By IDA4

THE SECTION WHICH IS REALLY HOPING THAT WE CAN ALL STOP TALKING ABOUT THE BLOODY SUPERBOWL ADVERTS NOW AND MOVE ON WITH OUR LIVES, BECAUSE FRANKLY IT’S BAD ENOUGH HAVING TO SEE ADVERTS MOST OF THE TIME WITHOUT THEM BEING TREATED LIKE SOME SORT OF CANONICAL SERIES OF TEXTS TO BE PORED OVER AND ANALYSED AS THOUGH THEY ACTUALLY MEANT SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT BEYOND OUR RAVENING, NEVER-TO-BE-SATED DESIRE FOR MORE STUFF:

• Twitter Commerce Is Coming: Not that it matters, obviously, because Twitter’s ALL OVER. Maybe they’ll roll this out before we all forget about Twitter and go back to sending smoke signals or, you know, actually talking to each other. Anyway, this is all speculation BUT it’s based on seemingly solid information and isn’t hugely surprising – the theory is that Twitter”s working on infrastructure which will enable product purchase from within Twitter with one-click (ie a ‘buy this’ button or similar), along with product recommendations, etc. There are a lot of people who will end up spending a lot of money they don’t have if this feature is as easy to use as it could be – it’ll make drunk eBaying look minor by comparison.
• Thomson Reuters Adds More Twitter Data To Financial Markets Desktop Service: An incredibly dull headline which masks quite an interesting story – Thomson are basically adding in a whole load of additional Twitter data to the info they feed into the infohungry maws of people who make a lot of money by effectively betting on how popular stuff is. ‘Financial professionals’ (traders?) will get all sorts of interesting information on how the world feels about key stocks in near-realtime; you can see how this can give competitive advantage. I’m always hugely skeptical about sentiment analysis – or at least the crap, superficial sort which is packaged with your standard monitoring software, which is mostly rubbish – but I’m guessing that Thomson Reuters, along with Goldman Sachs who I know are doing a lot on this, have developed something a but better than usual to underpin this. Oh, and they’re doing it for music too. 
• Twitter Data Grants: If you’re an academic or work at a research-led institution, you can now apply to Twitter for access to A LOT of its data. You won’t get the firehose, but they’ll give you lots more than would ordinarily be available to the average punter. 
• On Facebook Paper: As trailed last week, Facebook launched Paper on Monday (or at least they did in the US – there are workarounds to get it if you’re outside America, though); this is The Verge’s review of it (minor spoilers: they like it). Interestingly the reviewer suggests that there’s no reason why they would go back to using Facebook ‘traditionally’ after having tried Paper – it’s ad-free status can only be temporary, surely.
• Facebook Allows Page Admins To Comment On User Reviews: Only really of interest if your Page is linked to a place, but if you own a venue then this is worth knowing; Page owners can now respond to reviews left of their bar/restaurant/whatever on Facebook rather than just having to sit and silently fume as they read the latest whinge by a bunch of entitled consumers who somehow believe that ‘good service’ means acceding to their every whim and desire. Inevitably this is going to produce some GREAT reasoned debates. 
• You Will Soon Be Able To Edit Your Facebook Lookback Narcissismfest: In case you felt that the Facebook Lookback film produced for you this week didn’t adequately reflect the AMAZING BRILLIANCE of the past few years of your life, you’ll soon be able to hack it so that it presents exactly the sort of view of yourself that you want it to. Whilst we’re obviously all sick to death of / inspired and uplifted by (delete as applicable) the neverending stream of these which have filtered through the newsfeed since Monday, I’ll be interested to see how the edit function works – there’s got to be the inspiration for some sort of Storify for Facebook in here somewhere, no? Hang on, does that already exist? *Googles* No? *refines elevator pitch and prepares to be millionaire*
• Some Data About What Advertising On Instagram Gets You: An interesting overview of how ads on Instagram do in terms of comments, shares, etc. If you can’t be bothered to read it, they boost ‘likes’ but seeing as no one really knows what that’s worth the value of them’s still a little bit nebulous. So now you know. 
• All Of The European Social Media Statistics In The World: You want to know how many people in Greece are spending all their time distracting themselves from the parlous state of their economy by sending sexy pictures on Snapchat? YOU GOT IT. Well, not quite, but there’s a LOT of information here which you can use to persuade your clients to spend more moneyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….oh, look, you all realise that you can just make this crap up, don’t you, because we live in an era where attribution and footnoting is practically dead? Good. 
