography and just some great face acting, along with a lovely little pop song AND OH LOOK THE SUN’S OUT! This is Holy Roller, by Thao and the Get Down Stay Down:

6) Ricky Hil is a rapper, apparently. His slurry delivery on Sarah’s Song, combined with the lyrics, is very unsettling. Erm, enjoy!:

7) Back to the summery stuff now – Lou Marco is a French musician, this is apparently his debut single which is called Don’t Care, and the video for it is pure Saul Bass. Enjoy:

8) Whether Die Antwoord are/were a band, an art project or some sort of weird hybrid of the two, they’ve certainly been one of the more visually interesting projects of the past few years. This is collaboration between them and Gary Baseman called The Buckingham Warrior – to quote them: “The Buckingham Warrior [is] a tale inspired by Gary Baseman’s father Ben Baseman who survived the holocaust, fighting the Nazi invasion in Ukraine’s birch tree forests for almost 4 years. Baseman and Director David Charles transformed his father’s harsh reality into a whimsical story of survival and hope”. So there. Watch:

9) Last, and possibly least, we have this tourettic audio/animation combo by these people (the French are dominating this week). Enjoy, have fun, and have a LOVELY weekend. You especially:

That’s it for now


See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

Webcurios 24/05/13

Reading Time: 16 minutes

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Life Snails, Rye Lane, SE15
Garudio Studiage photo of the week

I had a whole thing worked out for this first bit, featuring a really romantic story that cannot fail to warm your heart, a couple of gags about the new XBox, the best reaction to classrooom criticism you’ll ever see, and the best wrong number text message conversation you will ever see

And then Wednesday happened, and I sort of lost the appetite for it somewhat. It would be funny to see idiots all over the internet blaming otherwise-blameless fabrics ‘muslins’ for everything were it not so incredibly depressing. 

Anyway, onwards with the stuff. Thank heavens for the bank holiday.
*looks outside*

Oh.

Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters
 


The Section Which For Some Of You Will Actually Be Of Some Small Professional Relevance But Which For Others Is Mogadon And Of Which There’s Quite A Lot This Week Sorry:

Twitter!:

  • Twitter Adds Lead GenerationWhat it’s technically done is add Lead Generation Cards, but you (and indeed I) don’t need to know that. This is a very significant innovation, in what has been a whole week of pretty big innovations from Twitter. This means that, in time when it’s rolled out to everyone, brands will be able to pay to have lead generation stuff attached to their tweets. Which means, in practice, that if you see a Tweet from, say, a restaurant talking about an exciting new menu item, if you click on the tweet it could give you the option to get access to a discount or free sample next time you visit. Which is, obviously, also giving said restaurant (potentially) your contact details (email, etc) and the tacit right to contact you about WHATEVER IT WANTS for perpetuity. The potential really is huge, though, and a very big thing indeed. The fundraising applications for charities in particular are huge, as they are for political parties (as pointed out by someone cleverer than me). Watch that space. Yes, that one there. 
  • Also Adds TV Ad TargetingThis is also HUGE, I tell you. They’ve also added the functionality (which is really clever and not a little spooky) to track what is being advertised on TV where and when, and serve content on Twitter to people tweeting about the programme within which the ad aired. So, to give a THRILLING EXAMPLE, imagine you are at home watching Jeremy Kyle in London; Twitter could know that London viewers were served an advert for the new Danny Dyer film; it could also know that you tweeted about the Jeremy Kyle show during the programme, thus meaning you were an ENGAGED AUDIENCE MEMBER who’d probably seen the ad; it could then serve you a tweet relating to said cinematic masterpiece. Which is amazing really, and if you combine it with the idea above leads to a situation where the Danny Dyer people could tweet discount coupons to users who had probably seen the ad for the film. Or, alternatively and if you’re more dystopian in your futuregazing, a future in which we get served horrifically intrusive contextual adverts based on ANYTHING we do or see. Ho hum.
  • Use Twitter to Record TV ShowsIn Brazil, at least. I can’t be bothered to explain the tech here – click the link, go on, if you care that much – but by syncing your Twitter account with your Sky account you can record shows by using the hashtag #Skyrec. The mechanic involves RTing content from the Sky feed, which makes it not only technically smart but also a nice, in-built promotion. 
  • 2-step verificationIt’s a security thing. Not that exciting, but if you run a branded account or if you’re concerned about EVIL people thieving your online identity then you should turn it on. Also, this should at last put an end to the ridiculous ‘oh, our account was hacked’ excuse from brands and sportspeople. No, it wasn’t hacked. You just said something you regretted, or tweeted from the wrong account. NO ONE HERE IS FOOLED. Hear that, Sky? DO YOU???
  • Charts For MusicYou can now see charts of what people are listening to through the Music service. Which is interesting from a media point of view – there’s surely a story in ‘within minutes the leaked Daft Punk album was the most-listened to music across Twitter’, etc. Or maybe it’s not, it’s quite hard to tell right now. 

Pinterest Adds More Stuff For Brands Too!: Tell you what, all this extra brand stuff on the internet really is going to make our day-to-day interactions with each other so much BETTER! This is a small-but-big addition to Pinterest which allows brands to attach more information to images they pin – so perhaps info about which particular shop an article of clothing is sold in, fore example. 

4sq Search Changes, Now More Like TripadvisorErm, what it says there. Effectively you can now search for stuff near you based on all sorts of parameters – food which it serves, price, how many of your friends have been there (or, perhaps more interestingly for those conducting illicit affairs, places where noone you know has ever checked in), etc. Let’s see if this helps make the service socially acceptable to the mainstream of humanity (it won’t). 

An Interview With David Karp The Tumblr ManSo that was a big thing this week. This interview’s from 2009, and is a nice look back. He seems like a nice man, for what it’s worth (nothing at all, fact fans). This is also worth reading – it provides an explanation as to why the deal happened, why it cost so much (CLUE: advertising to The Kids!), and why it might not actually work. Which neatly segues into this rather wonderful piece by The Onion on why branded content really is what we ALL want more of *feeds biscuit to machine*

Facebook (SADFACE)

  • Teens Hate FacebookThis did the rounds a lot this week, under a variety of headings which mostly took the angle that teenagers were deserting The Social Network in droves as they tired of the DRAMA surrounding their interactions on it, and the fact that too many of their older family members were now on it and harshing their buzz (I believe this is how The Kids talk). Actually bothering to read the bloody research, though, shows that teens aren’t actually leaving the site – they are just diversifying their presence across multiple networks. Oh, and the survey was of a MASSIVE and doubtless statistically significant 804 people. Oh (again), and does anyone really believe that all teenagers don’t have secret profiles with aliases which their family members know nothing about? 
  • Everyone Hates FacebookYear on year use in the UK is down 9%, say YouGov. My favourite part of this research is this, which I reproduce in full here: The number of UK internet users who have quit social media sites because of social media marketing promotions is up 28 per cent points from April last year
  • Brands Getting Flak For Ad PlacementHeaven forfend that I defend brands on here, but this really isn’t their fault. Hey ho. People have been getting upset about ads for reputable companies showing up on pages containing questionable content and suggesting that the brands should be ASHAMED for advertising on these pages. Which fundamentally misunderstands the way in which advertising online works. Well done, people.  
  • As a bonus, have some more stats about Facebook (and other platform) usage amongst teens here and here.

Google:

  • Creepy Sentient Computers Get CloserGoogle can now tell what things are in photos. No, seriously. IT CAN RECOGNISE CATS AND JEWELLERY AND STUFF WITHOUT BEING TOLD. I don’t think anyone is getting as scared / freaked out by this as they perhaps ought to be. OH HELLO NIGHTMARE DYSTOPIAN SURVEILLANCE FUTURE (NB – I am not actually a mad, paranoid conspiracy theorist, although I accept it might read like that sometimes). 
  • And CloserGoogle conversational search lets you talk to the search engine and ask it stuff (the same tech as used in Glass, I imagine). This examination of how it works is impressive, particularly its ability to contextualise questions and remember the sequence of queries and make inferences based on said sequence. 
  • Google Trends VisualisationA slightly pointless but hypnotic and compelling ever-shifting visualisation of the top search terms on Google where you are at any given time. This week it makes for slightly depressing reading, in the UK at least.
  • Google Knows EverythingThis is an internal parody by Microsoft, a company famed for being loving and caring and cuddly. As such it’s scaremongery, but not actually untrue.

OTHER THINGS IT’S NEARLY OVER I PROMISE:

  • A Nice, Simple Look at The Internet Of ThingsIf you’re not 100% sure what all that internet of things stuff is about, you could do worse than read this rather clear explanation. Useful.
  • What Amazon Might Do NextClue – sell lots and lots of information about our buying habits to third parties. Maybe.
  • How Stuff Spreads – Gangnam vs Harlem ShakeThis is by a new agency and as such is a piece of linkbait (which I have totally fallen for). In fairness there are some interesting observations there as to some of the qualities which can affect the manner in which a piece of content is shared or otherwise; it totally fails to mention the MASSIVE amounts of cash invested by record companies in promoting Psy’s global earworm, though. 
  • Why Your Fan Count Doesn’t MatterA decent presentation by Mat Morrison on what you should be looking at instead of fans on social media (really, we’re still having to talk about this?)
  • Bespoke BalladsBy Barclays. Can we all agree that we are bored of the ‘here’s a bespoke thing made JUST FOR YOU by a brand on social media’ thing, please? Please? I know there’s no such thing as a new idea, but it’s been 3 years now and I’m tired.
  • Coke Stunt #1So, so clever – giving teens the opportunity to help each other out by donating battery life to each other via th medium of a little Coke-branded dongle. This is excellent because THEY MADE A REALLY COOL THING. Learn, people.
  • Coke Stunt #2Again, clever – giving the opportunity for people in India and Pakistan to interact with each other thanks to Coke. Taps into the whole ‘teach the world to sing’ schtick which they’ve been doing since forever, as well as the happiness thing. And, if you leave aside the fact that it’s still just a stunt to shill sugarwater, another Basically Decent Thing to do. 
  • Day Off GeneratorThis is also very smart indeed; an app for an outdoorsy magazine which works to help fool people you work with into thinking you’re sick when instead you are doing OUTDOOR PURSUITS. What’s cleverest about it is the newsfeed takeover stuff which it does through Facebook (although it does make me question how many people actually go to the hospital with a cold). 
  • Anti-crack PSA Billboard ThingThe billboard gets eaten by insects to demonstrate the destructive effects of crack. Oh, bum, I totally ruined the surprise. Nontheless, take a look – the execution is very good indeed. 
Don’t ask
 

HAVE A HIPHOP MIX BY SADEAGLE TO SOUNDTRACK THIS NEXT BIT IF YOU LIKE

 

Other Things I Have Found Interesting This Week, Pt.1:

  • A List of Crowdfunding SitesA useful overview of places on the internet where you can persuade people to give you money so that you can make that model of Chewbacca out of cat hair like you always wanted.
  • Justice League FamiliesVery cute and pleasingly whimsical illustrations of superheroes with their kids. Nice illustrations for a child’s bedroom, perhaps. Just a suggestion.
  • The Perceptive RadioI really, really like this. Very clever project by Mudlark (who have made some really good stuff in the past) and the BBC, to create a radio which can take data about the environment around it (relating to location, say, and local weather) and then modify the content dependent on that data. In the test example, they created a radio play in which details changed depending on whether the listener was, say, somewhere where it was raining or not. This is kind of like the benign flipside of some of the Twitter/Google stuff up there – imagine the possibilities in terms of bespoke storytelling you might explore with this stuff. Plug in the internet of things idea and it becomes really, really interesting. Or maybe it just becomes horrible – maybe your fridge will tell your radio that it doesn’t have any Coke in it, and then the people on the Archers will start ostentatiously DRINKING Coke really loud to make you want it and then you will go out and buy some and OH GOD IT’S ALL GOING TO BE HORRIBLE ISN’T IT? *cries*
  • Make 360 Degree Videos On iPhones: What it says there <—–. Quite a cool looking little toy, although due to the endless reports about kids being ruined by exposure to pr0n on the radio this morning, I can only think of this in bongo terms. Thanks, radio!
  • Add Clippy To Your WebsiteRemember Clippy? He was fun, wasn’t he? Well now you can bring back the 90s EVEN MORE with this excellent little pointless webhack which allows you to add Clippy (or any of his helpful chums) to your website. I don’t think I can stress enough how much I want someone to combine this with the farting scroll hack from a few weeks ago in a massive, blaze-of-glory IT’S MY LAST DAY act of idiocy. Please?
  • 90s IslandSpeaking of 90s revivalism (SEAMLESS SEGUE KLAXON), this is a website promoting a (doubtless dreadful) novel all about the era. However bad the book looks (and I can’t stress enough that it looks really, really bad), the website’s a spot-on parody of bad early web design.
  • ReverseGif: Leaving aside the tedious non-issue of the pronunciation of the bloody word, this is a cute (and pointless) little tool which allows you to reverse the animation of any gif; amusing results, particularly when you take stuff of people eating.
  • A Great Collection of Behind-the-Scenes Film ShotsI’ve just realised how horrifically inconsistent my capitalisation is. Sorry about that. Anyway, some cast and crew shots from a whole load of films. The one of Joe Pesci and Macauley Culkin is weirdly chilling.
  • University of RedditSo apparently this has existed for a few years now. WHO KNEW? Perhaps my ignorance of it is due to the fact that I don’t move in the same glorious, rarefied circles as its graduates. Perhaps. There’s some really esoteric knowledge on here, in any case, if you fancy having a root around. I’ll let you know how I get on with Shamanism 101.
  • TaxheavenA nice website to accompany a petition against tax havens, made by Torchbox.
  • Odd Digital Art Project #1The Pirate Cinema takes frames from the most popular files being downloaded on torrent sites and streams a collage of them, formed out of the choices of entertainment being made by the faceless and unknowing mob. There’s an interview with the creator at the link; his observation about how much the project has taught him about the aesthetic similarities between pr0n and mainstream media is sort of chilling in a casual, throwaway fashion. 
  • Odd Digital Art Project #2A clever music remix-y website to accompany Haroon Mirza’s current installation at the Lisson. Move the images around to affect the composition, and upload your own in collaborative fashion.
  • The Pentagram BikiniKnow any female goths who like sunbathing? They might like this, then (NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility if in fact they really don’t like it at all). 
  • Typewriter RobotsJeremy Mayer makes robots out of old junk and they are really rather cool.
“Marilyn Monroe at Philippe Halsman’s Studio” (1959), by Philippe Halsman/Magnum
 

Other Things I Have Found Interesting This Week, Pt.2:

  • Dumbsto.reThis is really good. A mobile app development platform which allows you to code for non-smartphones. There’s not a whole lot there at the moment, but the potential is huge – there’ a weather app and a directions app, and if you start thinking about the potential to develop tools to enable people without internet access to take advantage of online information then it gets very exciting indeed. Charities working in the developing world should definitely take a look.
  • Nazi Hunter AlanI don’t know why this exists, but am quite glad it does. I don’t think Alan is real, but the music on his website is strangely soothing.
  • Time Magazine’s Top Websites of 2013Not quite sure as to the criteria by which they select these, but there are a few interesting ones, and it’s nice to see This Is My Jam getting a bit of big media love. 
  • Google Earth FacesThere’s a lot of interesting stuff being done around machine facial recognition at the moment; this project uses that tech to look at Google Maps and pull out faces from cityscapes, natural geography and the like, with pleasing results. 
  • CloudPartyRemember Second Life? IT WAS GOING TO BE HUGE (until all of a sudden it wasn’t). There are still a lot of people who use it, though, with their funny avatars and virtual marriages and real-life affairs and STUFF. Anyway, CloudParty seems to be like SL, except browser-based. I’m only mentioning it because they are running a $1000 virtual art prize, of which more details here, and frankly I reckon there will be about 3 entries so you’ve got a pretty decent chance of winning if you’re into that sort of thing.
  • I Love Your WorkMy favourite webarty thing of the week, this project has collected over 2,000 ten-second video clips recorded by adult film actresses over a 10-day period. The footage is available to watch, for a fee – each day ten ‘tickets’ are sold to access the video, for $10. No more. It’s not pr0n, although it might feature some; it’s a lot more interesting than that. Watch the trailer-type video on the website; it really is very good.
  • Visiting The Shot Locations of Album CoversNo more, no less. Lovely little project.
  • Nothing But A MovieA superb piece of storytelling merging comic art, animation and sound to excellent effect. In particular the audio is brillant. Takes 5 mins, do take a look.
  • More Interactive Storytelling: Another nice piece of digital work, showing how you can use video in slightly more creative ways online to improve interactivity, enrich content and just narrate a bit better. Sadly this example’s about the US healthcare system and not exactly scintillating, but it’s worth a couple of minutes’ play just to get the ideas behind it. 
  • A Deflatable Sex CubeSurely one of you will want to buy this, won’t you? SFW, just so you know. 

 

The Circus of Tumblrs:

  • Sexts From Marxists: Combining the dialectic with come-to-bed-eyes.
  • Mansplained MarxistA look at some of the sexist things said to one particular female academic. With Gifs.
  • Baguette Me NotsI don’t really understand what’s going on here, but there appear to be a reasonable number of moderately famous people (Matthew Broderick!) posing with bits of French bread. Whatever makes them happy, I guess.
  • Web2HellSome of the more egregious taglines of digital ‘businesses’ in the Web 2.0 era. 
  • Des Hommes Et Des ChatonsA Tumblr of attractive men and cats. Oh, and it’s French too. I’m sure there are some of you for whom this will probably be the best thing on here this week, so ENJOY. 
  • Eagles That Look Like Arsene WengerYes, really, there are LOTS of them. 

Games! Free Games! To PLAY!:

  • Cardboard Box Assembler: So obviously this sounds like the worst game ever, but let me reassure you that the amount of time you will spend actually assembling cardboard boxes is in fact very small, and instead you’ll play a very clever braintwisty 3d puzzler instead, which has elements of Fez
  • CanonA very small, very simple, very hard music/rhythm game. You will hate it, but it will compel you to play it. 
  • You Must EscapeAtmospheric and scary and based around echolocation and trying to find your way in the dark. Play with the lights out for extra effect (at nighttime. It won’t really work if the lights are off but it’s broad daylight, OBVIOUSLY).
Image by Denis Darzacq
 
 

LONG THINGS OF QUALITY AND DISTINCTION:

  • On Music Cloning and Spamming on iTunes and Beyond: A brilliant exploration of how people game the system on music sites and get you to listen to dreadful knock-off covers rather than the real thing. On which point, you really, really need to hear this example of someone scamming Macklemore’s Thrift Shop. Personally prefer it to the oiginal.
  • On Consent and Acceptable BehaviourVery smart piece in the Atlantic about the degree to which certain sexual behaviour should or shouldn’t be acceptable, even between consenting adults. Particularly pertinent in the UK in the light of all the Spanner Trust stuff. Obviously this is not about whether you’re into this stuff or not – it’s about whether people who are should ever be stopped from doing it.
  • Benji Lanyado’s Startup BlogBenji Lanyado is doing a startup, and blogging about it. Interesting even if you’re not in that sort of space; doubly so, I would imagine, if you are.
  • Prospect on FarageA really good profile of omnipresent grinning jackanapes Nigel Farage by novelist Edward Docx in Prospect. Makes me almost feel sorry for Nigel, almost, nearly. Certainly shines a spotlight on the unique horror that is being a professional politician. 
  • Street ChildrenNot a happy read, this one, but worth reading; a look into the plight of street kids worldwide. The pictures will make you sad, in particular.
  • On Cats and Japan and the InternetAn incredibly in-depth look at the internet’s obsession with cats, and the peculiar manner in which in Japan they appear to be used as a mask behind which their owners can hide. It certainly does seem that many of the owners of YouTube’s most famous felines are little more than life support systems for their more famous pets. 
  • Looking Back at BiggieI was never that into hiphop when Biggie was…er…big, and even now I’m not a huge fan, but this piece is an awesome slice of oral history, piecing together quotes from those close to him across his career to paint a very vivid picture of a talented artist and the odd soap opera that surrounded him and his death.
  • The Best Thing About Poker You Will Ever Read: Speaking of oral histories…this one pieces together the tales of the main players in 2003’s World Series of Poker, widely credited as the event which took the game to the masses like never before. It’s a truly incredible tale, featuring as it does the story of an unknown amateur who went from having $39 to his name to winning $2.5million. You don’t even have to understand poker (although it will help) to enjoy it. Get a cup of tea, this is filmic.
  • The Women Who Painted PinupsA fascinating look back at the life stories of the women who invented the American pin-up as we remember it. Also, loads of great illustrations. 
  • Visiting A Competitive Scrabble TournamentIf you liked Spellbound, you’ll love this. The weird, weird world of the people who are PROPERLY good at Scrabble. Contains far more allegations of cheating than I would have expected.
  • Why The New Star Trek Film Is CrapAn exhaustive and completely spoiler-ish examination of every single thing (and there are LOTS) that is wrong with the new Star Trek film.  
  • American Assassinations For DummiesMark Ames is one of my favourite journalists, and this is some sterling reporting for NSFWCorp. Particularly pertinent given the recent debates in the US about drone use, this is a slightly scary investigation into the fact that the CIA has been assassinating people around the world for years. Proper journalism, done well.
  • Playing In A Band Noone LikesFinally, the poignant story of a man deciding to call his band quite because noone liked them. They weren’t dreadful, apparently, just unlovable. An interesting look at when perseverance in the face of adversity just isn’t viable any more; sometimes, giving up is the only option. POSITIVITY! Anyway, you can hear them here.
 
 
 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, 60 seconds of animated brilliance in the form of the aptly-named Aliens In 60 Seconds which is…er…the film, Aliens, condensed into a 60-second animation. Cute, and makes me want to play it as a videogame:

2) Bit more of a sombre tone for the next one, which is a remarkable video made using 600+pinhole cameras and a lot of painstaking effort. This is London Grammar with ‘Wasting My Young Years’:

3) This is a gorgeous animation about a sad-eyed robot escaping a factory. It is called Obsolete:

4) If you have ever been a little boy, this video will make you regress hugely. This is basically what you wanted car chases with your toys to be like, and they NEVER WEAR and so childhood was always fundamentally disappointing. No matter – this is awesome, you should watch it:

5) I don’t know who’s responsible for this or what it’s about other than that it features a lot of melted icecream and that it unsettled me to an extent that I now want to inflict that on you too:

6) Hiphop slot this week is here more to illustrate quality than because I think the song is anything special. The track’s by a guy called Lyrican, and it’s a bit generic-UK-scene overall, but the guest verses from Web Curios favourite Harry Shotta really are impressive:

7) I haven’t featured anything by High 5 Collective for a while now, but they are still churning out brilliant, filmic videos for other artists’ songs. Am slightly amazed that they’ve not been picked up to make something a bit bigger. In any case, this is their short film (music video seems a bit reductive) for Tokimonsta’s song ‘Go With It’:

8) Ai Wei Wei is, it would appear, not only a legendary visual artist and political campaigner but also a musician. This is the obviously hugely allegorical and political video for his new song ‘Dumbass’ – I’m not sure I quite ‘get’ Chinese rock music, but I applaud the man’s creativity:

9) Finally, we have out-and-proud gay rapper Nicky da B, with his video for the song ‘Go Loko’. It’s…well…it’s certainly memorable, and I don’t think I’m likely to have cause to write the phrase ‘bum kaleidoscope’ again any time soon. WATCH:

 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 17/05/13

Reading Time: 18 minutes

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Laces Buy One Get One Free. Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, SE1
Garudio Studiage, photo of the week

It was pointed out to me this week that, were you to click on every single link in this thing as well as reading my overblown prose, the whole thing would take you about 7 hours to get through. Look, what can I say? I’m SORRY. It’s just that there’s a lot of stuff out there and I WANT TO SHOW YOU ALL OF IT. Just bear in mind that no one reads everything (except me) – really, no one, not even my mum. You’re under no obligation. Although obviously it’s ALL GOLD.