• Why What People Are Saying On Social Media Is Not Necessarily Representative Of The Real World: This really shouldn’t be in any way suprising or revelatory to anyone, but it’s a salutary reminder that not everyone in the world is on Twitter, and that just because SOME people are saying stuff there that doesn’t mean that that’s the way EVERYONE feels. 
• Lays Flavour Creation Competition: The idea is in no way original or exciting (crisp manufacturer gets people to suggest new flavours, offers prize to most popular one), but I think they’ve been quite clever in including a mocked-up packaging creator as part of the mechanic. Obviously there are LOTS of people making ‘funny’ flavours, but it’s actually pretty difficult to create anything too offensive (I have tried) and as such the mechanic has led these comic masterpieces being shared quite a lot. A decent way of taking people’s propensity to try and be subversive and subverting it in turn for your own nefarious capitalistic ends.
• Sunday Times ‘Icons’: By far and away the best piece of BRANDED CONTENT I’ve seen all year (I know, I know, it’s early), the Sunday Times’ short featuring ‘iconic’ (I know, I know, I’m sorry) cultural stuff is not only beautifully made but they win additional points for making the ‘making of’ stuff almost as interesting.
• Paypal Poems: Next week this section’s probably going to contain one or two examples of brands attempting to wring the last drops of revenue out of an already hideously commercialised made-up celebration, as the Hallmark Holiday once again darkens our collective doors. I can, however, fairly confidently predict that none of them will make me feel quite so sad inside as this service from Paypal, which lets people without the talent or imagination to compose poetry themselves get one of several wordsmiths to compose some verse on their behalf, courtesy of everyone’s favourite online payments provider. Yes, this is part of the plot of the film ‘Her’, basically. Oh hi, semi-dystopian future!

By Francesco Albano

WANT A MIX BY ATOMS FOR PEACE TO GO WITH THIS BIT? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES TO PRESENT YOU WITH AN INTERESTING, AMUSING AND EDUCATIVE SELECTION OF LINKS FROM ACROSS THE WEB, BUT WHICH THIS WEEK AFTER SOME FAIRLY INTENSE SELF-EXAMINATION IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT ALL IT IS DOING IS ADDING MORE NOISE TO WHAT IS AN ALREADY CACOPHONOUS UNIVERSE, PT.1:

• The Sochi Corruption Map: This is by a Russian anticorruption agency and is a pretty startling catalogue of allegations about misappropriation of funding and general shady behaviour. Ah, those Olympian ideals!
• The Sochi Schedule And Results Visualiser: Of course, if all you care about is the sport then you might be more interested in this, which is a cute little interactive which lets you explore the schedule and results for each event taking place over the course of the snowfest. 
• A Beautifully Deatiled Map Of The Internet: The work of Jay Simons, this is another in the long, long series of cartographic interpretations of the mess that is the internet – this one, though, is beautifully detailed and you really can lose yourself scrolling around its corners. Also, prints are available should you want such a thing, although I’m fairly sure that having one of these on your wall is pretty much the map equivalent of having a room full of replica weapons and armour from Lord of the Rings, or a full-sized mockup of the Enterprise in your basement. 
• Wingman: Imagine you’re sitting on a plane and you spot an incredibly attractive person a few rows ahead of you. You could just sit there and silently imagine the future life you could have together and what your children might look like, whilst doing nothing about it at all as you get increasingly drunk on poor-quality white wine miniatures and berate yourself for your lack of chirpsing chutzpah, OR you could whip out your phone and use this app which will, apparently, let you chat up people who are on flights with you (presuming they’re using it too, of course, which is a fairly massive assumption but we’ll gloss over that for now). Details on how it will actually function are sketchy (read: nonexistent) at the moment, but I’m including it largely as my friend Tinni had this idea about 5 years ago except she’d have called it ‘Dates On A Plane’ which is a MUCH better name. 
• That One Song: I really like This Is My Jam, the music service which encourages people to choose the ONE song that they’re obsessing over each week and share it with the world. This is a supersmart extension to that service, using a few years’ worth of user data to define the most popular song for each artist and packaging it as ‘if you only listen to one song by this person/these people, the song you should listen to is…’. A really nice way of introducing yourself to new artists, and it fits very well indeed with the BRAND ETHOS of the platform and all that guff. 
• Secret.ly: All I could think of when I came across this earlier this week is how incredibly easily it could ruin friendships and sow mistrust. Secret.ly is a newish app (currently only available in the US and Canada) which once installed allows users to send completely anonymous messages to everyone in their phone’s addressbook who’s also on the app. So you can say anything you like to people you actually know in the real world without anyone knowing who said it. Now just think about that for a second – imagine the sort of traumatic/amazingly voyeuristic stuff you get on PostSecret, except that you know it’s come from someone you ACTUALLY KNOW. Seriously, would the temptation to just write stuff like ‘I lie every day to the person who thinks I love them best’ and ‘I have found a way of cutting which no one sees’ JUST TO MESS WITH PEOPLE not be overwhelming? Erm, no? Oh God, I’m a dreadful person. Erm. Hm. I think I’ve probably just discovered something quite unpleasant about myself. You can probably apply all sorts of fun gameplay mechanics to it to, of course – see, that’s a nice, light-hearted application. I’m not a bad person, honest. 
• Your Ad Here: I like this project. Your Ad Here is looking to connect East London artists with small businesses in their local area to create billboard ads for them – these ads will then be displayed on specially selected ad hoardings in suitable locations for upto 3 years. Part of Create London, which is a generally brilliant arts organisation doing great stuff, it’s already got some big names including Jeremy Deller on board. 
• Easy Text Analysis: A free textual analysis tool which purports to spot patterns and do a degree of sentiment analysis too. I can’t claim to have played with this too much, so I can’t vouch for its power, but the case studies on the homepage seem interesting and I think that if you crunch a lot of data you should probably take a look. 
• The Outernet – The Internet IN SPACE: There’s quite a lot of scifi-ish stuff out there this week, none more than this project which aims to create a universal cheap broadband network across the world using satellites. Actual satellites, in space. I’m not going to pretend to understand the tech at play here because…well…I really don’t, but it’s all sorts of mind-boggling. 
• A Map Of All Of The Weather: We’re having a lot of weather at the moment, you may have noticed. This is a gorgeous globe-based map of wind and ocean currents around the world, using realtime data from a variety of sources. It’s sort of beautiful and hypnotic, and would make quite a nice installation in and of itself.
• What Appears To Be Another Teledildonics Site: This is SUCH a horrible website (sorry, but it really is), but I think it’s for a load of tech which is trying to bring teledildonics into the mainstream (really, I don’t think that this is going to happen any time soon, however clean and attractive and normal-looking the models you use in the ads are). What’s interesting about this is the design and positioning of it – sleek, affluent-appearing…and yet the v/o’s mention of ‘female to multiple male’ connections makes me think of webcam workers and pro-sex. Which, really, is ALL SORTS of creepy and horrible, as is par for the course with this sort of stuff. 
• Scanvine: This is another ugly-ish site, but one which I think is probably a lot more interesting and useful than the previous one (for most of you, at least – and who am I to judge, really?). Scanvine takes data from a very wide variety of news and information sites across the web, both mainstream and less so, and explores which of their stories are being most-shared across the web; a sort of virality-tracker for news. It’s American-focused, being as it is a US site, but I think you can get quite a lot of interesting information from the API about views vs shares across sites, etc etc etc. Useful for datawonks and students of the new journalism, I think (is ‘the new journalism’ even a thing? I think I might be talking crap). 
• Playing Tekken On The Piano: A friend of mine did something similar with Pong a few years back; this is a clever little hack of the game Tekken, which allows users to play the game by using a piano keyboard as controller, thereby winning by playing music. Admittedly the music created is only barely worthy of the name, but I like the work they’ve done on creating a musical interface for the game.
• Manhattan Booze Delivery: Are these things coming back? This feels VERY bubble-ish…anyway, back in the days of the first dotcom boom, there were several startups which rose and then spectacularly fell, predicated on the concept of online ordering and delivery of EVERYTHING for 0 markup (see the flaw in the business model?). Anyway, this one’s just for booze and just in Manhattan – but do they not have 24h boozeshops there? Are people really that lazy that they can’t stagger to the cornershop at 4am to pick up another 3 bottles of filthbooze? Jesus, show some commitment to your alcoholism. 