 
Anyway, as is now tradition let’s take a look back over the past week in RECORD TIME. We learnt that academia’s finally starting to take bongo seriously, that the definition of what is considered art is getting broader by the second, that the law really isn’t totally equipped for some of the ‘creative’ uses people are going to start making of new technologies, that it’s truly remarkable exactly how dreadful people can be when given the opportunity, particularly when they are reacting to NEWS on the internet, that sometimes it’s quite sad what happens to people in the aftermath of the internet turning its spotlight onto them, that we are probably more prejudiced by nature than we might like to think, and that people really are afraid of love.

There was probably more, but I need to go to Brighton this afternoon so don’t really have time for much more of this. With little further ado, then, let us undertake our very own FANTASTIC VOYAGE amongst the viscera of everything good (and, frankly, mediocre) that the web has had to offer this week. ONWARDS!


Quite A Lot Of Stuff About The Internet And Social Media, For Which I Can Only Apologise And Promise That There Is Better To Come Below, Honest, Really There Is, Trust Me, Don’t Walk Away, COME BACK: 

Googlestuffs:

  •  – So there were a load of announcements made about Google products and services at I/O this week. They are all interesting and worth knowing about, though as yet they probably don’t affect you too much (whether or not you work in advermarketingpr). You can read about some of the highlights here, or if you’re so inclined you can get a slightly more comprehensive rundown here, and you can read a reasonably decent bit of speculation about what it all MEANS here. In the unlikely event tht any of you give a flying one about my opinion, I think that this is all continuing the work Google’s been doing for the past few years since the advent of G+ – that is, building out its product suite so as to create an online ecosystem that means it’s increasingly hard not to be plugged in to their data gathering network. On the one hand, this has huge potential benefits – after all, Google’s ability to intimately know what you want, when you want it, and to be able to serve you stuff based on its gargantuan database of information about your travel/shopping/music/work/etc habits could be incredibly useful; on the other hand, Skynet. Hey ho. Oh, and the stuff about creating composite photos automatically is INCREDIBLY scary and weird and raises all sorts of questions about what we can and should consider ‘real’, if you care to consider them. 
  •  – YouTube Is Now A ShopNo one seems to have thought this as significant as I do; maybe I’m an idiot. Who knows? Nonetheless, this strikes me as very significant. Brands on YouTube can now sell products through their YouTube channels (I’m as yet uncertain as to how it will work with embedded videos), through retail partners or through their own sales channels. Now the initial example is haircare brand Tresemme (I know it’s meant to have an accent on the end, but I’m completely flummoxed as to how one types those), which is maybe why no one appears to have given it much thought, but this is very big news. If you were Nike or Adidas, surely you’d want to give people the opportunity to buy Messi’s/LeBron’s footwear as they watch a highlights reel of your brand’s athletes? Oh I don’t know. Anyway, basically in the future everything will be a shop. GREAT!
  •  – YouTube – New Channel DesignFile under dull-but-practical – this is a useful primer on how to configure the new designs for YouTube channels.
  •  – Why Are YouTube Videos So Terrible?: An interesting thinkpiece which discusses whether only a subscription model will save us from the neverending parade of truly dreadful YouTube content (the answer, by the way, is ‘no’ – I think that the depressing truth is that we live in a world in which people will watch literally anything if given the opportunity and the apparently-inexplicable popularity of the thousands of poorly made ‘comedy’ videos and the rest is simply a result of this. This is a society in which shopping channels actually exist and make money, for God’s sake – are we really surprised?).
  •  – Obligatory Google Glass-gasm: After last week’s brief respite, the hype is BACK. A few weeks ago I mentioned the possibility of a terrifying future in which face recognition tech was embedded into wearable computing – OH LOOK HERE IS THAT TERRIFYING FUTURE. I also said something about how incredible Evernote could be when integrated with Glass – OH LOOK AT MY NOSTRADAMUS-LIKE PREDICTIVE ABILITY (although in actuality the Evernote thing’s quite rudimentary as it stands). Anyway, this week we also got a users-eye video of what using Glass currently looks like, a video showing what people think it will look like in a few iterations’ time when they’ve added some bells and whistles (anyone else slightly scared by the constant focus in this video on how much money you have? This would give me the PROPER FEAR)…oh, and we got confirmation that the skinflick industry’s looking to get its mitts on a pair to make intimate, close-up bongo. Oh, technology!

Facebook Stuffs:

  •  – Facebook Is Now (even more of) A ShopSee It Shop It is a Facebook thing which allows brands to sell directly from within the newsfeed. They’re trialling it with Littlewoods. Really? Was no one else interested? Seems odd. Anyway, I think that this is all very prototype-y at the moment but it will be interesting to see if it catches on.
  •  – Facebook SectionsThis is a bit techy, but worth knowing about. Facebook Sections allows Facebook apps to integrate better / deeper with a user’s timeline – giving people the opportunity to further customise their timeline with dedicated sections for things they like / care about, which in turn allows Facebook to do more with the data which people give it through apps. Oh, God, that’s a really horrid description – go and read this for a proper journalist’s slightly less ham-fisted take
  • Vanity Fair on FacebookA long but interesting look from a recent VF at Facebook, it’s culture and its ambitions. Not revelatory, but a decent read if you’re so inclined. 

A Little Bit of Twitter:

  •  – Peanuts Estate Hires Vine ArtistAn interesting step by the estate of Charles Schulz, who have picked a kid who’s made really good Vine shorts to make Peanuts-themed work for them. I think this is a really positive thing, and a nice change from brands expecting punters to make content for them for free, or for the chance to win an underwhelming BRANDED EXPERIENCE. If someone’s good, pay them for their work – can we make this a trend, please, content people? Thanks.
  •  – Speaking Of Vine, Here Are Some Good OnesSome of these are really impressive. PROTIP: stop-motion really, really works on Vine. 

Other Things Gathered Together In A Slightly Flabby Final Section:

  •  – Social Media Is Bullshit (Again)This is a post by author of ‘Social Media is Bullsh*t’ BJ Mendelson which takes a short, smart look at why the concept of ‘going viral’ (as often understood by clients) is utter rubbish. Read it (and then go and hire a bunch of Indian workers for 21st Century sweatshop work!). 
  •  – Some Quite Good Examples of Decent WorkThere’s some dreadful trendwatching language in this blogpost, but there are also some very clever examples of decent online advermarketingpr work on there, which I personally hadn’t seen before. Take a look, if that’s your thing. 
  •  – BuyCott AppI am glad that this exists. This app allows shoppers to scan items and learn about the ethics of their making process, which parent company eventually owns them, etc. Incredibly good idea, particularly in this age of brands, sub-brands, etc, and something I would like to see developed further and made international. So someone do it, please. 
  •  – Domino’s LIVEDomino’s has taken the final, inevitable step in the post-bogeygate world, giving customers the opportunity to watch their pizzas being made LIVE (well, not their pizzas specifically, but you get the point). Which is all well and good and stuff, and an admirable commitment to TRANSPARENCY and all that, but does rather make me feel for the poor staff who are effectively now under potential constant on-the-job surveillance. Do we realise that what Domino’s are effectively doing with this service is outsourcing – for free, might I add – their production line monitoring to us, the customer? Do we even care? Oh. 
  •  – Coke Mother’s Day ThingAnother week, another bit of impressive marketing from Coke. This is one of the now-hackneyed ‘hey, interact with us on Twitter and we will make you a personalised thing, just for you!’ wossnames (pace Old Spice et al) – nicely done, though. Oh, and this one from Coke in Denmark is absolutely inspired, even if not digital. Bloody Coke *waves fist*. 
  •  – Jaguar Made A Short FilmIt’s 10 minutes long, and must have cost SO MUCH MONEY. I don’t imagine Damien Lewis comes cheap in this post-Homeland world. Can anyone seriously explain to me what the point of this is, really? The only reason I’m linking to it is because I am a little bit in love with Shannyn Sossamon who is LOVELY. 
  •  – Puma Dance DictionaryNicely made website, allowing people to stitch together short messages conveyed via the medium of DANCE which they can then send to friends/people they want to sleep with (judging by the tenor of the possible messages you can send). Loses points for the relatively limited number of potential options, and the fact that you can’t seem to turn off the bloody music. 
  •  – The Abercrombie Thing: So you may have Abercrombie getting all sorts of (well-deserved) flak, particularly on its Facebook page, for comments made by its (notoriously unpleasant – seriously, I know someone who worked for them in the US at head office and OH MY DAYS THE STORIES) CEO. He’s since issued a pseudo-retraction which no one in their right mind would give any credence to – not that I think it will really hurt the brand that much at all. Anyway, a video did the rounds this week of a guy giving Abercrombie clothes to homeless people as a CLEVER PIECE OF ANTI-BRAND SATIRE. It made me very uncomfortable, and remarkably the best explanation as to why comes from this rather odd Christian website. Have a read.
Untitled by Jesus Leguizamo
 


SOUNDTRACK THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AND INDEED THIS BLOG WITH AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT 5-HOUR MEGAMIX OF 90s HOUSE & GARAGE!

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 1:

  • Algoraving: Apparently this is a thing. Procedurally-generated music in clubs, creating some sort of weirdly unreplicable organic dance experience MAN. Obviously HUGELY Nathan Barley, but also quite interesting from a mathematical / programming point of view. If this sort of thing interests you, you might like to have a bit of a play with this Turing Music Generator, which is sort of the same thing on a smaller scale. I have yet to create anything that doesn’t sound like depressed robots as imagined in 1976 having deeply sad revenge sex, but you may do better. 
  • Yoko Ono, DesignerThis is incredible. Yoko Ono is a famous polymath, but I had no idea her unquestionable talents stretched to clothes design. CHECK OUT THE HAND TROUSERS! I fully expect to see someone in Clapton wearing these over the Summer.
  • Reclaim Your Digital LifeThis is an interesting idea, but only really that at the moment. The premise is that the site collects everything you post/share across all your online profiles in one place, with a view to one day creating saved, downloadable copies of everything. Obviously almost certainly massively illegal, but I think there’s a big thing here in terms of the creation of personal archives – I know most of what we throw into the gaping maw of the internet is ephemeral and deserves to be forgotten, but I for one (narcissist that I inevitably am) would quite like to be able to go back through all my internet blatherings over the years. Maybe that’s just me though. 
  • StrongBoxI think that this is hugely important. Strongbox has been launched by the New Yorker to offer whistleblowers and others a near-untraceable way of passing on information or stories. Every single news outlet in the world should have a similar system. 
  • The Reddit MapReddit is BIG. I mean really, really big. This is an attempt to map it in some sort of way, looking a connections between the individual sub-Reddits based on cross-postings, links, etc. Interesting not only as a visualisation of an information network, but also as a navigation portal to some of the odder, murkier sections of the site. CAUTION: there are some subReddits you really, really don’t want to click on (at work or indeed anywhere else). Just saying.
  • Arne Svenson is a VoyeurAnd also a photographer. This photoseries consists of pictures taken from the window of his apartment into the apartments of his neighbours. His neighbours, it would appear, are less than happy about the fact that he has been doing this and that these pictures are now being sold / exhibited.  
  • The Human Readable Type FontThis is an interesting idea. In a move to attempt to baffle Google and other spider/crawler-type programmes, this typeface is meant to work so as to be readable to humans but utterly confusing to machines; meaning anything written in this, in theory, can never be picked up by search and the rest. Nice idea in theory, but I’m not wholly convinced that it nails the ‘readable by actual people’ part of the equation.
  • The Ultimate Masochist’s GlovesTake a look at the close-up picture of the inside of these and try not to wince. 
  • Created Equal PhotosA photo series by Mark Laita which looks at the gulf between individuals in the US through the medium of diptych photographs. There are some truly gorgeous portraits in here – take the time to have a look, it really is worth it. 
  • PetswitchYou’ve probably seen this already, but in case not…you can now superimpose your features onto those of an animal. You may enjoy it, you may not. It’s not my problem. 
London Diorama Map by Sohei Nishino
 

Things of Potential Interest Which You Are By No Means Obliged To Click On, Pt. 2:

  • Abandoned GeographyA website collecting photography of abandoned places. There are some lovely photos, and the whole site is oddly peaceful. Makes me want to go walking in one direction and not stop for about 2 months (not in any sort of suicidal way, though). 
  • Post-Punk New Wave Super FriendsA series of posters depicting stars of early-80s music (Morrissey, Jon Lydon, etc) as superheroes. These are pretty cool, and also available as tshirts if that is your THING. I would love to see what Morrissey thinks of these (probably not a fat lot, to be honest). 
  • Teenage Diaries RevisitedSo this is a bit like our very own Up series of documentaries (but different); NPR in 1996 gave US teenagerstape recorders on which to record audio diaries. This year, they went back and did the same to see where they were in their 30s. Not a new idea, but there are some brilliant (and sad) tales in here – also I think that the audio-only aspect gives a greater degree of authenticity than on-camera interviewing, though that may just be me. 
  • Being A Food Stylist On HannibalThe truly fascinating blog of the person who does all the food for the US TV series ‘Hannibal’ (no idea if it’s any good). I am quite into food so possibly slightly overindex on how interesting this is, but I had no idea about the insane levels of detail and preparation that go into this stuff. The bit about the grapes is mind-bogglingly obsessional, for a start.
  • A History of Public Transit in San FranciscoNo, wait, come back! This is a lot more interesting than it has any right to be – the city’s past, as told through the tram, bus and BART network, and all delivered through a really slick web interface. As much about the design as anything else, this is an object lesson in making something ostensibly dry really quite sticky and stimulating (the end of that sentence, I’ve just realised, has ended up sounding oddly sexual. Sorry).
  • The Geography of HateA clever-but-sad project, mapping the use of hate speech on Twitter across the US. Obviously this is a bit of a blunt-instrument study, and you can only draw so many conclusions, but it’s a bit sobering. Also shows quite how much of America really doesn’t use Twitter at all (I refuse to believe that the blank spots on the map are there because noone’s saying anything unpleasant, nice as it would be to think so). I laughed darkly looking at Idaho, given what day it is today (see opening para). 
  • Live Map of Wikipedia EditsThis is oddly compelling. Does what is says in the description, by offering real-time(ish) geolocated indications of which pages on Wikipedia are being edited, and where from. What’s most interesting is seeing the slightly obsessional behaviour going on here – I now know, for example, that someone in Lytham St Anne’s woke up this morning with no greater desire than to spend their early waking moments making alterations to Cliff Richard’s Wikipedia entry. People are ODD.
  • Pop Culture MathsSlight-but-cute illustrations of superheroes and the like, in equation format. 
  • A Brain Made From A ForeskinWell, sort of. Ish. This hands-down takes the prize for oddest art/science project of the week, in any case. It’s quite hard to describe, so I’m going to defer to the artists’ description: this is “a speculative techno-scientific experiment that uses a stem cell reprogramming technique called induced pluripotent stem cell technology (iPS) to reverse engineer foreskin cells purchased from an online catalogue into embryonic (like) stem cells, which Ben-Ary and Hudson then transform into neurons”. So, er, there you have it. Feel free to make your own phallus-cranium jokes. As an aside, of all the things about this project that are marginally disturbing, the fact that you can purchase human foreskin cells online is probably the most WTF-ish. WHERE ARE THEY FROM??? Are mohels all over the world engaged in black market foreskin trades? WE MUST KNOW.
  • FreakstarterA collection of some of the oddest Kickstarter projects currently live on the site, and a wonderful testament to human ingenuity and, quite often, idiocy. Text-based strip poker? Really?
  • The Running Gags of Arrested DevelopmentThere is a lot of hype (on my bit of the internet, at least) about Arrested Development’s imminent Netflix return. The marketing around it has been excellent, although this site doesn’t look official. In any case, it’s a rather nice visualisation of the series’ running gas, which are legion. If you don’t know the series, it really is worth watching (promise). You can probably find it on certain websites, should you not desire paying for DVD boxsets (NOT THAT WEB CURIOS IN ANY WAY ADVOCATES PIRACY). As a bonus, have this rather nice Tobias Funke microsite which showcases everyone’s favourite nevernude’s acting chops. Oh, and here’s something on the whole cult around the series.
Exhibitionists at Exhibitions, by Jerry Pigeon
 

The Circus Of Tumblrs (I may have been a little premature in declaring the whole thing ‘over’ last week…):

  • 9 Film Frames: Films boiled down to 9 frames. Interesting exercise in boiling something down to its most minimal state whilst maintaining a degree of narrative integrity (or, er, something).
  • Merchandising Is ForeverA Tumblr featuring animated gifs of old Star Wars merchandising. Hypnotic in a way that I don’t wholly understand. 
  • GoldblumingsJeff Goldblum’s face, superimposed onto flowers, for reasons which at present escape me. 
  • I Don’t Want Your Fucking AppShaming those websites which continually push you to download their app which, almost inevitably, is unnecessary and unhelpful and would be used a grand total of three times. CAN WE STOP WITH APPS, PLEASE? 99% of the time they really aren’t needed. Just design responsive websites. Go on, you can do it. 
  • Anime BackgroundsAs you might expect, background illustrations from anime. Someone might find this of use, maybe.
  • Your Logo Is Not HardcoreA blog collecting the thousands (apparently) of logos appropriating the traditional hardcore design of the crossed-lines ‘x’. There is a LOT of commonality in design, it turns out.
  • Women of Google GlassSee! It’s not just men!
  • Obscure Videogames: A collection of gifs and reminiscences about obscure(ish) games of yesteryear.
  • Private EyeThe Eye des Tumblr. Early days, and at the moment it’s basically just replicating magazine content in bite-size form, but there is so much they could do with this…
  • Public ShamingAs linked to up *there*, this collects instances of people’s awfulness on Twitter around the issues of the day. US-centric, and guaranteed to make you feel really grubby and sad about the future of humanity if you spend too long on it. Enjoy!
  • A Whole Massive List of Arty Tumblrs (& Blogs) To Waste Time On

 

Games!:

  • MondrianismA very clever little puzzle game, based around the artistic style of Piet Mondrianwhich is not only fun but, when you get it right, plays beautiful music. 
  • Breakfast On A Wagon With Your PartnerAnother week, another lovely piece of interactive fiction. This is a post-apocalyptic tale which you can take in any one of a number of directions. I don’t know whether it’s something to do with the medium or whether it’s simply a function of where I find this stuff, but much of the more interesting work in this medium seems to play with ideas of gender and sexuality (as does this, on a certain level). Anyway, it’s rather good. Have a play.
  • Racer for ChromePart game, part tech demo, this is really, really clever. Play this excellent little racing game (with a cracking Giorgio Moroder soundtrack to boot) across mobile devices – up to five can be placed side by side to create massive tracks which several players can play on together. Really impressive tech, aside from anything else. 
  • Emulator Heaven: It’s Friday, you can afford to slack off. This site contains links to a huge number of emulators which will allow you to play retro games in your browser. Command & Conquer’s there, which for some of you will be enough to ruin / enhance your weekend (delete as applicable).
Abbas Momani / AFP – Getty Images
 

LONG STUFF WHICH IS LONG:

  • The Immortality Dreams of a Russian BillionaireIf you were mind-twistingly rich, wouldn’t you want to work towards a future in which you could exist forever? This piece about Dmitry Iskov and his frankly MENTAL 2045 initiative is fascinating and unsettling in almost equal measure. Proof positive, too, that sci-fi has so much more influence on the development of future technologies than we tend to give it credit for.
  • The Making of Chicago Restaurant ‘Grace’An excellent piece of journalism about a man’s obsessive drive to open a really, really good restaurant. Inspirational in a non-cloying sort of way. 
  • What Motherhood Does to BodiesA piece written for Mothers’ Day in the US, in which the author thanks her mother for putting her body through childbirth. Basically this is a fairly comprehensive look at all the *ahem* slightly  hardcore things which pregnancy and childbirth do to the human body. WARNING: if you are pregnant (or squeamish) I probably wouldn’t advise reading this.
  • 50 Shades of Grey As An Allegory for Late-Stage CapitalismA clever-if-not-100%-serious analysis of that bloody book as a cipher for aspirational culture and class differentiation in the Western world in 2013. 
  • The Modern History of SwearingA brilliant piece taking a look at the etymology of some of our favourite BAD WORDS, and introducing you to a whole host of others that you might not have been aware of. You will probably never talk about people ‘larking around’ again. (AN ASIDE: the best etymology of profanity stuff I’ve ever read came in Nic Kelman’s novel ‘Girls’ (not necessarily an easy or pleasant read at times, but an excellent book), in which I learnt that the word ‘cock’ was, in medieval times when the deity could not be invoked except euphemistically, once a synonym for ‘God’. Which tells you all you need to know about men, really). 
  • The Young Man’s Guide to Shopping For & Wearing Girls’ Clothes for the First TimeThe always-superb McSweeney’s has been running this column by male-to-female transsexual Casey Plett for a while now. This edition, about having to buy female clothes for the first time, is funny and poignant and thought-provoking and a bit sad and hopeful and and and and. Read it.
  • How Saudi Arabia Is Monitoring TwitterCome on, let’s not kid ourselves that it’s just those lovable guys in Saudi. 
  • What People Mean When They Wear OnesiesA nice piece of writing about what the rise of the onesie tells us about how people in their 20s are feeling about stuff (CLUE: Not fantastic, it turns out). 
  • Pitchfork on Daft Punk: I think we can agree that the marketing for the Daft Punk album has been absolutely stellar (and very, very expensive). This piece on Pitchfork is an excellent look at the band, the release, and Bangalter & De Homem Christo’s place in the popular culture pantheon (though personally I think that the real star of the piece is the page design, which is BRILLIANT). As a bonus, have this piece on why the album’s release is an excellent example of how the internet has ruined music criticism (amongst other things).
  • The Town of Lottery WinnersIn 2011, one small town in Spain one big on the national El Gordo lottery. This is an excellent piece of writing as to how it all worked out for them in the immediate aftermath.
  • Sisa – Crisis CocaineFinally, a great piece of reporting by VICE on Sisa, a cheap stimulant which is doing bad things to Greece. I would love to see a wider piece of research about changing drug use in recessionary times across Europe – someone make that happen, please. 
 