• Beta Online Streaming / Sharing Service: This is called Tiplii and based on the ‘signup – we’ll be giving beta access VERY SOON’ page it looks like it might be quite interesting, purporting as it does to allow easy streaming/sharing of video and other stuff from mobile to webwide audiences. Not the first service to promise this sort of thing, but worth keeping an eye on as it seems quite slick (though obviously that means very little if it falls over every 5 seconds). 
• Your Online Self Need Never Die: Were it not for the fact that there are some very real-seeming MIT people named and pictured at the bottom of this, I’d be inclined to think that this was part of some sort of elaborate promotion for some film or another. It’s not, though, unless it’s VERY well masked. Eterni.me is (or, more accurately, aims to become) an extension of your online persona which will exist after your demise – taking cues from your social media profiles built up while you’re alive and creating an ‘AI’ (my inverted commas – it’s unclear what sort of ‘intelligence’ they’re aiming for here, or how Turing Test-y it will bet) from the posts you’ve made which can continue interacting with your loved ones and friends after you’re dead. So basically if you affect the persona of a double-figure-IQ moron online, expect that to be the version of you which persists into eternity online. There is so much here that is scifi and weird and questionable – not least on a technical level, as this stuff is HARD – and I’m personally sort of convinced that it will be a long, long time until this is anything other than a mirage, but it’s a wonderful conceit (and to return to a perennial Web Curios obsession, is very reminiscent of Neuromancer – in this case, the McCoy Pauly ‘constuct’). 
• The Sony World Photography Awards: Just incredible, some of these. Although the one of the wildebeest does to me look ‘shopped to the point where it no longer even tries to resemble actual photography, which once again raises the question of the extent to which digital manipulation has rendered it something sort of other; can we PLEASE have a ‘no photoshop’ photoprize somewhere, please? Oh.
• A Truly HUGE Collection Of Ascii Art: I hope that at least one of you will find this useful – if nothing else, if you’re a geeky brand then you could do worse than making a load of ascii valentine’s cards from them for distribution (don’t say I never do anything for you). 
• The Future Timeline: This is quite an odd website, featuring HUGE amounts of futurology, arranged year-by-year. No idea who’s collating all of the information, but whoever it is is keeping it reasonably well-updated and reactive; looking at the stuff for the next few years, there’s nothing particularly outlandish or unbelievable but quite a lot more which is seemingly quite sensible. Bookmark this for when you’re all doing your inevitable 2015 predictions presentations for speculation-hungry clients in 10 months’ time. 
• Really Creepy Slinky-like Sculptures Of Heads Made From Paper: Watch the video – there will be a point where you sort of involuntarily recoil, I promise you. It’s not gross, don’t worry, just…unsettling, for reasons I don’t really understand. Sort of reminds me of the work of Bill Plympton, more because of my reaction to it than the aesthetics. 
• Projection-mapped Guitar Show: This is a now-funded Kickstarter, but it’s worth a look as the concept – a one-person guitar show accompanied by projection mapping onto both the instrument and the background – and using the music to generate live mapped projections over the course of an hour-long performance. A beautiful idea – would love to see this. 
• 15-Second Cookery Shows: This is one of the best uses of Instagram video I’ve yet seen – this bloke has created a series of nicely filmed 15-second films of him showing people how to cook various sorts of fish. Simple, well-made and useful, this is either going to be commissioned by a brand soon or ripped off by one (on your marks, get set…). 

By Matt Groening

WANT A MIX BY SOME CORNISH BLOKE WHICH IS REALLY RATHER INCREDIBLY ECLECTIC IN A NICE, DOWNTEMPO SORT OF WAY? OH GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH HOPES TO PRESENT YOU WITH AN INTERESTING, AMUSING AND EDUCATIVE SELECTION OF LINKS FROM ACROSS THE WEB, BUT WHICH THIS WEEK AFTER SOME FAIRLY INTENSE SELF-EXAMINATION IS INCREASINGLY OF THE OPINION THAT ALL IT IS DOING IS ADDING MORE NOISE TO WHAT IS AN ALREADY CACOPHONOUS UNIVERSE, PT.2:

• Google’s Devart Challenge: Very exicting if you’re a digital artist – Google, in partnership with The Barbican, is offering a developer the chance to have a large-scale installation in the space, alongside existing, recognised digital artists. There’s obviously all sorts of questions around the entry / selection criteria (I promise not to get into a tedious ‘but what IS digital art?’ conversation with myself, honest – you can read a non-tedious open letter on the subject here if you like), but the initiative is great and I’m rather looking forward to seeing what comes out of it. You can read more about it here, should you so wish.