NOW, FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, a documentary. ‘Jela’ is the story of an East London resident, former drug addict and football hooligan. Slow, quiet, contemplative and sad – a brilliant portrait of the changing-and-yet-not face of the East End:

2) I hadn’t heard of Josef Salvat until about 5 minutes ago, This is his song, ‘Hustler’ – the video’s not that exciting, but the song gave me proper goosebumps and so I recommend it unreservedly (I make no allowances, as ever, for personal taste). Hell of a voice:

3) I featured Team Spirit last week as well, but make no apologies for including them here too. After the Jesus-themed clip to accompany ‘Jesus, He’s Alright’, this time they head in the opposite direction to take on Satan in ‘MRDR It’s OK’:

4) No real clue what this is about or for, but it’s a brilliantly hypnotic piece of animation from Canada called ‘The Clockmakers’:

5) I have a bit of an obsession with eyes, which oscillates between fascination and bodyhorror disgust (basically the Dario Argento film ‘Opera’ is the scariest thing I can imagine, ever). This isn’t scary at all, you will be pleased to hear – it’s simply brilliantly inventive. This is ‘To The River’ by James Wallace and the Naked Light:

6) Obligatory slightly hipsterish hiphop of the week comes from Prolyphic and Buddy Peace with their single ‘Go Green’, which is not only excellent but also features a rather cool puppet:

7) There were two videos by Young Galaxy that I had on the list this week (the one that didn’t make the cut was this one, for Blown Minded, which features beautiful glass-painted animation) – the one I went for in the end was for their song ‘Fall For You’, which song reminds me slightly unpleasantly of the execrable ‘Sunchyme’ by Dario G but has a BRILLIANT animated video:

8) Have you ever speculated as to what websites would look like if they weren’t in fact websites but were instead children’s toys of the 1980s and 1990s? Oh good, it’s not just me then. This is a brilliant concept, superbly executed – it even feels like advertising aimed at kids from the early 90s. Basically designed to appeal to anyone a little bit webmongy in their early 30s (so basically me, then), and it also reminds me of ‘We Want Your Soul’ by Adam Freedland, though I’m not totally sure why. This is Neosignal with ‘Planet Online’:

9) I can’t work out whether this is inspired or awful Lou Bega-type rubbish, which probably means it’s dreadful and I have no taste. In any case, though, it’s insanely catchy and I could imagine it getting HUGE amounts of radio play. This is Menage Quad with’Listen To The Music’:

9) Last but not least, have some fully naked people dancing! Come on, it’s Friday, why not join in at work? This is Asaf Avidan with ‘Love It Or Leave It’:

 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 10/05/13

Reading Time: 16 minutes

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Eye Nose. Rye Lane, London SE15
Garudio Studiage photo of the week

HELLO! I know we always say this, but it really has been an odd week. Between the collective media furore over a septuagenarian’s retirement, the sad death of the king of the skellingtons, a very odd thing happening in the world of hiphop, the internet elevating an unlikely hero to cult status (whether for good or ill), the startling revelation that maybe the whole otherkin thing has been made up by bored teenagers, the best Google doodle yet, and the unveiling of almost certainly the oddest (worst?) centenary mascot ever devised, there’s been a lot going on. 

I was being best man at a wedding last weekend, which meant that I had scarcely ANY TIME to read the internet. So if you’ve seen everything that follows already, tough luck. I’m only bloody human, you know. STOP PICKING ON ME. In any case, let me take you by the hand and lead you through the websites of the internet; I will show you something that will make you…er…question the wisdom of clicking any of these links, quite possibly. ONWARDS! 

 

Part of a series by Roberto Casinelli
 

Things About The Internet and Social Media (ugh) and STUFF (but thankfully not too much this week so don’t worry it will be over soon):

Google (well, YouTube& G+ – you’re spared the Glassgasming this week. Enjoy the respite while you can):

  • The YouTube Paywall Is ComingIn this week’s edition of ‘Google turns YouTube into a broadcaster…’, we have the news that they are rolling out subscription channels for ‘qualifying partners’ – so now you get the opportunity to pay CASHMONEY for stuff that you have (to-date) been watching for free. Except without the annoying pre-roll ads, which is at least something. It seems churlish to complain – I have no problem paying for stuff if it’s good – but it will be interesting to see exactly what additional bonuses these subscribers will get; after all, there’s only so much EXCLUSIVE EXTRA CONTENT anyone really needs. Here’s a list of the initial channels participating –  LET THE MARKET DECIDE!
  • The YouTube Trends MapLaunched this week, this gives a fascinating overview of who is watching what, where, on YouTube in the US. There are, it is whispered, tentative rumours that this is going to be rolled out to other territories, but at the moment it’s just a really interesting look at viewing habits on YT (and by extension the frightening homogeneity of consumption – despite the near-infinity of stuff out there, it seems EVERYONE wants to look at topless vampires in True Blood trailers). Obviously there are all sorts of potential insights that can be drawn from this from an advertisers/marketers point of view, so from that perspective it behooves all of us to try and mess with the data and watch at least 3 Bieber videos a day just to screw the data.
  • Google+ Hangouts Now A Bit BetterJust a little change, but a significant one – Google+ Hangouts can now be paused whilst streaming in realtime, rewound, etc – making the whole live broadcast aspect of it marginally more useful / appealing.
     

KloutStuff (I KNOW! Whodathunkit? I still think it’s bunkum, mind)

  • American Airlines Give Perks To Klouty PeopleAmerican Airlines is giving people with a high Klout score access to its First Class lounge (for one day, at least). It’s not a stupid idea by any stretch of the imagination, but couldn’t they have chosen another selection criteria? Something like, I don’t know, people who waited in line for checkin with an unusual degree of good grace, or perhaps people who just look like they need cheering up a bit? I don’t know, I just don’t like the idea of rewarding the sort of self-obsessed digitards who bother with stuff like Klout any sort of reward whatsoever. Maybe I’m just bitter, though, because I probably wouldn’t qualify.
  • And Now Klout Scores Affect SearchWell, sort-of. Admittedly it’s only Bing, but it’s still a significant step for the company – effectively prioritising content from ‘experts’ in certain fields in search results. There’s a proper explanation in the link, and it’s worth a quick read, but does anyone REALLY think this is a good idea? It’s not like this is doing anything other than narrowing search even further, and the sort of people who are likely to participate through Klout are likely to be *ahem* of a certain type. Basically ask yourself ‘Would Google do something like this?’ and then realise that it’s maybe a bit of a rubbish development.
    How To Be Good At The Internet, According To The US’ National Security AgencyThis document is called ‘Untangling the Web’, it was produced by the NSA which is basically the US’ information-gathering service around foreign policy issues as well as being responsible for cryptography around US communications. So basically they’re Spooks. This is their guide to search, etc, originally written (as far as I can tell) in 2007ish, but still very interesting and more useful than you’d think. Worth having a skim through – you will learn stuff and get better at Google, if nothing else. Oh, and it’s really good for working out how to search for spreadsheets full of passwords in the oh-so-unlikely event that you might ever think of a reason why that could be useful *ahem*.

Buzzfeed Starts Agency Accreditation Programme: ‘9 Ways You Can Use Funny Cat Videos to Shill More Crap!’. Buzzfeed are taking a cue from Google, Facebook et al and beginning to work directly with ad agencies to school them in the ways of making stuff that loads of people really like on the internet. Interestingly, all this education comes for ‘free’, but there’s an expected minimum ad spend from the agencies’ clients. There are many horrid things about this – not least the vision of a future in which everything is communicated to us in numerical list format (‘376 Policy Commitments That Mean You Should Vote UKIP!’, but also because of the increasingly blurred lines this is going to create between editorial and advertorial. Sigh.

Some Campaign-ish stuff:

  • Pistol Annies Album Launch CampaignI had, I must confess, no idea who Pistol Annies were before I read this – then I listened to their music and realised why that was (what can I say? Country doesn’t do it for me). In any case, their recent campaign to launch their new album was an incredibly involved multi-channel thing which rather impressed me not only with the scale of its execution. Would love, as ever, to know participation numbers (yes, yes, I know, ENGAGEMENTZZZZZZZZZZ). 
  • NYC Sex Ed AppThis is just a good idea, isn’t it? App available in New York, developed by its Health Department, which tells teenagers where they can get sexual health checks, where they can get free contraception, where clinics are, gives them advice and operates as a sort of Q&A service for teens to get information about sex and related issues. Slightly amazed that this appears to be being touted as a ‘first’. 
  • Coke StairsAnother week, another annoyingly clever thing from Coca Cola. This one’s resolutely un-digital, but I don’t care. Very clever little stunt (in Spain) to persuade people to do a little more exercise – so they can then go and drink even more fizzy brown sugar water, and no one has to feel bad about it at all! Actually, there’s also a rather nice website to accompany the campaign so it is a bit digital after all
  • Jobseekers In The WindowCampaign by a Danish marketing firm to help highlight issues of Danish unemployment (but, more accurately, to get shedloads of press for aforementioned marketing firm). Jobless people, pimping themselves out in the agency’s window in search of work. What’s beautiful / dreadful about this – to me at least – is the totally unwitting way that the article linked to makes the comparison with the shop windows of Amsterdam’s red light district. Nice!
It’s not Miranda Hart, it’s a picture by Flora Borsi
 


Last Saturday Was Comic Book Day! Listen To This DJ Food Mix To Celebrate.

Other Stuff Which May Or May Not Be Of Interest, Pt.1:

  • Insert Rude Noises Into Your WebsiteThis made me laugh far, far more than it had any right to do. From The Onion comes this little piece of code that, at a stroke, makes any website flatulent, producing rude noises whenever people scroll up or down the page a certain number of pixels. I make only one request in this week’s Curios – can this please, please find its way to some disgruntled web developer who’s on their last day at work? PLEASE. I want this hacked onto BP’s website (or, frankly, anyone’s – I’m not fussy) now. 
  • GeoGuessr: A Google Maps mashup which shows you a randomised (I think) view from StreetView and challenges you to guess where in the world you are by clicking on a world map. Really interesting, and a terrible timesink, this is simple, but cute – and surely something that a travel brand might want to co-opt as a nice timesink to chuck on its website, perhaps with a link to buy tickets to / hotels in locations that people see and find appealing? Go on, someone make it. 
  • EscherSketchA terrible, terrible comedy name for what is a rather nice drawing-and-tesselation tool. I think that if you are a halfway-decent artist and have a Wacom or similar you could actually make some quite cool stuff with this; I was barely able to work out where the points of symmetry are, so I’m probably not the best judge.
  • NASA Sending Haikus To MarsYes, that’s right. We’re taking people’s names and messages to Mars – messages in the form of 3-line poems. You know the drill with these sorts of things by now; people have until July 1st to submit their name and a haiku, then there will be a POPULAR VOTE to determine which three are put on the space capsule DVD thing (DVD? Really? How are we presuming the civilisation which discovers this incredible treasure will be able to play the thing?). I doubt NASA will be so stupid as to allow anything too ridiculous to have the possibility of acting as man’s poetic message to God’s creation, but you never know. Get writing. 
  • Chainmail ShoesThis is a degree of next-level masochism. They encourage you to run in these things, for God’s sakes. Crazy.
  • Sculptures Based on Found DNANext time you’re having a tab and you throw it carelessly to the floor before running back inside to the comforting warmth of the pub where passers-by don’t look at you as though you are solely responsible for all of the cancers in all of the world, be aware that you could be giving someone the opportunity to make a slightly creepy 3d-printed mask of your face. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an artist from New York (where else?) takes fag butts, tissues, etc, found around the city, mines them for traces of DNA, and then makes sculptures of what the genetic material suggests the person who left the sample looks like. If you stop to think about this too hard you end up in a slightly scary Face-Off cul de sac of horror, which I don’t recommend.
  • Google TimelapseShould that be in the top section? Oh I don’t know, taxonomy is hard. Anyway, this is a collaboration between Google and Time Magazine, showing changes in the world’s urban centres, coastlines, etc, over the course of the past 25 years. As you would imagine, there’s a common ‘dear God, we’re absolutely ruining EVERYTHING aren’t we?’ undercurrent running through much of it. The site’s rather nicely put together, though, so that’s sort of ok then.
  • Ryan Gosling Refuses CerealMy favourite piece of pointless creativity of the week, and a rather nice use of Vine. Expect to see this joke being flogged to death until we’re making stock with its bones in a week or so’s time.
  • Ming MeccaI’m going to confess to not really understanding this 100%. I think, from what I can tell, it’s a modular videogame creation system based on the sort of analogue technology used in old audio equipment. This basically allows you to ‘mix’ games, live. I think, to create glitchy artstuffs. I really don’t know what’s going on, although if I’m broadly right about that there’s some quite nice things that you could do in terms of live 8-bit visuals in clubs, etc. Can someone more technically minded than me please explain, please? Thanks. 
  • Barbie JewelleryEver wondered what happens to abandoned Barbies? That’s right! They get cut up and turned into hugely creepy jewellery, that’s what.
  • CoupledA cute series of design-y posters, depicting the occasionally complex relationships between objects. Some funny, some sad, JUST LIKE LIFE (/profundity). 
  • The HedonometerI’ve long held the opinion that sentiment analysis tools are a load of bunkum (unless you’re, I don’t know, Goldman Sachs and have some sort of military-grade computing power behind market analysis and prediction, in which case I imagine you’re slightly better than Radian6), but this is still interesting. The Hedonometer is a project which analyses (some of) the English language conversation on Twitter to come up with an overall happy/sad rating for the day. Take a look – interesting correlations and data. 
  • Colour Signatures of NovelsI have no idea what these are derived from (it says ‘the visual content of the novels’, but that leaves me none the wiser I must confess), but they look rather cool.
  • The Beauty Face Sag Skin StretcherHowever awful that description sounds, the reality is far odder. Oh, Japan!
Couple Embracing, by Egon Schiele
 

Other Stuff Which May Or May Not Be Of Interest, Pt.2:

  • DipjarA really clever solution to simplify giving tips in the age of cards, etc. Probably more use in the US given our total failure to understand tipping culture in the UK, but very smart nonetheless.
  • Outsourcing Your Online DatingPossibly the most first world job advert you’re ever likely to see.
  • Heroic Words of WisdomQuotes from Superheroes, turned into motivational-type posters. Some of you will like these, some of you will feel sick to the very pit of your stomach at the idea of grown adults taking inspiration from the fictional words of men and women in tight-fitting spandex. Truly, we are a varied and multifaceted species.
  • The Last WebsiteThis is, apparently, ‘a new kind of immersive literature, combining aural, visual and linguistic storytelling’. Chuck in your headphones and have a go – it takes 15 minutes, tops, and it’s very nicely made – and the music is, in parts, beautiful. 
  • FeedBuzzIt’s like BuzzFeed, but DIFFERENT! Obviously a parody site, but I properly laughed out loud at around 60% of the stuff on here, which is a pretty decent hit rate. Mostly better than the real thing.
  • Photographs of the Sweetwater Rattlesnake FestivalIf you’re scared of snakes, and blood, you probably won’t like these pictures a whole lot. Shame, though, as they’re excellent. By photographer David Kasnic, the piece also includes a selection of photos from another project of his called On The Cusp, documenting wasted teens across America. Good stuff, these. 
  • A Collection of Vintage Dutch Safety PostersMy Dutch is ‘limited’, so I have no idea what these are warning against – nonetheless, they are properly threatening.
  • SpaceWarpsWant to help scentists find cool stuff in space, from the comfort of your own laptop/tablet/whatever? Of course you do! SpaceWarps is a project by Zooniverse, an agglomeration of ‘citizen science’ projects, which asks people to look through pictures trying to spot massive galaxies which are warping space and time. Which, be honest, is about 348x more important / impressive than what most of us get paid to do for a living.
  • Exquisite Corpse Film Project: I love this idea, and want to see the film. Five comedy writers each write 15 pages of a film, having only read the final five pages of the preceding writers’ work. They made a film out of it, and it premiered last month – here’s a sort-of-review
  • TextastropheTaking a liberal dose of inspiration from the now-legendary David Thorne’s trolling of the world, this person does much the same thing via text with blameless tradesmen who leave their mobile numbers on flyers. Obviously he is massively wasting people’s time, but the results are occasionally guffaw-inducingly good. 
  • Betteridge’s Law – NO!I confess to not having heard of this before this week. In any case, Betteridge’s law states, roughly, that when a headline asks a question, the answer to that question is invariably a resounding ‘no’. This website proves that, repeatedly, and also highlights an irritating and increasingly prevalent lazy linkbait technique. 
  • Make Google Streetview AnimationsSimple, quick, impressive – a really nice little tool, which makes outputs similar to that music video I posted last week WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T WATCH IT I HATE YOU. 

The (Flea) Circus of Tumblrs (that’s meant to be a funny reference to the fact that there weren’t very many this week, but it doesn’t really work):

  • Worst Rooms in NYC: You think we have it bad in London? I am very glad that I don’t need to rent in New York.
  • InternshitInterns post their experiences of what it’s like to be underneath the bottom of the pile, professionally.
  • Beyonce Art HistoryArt world classics, improved with the addition of lyrics by everyone’s favourite image control freak. 
  • The Bluth CompanyArrested Development fan Tumblr. If you haven’t ever seen it, correct that fact. It really is very good. Even if my friend Mo thinks “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” is better (she is wrong about this). 
  • That’s it. Tumblr is officially OVER. 


Games:

  • OverdoseVery trippy series of drug-themed minigames. fun, but really don’t play this if you’re at all epileptic.
  • BrokedownAnother week, another piece of interactive fiction. This one’s got a simple but clever mechanic, where you can dial the purpleness of the prose up or down at will by using the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ icons. 
  • Gods Will Be WatchingA point-and-click survival adventure thing, which challenges you to keep the crew of a crashed spaceship alive for 40 days and 40 nights. Minimalist (as befits an entrant in this year’s Ludum Dare), atmospheric and really quite sad, it’s worth a bit of your time.
  • Watergate: Yep, that’s right, you get to play through Watergate. More fun than it sounds, though you will want to turn off the music unless you’re some sort of tone deaf masochist.
The Street by Dan Luvisi
 

Long Articles Which Are Admittedly Long But Worth The Time, Honest:

  • The Truth About FlappersWith it now impossible to breathe without inhaling a huge stinking cloud of hype around the may-be-not-as-bad-as-expected Luhrmann adaptation of the Fitzgerald classic, this piece looks at the truth about the flapper movement, which is infinitely more interesting and politically significant than a few dozen articles about beaded dresses and gimlet cocktails could ever suggest. Good history, this one. 
  • Brad Frost on BullshitNot a long read so much as a long watch, this is a 20-minute presentation by Brad Frost on the subject of noise – or, as he terms it more colloquially, ‘bullshit’. Very much worth watching, not solely because of the content but also because of Frost’s engaging presentation style – you can see the slides here if you’d rather go through it at your own pace, but they lose something without the audio.
  • Hunter S Thompson on the Kentucky Derby – AnnotatedThis is why the internet is great. Thompson’s riotous story about him covering the Kentucky Derby (as with much of Thompson’s writing, it’s less about the event than the weirdness of the collision between him and the event), which first ushered in his career-long collaboration with Ralph Steadman, with added annotations and historical / contextual detail. If you only read one of these things, read this – man was an incredible writer. 
  • What It’s Like Being A Startup Person In The ValleyA great NYT piece profiling some of the young men and women pitching theoretical billion-dollar businesses to the business angels and VCs on the West Coast. It’s mental – and worth a read not only if you care about tech, but just as an illustration of the weird economic world these businesses inhabit, and what that means for our concepts of ‘value’ and ‘worth’ and other such abstract values. 
  • Nautilus MagazineIf you like science and stuff, this is your new favourite online magazine. Just launched, but full of quality writing about a wide range of topics around popular science – can we have more magazines like this, please, with proper longform writing and nary a list or piece of linkbait in sight? What? No one else wants that? Well screw all of you, in that case. 
  • What The People You Went To School With Are Doing NowA look at all the stereotypes who you shared your school days and what they are probably doing now. A better piece of writing than it probably has any right to be from VICE. 
  • Raymond The DC JunkieA couple of nights ago John Stanton started tweeting his reminiscences of DC, from the days when the city was PROPERLY tough. His tale of Raymond the junkie is captivating – not just because of the story, but the way it’s told through Twitter. An object lesson in how to tell tales in short-form bursts. 
  • What It’s Like To Be A Cyborg: Google Glass? PAH! You want to take a look at this bloke who’s basically put chips in his head to cure his congenital inability to distinguish colour. It’s amazing – particular when he starts talking about the jack he’s going to have put in the back of his head to allow himself to swap implants in and out (HOW GIBSON-ESQUE). BONUS LONGREAD – this man’s been wearing homemade Google Glass for years. In your face, global technology giant. 
  • Jeff Koons and his ArtKoons is a proper oddity, even by the famously odd standards of the international high art scene. This profile of him is simultaneously quite revealing and all surface – he’s rather Gilbert & George-esque, in that it’s very hard to divorce the persona from the artworks and vice versa. It did remind me of the atrocious output of his ill-fated marriage to Ilona Staller, though (you may be more familiar with her nom d’arte). 
  • The Dildo FactoryI don’t normally link to Buzzfeed because, well, it’s not like they need the traffic and they never link to me, the sods, but this is interesting not only due to the subject matter, though (no really, it is) but also the photography (some great shots in here). Moderately NSFW, depending on your employer’s tolerance for large latex penises.
  • Constant Dullaart, Internet ArtistA fascinating profile of the fabulously named Mr Dullaart and his thoughts on the interface between programming, the web and art.
  • On Depression: Hyperbole and a Half is an incredibly successful blog (Oatmeal-ish in style), whose author has recently returned to it after severe depression. This is her blog about how she felt. It’s very good indeed, although obviously not always the cheeriest thing you will ever read (convention dictates I say something like ‘Warning: Triggers’ at this point).
 

Part of the Screen Lovers series, by Eli Craven
 
 
 

NOW THE EMBEDDED VIDEOS CAN COMMENCE:

NB – I really wanted to include the Flaming Lips’ promo for You Lust on here this week, but it doesn’t appear to be freely available to embed. You can watch it here, if you want – there is a LOT of nudity, be warned, but it’s very (almost creepily) non-sexual


1) Segueing seamlessly from the Hyperbole and a Half post above, this is a video to accompany an edited version of Web Curios’ perennial obsession David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to university students in 2005 (you can read the whole thing here). You may have seen this already (2.5million people already have) but if not it really is worth taking the 10 minutes it takes to see the whole thing, I promise:

2) By way of light relief, have this – Maker vs Marker, as one man’s hand fights his drawings in a StreetFighter-inspired animated short of quite astonishing technical accomplishment. You may have seen stuff like this before, but this one’s particularly strong:

3) This is so, so impressive (if very short). Just everything about it – the colours, the CGI, the weirdness – is spot on. Sadly I have just found out that it was commissioned by Adobe to promote its new thingy (BRANDS AS PATRONS, KIDS!), but no matter – it’s still good work, and credit to everyone who worked on it. Vein with ‘Magma’:

4) I’m a sucker for videos that use hands in creative ways (remember this one?), and this combines a great song (which for reasons unknown reminds me both of Hot Chip and White Town) with hands and cut-out stuff to (I think) great effect. Riva Starr with Absence:

5) I’ll be honest, I don’t really like the song and I think the artist and the people who made the video are posturing idiots who would last all of 5 minutes in the sort of warzone they’re so glibly depicting. That said, MAN’S RIDING AN ALLIGATOR!!!!:

6) Hipster hiphop! Well, yes, but this is in here because I think it’s a legitimately good song, it’s short, and I find the artist quite endearing – she seems to be enjoying herself in the video, which I like. So there. It’s MY BLOG (well, Imperica’s actually, but you get my gist). Randa, with ‘Orange Juice’:

7) The people who made this video are going to hell, as may well I be for posting it. It’s called ‘Jesus, He’s Alright’ and it imagines the Son of Man as a fratboy. Blame the band, Team Spirit, not me. SORRY JESUS:

8) The context to this escapes me. All I know is that it’s Japanese (I think), that the soundtrack is wonderful and jazzish and cool, and the animation is brilliantly surreal in a cute, endearing way. It’s called ‘We Should Make Strange Things’:

9) Finally this week, we have the OH SO CONTROVERSIAL video for Indochine’s latest single ‘College Boy’. It’s about bullying, and I will warn you now that it does not have a happy ending. HAVE FUN KIDS!!!!:

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 03/05/13

Reading Time: 18 minutes

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Jazz Nursery. Great Suffolk Street, SE1
Garudio Studiage, Photo of the week

You now how ordinarily I write some stuff here about the last week, what I’ve done, etc etc etc? This week I have NOTHING. Literally nothing. Too much work, too little sleep (self-inflicted), and a general sense of mild annoyance at the whole UKIP thing that we’ve worken up to today means that you can get straight to the GOOD stuff (ie the stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with me. Go on, be grateful. YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO LEAVE AND ENJOY THE BANK HOLIDAY UNTIL YOU’VE READ EVERYTHING (that’s not true, I promise). 

Have a lovely 3 day weekend, webmongs, particularly those of you heading to this on Sunday. ENJOY YOURSELVES!

 

Image by Remi Rebillard
 

Advermarketingprinternetextravaganza:

Google:

  • I promise that I am going to stop including the Google Glass stuff soon – it’s just that the novelty hasn’t quite worn off yet, and I am still fascinated by the sheer scifi oddness of the whole project and the circus that surrounds it. Anyway, this week the first in-depth user reviews started coming in suggesting, shock horror, that the semi-prototype technology isn’t ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. There was quite a lot of dismissive “Well, it’s obviously RUBBISH then” muttering on the internet around this, which is what the internet is wont to do – I won’t labour the point, but there’s something quite dreadfully wonderful about a collective, entitled, sigh of dismay from the Western middle class at the fact that the first iteration of their space age face-wearable-computer-visor-thing isn’t ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. Jesus Christ, what do you people WANT? Anyway, here’s professional technology fetishist Robert Scoble writing about how he will NEVER TAKE THEM OFF, here’s some stuff about people tweeting through their glasses (a phrase that sounds so ridiculous when you say it out loud – try it in your head) – and here’s a very angry piece about the whole thing, which may get your blood running with righteous ire.
  • Google+ Overtaking Twitter: Or at least that’s what the numbers apparently say, and who are we to disregard the numbers? Noone. OBEY THE DATA. I don’t doubt that lots of people have an account to G+, but I’d also hazard a guess that lots of people doing so may not really know or remember – not, I suppose, that that matters if you’re Google and you’re still in the process of trying to stitch the internet together using a thread made of your own sinew (unpleasant, but I’m in a hurry here). But seriously, WHO IS USING THIS REGULARLY? Really, I am intrigued, I want to know. I know it’s photographers and techy people, but beyond that? I would love to see the venn diagram of, say, Mail Online readership and G+ use. 

Facebook:

  • Everyone’s Leaving!It’s over, go home. All you Facebook community management specialists, start packing your bags – NOONE CARES ABOUT THE FUNNY ANIMALS IN HATS ANY MORE. Let’s all go and try and sell people stuff on G+ instead. Obviously this is hyperbolic rubbish which was massively overplayed this week – if you’re interested in making money and owning all of the data, which Facebook is, it’s more important to have LOADS of people using a service than it is to be cool-yet-empty.  
  • But Facebook Is Still Incredibly Rich!:…which is basically what this article says. Go on, read a PROPER newspaper validating my point of view.
  • Another Week, Another Advertising ProductBlah blah promoted Like worldwide rollout blah blah. 
  • Facebook Studio Award WinnersA collection of award-winning pieces of brand work on Facebook. Worth a look for ‘inspiration’, and so that you can scroll through sneeringly saying ‘mediocre, mediocre, rubbish, dull, pedestrian’ whilst secretly being bitter than you have never won any professional awards, ever, JUST LIKE ME!

Twitter:

  • A Decent Look at Twitter’s Ad OfferingA look at developments in Twitter’s advertising, with particularly interesting stuff about keyword-based advertising, and a glimpse into a terrifying future where EVERYTHING YOU SAY OR THINK is used to serve you contextually appropriate advertising.  
  • RetwactIt’s always good to know that the internet LISTENS to me. Not a week since I DEMANDED (well, linked to an article demanding, but you know what I mean) a service allowing people to make post-publication edits to tweets then here one is. It does have the admittedly appalling name of Retwact, which is almost unforgivable, but I can overlook that because it’s actually a very good idea. This might be to go back through your timeline and amend anything incriminating / offence – I’m sure that the hasty addition of the suffix ‘JKG!’ will suffice.

Foursquare Is About To Turn Your Whole Life Into Advertising DataIn similar fashion to the Twitter stuff above, this is Foursquare’s latest attempt to make a success of itself (I say that relatively – obviously 4sq is more successful than, say, me, but it’s certainly never come close to troubling the mainstream) and make all of the money in all the world by selling advertisers the opportunity to offer you discount paracetamol the night after you checked into 5 bars in a row. Or something like that – just use your imagination, it’s not hard.

Instagram Now Lets You Tag People, Brands, etcYou know how much you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to tag that can of Coke Zero in your painstakingly multi-filtered collection of moody urban realitysnaps? YEAH! Well now you can. Lucky you. I look forward next week to bringing you the first wave of poorly-conceived-but-it-doesn’t-matter-because-FIRST! brand-led competitions which force users to tag brands in all sorts of CRAZY or CREATIVE pictures in exchange for the right to…er…becoming a cheap advertising drone for a major multinational corporation. It will be great.

On ‘The Internet of Things’ and SearchA hugely interesting piece about what the future of search might be like when you can look for individual things on the internet. Which, it turns out, you sort of can thanks to incredibly techy and not insignificantly Gibsonian search engine Shodan. Take a look, have a think about what it could potentially do, and then slip into a reverie in which you’re imagining the plot of every single variant on a spy/terrorism thriller for the next decade or so: “Mr President! They’ve hacked the Hoover Dam! It’s going to open in 10 MINUTES!”. Thanks, Hollywood, you’re welcome.

Campaigns Of Note (or, more accurately, that I have seen):

  • The Best Marketing/Advertising/Whateverthisiscallednow Video Of The WeekSanremo is not only Italy’s PREMIER song contest; it’s also, it seems, a brand of industrial espresso machine. This video isn’t anything hugely original – song made from various machine noises – but it is really nicely executed and a bit more lively than these things usually are. 
  • The Buddy CupYou’ve probably seen this already as Rich Leigh posted it earlier in the week, damn his eyes, but if not it’s a cute thing from Budweiser in Brazil – cups with embedded NFC chips which, when ‘cheers-ed’ (Dear God, what is the word for the act of banging two cups together in convivial fashion?), causes the two people toasting (THAT’S IT) to become Facebook friends. Notable not just from a tech point of view, but also because last I heard you weren’t allowed to do this sort of thing as part of Facebook’s T&Cs. Not that it matters if you are Budweiser and spend $25million+ on advertising with FB a year, of course. IT’S ONE RULE FOR THEM, etc etc.
  • Coke Happiness Project AGAINI know, I know. But again, it’s a nice mix of emotion and cute and happy and tech. This is another audiomashupy thing, in which a Japanese DJ goes round Tokyo recording the sounds of the city in a special coke bottle and then mixes them to suitably pleasing effect. Not included so much for technical brilliance as for its excellence in evoking the whole ‘happiness’ thing. Damn them.
  • The HemingwayJacker: This is a Facebook thingy produced by the Hemingway Foundation – a museum in the US dedicated, unsurprisingly, to Facebook. This allows you to donate your Status Updates to the programme, which turns you into ‘Hemingway’ for a bit. Interesting more in concept than execution; there is quite an interesting idea in here somewhere, though, about creating something like this with multiple fictitious personalities, all with a prescripted narrative which interlocks and interconnects in seemingly reactive fashion – it would be rather fun for, say, 5 people to donate their Facebook Updates for a week to something that is in effect puppeteering them through a soap opera whilst their friends look on unknowing. Did that make sense? Oh, sod it.
  • Most Incredibly Expensive Marketing Thing I Have Seen In AgesActually maybe it’s not THAT expensive, but it certainly looks like it might have been. To promote something about mobile working through Office, Microsoft included MINIATURE WIFI HOTSPOTS in copies of Forbes Magazine. Yes, that’s right, THEY PUT THE INTERNET IN A MAGAZINE. Amazing.
  • The Benefit ExperienceFinally for this section, a brilliant video. Benefit is apparently a cosmetics brand (I am not target audience). They decided, as is now de rigour for brands who want to do ‘content marketing’ and ‘make a viral’, that they were going to do something to ‘surprise and delight’ random passers-by, liberally inspired by that bloody ‘Push Button To Add Drama‘ thing, and the Skyfall Coke thing. Cue pink phonebooth, members of the public, and an impromptu makeover followed by…erm. well, followed by the frankly horrific prospect of being forced up on stage to sing in front of a bunch of students who’ve been roped in by the events company for the day to comprise an ‘audience’ and are probably bored and baying for blood. The brilliant thing about this is the many moments in the video when the ‘lucky’ punters look simply TERRIFIED by the prospect, and you can see the organisers’ panic flaring behind their irises as they desperately smile and mug whilst attempting to mask everyone’s sense of slight unease about the whole project. Brilliant.
This is from that Open Switzerland thing which I mention down there
 

MUSIC! Why not listen to this rather brilliant mashupmixthing, pointed out to me by Joel Golby on Twitter? Or maybe this one?

A Miscellany of Interesting Things, pt.1:

  • Jess & Russ Get MarriedOr, in fact, got married. In any case, this website which they built for their wedding and which tells the story of their relationship, is (despite my general lack of sentimentality) really very sweet and heartwarming and (from a geeky perspective) very nicely built indeed. I have no idea who Jess & Russ are, but I hope they are very happy.
  • KillswitchOf course, statistically speaking it’s more likely that Jess & Russ will end up locked in the throes of an acrimonious divorce which will sap both their will to live and their bank balances, leaving them drained of energy and emotion until they’re inert and loveless. At that point, they could do worse than check out Kill List, an app which removes ‘every trace’ of your ex from your Facebook Page. Likes, pictures, comments, etc – all gone. This is sure to be bought / replicated by a brand soon, no?
  • Sound Art in NYC: Opening this week at NYC’s New Museum, Streetscape Symphony is an ambitious project which looks to create an audiovisual portrait of each of New York’s 5 Boroughs within the gallery space. Combining cutting-edge technology with the ideology of the ‘found sounds’ aesthetic, the show will allow visitors to experience the wonderful, overwhelming, baffling and often profane sounds of New York. I would like a London one, please. 
  • The Colors News MachineColors is a brilliant magazine. Brainchild of famed(then)  Benetton creative Oliviero Toscani, the ‘magazine about the rest of the world’ tackles a different theme in every issue, and comprises some of the best photojournalism and intelligent writing you will read. The magazine’s latest issue looks at ‘Making the News’ – and to launch it, Colors created the News Machine and put it on display at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. The machine looks at the manner in which information is filtered, reinterpreted and distorted by multiple channels of dissemination.
  • There Once Was a ‘Like’ Button for RadioWell, sort of. This was an invention from the 1930s called the ‘Radiovoter’, which was designed to gather binary feedback from listeners to questions. The inventor imagined its eventual use as part of participatory democracy, envisioning a terrifying future in which listeners to the radio were asked to vote on questions like (actual cited example) ‘Should we go to war?’. Incredible,
  • BDSM Accessories for GeeksThere’s a lot of truly odd stuff on Etsy, not least this collection of sci-fi themed paddles, whips and the like. I always thought there was something a bit…well…silly about certain aspects of BDSM; how anyone is supposed to administer corporal punishment with a paddle shaped like an NES controller and maintain a semblance of authority is beyond me, but then what do I know?
  • iFont MakerAn app which lets you use your iPad to draw fonts. Simple as that, but I imagine it might be quite nice to make your own personal typeface.
  • RetrovectorSlightly related to the above (but only very slightly), Retrovector is a potentially useful site which contains a whole load of free – and seemingly not dreadful – graphic elements for designers to use as they see fit? Are you a designer? ARE YOU? Well go on then.
  • CrapchaPointless, irritating and strangely satisfying – Crapcha is a fake Captcha service which allows you embed an impossible – and non-working – ‘prove you are human’ task on any website. Someone somewhere in control of a company intranet can have a whole Friday afternoon of fun with this – come on, you know you want to. 
  • Futurology from 1982There’s so much of this starting to be unearthed at the moment – this is at least the third of these sorts of things I’ve seen in the past month. This time it’s the New York Times, reporting on research by the National Science Foundation with the rather wonderful headline ‘Study Says Technology Could Transform Society’. Could. Love that. Anyway, it’s pretty much bang on – and even picks up the privacy thing which we then promptly went and forgot about until about 2 years ago.
  • Iconic Photos: I generally tend to hate the term ‘iconic’ in terms of photography (a legacy of working around – otherwise lovely – people in sports marketing whose response to EVERY SINGLE BRIEF was to say ‘iconic photography’ until their heads span round and round like that kid from The Exorcist), but I will make a exception for this site as a) the photos really are very good indeed; and b) they bother to explain why said photographs are iconic, and provide a degree of context that you don’t always get. Instructive. 
  • Wearable Foods: Yeonju Sung is a Korean artist who makes clothes out of food (or who makes clothes that look like they are made out of foodstuffs). If this hasn’t already been used in an ad campaign / promo photoshoot then it will be imminently.
Image by Kevan Davis
 


A Miscellany of Interesting Things, pt.2:

  • Behind The Scenes on The Empire Strikes BackThese are really rather nice, whether or not you are a Star Wars fan / obsessive. Note, by the way, how Carrie Fisher flirts with Anthony Daniels and in fact pretty much everyone on set.  
  • Walmart PaintingsBrendan O’Connell paints pictures of scenes from the inside of Wal-Mart. They’re oddly affecting. Part of me quite likes the idea of supermarkets having artists in residence, and part of me thinks that it would end up being used for crappy PR. Mind you, the sort of hallucinogenic stuff you might get someone to pump out after spending 24h straight in the giant Tesco’s in Slough (a building so large that walking past it is a bit like that moment in sci-fi films where the camera pans past the spaceship and it just keeps on going) could be quite interesting. Tesco’s PRs – that’ll be £10 please. 
  • Black Playing CardsI know that thinking that anything in black is ‘cool’ is horrendously teenage, but nonetheless I do think these playing cards are rather good. Anyone wanting to buy me a set is most welcome; thanks.
  • Fighting Game Backgrounds: A collection of animated gifs of backgrounds from fighting games of the 90s and early 2000s. I’m sure that this might be useful to someone out there, though I’m baffled as to how or why.
  • HuffPo SpoilersA Twitter account which links to RTs the Huffington Post and explains what is hiding behind such click-tempting headlines as “Which Marvel Movie has the most Oscar-friendly cast?”. Can someone do this for the Mail, please, in such a way that it shares links to Mail stories and tells people exactly what they are supposed to be angry about in each case, or perhaps which group of people the paper is decrying in each article? Thanks.
  • If You Were To Make Kaledoscopic Animations From Pictures Of Popes They Would Be Called KALEIDOPOPES!
  • Short Films By Louis CKBefore Louis CK became arguably the best US standup of the decade (arguably – Dave Chapelle might have one or two things to say about that) he was, it transpires, making these odd, arty shorts. Very New York, not very much like what he’s doing now, certainly interesting.
  • The Wipe ShirtThis is such good design. Quite want one of these too. 
  • Musicians’ Riders, PhotographedThe food and drink requested backstage by gigging musicians, as photographed for VICE. The Foo Fighters one made me laugh.
  • A Comic About 1950s HipstersThis is a BRILLIANT slice of the past. A comic strip from ’57 which tells the story of some hipsters starting a club, and the ghosts that try and stop them (bear with me). It’s incredible on many levels, but mainly because of the incredible language. If you can start sprinkling your day-to-day diction with gems from this, you will earn the respect and admiration of your friends and peers – FACT.
  • Open SwitzerlandA project by a Swiss design agency looking at notions of Swiss identity and inviting people to make posters which explore the Swiss idea of nationhood, etc. There are some great examples in there. 
  • ReductressA new(?) site doing for the women’s magazine industry what The Onion purports to do for news. It seems well-written and funny, though I do wonder how may gags you can get out of an industry that seems to repeat itself on a 3-monthly cycle (although regular readers will by now have worked out that I am not a satirist and therefore know not whereof I speak). 
  • Inside One Very Creative Man’s BrainGlitch was a cute-but-ultimately unsuccessful browser-based multiplayer game which shut down last year.  These are a selection of the random ideas which Keita Takahashi cane up with during the game’s development, and is a fairly unique insight into the brain of a very creative individual indeed. 


Videos Which For A Variety Of Reasons I Am Not Embedding Below:

  • Lego Breaking Bad VideogameI have never played one of the LEGO videogames. I have never watched an episode of Breaking Bad, though I feel as though I have what with everyone incessantly telling me that it is the best thing ever and the internet falling over itself to hamfistedly try and meld it with every other element of popular web culture ever. That said, this is EXCELLENT and makes me really want to play this game. 
  • Two ChipsAdam Patch is an animator whose wife came home drunk one evening and wanted to tell him a joke. He recorded the audio and made this lovely animation to accompany it. Makes drunk people telling jokes seem cute rather than unspeakably irritating, which is nice. 
  • Teddy Has An OperationYou’re probably one of the several million people who have seen this by now, but in case not then have a slice of odd from Ze Frank. It’s creepy in a way that doesn’t really hit you until a little while after you’ve finished watching it. 
  • Pacific Rim TrailerI don’t normally post film trailers, but this one is mental. Also, as a little kid I always used to watch Japanese giant robot cartoons when I went on holiday to Italy (there are maybe 3 people that are likely to read this and appreciate the link which is hyperlinked right here) and this takes me right back to that in a pleasingly nostalgic, near-ASMR way. 
  • The Magic BoxThis short film has a lot of the John Lewis advert about it. It may make you cry, and then you will probably feel bad that you’re so easily manipulated. 
  • Home-Made Machine to Steal From Vending MachinesThis is brilliant – a French kid made himself a great robotic contraption to thieve cans from vending machines (OBVIOUSLY stealing is wrong. Obviously).
  • Awesome Japanese Toy Drone ThingThe protective cage thing is brilliant. Christmas 2013?
  • Dear God, These SHOESWow.
Image by Paul Ruigrok van der Werven
 

The Circus of Tumblrs:

  • Eat Shit Winnie Cooper: One woman’s irritation with the ‘Wonder Years’ actress, who unaccountably crops up twice in one Curios this week (foreshadowing). 
  • The White HouseCould any other world leader get away with (or actually have some rationale for having) a Tumblr? I can’t see it, somehow. They really are very good a this stuff, damn them (or is it more that this stuff is good for them as a result of Barack’s popular perception as being a touch more down with the kids than your average President? Hmmm?)
  • Gitmo BooksBooks (and occasional other things) available from the library at Guantanamo Bay. There are, I am sure, people who will point to this as evidence that it can’t be that bad. 
  • Berlin UndergroundOne of those odd, obsessive projects that ends up being weirdly charming, this Tumblr takes photos of all the subway stations in Berlin, one line at a time.
  • CosmarxpolitanAgain, this one’s been everywhere this week. Mixing Karl’s politics with the breathless style of everyone’s favourite insecurity bible. 
  • Shorties In AdidasI don’t think I’ve ever typed that word before, and I’m not sure I ever will again; nonetheless, a Tumblr of pretty women wearing Adidas clothes, just because.
  • Jesus Christ Silicon ValleyI linked to this all the way up *there*, but it’s worth mentioning again – this is deliciously angry about all aspects of tech/startup pretension. Real coruscating rage here, which is very enjoyable. 
  • GTAV Trailer CommentsThe latest trailers for Rockstar’s imminent videogame behemoth came out this week. This collects some of the more baffling / depressing YouTube comments from the dark places below the line. 
  • Dogshit SelfieSelf-taken photographs which include defecating canines. Yes, that is a *thing*, it would seem.
  • White Men Wearing Google GlassPretty much exactly the sort of people that that Tumblr up there is railing against.
  • All Things Sloth: Lots and lots of sloth-based imagery.
  • Dick’s Doodles: My friend Sarah doodles on the tube, and posts them here. Spot yourself, and then pay her lots of cash for the drawing.

Games! Everyone Loves Games!

  • Ninja Slash: Like Temple Run, but on desktop. Fun.
  • Odd Japanese Keepy-Uppy Game Which I Don’t Really UnderstandBut it’s quite fun nonetheless.
  • DropNotch, the genius behind Minecraft, probably knocked this up in about 24h. It’s a minimalist typing game with an electro soundtrack and it is BRUTAL.
  • SacrilegeInteractive fiction about clubbing and sex and friendship and being on drugs and all sorts of other things. Really rather good, I thought. 