• The Seattle Space Needle: I have no idea if this is a new website (though I think it is, what with it being all HTML5 and shiny and stuff), but I rather like the gimmick – go on, click and see for yourself. 
• Crowdwish: A site made by people in London, asking people to submit wishes, getting the community to vote on them and choose one ‘winning’ wish ecah day, and then doing ‘something’ to make those wishes closer to reality. I sort of feel like I should really dislike this, but the approach to the ‘winning’ wishes so far has been pleasingly esoteric, from buying Euromillions tickets to arranging bulk-buy deals for purchasing iPhones, and the tone of the whole thing is well-pitched. The wishes are a mixture of the nakedly commercial and the pleasingly whimsical,and overall it’s just a nice project. Have a look.
• Race Yourself With Glass: Another week, another Glass app – this one’s a fitness hack which tracks your time over distance and allows you to race yourself, in a real-life equivalent of the ‘ghost mode’ from car racing videogames. Basically you’ll see a virtual representation of your previous time over a course in your Glass display, which you’ll be encouraged to beat, earning points for so doing. Glass will be the thing which resurrects the concept of gamification, I think. More’s the pity. 
• Rats With Teddy Bears: This is the sort of thing which may well have been in the Mail this week – if so, apologies. If not – LOOK! RATS HOLDING TINY TEDDY BEARS!!! Look at their little twitchy plague-carrying snouts!
• Beautiful Photographs of Sea Caves: Truly amazing photos of the striations and rock formations of sea caves, ordinarily inaccessible except by boat but rendered walkable thanks to extreme temperatures and frozen seas. Gorgeous. 
• The Virtual Theremin: If you’re unlucky enough not to have your own owl theremin, you could do worse than to have a play with this virtual equivalent. Tell you what, why not try communicating with the colleague opposite you solely via the medium of theremin noises this afternoon? They’ll relish it, I promise. 
• Vintage Posters From Oldschool Skinflicks: Notable not only for the artwork, but also for the often baffling straplines. I’m a fan of the double entendre, and often the single one, but really – what does ‘Her Garden Of Eden Was Under ANY Tree’ even mean?
• Terrible Wordsearches: Community managers! Do you hate your jobs and the idiots who you interact with in the name of BRANDED ENGAGEMENT on Facebook? Well why not spend the next week trolling them by posting nothing but these dreadful wordsearches under the guise of ‘fun games we can play’? The best thing is that there’s a generator buried on the page somewhere which lets you create one using whatever word you choose – perfect for game-based branded moments of truth. 
• Subtle Patterns: Free-to-use tileable, textured patterns for web developers, all under Creative Commons. Useful for some of you, perhaps. 
• Life Once Removed: A photoproject by artist Suzanne Heintz, photographing herself around the world with her mannequin family. The artist states that it’s a commentary on spinsterhood and singledom in modern America, and who am I to argue – they’re deeply sad pictures, in any case, but beautifully composed. 
• 3d-Printed Popeye: Just terrifying. Will be interesting to see the development of 3d printing in the context of sculpture over the course of the next 12-18 months, I think.
• All Of Prince’s Hairstyles: Prince this week has created one of those moments, like the Stone Roses at Spoke Island or the Beatles in Germany, where far more people will claim to be at his gigs than could physically ever have been. No matter – this little illustration documenting the diminutive human erection’s hairstyles over the years may provide some scant consolation if you’ve yet to see one of his AMAZING SECRET (NOT SECRET) GIGS. 
• A New HTML5 Game Each Week: Thomas (I can’t find his surname on the site) has set himself a task – to build a new game, from scratch, in HTML5 each week for a year. He’s 8 games in at the moment – it’s a fun collection of toys, and (if you’re interested in coding AS WE ARE ALL MEANT TO BE THIS YEAR (an aside – really, it’s NOT possible to learn to code in a day, whatever the Government may find it convenient to tell people)) a useful diary of the learning process he’s going through. 
• Electric Sheep: There have been quite a few projects over the years using the collaborative power of ‘sleeping’ computers to work on large, complex projects; this is the art equivalent. Electric Sheep uses hibernating machines to generate morphing, abstract animations which over time are refined and ‘evolve’ based on user review and voting. An interesting project, and a very hypnotic thing to download onto your tablet-type device. 
• Vintage Work Safety Posters From Holland: As non-scaremongering as you wold expect, and some great art styles and design amongst the collection here. 