LONGSTUFF (A bumper crop this week, which if the weather is as nice as it is right now NONE of you will read):

  • I Love Winnie Cooper: I told you she’d be back. Lovely nostalgic piece looking back at The Wonder Years and not actually really about Winnie Cooper at all. (I just did an image search for Winnie Cooper and it was a bit odd)
  • On Having Your Photos Go ViralA really interesting article by a photographer whose photos of Amazon warehouses went everywhere on the internet. Contains good thinking on creativity, ownership, attribution and creation, and made me feel slightly bad about the fact that I never email the people whose photos I use on this blog (although I do name and credit and link). I will start next week, promise.
  • Amazing Facebook Data AnalysisThis is truly jawdropping. Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha fame has taken people’s Facebook data, gained through their participation in the Facebook Data Project, and has crunched it a bit. Just look at this – and this is SUCH a small sample, and doesn’t even begin to touch the tip of the smallest bit of the surface of everything that Facebook knows about people, their connections, their habits, their friendships, their use of language, their interpersonal interactions…JUST THINK ABOUT IT. It’s quite datawonky, but it really is worth looking at – not only for the data, which is interesting, but also because of the domino rally of ‘where will this end?’ thinkking which it will probably set off in your head. 
  • The Voynich ManuscriptThis is huge, but the tale of the Voynich Manuscript will appeal to anyone interested in cryptography, mystery, secrets and Da Vinci Code type stuff. It’s properly baffling, and makes me wish I was good at maths.
  • The Great Boards of Canada Music Mystery: Speaking of codes and mysteries (SEAMLESS!), this may be the start of some sort of ARG by the band Boards of Canada. Or they might just be throwing this out there to see exactly how far their obsessive fans will go to unearth CLUES. Who knows? Interesting stuff, though, and as ever the willingness of people online to go down rabbitholes is startling.
  • AMA With A Man Who Liberated DachauOr, more accurately, his grandson who was sitting with him at the time. Amazing, sad, and why the internet is remarkable.
  • Jason Collins on Coming OutYou probably saw the news about NBA star Jason Collins coming out this week, and stating that he wants to continue playing. The piece in Sports Illustrated which he used to announce his sexuality is a great interview and well worth a read.
  • The History of KidsAh, 1995. Were you horrified and appalled by the teenage behaviour exhibited in Harmony Korine’s ‘Kids’? Or were you a teenager yourself and wishing that your life was that gritty and exciting (but without the HIV)? Either way, this look back at the cast of the film, and the NYC skate culture which spawned them, is a great piece of writing and evokes an era before videogames made skateboarding cool again. 
  • In Which A New York Times Author Tries Being A HipsterMuch, much less sneery than you would thing, I promise, and comes out making you laugh and feel oddly hopeful.
  • A Year OfflinePaul Miller took a year off from the internet; this week, he came back. This is his piece about what it was like, and what he learned about himself along the way. If you believe that we would all just be happier if we stopped using the internet, this may not be the article you want to read.
  • Creepy Things Kids SayThanks to Josh, Alex and Dan for putting me onto this. CHILDREN ARE TERRIFYING (well, these ones are).
Image by Jens Ingvarsson

 

NOW THE EMBEDDED VIDEOS CAN COMMENCE:


1) All that talk above about Facebook data leads nicely onto this first video, which is a beautiful little short which uses Google Autocomplete to poignant effect. This is our life, as Google sees it:

2) A man, dressed in weird papercraft drag and Sailor Moon costumes, dancing camply to ‘Do My Thing’ by Estelle and Janelle Monae. No idea why, but there’s something about this that makes me rather like the fellow:

3) Socially conscious hiphop alert! I featured an Akala freestyle on one of the FIRST EVER Web Curios back in the day, back when I had some semblance of editorial control and these things were 1/4 as long as they are now. Great times. Anyway, this is the man’s third go at Fire In The Booth, Charlie Sloth’s freestyle segment on his 1Xtra show, and it is BRILLIANT. Really worth properly listening to this:

4) Really nicely stitched walkthroughs of Google Maps using Streetview in this one – Strip Steve with ‘Hood’:

5) This is a Japanese animation about, I think, what it feels like to have a stutter. It actually becomes really quite hard to watch at the end – there’s a sense of frustration and yearning that’s really quite uncannily well-evoked. Also the art-style is awesome:

6) This reminds me of that advert for some camera firm from a few years back with frames becoming pictures and the whole thing zooming in and out of itself in a fashion that was both clever and massively disorienting – you know the one I mean? No? Oh. Anyway, this is all the more impressive for apparently involving no digital manipulation. Will make your head hurt, but in the best possible way:

7) I was in Mexico recently. This isn’t set in Mexico – it’s Bolivia, fact fans – but really makes me want to go back there. This is so beautifully shot, the song’s good and the video doesn’t quite go where you think it will. Landshapes with ‘In Limbo’:
{vimeo}62797737{vimeo}

8) Penultimately, this is a glorious song (I think) with an equally lovely video about an unlikely romance between two misfits. And some lovely dancing too. Everyone’s a winner! Young Galaxy with ‘Pretty Boy’:

9) Finally, we close out with this EPIC multiple-SpyvsSpy extravaganza from Vitalic. This is the very stylish promo for ‘Fade Away’. BYE!!!:
{vimeo}64310817{/vimeo}
 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 26/04/13

Reading Time: 16 minutes

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Original Virgin Brazilian Hair – Walworth Rd, SE17
Garudio Studiage, Photo of the week

I AM BACK! You’re lucky that I’m on a tight deadline this week, so you’re not going to have to suffer anywhere near as much as usual with the poorly constructed attempts to pull together an opening narrative. Suffice it to say, though, that I learned a lot in my absence – about abhorrent rapper Pitbull’s inexplicable popularity in the Americas; about the fact that there really are songs played in public these days which would make the OutHere Brothers blush; about how there is almost no song in the world that can’t be improved by being covered in Spanish with a lounge/bossanova backing…like Bohemian Rhapsody, for example. So much. But most of all I have learnt that I really quite like being away from the internet for a fortnight. You should try it, it’s healthy.

 
Oh, and MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSORS, you should also come along to this if you’re in London next weekend and are interested in webby technology stuff and THE FUTURE OF ENTERTAINMENT. It’s free, so it’s not like I’m really selling anything. Honest.

Of course the brief break has meant that I have returned refreshed and rejuvenated, and ready to dive head-first into the viscera of online culture. Or something. As you can tell, I didn’t spend my free time honing my metaphors. ONWARDS!

Self Portrait by Bogdan Rata
 

Internettish Media-type Things of Questionable Interest and Value But With Which Tradition Dictates We Start

UK Digital Literacy: Ofcom’s annual datadump about how the UK uses the internet came out this week; unsurprisingly, more of us than ever are online, more people are using smartphones, etc etc etc. This stuff is interesting up to a point, but as ever contains some slightly odd language / taxonomy which skews the findings somewhat; the statement that “nearly half (41%) of 16-24 year olds don’t read newspapers or magazines” simply isn’t true – they’re just reading them online is all. Small point, but worth noting. Buried in there somewhere are a couple of interesting figures about people’s attitudes to community, too – apparently “slightly more than one in three adults (37%) agree that they consider themselves to be involved in the local community, with around half (50%) disagreeing. Adults aged 16-24 are more likely to disagree (59% vs. 50%)”. Insert your own assumption about the alienating effects of the internet here.

Google:

Facebook:

  • Mobile Page RedesignSmall-but-significant (if you do stuff on Facebook for brands) – Pages on mobile are being redesigned (a bit) to make them a bit more useful. I can’t be bothered to explain it; it seems most important for brands / companies with physical locations tied to their pages (as one might expect).
  • Thinglink Comes to FacebookI’ve mentioned ThingLink before, I think (and they don’t even pay me, though I am of course open to offers) – it’s a service which allows additional data to be ‘tagged’ to an image (so, for example, you can tag a picture of a pair of trainers with information about where it’s sold, a video of a famous person wearing them, an animated gif of someone fetishising them in a slightly creepy manner, etc), which data travels with said image wherever it might go, be embedded, etc. It’s been integrated into Twitter for a short while now, but has been rolled out to Facebook this week. It would seem to make fairly obvious sense for brands to use this sort of thing as a matter of course, probably, maybe, particularly if you sell directly to consumers or want to share vouchers, coupons, etc. I think.
  • FriendFrackerThis won’t last long, but give it a try while you can. FriendFracker will automatically delete between 1-10 of your Facebook Friends at random. It won’t tell you who, nor will it tell them. See if you notice! Somewhere in a ‘creative’ office somewhere in the world, someone is thinking ‘Yes! Just like that Burger King ‘Sacrifice’ app from years ago that people still wang on about!’ and trying to work out how to shoehorn this functionality into a client campaign. They’ll probably call it something like ‘Russian Roulette’. That’ll be £10 please.

Twitter:

  • Video Ads embedded in TweetsWhat it says there. This is being trialed by BBC America as part of its promotion of Dr Who in the US; let’s see if it takes off. I’m not 100% clear as to why brands would pay for this when you can…er…embed video in Tweets already, but I am doubtless being dense.
  • Twitter Needs a ‘Nope, Sorry, I Was Wrong’ ButtonRelated to the Boston/Reddit/Buzzfeed thing above, this is a smart piece highlighting the need for a function which allows people to flag when something that they have previously tweeted has changed; effectively, to make post-facto amends to tweets which also apply to RTs, etc. 

Campaigns and Things:

  • UNICEF – Likes Don’t Save LivesThis got a lot of love online yesterday – UNICEF’s highlighting of the disconnect between ‘Liking’ something on Facebook and making any sort of difference at all. Although, of course, it sort of ignores this campaign which they’ve been doing for years with Pampers
  • The Biscuit/Content Event HorizonIncredibly, this REALLY IS biscuit-related content (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, go here); a campaign for Weetabix’s breakfast biscuits which allowed people to get a free sample of said product by taking a picture of an ad which aired on Monday evening and then brandishing at a cashier in certain shops). Not totally stupid, although as pointed out by someone else it’s quite hard to track and you really might as well just tell people to go and whisper a secret word to the cashier. 
  • WW1 Facebook Timeline: A nicely made Facebook Page for Léon Vivien, a WWI soldier, put together by Le Musée de la Grande Guerre de Meaux. Not a super-new concept, but nicely executed and shows how the medium can be used for historical / educative purposes. Erm, it’s all in French FYI.
  • Order Pizza Through XBoxNot sure how much additional explanation is required for this. Needless to say, this isn’t great news for the health of young men in the Western World, probably. Unless you’re using Kinect, in which case it probably all balances out. Doesn’t it?
  • Icelandic Anti-Incest AppI had no idea about this, but apparently Iceland is so small that there are problems with people involuntarily sleeping with people who are related to them in some minor fashion. This app aims to stop that, by incorporating data from ‘The Book of Icelanders’, which contains details of the country’s genealogical history.  
  • Local Hockey Team Season Ticket Campaign Less Successful Than HopedMy favourite PR-ish story of the week, and a cautionary example as to why you should never put yourselves in the hands of the online community. I’m almost tempted to buy a season ticket myself so the poor buggers can get down and go home. 
Transluscence by Anthony Wallace
 

LISTEN TO SOME MUSIC: Why not make it this 35+minute mix of rather excellent crate-dug vinyl?


Stuff I Have Found Interesting This Week, pt.1

  • Potentially Lethal BoozeThis is a recipe for weed-infused drinks. I don’t think that there’s any way in which this could be good for you, but if someone wants to try cooking some up in the spirit of enquiry then please do let me know how it does (once you regain the power of speech).
  • The Future of Mobile TV (or not): I don’t 100% understand how this works, I must confess, but I think that it streams live TV direct to your mobile or tablet (but only if you live in NYC, at the moment). Obviously this isn’t massively appreciated by broadcast networks, so no idea whether it will survive, but it’s an interesting development and probably quite technologically significant in ways I’m not quite clever enough to understand.
  • Best Website-based Music Video of the YearTurns out this was on B3ta last Friday, for which apologies but a) I wasn’t here; b) it’s still good and deserves linking to again. A great concept, well designed, and interesting as much as a piece of group psychology as a technological / artistic exercise. Although scary to see how much we are all alike in terms of how we respond to certain stimuli. Have a play.
  • Macabre NYC Walking ToursYou know the slightly macabre Jack the Ripper tours that you can do in London? How soon is too soon for that sort of thing? Test the boundaries of taste with Walking & Stalking, an iPhone app which guides you around the location of some of NYC’s most notorious 20th Century true crimes! As the blurb says, ‘see the crimes that inspired the movies!’. Yes go on, you ghoul, you do that very thing.
  • The Terrifying Homogeneity of Korean Plastic SurgeryI’ve just realised that this is on the Mail today. Oh well, hey ho – that’s what happens when you source things from Reddit. Take a look at the scarily similar faces of Miss Korea 2013 entrants.
  • The Drone ProposalWeb Curios confesses to being a bit obsessed with drones so far in 2013. The craze continues apace, with this San Franciscan turning everyone’s favourite anonymous death machine into a kooky vehicle for a marriage proposal! Creepily cute or cutely creepy – the relatively low price of drones, though, means we’re only going to see more of this stuff (witness, for example, this college football team using one in training). Particularly in PR / Marketing – there’s going to be a big brand stunt with one of these soon, I reckon (if there already has been then I am still right, just…er…late).
  • A Mix for the British MuseumThis is a beautiful idea. Magnetic Magazine are, in their own words, ‘challenging some of EDM’s most talented DJs and producers to render their own acute perceptions of an architectural space by way of a medium that we hold so dear, the DJ mix. Rather then limit your experience of a distant piece of architecture to a Google image search, Sounds & Spaces will establish an archive of EDM that will contribute to our perception and understanding of the built world’s most exalted gems’ (EDM, for those unfamiliar with the acronym, is Electronic Dance Music. So now you know). For their first commission, they’ve engaged genius (not an exaggeration – the man’s got a Phd in computational biology, which is quite hard) Max Cooper to soundtrack the British Museum – take a listen, it’s lovely. 
  • Documenting the Changing World of JournalismDeadline is a photoproject by Will Steacy, looking at the cutbacks and layoffs brought on by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s circulation declines, numerous ownership changes and 2009 bankruptcy. It’s a poignant look at the way in which the newspaper industry has changed (almost) beyond all recognition in the past century. 
  • Portraits of BostonAnother site, of which there seems to be one for each US city, collecting photos of random citygoers with a little bit of information about them. A massive timesink, really interesting, and yet another website / project which I think someone more talented and motivated than me should replicate in London. Please?
  • Tokyo City SymphonyThis is a project to mark the 10-year anniversary of Roppongi Hills, which Google has just told me is a ‘new urban centre’ and one of Japan’s largest integrated property developments in a district of Tokyo (no, I don’t really know what that means either). This is a cute, odd website which projects interactive visuals with music onto a very small model of the development, allowing users to create their own little audiovisualvideothing. It’s very nicely made, as we’ve come to expect from Japanese development.
  • I Don’t Really Know What This Website IsBut it’s confusing, odd and a little bit creepy, and as such ticks all the Web Curios boxes.
  • Sewn Found PhotographyLisa Kokin combines found photography and needlework to strangely poignant effect. 
  • Digital Public Library of AmericaThis is an excellent digitisation project, purporting to give online access to the archives of America’s libraries, archives and museums. There’s SO MUCH STUFF in there – another, very geeky timesink.
Image by Allen Ying
 

Stuff I Have Found Interesting This Week, pt.2:

  • Browser AccordionPlay the accordion by resizing your browser window. A throwaway conceit, nicely made – and actually quite clever design both in terms of coding, etc, and the relationship between the virtual activity and its real-world analogue (I know that there must be a term for this, but I am struggling to think of it – it’s something a bit like skeuomorphism, but not that. Anyone?).
  • A New Form of Music NotationReally interesting attempt to update traditional musical notation; I’m sadly not a musician (despite my HUGELY IMPRESSIVE Grade 4 guitar), but maybe someone who is can tell me whether this is a good idea or not. Similarly, this was on the Guardian this week about the search for an alternative to the QWERTY keyboard (also contains more about skeuomorphism)
  • 18 Cadence – Another Interactive Fiction Model: 18 Cadence is…er…another interactive fiction model. This allows users to piece together story fragments and details together in a variety of different ways, which stitch together in a variety of ways to create a variety of different potential Frankennarratives. It’s cleverly made and worth a play.
  • SciFi InterfacesA blog which analyses the technology design in scifi films and tv series. A bit scary in terms of the attention to detail shown, but there are some very astute observations in here about what makes good design, etc. They’re doing the 5th Element at the moment, which also gives me an excuse to remind myself of Tricky’s AMAZING future-West Country accent in that film (sadly underrepresented on YouTube).
  • The Alternative Limb Project: Some incredible prosthetics here -incredible fusions of medical technology and art.
  • ScribblerA cute little generative drawing tool. Very easy to create some rather cool effects through this, even if you’re a cack-handed anti-artist like me.
  • The Ultimate Status TimepiecePatek Philippe? Pah. TAG? Nah. This is an iPod-size, £300,000+ timepiece which is one of 8 worldwide and measures millennia. Christ alone knows why you would need or want one – and frankly, if you can afford that then you should probably consider making a donation to the sadly underfunded Matt Muir indolence trust instead. THANKS!
  • Restaurant Reviewed By Child, In PhotosQuite a nice idea – SF Chinese restaurant reviewed via the medium of one child’s facial expressions whilst eating. Obviously what now seems cute as it’s the first time I’ve seen it will of course become MASSIVELY IRRITATING when every single parent in the western world decides to document their offspring’s adorable taste reaction pictures. Til then, though, the people at Cow & Gate can have this for free.
  • Photos of Spiritualists: Shannon Taggart has taken some cracking pictures documenting the in-no-way-fradulent world of the spiritualist community.
  • “2 Grams for $40”: A brilliant if somewhat irresponsible way to make use of your 50,000-odd Twitter followers. There’s some truly questionable judgment on display here, not least from the people who are apparently former felons. Try it on your parents, kids! (NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for familial relationships destroyed as a result).
  • Photographs of Stag & Hen Parties in BlackpoolProsaic description, amazing photos. I had to spend quite a lot of time in Blackpool a few years ago when I worked in politics – I can safely say that these images are broadly representative of what the place looks like (particularly during Party Conference season, if I recall correctly). 

A Selection of Videos That Aren’t in the Embedded Bit at the Bottom:

  • San Francisco in 1955Beautiful nostalgic footage, in colour, and it all looks so CLEAN and LOVELY. 
  • Angry Poetry about Harry PotterI confess to having had NO IDEA about the fact that the character of Cho Chan in Harry Potter was at the centre of a minor furore about the representation of Asians in popular culture (most probably due to the fact that I am a 33 year old caucasian man). Nonetheless, she is – this is a piece of spoken word about the whole thing by Rachel Rostad which is not only interesting but also rather good.
  • Bobby: 19 seconds of mental weird. Anyone able to tell me what film this is from?
  • Kiss Me (Alternative Version)Ah, 1998! SO MUCH NOSTALGIA! Or was it 1997. Can’t remember. Anyway, at some point in the 90s dull-but-ubiquitous Christian pop-moppets Sixpence None The Richer were EVERYWHERE with that bloody song ‘Kiss Me’. You may have thought you never needed to hear it again, but you probably didn’t know that someone had recorded a version in Kllingon. YES, QUITE. 
  • What Is Big Data?Very clever little video explaining a bit about the concept of big data, what it can do and where it might be going. Concise and smart and worth watching / listening to, largely because if people are going to keep on using the sodding phrase you might as well know what it means.
  • More Killian Martin: This is the third time I’ve featured this guy, and I make no apologies. Another amazing, balletic and wonderfully shot skate video, this one shot in India. Relaxing like cocoa.
Untitled by Fintan Switzer
 

The Circus of Tumblrs:

  • Women Holding FishTo the best of my knowledge, there is nothing sexual about this.
  • My Dead Parents: Slightly harrowing personal history project looking at the author’s relationship with their dysfunctional alcoholic parents. 
  • Stills from Films (With Associated Colour Palettes)More interesting than you’d think, and useful around issues of shot composition, etc, for photographers and cinematographers alike. Oh, and chromatics enthusiasts.
  • Bad Covers from Bad Romance NovelsSave yourself a fortune on hipster-ish greetings cards by bookmarking this and printing out a bunch of them on purloined office stationery. You’re welcome!
  • Hanksy: Tom Hanksy is a stencil artist from NYC who does pop-culture-themed Banksy-ish art, with some fairly dreadful punnery.
  • Beautiful 8-bit-style Gifs: What it says on the tin. There’s a nice aesthetic sensibility present throughout these, though.
  • Boys’ ClubsA selection of institutions and bodies which remain resolutely men-only. Unsurprising but quite saddening.
  • Stereopeople: Stereoscopic gifs of apparently random people (and animals), with quotes. Oddly compelling.
  • Better SuperheroesIn a similar vein to the now legendary Monster Engine, this Tumblr collects drawings of female superheroes inspired by costumes worn by little girls. Some great illustrations here.
  • Draw Homer: A project which seeks to encourage PROPER artists from around the world to draw Homer Simpson, however they want. There are some cool interpretations of a pop-culture icon in here…
  • Simpson’s Drawing Club: …as there are in this, which is similar but for the whole Simpson’s unverse, and featuring drawings by non-PROPER arists.

LONG Reads:

  • Kevin Russ Makes A Living From iPhone PhotographyThe git. This is the apotheosis of the trend that started with mobile phones being fitted with cameras a decade or so ago – and possibly the apogee of the democratisation of the artist’s trade. Russ uses filters for his photos that anyone could use – he’s a good photographer but not an exceptional one, and the pictures he produces are certainly not beyond the reach of many other amateur snappers with access to decent scenery. What sets Russ apart is his willingness to be flexible, work from anywhere, and leave his friends and home behind to pursue the pictures. What his story shows, though, is a shift in opportunity – in many respects, it has never been easier for artists to make an income from work. Whether that income will, for most, ever be enough to have what might be termed a ‘traditional’ existence, though, remains to be seen. You can read more about Kevin  here – his Instagram feed is here.
  • Shopping for High-Grade Weed in CaliforniaThis is a really interesting and well-written look at the culture surrounding medical marijuana purchase and consumption in the US. Stylistically it’s possibly channeling a little too much of David Foster Wallace’s non-fiction style, but overall it’s excellent. Also, dabs sound TERRIFYING. 
  • How To Become Internet Famous (Without Existing)How to create a real-enough online persona for a fake person, for about £50. Not only interesting in general, but it pleases me because of its happy insistence that Klout & Kred and all that jazz are bunkum.
  • A One-Night Stand Under LockdownThe story of what happened when a one-night stand was forcibly extended by the Boston Metro Area lockdown the other week. Cute, and, as one commentator points out, must surely lead to marriage. 
  • Insane Sorority EmailI’m going to presume a degree of familiarity with the American fraternity system (hazing, meat helmets, and all sorts of charming behaviour) – this is an email that went sort of viral last week from a member of a sorority at the University of Maryland and it is TERRIFYING. You can almost see the flecks of spit flying from her mouth as she types. 
  • How To Write The London NovelExcellent piece of parody writing on VICE, which will ring tremendously true if you’ve ever read a London novel by Amis, Self, Smith, Hornby, Lanchester or any one of a number of other luminaries. DARTS!
  • The Bottom Logistics of Cocaine SmugglingNo! Wait! Come back! Ok, so it is about how much cocaine the average person can fit up their bottom, but it’s also fascinating on how smuggling works and also (unsurprisingly) biology. Also, will probably put you off either smuggling or using cocaine for at least 15 minutes or so. 
  • Eric Schmidt & Julian AssangeA full transcript of their conversation from last year. I’ll be honest, this is newish and I haven’t had the chance to read it all – am pretty sure that SOMETHING of interest will be buried within, though.
  • Bush Is Smarter Than YouIn the week in which the Bush Museum opens, Keith Hennessey, a former Bush adviser, writes an interesting take on the ex-President’s intellectual prowess. I’m not really in a position to comment on this one way or the other, except to say that, whilst at the BBC in Washington in early 2001, the considered opinion of all the long-standing US correspondents there was that Bush ‘wasn’t stupid enough to do anything that interesting’ during his Presidency. Obviously then one or two fairly major world events happened rendering those pronouncements pretty useless, but still.
  • The Story of SuckGreat time travel web-nostalgia time machine stuff from Wired in 1996, on the website ‘suck’, the first dotcom bubble, internet publishing and all sorts more besides. Definitely worth reading for anyone with a passing interest in web culture.
 
Image by David Solomons
 
 

 

NOW THE EMBEDDED VIDEOS CAN COMMENCE:

1) We start with a video that’s basically a distillation of all the digital web art guffery that I’ve been wanging on about for a few months now – gifs and glitches and janky 3d animations andall sorts of other stuff combine in Win Win by Landloper, along with a song that to me is oddly reminiscent of Gracelands-era Paul Simon:

2) Like dominoes? Like electro? Strangely fascinated by Rube Goldberg machines? Tolerant of stuff that pretends to be one-take video but which quite evidently isn’t? Great, this will be right up your street, then. A-Trak & Tommy Trash with Tuna Melt:

3) This one’s a week or so late, but SCREW YOU I WAS AWAY. If you’ve not seen it before, it may take you a little by surprise – LOGO with Cardiocleptomania:

4) Radiohead are unquestionably an excellent group of musicians who’ve got an incredible and enviable catalogue of work. They are, though, often accused of being a touch po-faced, a bit joyless. What I’ve always thought (no, really!) is that they could use a touch of middle eastern influence to lighten their tone slightly. How fortunate, then, that someone should have gone and made this remarkable cover of Karma Police:

5) So I know that this is almost certainly a really emo visual allegory for how HARD it is to be a teenager when you’re DIFFERENT and stuff, and not a very subtle one, but I can’t stop watching this clip. The colours and photography and everything are just great, and the song’s better than I at first thought. MS MR with Hurricane:

6) You know that really creepy monster with the eyes in its palms from Pan’s Labyrinth? Well, that, but in strange clayfaceman art form. Look, just watch it. Joy Wellboy’s song ‘Flush Me’:

7) Hipsters! Think your bike is impressive? Try one of these for size. Slightly terrifying video if you’re a bit afraid of heights:

8) By way of a pre-emptive apology for the next one, have some Cookie Monster vs Tom Waits joyousness:

9) Finally, welcome to the oddest video of the week. I don’t really know what to say about it, other than that it’s quite NSFW due to CGI nudity. HAPPY WEEKEND, EVERYONE!!!

 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 05/04/13

Reading Time: 17 minutes

[image missing]

Just something I threw on this morning
Jo Jakeman, CC licence http://www.flickr.com/photos/jojakeman/2763061083/

Last weekend was Easter. Ah, Easter. It’s amazing how quickly the glow of a 4-day weekend can fade in the face of the annual cavalcade of companies lying to us and pretending its funny, though – also, for an April Fool to count doesn’t there have to be at least some possibility, however minimal, that someone might believe the ‘hoax’? Anyway, it made me angry, just like this person.

BUT then I got distracted by the saddest life in all of the world, a young man who’s putting an early but spirited challenge for the title of worst human being on the entire planet (and that’s including the man who wants to kill us all with BOMBS), the most horrible article of clothing ever devised, the best art gallery cafe EVER, the greatest Ninja in all of the Western World, the strange case of the man who got high on music, the oddest fetish-meme I’ve seen in a long, long time, and a truly unlikely – and unpleasant sounding – fatal argument between friends in Russia.

Of course, then I properly looked into the benefits reforms that kicked in this week, read this piece on the concentration of the super-rich around the world (circa 0.1% of Londoners have more than $30million in the bank, fact fans), and watched as people use a really sad story as a political football and got all depressed again. But it’s ok, though, as I am going on holiday for two weeks tomorrow. 

Yes, that’s right, it will be 3 WHOLE WEEKS until your next dose of Web Curios. I’ve made sure to make this one EXTRA GOOD, though (I haven’t really, it’s the same old tired collection of accumulated scraps and poorly-worked prose as it ever was). In my absence, feel free to mount some sort of candlelit vigil. Anyway, without further ado, let’s give the internet a colonoscopy TOGETHER!

Image by Brendan George Ko

SocialMediaMarketingPRAdvertisingCampaignsPlatformDevelopmentStuff
It’s unlikely that I will ever write a word that ugly again. 

Facebook:

  • Facebook HomeThere was going to be a Facebook phone, everyone said. They were going to MAKE A THING. Turns out that that was sort of half-right; Facebook Home is software rather than hardware, yes, but it’s also software that could (BIG ‘could’ there, obviously) become a default interface layer for the biggest mobile platform in the world. Which is quite smart really, not that you’d expect anything else. As to whether people actually *want* to have their phone’s usage filtered through a Facebook-designed UI…who am I to say (although I don’t imagine anyone will relish the inevitable future where the portable computer in your pocket is just another piece of advert-peddling plastic in your life – THANKS, FUTURE FACEBOOK!)? I barely use the thing any more. I saw a phone the other week which had a physical Facebook button on it – because life is just TOO SHORT for people to put up with more than one click to share pictures of their sodding food with their ‘friends’, it would appear – and nearly recoiled in horror; I’m unlikely to be target audience for this development. You can read more about how it will work here, some stuff about the (inevitable) privacy concerns here (but seriously, YOUR PHONE ALREADY TRACKS WHAT YOU DO) – and the best comment on the whole thing from some kid in the US here.
  • Speaking of AdsMore of them, in your newsfeed, tracking you better. I may stop writing about this stuff; we may as well all just assume that EVERYTHING we see on the internet is trying to sell us something and leave it at that. 
  • Better Ad AnalyticsBut seeing as I’ve started…FB has also tweaked its ad analytics, allowing advertisers to easily see exactly how ads have performed against specific metrics such as gaining new followers, ‘engagement per post’, etc. Which is basically just another way of Facebook reinforcing its incredible, symbiotic relationship with media buyers and allowing them to go to their clients “Look! We said we were going to increase engagement by buying adverts and we DID increase engagement by buying adverts now watch as I roll over so you can tickle my tummy because I am a GOOD ad buyer!”. It’s like the people at Ocado proudly demonstrating that they have achieved your stated shopping goal of buying salad, or something (it’s early and I’ve not really thought this through, so it’s entirely possible that that comparison really doesn’t work at all, for which apologies).
  • Threaded Conversations on PagesComments on FB Pages become more like those on Reddit, so it’s easier to see who’s replying to whom. That’s basically it, although this line is interesting: “Also, the most active and engaging conversations among your readers will be surfaced at the top of your posts ensuring that people who visit your Page will see the best conversations”. Hm, the best, eh? Try telling that to the brand which is dealing with the SOCIAL MEDIA CRISIS. 

Twitter:

  • More Twitter CardsNo, me neither. Twitter Cards are apparently those bits of code which allow web devs to code pages so that content shared from them can appear as a thumbnail / preview in a user’s Twitter feed. You know – when you share a photo or video or something, and you can see it / play it without leaving Twitter. That. Anyway, they’ve expanded the service – useful to know if you (for some people. Maybe not you, though).
  • Vine – Good & Bad ExamplesA look at some good and less good examples of Vine used for branded communications. There is something a little silly about this amount of attention / analysis being given to a medium which allows the creation of 6-second video clips, isn’t there?
  • Twitter on Bloomberg TerminalsThis is my ‘under the radar but actually quite significant news item of the week’ (part of an in-no-way-regular series). Traders on the floor of Wall Street will be getting Tweets fed to them through their Bloomberg terminals – which in terms of rubber-stamping the platforms centrality to the way information moves in 2013 is pretty big. It’s also very big news for large corporates – at the very least, it sort of demands that they use Twitter for news dissemination and media relations, to an extent, as it’s feeding directly into the market and has suddenly become hugely price-influential. Not that it wasn’t already, but, y’know, moreso.

Google:

  • Building Apps on GlassThis is a 50-minute developer video, and is NICHE. Nonetheless, if you’re in any way interested about how Glass will work, how developers can work with it, and a few of the tricks it has up its sleeve, it’s worth a skim.
  • All of Google’s April Fool’s GagsIn case you’re not bored to tears with all this crap yet. Even if you are, though, you need to doff your cap to the amount of time and effort which Google devoted to make the whole ‘We’re shutting YouTube’ one – there was a whole additional 8 hours of video which they put together to go with it, which is an impressive commitment to a throwaway gag.
  • Use Gifs as Google+ Profile PicturesIf you’d like to, you can.
  • Visualise Website AnalyticsThis isn’t by Google, and it’s basically just a marketing tool, but it’s still actually quite cute – service produces a nicely designed poster-style analytics report for your website. Useful for reporting purposes, perhaps, maybe.

LinkedIn:

  • Mention and Tag People/Brands on LinkedIn: You know how you can name people and tag them in Facebook posts? You’ll be able to do that on LinkedIn soon. Possibly of use to those few brands who have found a viable use for LinkedIn other than recruitment – all 7 of them.

General Internetty Newsy Things:

  • Social Media Usage Habits in the UKThis is actually 3 weeks old. SORRY. In case you didn’t see it, though, it’s some useful-if-you-need-to-justify-something stats on UK social media usage. Everyone uses Facebook! Lots of them on mobile! The kids ARE on Twitter! 17% of the UK population uses Google+! Er, wait, what, hang on? You can see the full report here – which makes it clear that the sample size was 1,000. I’m going to take that Google+ stat with the requisite pinch of salt, in which case. 
  • On the Utility of Social Media MarketingI love this piece, largely as its central thesis seems to be ‘well, this stuff seems to work. A bit. Sort of. Muchlike a load of other stuff. We don’t really know why, though. Or how. But it can’t hurt to throw money at it, can it?’. Which is BRILLIANTLY HONEST. Oh, and I KNOW that the pradvermarketing industries CAN track stuff and SHOULD track stuff and and and. It’s all just lies, though, isn’t it, really, when it comes to a lot of this? What’s that you say? 49billion earned impressions of your campaign across digital channels? Come off it, people, not even you believe this stuff any more.
  • How Bitcoin WorksYou can’t move on the internet for people writing articles about Bitcoin at the moment, and how it’s changing EVERYTHING (until I am able to pay the aforementioned Ocado man with it, I’m not convinced). The link back there explains how it works – so does this piece, in slightly more detail. Read it, and then nod knowingly and stroke your chin when someone tells you that they are jacking it all in to go Bitcoin mining (this piece explains why they’re probably a little late to that party, in case you’re interested).
  • Tracking the Harlem ShakeYou remember that Harlem Shake thing? No? Oh you fickle, fickle people. In any case, this is a really interesting look at some of the factors which made it temporarily the BIGGEST THING ON THE INTERNET – there were, unsurprisingly, one or two commercial factors involved. Another nail in the coffin of the phenomenon of natural virality.

Campaign-type Things:

  • Crowdsourcing Carly-Rae Jepson’s Lyrical Output with CokeI think that, after this point, noone is ever allowed to tell a musician that they have sold out ever again. The concept is simply redundant. This is the apotheosis of Simon Cowell’s decade-long forced-mating of music and brand culture, in which American Idol, Coca Cola and doubtless charming internet pop-mopsy Carly-Rae Jepson collaborate to produce what will almost certainly be the best song that has ever been written by anyone, ever, in the history of soundwaves. I don’t really want to write much more about it, as it sort of makes me a bit sad, but you can see the whole campaign thing here.
  • WiFi Poster Campaign: This is smart. A poster campaign in Korea included WiFi devices in billboards for a certain film, giving passers-by the opportunity to download the trailer and other bits and pieces quickly and for free. Clever and helpful.
  • The Best Job In The WorlzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzThe one certainty in advermarketingpr is that there’s nothing better than a truly original idea – other than a slightly different take on an idea that’s worked pretty well for a load of other people before you! Here’s a hotel chain doing their very own riff on the best job in the world thing, this time advertising for professional sleepers to test their beds. CAN WE STOP THIS NOW PLEASE? Thanks.
  • UNICEF Vending MachineI really like this (video’s in Portuguese, but it should be fairly comprehensible). UNICEF set up a vending machine in a shopping centre, allowing people to directly ‘buy’ vaccines for children. It’s an excellent execution, although if you think too hard about it it does say a couple of worrying things about how hard-connected the ‘make a physical purchase, feel an endorphin rush!’ thing is.
  • Rijksmuseum Flashmob: The PR around the full reopening of the Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam has been nothing short of spectacular – it was EVERYWHERE, yesterday. This is one part of that superb execution – I am bored of faked flashmobs, but this put a smile on even my jaded fizzog. Watch.
Lisa Gerber by Jeanloup Sieff

Things of Interest and Wonderment, pt1:

  • Soundtrack this section with the SUBLIME Jazzmatic – Nas’ Illmatic, reimagined as being recorded in a 30s jazz style. So much better than it should be based on that description.
  • Minuum – A Typing SolutionI think this is a lovely piece of design, particularly for people with fat fingers. A minimalist keyboard interface which allows for fast, non-accurate, auto-correcting typing. Obviously the proof is in the usage, but it’s a clever idea.
  • Recalling 1993I love this. An urban history project taking place in New York City, put together by the New Museum, which allows anyone in the city to access location-specific memories from 1993 from payphones located around the city. It’s SUCH a lovely idea, and a brilliant example of clever urban storytelling and use of civic infrastructure. Can we do this everywhere, please? Obviously London no longer really has working phoneboxes, but RFID tags in park benches which play audio, perhaps, or something to do with those WiFi enabled posters from Korea which I mentioned above…So much potential. 
  • Vogue Meets Star WarsNo, really. In 1977, the cast of Star Wars (in character) appeared in a fur photoshoot in US Vogue. Very weird pop-culture/fashion crossover.
  • NYT Haikus: Sticking with NYC, this is one of the NYT’s seemingly-infinite stable of websites – this time, showcasing accidently haikus which have appeared in the paper, as picked out by an algorithm. There are some occasionally quite beautiful ones in there, but aside from anything else it’s a pleasingly abstract / pointless project. 
  • The 100 Most Significant Websites of 2013 in the UKAs of tomorrow, the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College Dublin, will gain powers to archive the entire UK web, along with e-journals, e-books and other formats. This is the list of those websites chosen by the institutions as the most significant / interesting / representative; it’s a fascinating look at what our nation’s curators think of as our national identity as expressed online. 
  • The Dead Duck StoryI first heard about this duck thing about 10 years ago, and it’s stuck with me ever since. This TED talk is about how one duck changed a man’s life forever. It’s an…erm…odd story, and one which really does give lie to the whole ‘cuddly nature’ idea. As an aside, I once told the duck story to a room full of civil servants at a party, only to be met with stunned and slightly horrified silence and a slow shuffling away – turns out it’s not as good an icebreaker as I might at first have thought. Oh, and bonus-duck.
  • Pictures of HoliHoli is the Hindu festival of colour, and these are some gorgeous pictures of it from last month. Cheering as we limp, pitifully, into British Summer Time.
  • Obscure Hiphop Motherlode: There is SO MUCH excellent music on this site (if, that is, you like 90s=ish hiphop. I do).
  • Killing CoolA website for creatives who are frustrated by their clients persistently failing to acknowledge the genius behind their ideas, allowing them to keep track of ideas that are ‘killed’ and get rewards for milestones hit (500 ideas killed? HAVE SOME STICKERS!). Sometimes ideas deserve to die.
  • My Little Pony Love SpatThere aren’t really any adequate words for how odd this is. Suffice it to say that it’s a letter written by a man who seems to seriously believe that he is in love with, and will marry, a character from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (an aside: how LONG is that Wikipedia entry? About as long as the one for ‘Gene’, fyi) to another man who gets his jollies drawing sexually explicit pictures of said pony engaged in heavy-duty acts of congress. It’s entirely SFW and VERY ODD.
  • Lifehacks from QuoraQuora’s a bit of a forgotten site these days, but it regularly throws up interesting / useful threads – like this one, which collects some genuinely useful tips for better living. You can see some of the better ones at Quora Spotlight.
  • Pictures from VietnamBack to Boston.com for this collection of never-before-seen images from Vietnam. Some great photos, from an exhibition which opens today in Portland, OR, USA.
  • Every UK Number One Album, Reviewed in Such a Way as to Make You Want to Listen to ItNo more, no less. There is some brilliant writing on there, not least the one about Charles & Diana’s BBC Royal Wedding album. Go read.
By E.V. Day

Things of Interest & Wonderment, pt2:

  • Separated by a Common LanguageA great blog (for people interested in linguistics, culture and the like, at least) looking at the differences between US and UK English. Geeky and technical, but also full of interesting etymology (if that’s not an oxymoron).
  • America Hates AtheistsAtheist is a shoe company based in Berlin. They are SUPERHIPSTER! Nonetheless, they ran an interesting experiment to see whether or not their brand name affected the likelihood of their goods successfully reaching customers in the US. Turns out it did – seems that employees of the USPS aren’t only prone to homicidal fits of rage, but they also LOVE JESUS.
  • The Crimer ShowThis is…well, I don’t know what it is. A website and Twitter account which basically tells CRIME stories in a tone of voice halfway between LOLCats and Clueless Joe. It made me laugh, which is obviously the only important thing about it.
  • Polaroid Portraits by Max GalimbertiSo this man has photographed MANY FAMOUSES, and so is probably quite famous himself; nonetheless, this is the first time I’ve seen his brilliantly kaleidoscopic polaroid portraits – they are BRILLIANT.
  • The Architecture of DensitySeeing as we’re doing photos, these are great – hyperdense cropped views of battery-packed urban living. Screws with your head a little bit if you start to imagine ALL THE LITTLE PEOPLE behind the windows. 
  • NeurofictionI don’t think that this is an April Fool. It seems genuine enough, but it also seems utterly fantastical and a bit…well…impossible. It purports to be tech developed in Scotland, with the support of New Media Scotland, which READS YOUR MIND and then generates stories for you on the fly based on data pulled from an encephalogram (is that what they’re called?). Effectively it can ‘read’ how you are reacting to stimuli and then deliver alternate content based on what you appear to want/like/dislike. Expect something like this to do something spine-chillingly horrific as part of a Hallowe’en event / installation sometime in the next few years (or sooner, if I can get my mitts on it).
  • What We Wore: A project documenting the style history of the UK, from the 50s to now. Some great nostalgiapics in there, and some truly dreadful haircuts, Warm, fuzzy nostalgia – you can lose yourself in this one, a bit.
  • The Imaginary Poetry of Sally DraperI don’t watch Mad Men (or indeed any of the HBO megaseries. Sorry about that) but I understand that there is a teenage character called Sally Draper in it. These are her poems, as imagined by Jennica Harper. They’re really good – a touch Judy Blume (with less Ralph).
  • Cats Can Be Your FriendOr so this rather cute photoseries of a small girl and her cat would suggest. Don’t normally do ‘cute’ in here, but these really are rather nice.
  • The Best Worst Album Cover You’ll See All WeekI’m sure this practice has a name, but I can’t for the life of me think what it might be. 

Image by Jack Davison

The Circus of Tumblrs (BUMPER EDITION):

  • Depressed CopywriterUndermining the world of fake corporate cheer in advertising, one tear-stained post at a time.
  • Benedict Cumberbatch Drawn as Every Single Pokemon: Yes, that. No idea at all why, but it’s strangely compelling. Bonus points for the slightly unhinged URL.
  • International Relations as Depicted Through CatsThere is nothing so geopolitically complex which cannot be described or explained via the medium of feline photography and captioning, it seems.
  • Videogames in ToiletsOne man’s (come on, it’s not likely to be a woman, is it?) quest to comprehensively catalogue toilets in videogames throughout the ages. Obsessive.
  • Modernist ArchitectureA tumblr collecting B&W shots of modernist architecture. For one person this will be THE ideal mood board or inspiration this afternoon. You may not be that person, though.
  • Calvin & Hobbes GIFS: Not sure that this quite works, but here’s a Tumblr full of animated GIFS of Calvin & Hobbes panels. Quite surprised that the famously litigious Wa
  • Actresses Without TeethIn case you’re one of the 13 people yet to see this.
  • Stalking GUTSGUTS was a 90s Nickelodeon show in the US, billed as an ‘Action Sports Quiz’. No, I don’t care either. This Tumblr is brilliantly creepy though, as it goes through and SOMEHOW (and I am really impressed by the fact that they seem to be finding these people) tracks down former contestants on Facebook and posts ‘Then & Now’ photos here. I would like to see a UK version for, say, Knightmare, please. Thanks. 
  • Pictures of Blacked-Out NYCCollecting images taken during Hurricane Sandy. Some really good shots in here. 
  • KilopanoramaGlitched-out iPhone photos. Empty and a bit creepy and quite Lynchian.
  • Indifferent Cats in Amateur PornAs NSFW as the title would suggest. Amazing photobombing, porncats!
  • James Franco, With CatsNo porn this time (though for some of you I appreciate that BLOODY JAMES FRANCO might qualify). Included largely for the wonderfully poor photoshop in most of these pictures.
  • Vinnie’s Pizza Specials BoardVinnie’s is a pizza joint in Brooklyn. This is a Tumblr of its daily Specials board. Small businesses! THIS IS HOW SOCIAL MEDIA SHOULD BE USED.
  • Distractions in SpaceWhat astronauts might talk about, maybe.
  • Who Is That Hot Ad Girl?Creepy, stalkerish site which invites people to submit screencaps of actresses in adverts so that they can be identified by name. Not convinced that this is ok.
  • Street Hijab: Pictures of stylish women, in hijabs. 
  • What Ali WoreI posted this on Twitter last week and the response was ASTOUNDING. Girls in particular were SWOONING over Ali – and it’s easy to see why. As with the actresses/teeth thing, you’ve probably seen it already – I really hope some fashion brand makes Ali PROPERLY famous.

LONG READS!

  • Try this as a soundtrack for this little lot – ambient piano instrumental called ‘Every Day We Are Dying And Outer Space Does Not Give One Single F**k’.
  • The Man Who Sold Shares in HimselfA fascinating look at one man’s project to turn himself into a company, with shareholders who can dictate his existence. I am quite seriously considering buying some myself, just to see how it works. But that might be a bit too odd, not sure yet.
  • The Disbenefits of the Bacon-wrapped EconomyOk, so this is ostensibly about the Bay Area in the US, and the impact that having all these fabulously rich and very young people dominating the culture out there. The points it makes, though, about how the arts and cultural sectors can and should be funded, how relatively small demographics can skew a whole area’s identity, gentrification, responsibility and urban renewal are pretty universal, and worth reading particularly with reference to East London (yes, I know that there isn’t the money there, but there are still parallels).
  • A Very Sad Look at the ‘Erotica’ IndustryI’d always thought that David Foster Wallace’s ‘Big Red Son’ was the defining ‘straight’ look at adult industry awards – this one’s up there with it. You will feel nothing more than grubby when you’ve finished, but the writing is excellent. 
  • One Man’s Addiction To GucciThis will make you feel grubby too, although for different reasons. The story of one very, very rich man and his apparent quest to be made a fool of by a legion of fashionistas. Really, man, TAKE A LOOK AT YOURSELF. Also, the money involved is just jaw-dropping. Go read. 
  • On the Psychology of Extreme AltruismI like to think I’m quite a helpful person, which almost certainly means that I’m nothing of the sort. I, and almost certainly you, pale into insignificance when compared to the insane willingness to help displayed by US academic Adam Grant – this article examines how he does it, how he benefits, and whether it’s something we should all do more of (answer: we should).
  • All About VICENo question the smartest lifestyle/consumer/publishing company in the world right now, this is a look at the VICE empire, where it came from, how it works and where it wants to go. I wonder if The Man ever turns up to any of their board meetings.
  • Hugh HefnerThere have been no shortage of Hefner profiles, but this one’s particularly good and shot through with an elegiac sadness which you don’t often find. Definitely worth reading, this one.