• Only The Best Recipes: A recipe search website which limites resulst to the top 1% of results from a selection of popular peer-reviewed recipe sites. A nice idea, and this sort of layered metacuration is going to become more and more popular (DUH!). Annoyingly all the sites are American and so they use STUPID measurements (sorry, Americans, but ‘cups’?), but the idea’s good. 
• Images Of The French Revolution: A collection of 12,000+ images from the Stanford archives from the French Revolution – etchings, engravings, satirical cartoons…there’s a treasure-trove of stuff here, if you’re a scholar or just generally interested. 
• Easel Is An In-Broswer Web Design App: Basically lets you do webdesign in a VERY BASIC but helpfully simple / visual way and then export the code. It’s not hugely powerful, but it’s quite useful and could actually be a helpful learning aid for people trying to get their heads round HTML/CSS.
• The Analog(ue) Memory Desk: A brilliant piece of design, this desk is designed to enable you to record everything you could ever possibly want to record, in analogue fashion. Just lovely. 
• Dave Benson Philips Will Do Things For Stuff: 30somethings across Britain seem to have a weirdly close relationship with kids’ TV star Dave Benson Philips – now that so many of us are in POSITIONS OF POWER (ie churning out brand-related rubbish as we all did pointless arts degrees back in the boom years and have no real skills or talents beyond a vague feel for popular culture and a rough understanding of postmodernism), why not indulge that nostalgia and book Dave for a brand-related engagement (or indeed for anything)? He’s available for public appearances in exchange for…er…a Nando’s meal. Or some trestle tables. Seriously, Dave, you’re better than this. 
• Yung Lennox Draws Album Covers: If you want to buy a representation of a famous album cover as drawn by a talented 7 year old, then this is the website for you. They’re actually pretty good, and I quite want the ODB one. 
• Macedonia Has The World’s Most Terrifying Carnival: This is called ‘The Carnival of the Vevcani’. It happens every January. Imagine doing acid and then going to this. 
• Poolside FM: A site which streams a selection of 80s pop hits in conjuction with a series of videoclips showing beach/poolside scenes from a variety of 80s films and shows. Big hair and bikinis, basically.
• The Creepiest Gifs Ever: Jesus, they’re not lying. 
• LOVE XXX: I literally have no idea what this is, beyond the fact that it’s obviously some sort of art project and that it occasionally throws up male and female nudity as it cycles through pictures. It’s quite rabbithole-y, though, so go and click around and see what oddities you find. 
• Brand New Garbage Pail Kids: Readers of a certain age will get all nostalgic about these – younger people, take note! This is what we got excited about in the playground when we didn’t have the ability to send pictures of our genitals to each other via the medium of mobile telephony. 
• Google Trends For Pr0n: Yep, that very thing. Porngram has taken the titles of skinflicks (over 800,000 of them) and lets you look at trends of keywords featured in the titles. Really interesting from a social psychology point of view, and also quite depressing depending on what you choose to search. Totally SFW. 
• Dumbstruck: This is going to end badly. Dumbstruck is an app which allows users to send messages to others – these others have, to see the message, to allow their phone to access the front-facing camera, thus taking a short video of their face as they read the message. Expect this to lead to a rash of prank texts where people send their parents / partners really horrible revelations and film their reactions FOR THE LULZ!
• I Have Something To Tell You: On that very note, let me leave you with this. A photoproject by artist Adrain Chesser, in which he tells his friends and family that he’s HIV positive and then photographs their reaction. Yes, quite. I know, I know, ART, but still. There are quite a few of these where the person’s expression is a mixture of shock, sadness, and eyes that say ‘you total and utter prick, Adrain’.
• Horace And Agnes: Actually no, I’m not going to leave this section there as it’s just too sad. I’m going to leave you with the somewhat perplexing love story between Horace and Agnes, as told in photographs. Enjoy. 

By Tejal Patni

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Citation Needed: A collection of oddities and seemingly un-factchecked Wikipedia entries. 
• WikiPicks: More Wikipedia, this time in the shape of some of the more esoteric facts which you can dig up from the site. 
• Girls Giving Compliments: A collection of those ‘your hair is lovely’, ‘no YOUR hair is lovely’ conversations which you occasionally see women having on the internet (look, it’s true, come on. Not everyone, not all the time, but you’ve all seen this stuff on Facebook and you’re lying if you say you haven’t).