Some Videos That Don’t Fit Down There:

  • Post-it AnimationPost-its used as pixels in animations are nothing new, but the effort put into this stop-motion short is astounding.
  • Calvin & Hobbes – The Gritty RebootThis spoof trailer for a Calvin & Hobbes reboot actually makes it look as if the concept could stand up. What would Calvin’s life be like now, if his prodigious and uncontrollable animation had never deserted him. PRETTY SCARY, it turns out.
  • This Week’s Odd Internet Art-thingThis is Michael the cat. Michael’s quite special. Also, he turns into a robot at the end.
  • Garrett’s FightI really don’t know how I feel about this, but the news report is really interesting and throws up a whole host of questions that I’m not about to attempt to answer here. This is the story of Garrett, a Down’s Syndrome man, and his nascent career as an MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) fighter. I cried A LOT whilst watching this, I warn you.
  • Lana Del Rey covers CohenI love Chelsea Hotel No.2 by Leonard Cohen. This is actually a very good cover, whatever you may think of Ms Lizzie Grant.
  • Flaming Lips & Bon Iver: This feels a little like it’s trying slightly too hard to be odd, but it’s still worth a watch because it’s the Flaming Lips and Bon Iver.
  • Watch OutFull disclosure – I know the person in this, but nonetheless it’s a really well cut short made by some South London teens. Someone give them some acting / editing work. GO ON, DO IT.
By Matthew Woodson

NOW THE EMBEDDED VIDEOS CAN COMMENCE:

1) This week kicks off with a short, slow motion piece of footage of people blowing bubbles with bubblegum. It’s relaxing and a bit gross at the same time, and really made me think of toads:

 
2) This video is a cross between mid-90s side-scrolling arcade games, The Smurfs and the entire art back catalogue of Robert Crumb. Needless to say it’s excellent, as is the song; this is…er…’Kleenex Girl Wonder’ by NUBBS:

3) Reverso is a short French animation about a man for whom gravity doesn’t quite work like everyone else. Charming, and technically excellent:

4) Staying on the theme of animation, have you ever wondered what it might be like to be the only straight flamingo at the annual flamingo gay pride party? I thought so – in which case, this video’s for YOU:

5) Short, bloody and not very sweet, this is my favourite song of the week. The Thermals, with Born to Kill:

6) Political campaigning is, we all know, becoming more and more sophisticated – I mean, just LOOK at this website, for example! Which makes this video effort by the Tea Party movement all the more odd – it’s just TERRIBLE. A look at the dystopian future in which the FILTHY LIBERALS have their way and all decent, God-fearing people are being taxed 100% and everyone’s so SOMA-d out with benefits that they have lost the entrepreneurial spirit that made America great and…oh, look, just watch it. All served with a healthy dollop of Hunger Games. AMAZING:

7) I know I feature OFWGKTA stuff on here quite a lot, but they do make good songs / videos. The latest from Tyler is for IFHY, and is not only really well put together but also shows off what a good actor the man is. Impressive, I think:

8) I’m not a fan of the song, particularly, but this is the most beautiful video I’ve seen in ages. Another one taking the aesthetic of high-quality B&W gifs and applying it to video, this is Back to Me by Joel Compass. If you only watch one thing, make it this one:

*

9) Finally, this is a really sad little animation about love and losing love. It’s called Howard. HAPPY WEEKEND, EVERYONE!!!

 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.
 

 

Webcurios 22/03/13

Reading Time: 15 minutes

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A hard morning at the bus stop
Catherine, CC licence http://www.flickr.com/photos/sailor_coruscant/2951094290/

Well, it’s been another tumultuous week (aren’t they ever thus), what with the export of the very best of Western Culture into China (truly, we have nothing left to give them), the opening of the best / worst-named restaurant in the world, the International Day of Happiness (WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN’T NOTICE) and NYC Macaron Day (why we don’t have one of these in London is a source of much agitation to me), the sad cancellation of what sounded like being an amazing gig, my realisation that there exists an anonymous confessions hotline in New York (I WANT ONE HERE PLEASE), and the discovery of the all-important recipe for home-made creme eggs.

There’s also, of course, been the small matters of the Bread & Circuses budget, a little bit of chat about the regulation of the press, the 10-year anniversary of Iraq War II…oh, yes, and the small and frankly absolutely insane vision of a whole country mugging itself. The Cyprus stuff is quite scary, to be honest, and given that it might drag us all into the mire with it I’m going to stop thinking about it now and move on to talking about stuff that, by comparison, is of no importance whatsoever. I know my place.

I went to see Louis CK last night (he was very good). He does a bit about how people present the very worst version of themselves online – we were discussing this in the pub afterwards, and my friend Mo charmingly said that I was quite the opposite and was basically loads better on the internet than in real life. YOU HEAR THAT, PEOPLE? THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE BEST OF ME YOU’RE GETTING HERE. Be grateful.

 

Taken from the fabulous Scarfolk blog

Advermarketingprinternetstuff (anyone with better suggestions for this, other than ‘the bit noone reads’, please do let me know):

GoogleThings:

  • Google KeepThis is basically Google’s version of Evernote – a service which lets people do all that ‘tag, store, note-take’ stuff which they all seem so keen on doing these days. Effectively it’s them saying ‘look, we know where you live – now outsource your memory to us as well! What’s the worst that could happen, eh?’ (I imagine them mugging and winking furiously to camera as they do so, for reasons known only to my subconscious). Obviously I am (possibly) exaggerating the sinister aspects of this for effect – it will probably be quite useful. If I were Evernote, I might be a bit scared. Although of course it could all go the same way as the other stuff in the Google Graveyard (speaking of which, if you do miss Google Reader then you might like this as an alternative).
  • Google Gif SearchIt’s increasingly seeming like there’s very little point building stuff if you’re NOT Google – even if you get there first, they’ll just make their own version of whatever you throw out a few weeks/months/years later and then crush you beneath their juggernuat wheels like the miniscule, insignificant whelp that you are. You may (or may not) recall Giphly, a nice little gif search engine I found a few months ago – this is Google doing that. Lose yourself in the Ryan Gosling gif universe – you know you want to.  
  • Google Unified Chat: Included more from the mistaken belief that completeness matters than from any burning sense of excitement, this is the news that Google is planning on unifying the ‘chat’ function across Gmail, G+, Google Drive, etc. Which is actually quite a clever idea, and probably has a lot of positive implications for potential customer services things if you’d like to think about them. Also, it’s rumoured to be called Babble WHICH SOUNDS LIKE BABEL. Just, you know, pointing that out. 
  • Nice Little Literary Promo for Collaborative Working: This is a very nice piece of work to promote collaborative working through Google Docs, which takes your prose and imagines what it would be like were you collaborating with a host of famous literary figures and they were editing your copy in real-time. What it would be like, by the way, is VERY IRRITATING – Shakespeare’s undoubted ability to spin a yarn doesn’t automatically give him the right to gussy-up my prose whenever he feels like it, the be-ruffed nincompoop.
  • YouTube TV Shows: I don’t really know whether there’s anyone who’s done Channels on YouTube that’s achieved proper mainstream crossover success – is there anyone? I mean, there’s big-if-niche channels like Machinima or Epic Meal Time, and I thinkk VICE are doing pretty well with Noisey, but I have no well-known they actually are. Anyway, will be interesting to see how the two new channels being punted by Ricky Gervais and Simon ‘Reality TV Sauron’ Cowell (copyright Marina Hyde on that one) fare – and even moreso to see how Reddit do with their new Explain It Like I’m 5 series, where they explain knotty concepts to actual 5 year olds (it is unclear what benefit the 5 year olds are getting from this deal. Jelly and icecream at the very least, I hope). 
  • Chrome Maze-y Thing: This is only going to work for you if you a) use chrome as your desktop browser; b) have an android mobile device which also runs chrome. If it does, this is fun-if-pointless – you can turn any website you like into a pretty fun little rolling marble game, controlled by tilting your phone. It’s a gimmick, but personally I was left really impressed with the tech and execution. 
 

Facebook:

  • Lookalike AudiencesYou may recall that last year Facebook gave advertisers the opportunity to upload a database of email addresses or phone numbers and target those people via ads, whether or not they were already connected to said advertiser on FB. Now you can not only do that but also advertise to people who Facebook thinks might be a bit like the people who’s data you’ve got. I’m skeptical as to how good this ‘people like this’ targeting is going to be – then again, Zuckerberg is a billionaire and I am most definitely not. so perhaps my opinion’s less than vital. 
  • Moderation GuidelinesIt’s actually unclear whether these apply solely to Facebook or a variety of sites, but they are from a third-party moderation service the like of which FB offloads some of its burden onto. Fascinating – and quite surprising – to see what you can and can’t get away with according to the powers that be.

Amazon:

  • ‘Send To Kindle’ ButtonBasically a ‘read this later’ button which sends whatever page you’re reading to your Kindle (if you have one. If you don’t, it won’t). Worth knowing about – you might as well chuck it on your website’s editorial content. 

Some Campaigny Things and Other Things:

  • Win The Chance Of Maybe Working at Subway!Subway is running what appears to be a global contest inviting entrants to create a ‘Virtual Subway’ franchise, complete a number of online challenges and get people to vote for their shop, all to win one of 5 trips to NYC & Washington DC to meet and Subway co-founder Fred Deluca. Another of the big selling points (!), though, seems to be the fact that high-achievers in this virtual contests will gain exposure to the Subway network and may be lucky enough to get picked up for a job. This is all very, very odd, although not as odd as the fact that, as things stand, about 800+ people appeared to have entered worldwide. I know that the job maket’s tough, but still…
  • BA UngroundedWhat do you think the best way in which to debate and arrive at solutions to the world’s greatest problems, such as talented people’s lack of access to opportunity, might be? If you answered “hand-picking 100 of the most forward-thinking founders, CEOs, venture capitalists, and Silicon Valley game-changers, and putting them on a flight from San Francisco to London”, with a view to then getting them to “present their ideas to ranking delegates from the United Nations”, then CONGRATULATIONS, you think just like someone from British Airways or their PR/Marketing/Ad agency. IS THIS A JOKE, BA?????
  • A Look at FourSquare Checkins in NYC & TokyoMainly because it’s quite a pretty visualisation. I still don’t know any real people who use 4sq (when I say ‘real people’, I mean people who don’t work in tech or advermarketingpr – we are not real people). 
  • A 3d Map of the InternetHaving repeatedly mentioned William Gibson last week, the theme continues with this video which shows a version of what the internet look like if you were to turn it into a 3d navigable THING. It’s slightly disconcerting, and really does make me think of what Gibson imagined when he wrote about Cyberspace (an aside – I went to see Evgeny Morozov talk at the RI this week, where he spoke about how the idea of “the internet” is a fundamentally wrong-headed one. He’s probably right (although for the purposes of Web Curios I will continue to do just that – sorry, but I haven’t got the time to semantically unpack exactly what I mean each time I type that phrase, which is, I know, lazy. SORRY EVGENY SORRY) – have a read of some of his thinking here and also here).
  • Facestealer: The AppThis is an app by Yahoo! Japan, which allows you to (and I quote) “WEAR SOMEONE ELSE’S FACE”. It’s creepy and horrifying and I suggest you try an download it at once.
  • Anti-Domestic Violence VideoI’m putting this up here as I’m 99% certain it’s part of a campaign for an anti-domestic violence charity, although which one (or any other linked elements) have yet to be revealed. I really, really hope it’s not a real video. Oh, and as with all YouTube videos you’re probably best off ignoring the comments. 
Domestic Camo (Image by Maria Kapajeva)
 

Listen! It’s A Mix of Rare Soviet Music by Solid Steel!

Other Things Off The Internet Which I Thought Were Worth Telling You About But I Can’t Guarantee Will Arouse Anything Other Than Moderate Interest, pt1:

  • Letters From A PrivateScanned letters home from a Private in the US Army, 1944-45. A beautiful little slice of very personal history.
  • The Future, As Seen From LA in 1988This is awesome – back in 1988, the LA Times ran a piece looking at what life would be like for citizens of LA in 2013. Certain elements are pretty close, but the traditional robot servant prediction remains sadly unfulfilled. Sort it out, science.
  • Slavoz ZiseK Writes for Abercrombie in 2003: Slavoj Zisek is a philosopher. For reasons known only to him (and, one would presume, someone at A&F), he ended up writing copy for Abercrombie & Fitch’s 2003 ‘Back To School’ lookbook. This is brilliantly weird – pictures of tanned, healthy, beautiful (and often naked) American youth, juxtaposed with frankly surreal phrases such as ‘The naked couple without the bespectacled teacher would be reduced to two clumsy ignorants unable to perform the act’. I would love a print copy of this.
  • OverdogThis is a really interesting idea – Overdog is a US project that is seeking to set up a community where sports fans can play videogames against sports stars. It’s smart – given that most athletes are young men in their teens/20s, most of whom will likely play videogames to get over the stultifying boredom of the life of the pro sportsperson (I’m obviously just jealous of their bodies and salary), and given that there’s a large crossover with fans in that they are often young, videogame-loving men too, you’d think that there might be a market for this. It’s even reasonably easy to see how they could monetise it. Sports brands people, get on this one. 
  • Author-to-Author FanlettersA lovely literary love-in here, with a selection of letters from famous authors in which they tell other famous authors how awesome they think those famous authors are. My favourite, though, is the Burroughs-to-Capote hatemail at the end.
  • TedX Summerisle: I would call this a hoax, but it’s unclear how many people were taken in by it. Nonetheless, it’s a really rather impressive piece of TRANSMEDIA!!!! storytelling which takes the uninspiring premise of crossing the breathless improvement-evangelism of the TED movement with the creepy fictional Scottish murdervillage of The Wicker Man
  • Tarantino vs Penguin BooksDesigner Sharm Murugiah has created Penguin Books-style designs for Tarantino screenplays. These really should be available as prints (says the never-satisfied, demanding, needy, entitled webmong).
  • The Cat Font: A font made of cats. It is what it is. 
  • Michael KeatonI really have no idea what is going on here, at all, in any way. Needless to say that this site doesn’t appear to be affiliated with the famous Michael Keaton in any way, but it does feature a lot of odd little comic strips and a slight-but-persistent feeling of alienation. Odd, but in a good way.
  • The Artist ExplorerInteresting little hack which breaks down artists by song data taken from Echonest and lets you play around / cross reference it. More interesting than useful, but it’s an interesting way of comparing artists’ output (in totally arbitrary and valueless ways, admittedly).
  • US Gun Deaths in 2013: A beautifully rendered animated visualisation showing data of gun deaths in the US so far this year. The ‘years stolen’ figure is gimmicky, but it does tug at the heartstrings somewhat. There’s full data for 2011 in there too, should you be interested.
Image by Ted McCabb
 

LISTEN! To Songs Which Inspired Daft Punk!

Other Things Off The Internet Which I Thought Were Worth Telling You About But I Can’t Guarantee Will Arouse Anything Other Than Moderate Interest, pt2:

  • TinyGames – A Worthwhile KickstarterI don’t ordinarily feature Kickstarters, but I like this one (and the people behind it). Hide & Seek are trying to get the money together to make an app featuring 100s of tiny games (you can see where the name came from), which can be played anywhere. Not videogames, mind – all sorts of different types. If I were a parent, I’d look at this and think “YES! THIS WILL BE A WORTH ADDITION TO THE iPHONE BABYSITTER’S REPERTOIRE”. I’m not a parent, though. That I know of. 
  • Casio Transmitter WatchI can’t believe this was on the market a year before that LA futurology piece up there. THIS IS AMAZING. Just think of the fun you could have – I’m thinking particularly in terms of what you could do to freak people out in traffic jams. Am I misunderstanding this? It seems like potentially the best childish prank tool ever. Is there an iOS app that can do anything similar?
  • Mark E Smith is Funny, GrumpyThe Fall’s famously irascible frontman’s best sayings, accompanied by images of his gurning fizzog. 
  • The Imaginary AtlasA website collecting cartography of fictional lands. You don’t need to be a geek to like this, honest – or, well, maybe you do. I think that there’s something strangely soothing about looking at maps of imaginary cities, but then again I also like playing videogames so perhaps I’m a lost cause. 
  • The Lullaby Factory of GOSHWHY DIDN’T I KNOW THAT THIS EXISTED??? A lovely, whimsical piece of architectural design, or a playful folly, or perhaps both simultaneously.
  • The 100 Most Influential Records of the 1960sNo more, no less, but a very comprehensive rundown containing some great songs I had never heard of. Musos will enjoy. 
  • InklewriterAfter Twine the other week, this is another Interactive Fiction-creation tool, which is (early impressions suggest) very easy to use and pretty powerful.
  • Fat & Furious BurgersThis is the apogee of burgers-as-art (actually ‘apogee’ would suggest that ‘burgers as art’ is a thing – it probably isn’t, is it? Oh well) – a French website containing beautifully constructed, stunningly photographed and often totally inedible burgers. In French.
  • Incautious ‘Art’: There’s a fine line between art and extorsion…Incautious is a project which scrapes comments from pr0n and sex websites – in particular, comments that contain phone numbers. These are then painted onto canvasses and act as one-off artworks for people to purchase. So far, so internet – the slightly dark bit is that they are looking to charge 1000Euros to anyone who sees their phone number listed on the site and wants to have it removed. Which, frankly, I don’t think is very nice. Imagine me pursing my lips disapprovingly as I type this, like a cat’s bottom.
  • Mastectomy TattoosPhotos of women who’ve had tattoos done over their mastectomy scars. I might question some of the art, but there’s something quite inspiring (sorry) about the sentiment behind them.

The Circus of Tumblrs

  • I’m GoogleThis is quite hard to explain, but it’s a little bit like visual word association by Dina Kelberman.
  • Noise Park: Bands and musicians from the noise / industrial scene, reimagined as characters from South Park (and frankly a load of other obscure people who I can’t really categorise). Needs a little bit of knowledge, but there’s a lot of nice attention to detail in there. 
  • Beverly Crusher’s Miniature TheatreThis is very odd. Gates McFadden played Dr Beverly Crusher in the Star Trek: Next Generation series. This is a Tumblr that she maintains, featuring the action figure version of herself in a variety of vignettes. I don’t really know what sort of effect doing this on a regular basis must have on her psyche. It’s all VERY meta.
  • Women Eating on the Tube: I’m linking to this mainly to let people know that it exists – there’s something a bit creepy / misogynistic about it, I think, although I can’t help but be darkly impressed at how many people manage to take pictures of strangers on the tube without being noticed. Although I did once take one of a woman who looked an awful lot like Marcel Desailly, which I’m not proud of. 
Image by Mash Design

Long Things Which Are Long:

  • The Age of the Expense AccountA really wonderful piece of writing, look back at the long-gone age in which well-connected foreign correspondents had their alcoholism subsidised by the 4th estate. A really good story about an era in which journalism really must have been rather a lot of fun (and very, very drunk indeed).
  • The Crucifixion of Tomas YoungThe title of the piece is too good to replace. This is the story of Tomas Young, an Iraq war veteran who was wounded in 2004. It’s not, I warn you, a very happy story, but one worth remembering given this week’s 10-year anniversary of the conflict. 
  • The Czech Republic on DrugsI must confess, I hadn’t linked the Czech Republic’s lax attitude to drugs and the never-ending stream of stag parties heading out to Prague. More fool me. This is an interesting look at what drug liberalisation has changed in the country. It sounds a bit grim – though that’s Spiegel’s editorial line as much as anything – but that’s as much due to economic factors as anything else. The meth thing’s a bit troublesome, though.
  • A Quarter-Century in Solitary: What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without talking to anyone, or being in company? This is an amazing piece of writing – the author is a convicted murderer, and obviously did Bad Things, but his account of what it’s like being in solitary for over 25 years is mind-boggling and not a little harrowing. It doesn’t, rest assured, sound like it’s been any fun at all.
  • Hislop On MediaIan Hislop’s always good value, and this piece (admittedly from a few months ago) is worth reading in the wake of this week’s Leveson chat. His description of Blair as “a man who constantly looks like he’s playing his own character in an action movie about himself” is lovely.
  • The Tragedy of Dr PolidoriIf you’ve ever seen the film ‘Gothic’ by Ken Russell, all about Byron and Mary Shelley and the rest during the laudanum-fueled week that led to the writing of Frankenstein, this piece will ring some bells; if you haven’t, it’s even more worth reading as it’s a fascinating account of some very brilliant, and very damned, young minds. The description of Polidori as someone who was basically destined to be nothing more than a footnote in his own life is brilliant and sad. Byron, though, eh? WHAT A LAD.
  • DIY SuperpowersEver thought of slicing your arm open and, say, putting a magnet inside it and calling yourself “Magneto”? No? Thanks Christ for that. Nonetheless, this piece provides an overview of some of the options for tech-oriented body augmentation. IT’S QUITE ODD.

A Few Additional Videos That I’m Not Putting Down There:

  • Nicholas Cage In ZeldaThe internet’s obsession with Nicholas Cage reaches what might be its apogee with this video of a hack applied to Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which puts Nic Cage’s MAD FACE all over the game. Interest in / knowledge of the original title is not required to get exactly how strange this is.
  • Mad SausageA campaign, being supported by the Mercy For Animals charity, to draw attention to the less-than-sanitary genesis of processed meat products. Quite odd.
  • Usher vs The Afghan Whigs: Surely this must have been one of the odder things to have happened at SXSW? OLD rockers The Afghan Whigs gigged with blandest-R’n’b-millionaire-ever Usher and it was actually QUITE GOOD.
  • How Webcomics WorkShort video looking at the economics of webcomics – frankly, though, what it says is applicable to most if not all creative endeavours you’re promoting these days, it seems.
  • Take My PictureA brilliant short looking at the ever-growing world of amateur fashion bloggers and photographers. People get REALLY excited by clothes, eh?
  • Singing VaginasNo more, no less. Not embedding this one for obvious reasons – it’s strangely sort of pleasing and happymaking, and is about as sexual as Puppetry of the Penis (ie not at all, in the slightest). Except, obviously, it does feature real vaginas, singing. So quite NSFW, then, so you know.
  • Fist Of Jesus: This is not the Jesus you remember. A very odd short film from Spain, featuring Jesus, zombies and a novel take on the loaves/fishes incident (skip to 7:40 to get to the heart of the oddity) – they’re raising money to make a full-length version, if you’d like to see more…
  • Guitarcam: THIS FEELS WEIRD.

NOW THE OTHER VIDEOS:

1) We start with a short film from a few years back, called “Are You The Favourite Person of Anybody?”. It stars John C Reilly, and also features Miranda July, and it’s pleasingly bittersweet:

2) WendyVainity is a YouTube ‘star’ who makes the sort of odd 3d animations which are sort of pointless and unsettling which I quite like. This is a showreel of some of her self-portraiture. THIS IS ART:

3) Once upon a time, doing the sort of bullet time-type effects made famous by The Matrix would have cost A LOT of money. Now you can do it for pennies (well, almost), just like these wizards of home cinema. A great ad for GoPro, this:

4) Doing stuff to stuff in slow-motion. There’s a lot of this stuff online, but this is a particularly fine compilation. Guaranteed to put a smile on your face, for reasons it’s quite hard for me to define:

5) This week’s first ‘Blimey, that’s a bit odd’ music video of the week comes in the form of this trippy little number from Lapalux. The song’s sort of minimally absorbing, but the video’s what makes this – it’s called “Without You”:

6) Odd video of the week, part 2 – apparently Dillon Francis is “an American electronic-dance musician, known for being one of the pioneers of moombahton, a fusion genre of house music and reggaeton, and moombahcore, a sub-genre of electronic-dance music deviating from moombahton”. Moobahton? Really? Are you making fun of me, internet? In any case, this is his wonderfully strange video for “Bootleg Fireworks”:

7) James Franco apparently has something to do with this, thought it’s unclear exactly what he does in the band – probably EVERYTHING, the insufferably goodlooking polymath. God I’m jealous of James Franco. Anyway, his band is called Daddy and this is the cultish video for Ted James’ remix of their 2012 single “Love In The Old Days”:

8) You’ve probably seen this already, but I don’t care. It’s brilliantly impressive, if not wholly original, and deserves all the views – it’s called ‘Forward’:


9) Last but definitely not least comes this, from Russian band ‘Biting Elbows’. I can’t type the song title for fear of profanity filters, but this is just BRILLIANT. Again, you may have seen it before but I’m posting it due to the number of people who sent it my way this week – again, it deserves the views (another great ad from GoPro, by the way):

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.

Webcurios 15/03/13

Reading Time: 17 minutes

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Dead Range Rover
Tim Parkinson, CC Licence – http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/2881061793/

So, we have a new spate of ‘parody’ Twitter accounts ushering in the new Pontiff. Thanks, everyone. It was a very surreal week in general, and one which made me incredibly glad that I wasn’t tasked with liveblogging smoke (that sounds like an analogy for something, and possibly ought to become one) – welcome, though, to Francis I from the internet and, most importantly, from the creative geniuses at Taiwan Animation (click on this, now. It features Dennis Rodman and a unicorn, and an unexpected reference to NBA Jam and references to the GAY VATICAN CABAL THAT FORCED BENEDICT FROM THE PAPACY (their words, not mine) – and still manages to be nowhere near as patently odd as the rigmarole surrounding papal succession).

 

 

Nothing else has been REMOTELY as exciting as the surprise election of an old white man to one of the World’s highest offices – frankly I have no idea WHAT we’re going to do to keep ourselves amused from now on. Maybe stuff like this (although I really do hope not). Anyway, there’s a lot to get through – grab your rosary and pray for divine intervention, for I am taking you deep into the godless world that is THE INTERNET (I may never have been more hyperbolic. Don’t worry, it’s still just links and stuff. Don’t be scared. COME BACK!).

iPope (Image credit: Michael Sohn / AP)

AdvermarketingPRinternetty Stuff:

TEXAS:

  • SXSW Overview: I may have mentioned last week that I wasn’t at SWSX and that I was IN NO WAY BITTER. On reflection, I’m really not. Anyway, for all you other proles who, like me, stayed home and forsook barbecues in favour of frostbitten extremities, the WSJ roundup of news is worth a look (Hater is my favourite, fwiw). Regular readers of this thing (I’m talking YEARS, here) may want to send me a congratulatory email and perhaps a present given that this year’s apparently revelatory BIG THEME was all about the confluence of physical and digital, which I may have been banging on about for a while now. You won’t, though, will you? Not even a postcard. You disgust me.


FACEBOOK:

  • More ActionsThis is going to keep on coming, but the verb invasion on Facebook continues apace, this time with the addition of Open Graph developer actions for ‘Rate’, ‘Run’, ‘Read’, ‘want to read’, etc… I think that the ones expressing desire are particularly interesting if you’re in the business of promoting stuff / things which people could reasonably be expected to look forward to (INSIGHT!!!) but, as I keep repeating and will continue doing until the world basically shows signs of agreeing with me, is unlikely to be of so much use if you have a Facebook Page promoting, oh I don’t know, toilets or something. 
  • Hashtags?So this is nothing more than speculation, and the article rightly calls out all the functional barriers to this working (protected statuses and general FB privacy stuff, basically), but this would potentially be a useful addition to the platform (primarily – you guessed it – as a way to sell more advertising!).

TWITTER:

  • More Promoted Tweet Analytics-y Things: After the Ads API thing the other week, this is another sensible move when it comes to showing advertisers quite how much bang Twitter delivers for their paid-media buck. Aside from that, though, the addition of all the information about ‘earned engagements’ (sorry) is actually very useful in terms of determining a campaign’s actual resonance and effectiveness. Depending on how good they get at drawing out detailed demographic info (which is harder for them than for FB as gathering that sort of info’s not part of the sign-up process) this could all be very powerful.
  • Twitter Developing Music App(?)Not sure if it needs the question mark, as it looks like a fait accompli, but nonetheless. Details are vague, but it seems to be that it will be some sort of magical taste-determining thingy which will be powered by SoundCloud (and, possibly, by magic. Who knows? I certainly don’t). 
  • Now With Added Line-Breaks: This is a brilliantly comical terrible idea. Twitter this week started to allow people to insert linebreaks within Tweets (although it’s only visible when viewing tweets on the Twitter website). What this basically means is that people can now GO HAIKU CRAZY (actually, any community managers reading this with a skill for Japanese verse and a willing client – take that and run with it. Go on. DO IT)! Oh, and really mess with their followers’ timelines by writing tweets at 1-character-per-line. Expect this to be turned off or at least modified fairly significantly in the not-too-distant future.

PINTEREST:

  • Look! Analytics!Not particularly interesting stuff, but worth knowing if you have a Pinterest presence and are trying to work out what it’s doing for you and justify why… An almost certain precursor to the rollout of ads on the platform in the next few months, I reckon. What do you mean you don’t care? Ingrates.

GOOGLE (OR “THE CYBORG MANIFESTO SECTION”)

  • Apps for Google GlassUnsurprising to see apps announced for Google Glass (and if you think I’m being wanky and hyperbolic with that Cyborg Manifesto link, take a second to think about what sort of incredible knowledgegathering / information archiving / memory augmentation a combination of Glass and Evernote can afford one. Go on, THINK. It’s absolutely incredible, and this is just the really crap alpha iteration of all this sort of stuff. MASSIVE DIGRESSION AHEAD: I recently reread Neuromancer, and aside from (as ever) being struck by the sheer density of ideas and the odd not-quite-prescient-but-certainly-pretty-good-guesswork nature of all the techstuff, it got me thinking about the interesting shift in thought about man/machine interfaces …we’ve moved from a position where we imagined plugging chips into our heads to one where we imagine being able to take the augments off at will – but potentially creating a society in which we’ll never want to…). These will be big, anyway, and the possibilities are HUGE. Wonder when the FB one will be announced which partners their nascent facial recognition technology with Google’s to create something which tells you who EVERYONE is when you pass them, what their stated interests are and how many friends you have in common? Dear God, and just imagine what you could do with Bang with Friends
  • Shopping on GlassA look at grocery shopping in an augmented future. Now think about what I said about Evernote, above, and what an archive of every recipe you’ve ever seen and thought, “ooh, that sounds good, might cook that one day” combined with a comprehensive database of what’s in season, combined with something that tells you what shops sell what, might look like. IT LOOKS HUNGRY.

STUFF THAT MIGHT BE USEFUL:

  • No-download Browser Sharing: Erm, exactly what the description says. Really useful alternative to Lync, G+ Hangouts and the like for people who don’t have them. 
  • Catch-all Shared Drive Access ThingyA career in product naming is doubtless but weeks away. This is basically a shell programme that gives you access to all your online files from one place. Draws stuff from Dropbox, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc, into one box. I’m describing it appallingly badly, but I’ve had a play around and it’s quite useful. Also, the people behind it were very nice when I emailed them with a suggestion, and that goes a long way.
  • OneTabThis Chrome extension could have been made for me, but might also be useful to anyone else who regularly has about 150 tabs open. With OneTab, you can pull all your open tabs into a single one as a linked list – really useful if you need to stop browsing but haven’t finished looking at stuff and don’t want your browser to take about 15 minutes to start up next time. 

CAMPAIGNY STUFF! (as mentioned before, a lot of these are via Roberto Venturini’s blog):

  • Renault – Lifted By LikesThis one’s Renault in the Netherlands, who set up a FB competition to win a car. Each ‘Like’ the competition app received translated into a real-life weight being added to a seesaw – at a certain point the likes would outweigh the car, which would lift up – the person whose ‘Like’ was responsible for tipping the car won said vehicle. My favourite thing about this is that, with a bit of basic maths, we can work out exactly what each ‘Like’ cost Renault. Cost of the car at retail? Say £12,000. Cost of the app? Say £7,000. Cost of all the physical stuff (seesaw, weights, people, etc)? No idea, but let’s say £2,000. Cost of the time spent by a bunch of agency people drafting a load of documents, strategies, etc, to make the case for the bloody thing, as well as the endless conference calls and meetings and frenzied calls to the designer when the client said that they didn’t feel the app logo was a red enough shade of red? Hard to say, but I don’t think £20,000 is an outlandish estimate. So that’s £41,000, very roughly, to deliver…12,000 additional likes. That’s £3.41 per like. That seems like rather a lot. AND YES I KNOW IT’S NOT ABOUT LIKES IT’S ABOUT SODDING ENGAGEMENT, BUT STILL THIS IS JUST STUPID ISN’T IT?
  • Canberra’s Human BrochureNice work from Canberra’s tourist board, who got a load of real people to go and become the HUMAN BROCHURE to promote the area through social media. To the point above, this will also have worked out as expensive, but the outcomes seem to me to be a lot more worthwhile. Maybe I’m an idiot, though. In any case, I like the execution. On a similar note, this slideshare from Tourism Australia is a nice look at how they use digital in their communications – whilst it’s easy to snarkily say “yes, well, try that with Swindon you smartarses”, there are some sensible principles in there. 
  • H&M’s Gif-y Shop& Other Stories is apparently a fashion brand which is an offshoot of H&M. It’s probably meant to appeal to a completely different core userbase; I am sure that there are brand bibles somewhere which explain exactly who their core target consumer is, how she is different from H&M’s core consumer, and how fashion makes her feel. I don’t care about that, as I am (as has been previously mentioned) so poorly dressed as to be practically sartorially handicapped. I’m only including this link as the website has replaced some of the product thumbnails with animated gifs which gives a subtle hipster aesthetic to the whole thing (oh, maybe I do get the userbase thing after all) and is another sign that gifs are mainstream, MAN.
  • Old Spice Are Making Fun Of Us:  So following in the footsteps of Isiah Mustafa and Fabio. Old Spice has another FUNNY CHARACTER to front its advertising. This has basically descended to the point where, surely, the people at W+K (or Y&R or whichever advertising behemoth is behind this one) are just sitting there laughing at us all, isn’t it? I mean, the central conceit of this appears to be that Old Spice now have a talking wolf doing their marketing (MANLY!); said wolf has a hilariously simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) approach to campaigning and marketing which we are meant to laugh at, whilst at the same time we consume exactly the same sort of  simplistic and brutal (and yet ironically sophisticated) maketing materials we are supposed to be laughing at OH GOD MY HEAD HURTS. The LinkedIn Page made me laugh, though
Young Critic Engaging with John Lavery’s

“Portrait of Anna Pavlova” (1911) (Via Christopher Higgs)
 
 

BEST THING I FOUND ALL WEEKWhen I was 14/15 and growing up in Swindon, Chris Morris’s Radio1 show on (I think) Wednesday nights was the funniest, most subversive thing I had ever heard (on reflection that makes me sound quite sheltered. Oh well). This is an archive of nearly all of them – I listened to a few this week, and was reminded of how much he got away with, and how much of this stuff wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near UK radio, especially the BBC, these days. Funny and silly and clever all at the same time – and, as a bonus, he played some awesome music too. If the idea of a small child telling Richard Littlejohn that he is ‘a Grade-A nonce’ makes you laugh, you’ll like this.

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 1:

  • CouchSeatsA website which pulls together videos of musicians’ live performances. Nothing you can’t find on YouTube, but if you like watching people live (or, more accurately, recordings of them performing live) then you might like this.
  • OurSpotThis is a marketplace for people to buy and sell photography services for various events. A nice idea, and potentially a useful thing if you’re an amateur who wants to build a portfolio or something.
  • Paintings-with-food‘Red’ Hong Yi self-describes as a painter, but makes her work with food rather than with pigments. The results are very impressive, in any case – see this on the Facebook page of A N Other food-related brand sometime very soon (turns out she’s quite famous already, in fact, so maybe I’m late to her work. Hey ho).
  • Product Posters for Stuff That’s In FilmsI’m having a fairly hard time describing ANYTHING today. Perhaps I’m getting ill. In any case, this site hosts a collection of rather excellent fictitious adverts for objects from popular culture – so the silly gun from Men In Black, 3 Course Dinner Gum from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that sort of thing. There are some rather good designs on there, check them out.
  • World of Classcraft: I thought we were done with gamification, but it turns out it’s still kicking its little legs in defiance of the fact that everyone’s now moved onto another overhyped buzzword trend. I’m also pretty much certain that the number of people with any connection to education who read this is pretty much 0. Anyway, World of Classcraft is an interesting concept for gamifying the classroom – applying the same sort of concept that informs the ‘House’ model popularised by Harry Potter to a fantasy-type game to be played during lessons. No idea whether it would work, but I think it’s an interesting concept and, for certain types of kids of a certain age, might be useful. Tell you what, why not try adapting it for your agency?
  • How To Survive a Political Coup: It’s been a bad week for Dave, all told, which makes this blog on how to survive a political coup by former Gordon Brown SPAD Damien McBride particularly interesting. 
  • Someone At The Onion Really Doesn’t Like Christopher WalkenNo idea whether this will still be up by the time you click on it, but it’s a pretty punch piece of writing about Walken’s somewhat murky past. He’s still a great dancer, mind.
  • A Musical Map of ParisA lovely project, accompanying an exhibition which apparently took place last year, and assigning songs to each of Paris’s Arondissements. On a similar tip (but less digitalinteractive) is this map of which UK cities have spawned which musicians / bands. Who knew Newton Le Willows would give the world so much?
  • Logos for CHARITY!Today is COMIC RELIEF! Your main feeling at that is likely to be one of relief that you will, soon, cease being inundated with crap, unfunny CHARITY initiatives (THERE IS NOTHING INHERENTLY FUNNY ABOUT GOING TO WORK IN PYJAMAS), but it is still a good cause and this is a lovely initiative to raise money. Brand / design agency MultiAdaptor will, for a small donation, design YOU your own personal logo. If you’re one of those insufferable squawking inanities that likes to talk about your ‘personal brand’ this is your lucky day.
  • If Superheroes Got SponsorshipNot sure if I quite agree with some of these. I always thought Batman would be Audi, personally, or maybe BMW. 
  • Vinyl BoomboxHow Hackney isn’t already overrun by people carrying these I will never know.
  • BureaucraticsFascinating photoseries of civil servants worldwide. I think there’s a certain similar cast to the eyes, though that might be projection on my part.
  • Children and their PossessionsAnother globetrotting photoproject, this one looking at children from all over the world and capturing them with their favourite things. Not only rather cute, but also a (unsurprisingly) startling look at a practical demonstration of lifestyle/value/income differentials. 
I find this really upsetting. Photo by Alma Haser
 

Stuff I Found That I Think Is Good / Interesting, Pt 2:

  • The Global Internet Pr0n Search Habits SurveyAn ostensibly SFW (no nudity, but I have no idea whether your employers will look askance at you should they see the words ‘MILF’ and ‘facial’ plastered (sorry) all over your screen) look at the top 10 pr0n searches in a variety of countries, regions and US states. My word, Romania, take a long, hard (sorry) look at yourself. 
  • Pr0nstars With & Without Makeup (But With Clothes)This did the rounds early this week, but if you’ve not yet seen it it’s both interesting and heartening and sad, and illustrative of exactly how illusory (if anyone needed telling) the image of women that pr0n is peddling is.
  • Creepy Sex Aid of the WeekAs with many of these things, what really puzzles me is how exactly someone arrives at the point where they think “Yes! Yes, that’s EXACTLY what I need to make my erotic life perfect!”. I mean, I know that this marks me down as incredibly vanilla, but really – A GIANT LATEX EGG LIKE ONE OF THOSE OFF ALIENS???
  • The Apogee of TwitterIt’s probably never going to be used for anything this significant ever again. I don’t think, in this person’s position, I would necessarily have shared the experience, but I am sort of grateful that he did.
  • Selfless Portraits: A cute little FB-led art project which invites people to draw the profile pictures of complete strangers from Facebook, creating a gallery of portraits inspired by no emotional connections whatsoever. There are some rather nice pics on there, although a little too much use of cheaty photoshop filters imho.
  • The AlephI’m going to have to take the description from the site itself, as otherwise I will just mangle it: “The Aleph is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a man is suddenly able to see all things at once. I wanted to present a version of what The Aleph might look like now, designed as an endless stream of descriptive passages pulled from the web. For source texts, I took the complete Project Gutenberg as well as current tweets. I searched for the phrase “I saw.”” . Turn it to ‘tweets’ and lose yourself – I could read stuff like this forever, I must say (‘interesting’ thematic consistency – The Aleph, and Borges, are recurring themes in a later William Gibson cyberpunk novel called ‘Mona Lisa Overdrive‘, EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED).
  • Let Your Emotions Choose Your Playlists: This is from SXSW, and maybe should have gone up there, but it’s too odd to bury in the dull bit about social media and stuff that people tend to ignore – this is a prototype for a music system that picks music based on your brainwaves and hence your emotional state. Obviously it’s nowhere near as sophisticated or sensitive as that makes it out to be, but still…mental (B’DUM-TISH).
  • Hack Your Life With RedditA short, useful guide to which threads on Reddit are worth bothering with in terms of helpful tips. Although I don’t know whether I’d take sex tips from there, to be honest. 
  • The Smartphone BreathalyserComing soon, so it says. This is either going to save lives or it is going to lead to some absolutely insane competitive drinking games where kids compete to see who can register the highest blood alcohol levels without dying. Possibly both in parallel, which may well fulfil some sort of Darwinian function for which we should all be grateful. 
That is a LONG neck (image by Hanna Antonsson)


The Circus of Tumblrs:

  • TrollThread: Not so much a standard Tumblr as a home for an art publishing project, this collates trolling comments from internet threads, arranges them by theme, and publishes them as books. Odd but interesting.
  • People Dancing Alone to PonySo apparently this is a reference to a scene in the film ‘Magic Mike’; who knew? What’s even odder, though, is that there are so many people who have uploaded clips of themselves dancing to this, alone, in a variety of ‘sexy’ ways.
  • Rare or Unpublished National Geographic Pictures: Some great photos from the National Geographic archives collected here. I particularly like the one of the Russian lion-tamer.
  • Ants: A series of gifs showcasing the crazy, violent, brutal and short world of the ant. More interesting than it sounds, honest, though not great if you are a bit freaked out by mandibles and stuff.

LONG Reads

  • Tumblr As ArtA piece commissioned by the Tumblr Art Symposium mentioned here last week (and which you can watch a stream of here). I’m not going to lie – this is VERY long and VERY artwanky, but also interesting as an illustration of how almost universal access to publishing platforms and copy culture is having a transformative effect on art in much the same democratising fashion as the mass-availability of the camera did. This quote which I stumbled across this morning seems relevant, in any case.
  • Oh, And On  A Semi-related NoteThis is an interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, MoMa’s 1st Poet Laureate, again looking at copy culture and appropriation, and containing this awesome, and very true, quote (I don’t imagine my approbation is that surprising): “You see, we are faced with a situation in which the managing of information has become more important than creating new and original information. Take Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most powerful blogs on the web, but they don’t create anything, rather they filter the morass of information and pull up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing that they’re linking to. The new creativity is pointing, not making. Likewise, in the future, the best writers will be the best information managers.”
  • What Makes Parody Twitter Accounts WorkCLUE: It’s not about being first to an obvious gag. This is a really interesting look at the creative process behind a few of the more successful / lauded parody accounts and what makes them successful. Quite a lot of hard work, unsurprisingly.
  • Extreme Urban Exploration: You may recall these pictures from a year or so ago, taken by intrepid urban explorers who broke into the Shard  – this piece in US GQ speaks with them and other pioneers of urban exploration from elsewhere in the world. The whole political side of this stuff is fascinating, I think – the right to take risks, etc etc.
  • A Very Strange Tale About Drugs Smuggling and a Potential Nobel PrizeThe headline to this NYT piece is pretty much unbeatable – The Professor, The Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble. Very clever people really can be outstandingly thick sometimes. 
  • The Man Behind The Meme(s): Who invented the meme? Well, yes, Richard Dawkins. But in a slightly less obvious way, maybe this person did – back in the day when making FUNNY videos from source material involved razorblades and VHS machines and a lot of patience. A look back at how remix culture began and some perspectives on where it’s going – links back rather interestingly to the Tumblr/art debate above.
  • Cypherpunk and SurveillanceYou know the whole debate about privacy and how much the internet knows about us and stuff? Well it’s probably already too late. Ignore the horrific term ‘Cypherpunk’ – this is morelike social history than it is geekery, and is frankly quite scary if you look at it too closely. 
  • Who’s Watching You?Continuing this week’s (apparent) theme of ‘creepy stuff about the internet and technology’, this is a really unsettling piece on webcam hijackers and the practice of RATTING. Might make you think twice about sitting naked at your laptop (or it might not – I have no idea what you’re into, after all).
  • Miss USA in Seedy, Horrible SHOCKERI don’t imagine that anyone’s going to be all that surprised that a multi-million dollar beauty pageant business owned by Donald ‘Charming’ Trump is anything other than a bastion of moral rectitude, but in case you needed the scales pulling from your eyes then this article should do a pretty good job. Ugh. GRUBBY.
  • Big Narstie vs EastEnders: So Big Narstie is a UK Grime musician who’s become moderately well known in part through his music but moreso through his Twitter commentaries on EastEnders, which he approaches with a dedication and emotional commitment that at times borders on zealotry. Even though it’s been about 15 years since I was into show (I always thought that the Mitchell Brothers’ car chase and subsequent watery escape was the series very own ‘jump the shark‘ moment) I still found this very, very funny.

 

Image by Bernard Plossu

VIDEOS!

1) We kick off this week with a longform documentary on Belle & Sebastian’s awesome second album ‘If You’re Feeling Sinister’, for which I offer no apologies. This is long and to be savoured (if you’re a fan – if you’re not, it will probably leave you cold and you should go onto the next one which is weird and has breasts in it). I’ve always thought that Belle & Sebastian had one of the more oddly diverse fanbases in music – from skinny, pallid betwetters like me, to people like a bloke I once knew in Swindon who was a bit psychopathic and used to keep bottles of his own urine in his bedroom (B&S were the only thing we had in common, fyi). Anyway:

2) This was sent to me and another Twitter person on Wednesday, with the accompanying message “I saw this and thought of you”. THANKS! This is apparently an advert for a Russian workwear clothing brand called “We Cum”. To be honest, it could be anything – it has a strange poetic beauty all of its own:


3) By way of an apology, have this – an incredible combination of graffiti and camerawork and animation which, I guarantee, will properly drop your jaw around halfway in. Seriously, watch:


4) This is Earl Sweatshirt’s latest, and features a lot of the traditional OFWGKTA tropes – skateboards, jackassisms, dense flow (I can’t help but feel self-consciously stupid writing that, but hey ho) and a barely contained sense of menace. It’s very good, I think:


5) You’d expect a song titled ‘Evil Friends’ to have a somewhat sinister video, and this doesn’t disappoint. The song is AWESOME, though, and the video from artists Portugal The Man is a little creepy but also does some quite cool stuff in terms of recreating the imagery of photos and gifs within moving images. Ahhh, PSEUDERY!:

 
6) This week’s slice of 80s-film-inspired Goonies/Mad Max-esque film comes courtesy of Wavves, whose songs I’ve always liked but who I’ve always found it hard to warm to. No different with this one, but the accompanying clip will make you want to watch a long-form film version and there’s no higher compliment. The song itself is also very good indeed, which helps:


7) What do you get if you combine Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (and Bambi) with Top Gun, and turn the whole into a story about Tom Cruise wreaking vengeance on woodland creatures for no clearly defined reason? This, it turns out. Aerodisney, by Africa Pseudobrutismus:


8) Cartoon ducks. At a rave. Drawn in the slightly unpleasantly lysergic style of an unsteady-handed Ralph Bakshi. This is “It’s My Beak” by Libythyth:


9) Finally, this is a beautiful and romantic and slightly sad/wistful short by Gustav Johansson. Get a cup of tea and watch it with someone you like a lot. It’s called ‘Everyday’:

 
 

That’s it for now

See you next week. Please forward this onto as many people as your mail server can physically handle. If you’re reading this and have yet to subscribe, visit the Imperica newsletter page to do so.