• Millennial Gospel: I don’t really know what this is, but it does contain some great pro-Jesus imagery and inspirational quotes and stuff, as well as the BEST religious streetwear outfit you’re likely to see in 2014.
• Love For Sale: Valentine’s illustrations inspired by the music of Talking Heads. Pretty damn niche, even by Tumblr standards. 
• Slapped For the Very First Time: I KNOW THAT THIS ISN’T A TUMBLR BUT IT REALLY SHOULD BE. One person’s quest to listen to a new album every day and to write up their thoughts. Nice project and a decent pointer towards some stuff you might not know yourselves.
• Lush Sux: Lush is, I think, a Spanish graffiti artist who does quite a lot of pseudo-disruptive stuff. This tumblr collects his more guerilla-ish projects – I’m quite uncomfortable about the homeless art dealer idea, but there are some interesting other ones on there. 
• Who’s Daft Punk?: WHO ARE THE MEN BEHIND THE MASKS? A series of speculations can be found here, should you wish to look. 
• Art Of The Rap Logo: A collection of logos designed for and used by rap acts. Ah, personal branding, it’s a beautiful thing. 
• Figure Skating Costumes: TOPICAL.
• Newsgames: A Tumblr promoting a conference taking place in March to investigate and discuss the development of game-type techniques in news (cf Us Vs Th3m, etc). 
• The Design Of Stephen Wildish: Amusing Venn diagrams and flowcharts and generally good design
• Post Libertarian: Artworks ‘hacked’ to provide SATIRICAL COMMENT on neoliberalism. A bit of a blunt instrument, but the Ayn Rand one made me laugh quite a lot. 
• We Invent You: More arty gifs, by the people who made the rather excellent conference call simulator from a few weeks ago.
• Contemporary Art Event Generator: In Peckham.
• Computers On Law And Order: Screencaps of computers as featured on the TV show Law & Order (which is actually part of this project here which is all serious and academic and stuff)
• Pornhub Comments On Valentine’s Cards: The logical conclusion of the recent trend for the juxtaposition of bongo comments with non-bongo imagery. Obviously all the text is total filth, but I challenge you not to laugh. 

LONG READS WHICH ARE LONG BUT WHICH MAY FORM A PLEASING ANTIDOTE TO THE INCREASINGLY SHRILL WHISTLING OF THE MEDIA AS IT SWARMS ABOUT US LIKE SOME SORT OF HIDEOUS ILL WIND BRINGING NOTHING BUT STRESS AND ANGST WITH IT WHEREVER IT GOES:

• The Buzzfeed Style Guide: It’s very easy to be sniffy about Buzzfeed, and God knows I’ve spunked enough words doing that very thing (I’m just bitter and jealous really), but their style guide is actually a really, really interesting snapshot of contemporary Western web culture and a very comprehensive document indeed. A genuinely interesting thing to flick through, although they are VERY WRONG about some things (in particular the spelling of ‘chocolatey’, which DOES have an ‘e’, whatever they may say. Or, er, having googled it just now, whatever anyone else may say either. Oh, damn, I’m wrong about this, aren’t I?
• A History Of The Selfie: The article which should have been written last year when the term got dictionaried (I know, not a word – I’m having a bad morning in that regard) but which no one did write because it would have taken longer than an hour to pen and, you know, SPEED. Anyway, it’s a rather more in-depth look than you might expect at the concept and generally an interesting read, placing self-portraiture in artistic/cultural context rather neatly. 
• The Typography of 2001: The first post on a new site looking at the use of typography in science fiction, this looks at the manner in which fonts and type-design are utilised in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Far more interesting than you’d expect, I promise, although obviously you’ll get more out of this if you’re a designer or Kubrick/fonts obsessive.
• On Katie Hopkins And The Danger Of Obverse Journalism: It’s not really stating anything other than the obvious to assert that one-woman outrage bomb Katie Hopkins is A Bad Thing for reasoned, intelligent debate (although you do wonder what sort of point an individual’s life must have reached when they really will hold any viewpoint, no matter how utterly hateful, on television in exchange for money) – this piece from VICE, though, is a decent look at why defining any debate in binary, oppositional terms is also A Bad Thing. BONUS – babyfaced scion of the left Owen Jones on his recent appearance on FIGHTNOTDEBATETELLY.
• A Truly Weird Interview With Michael Keaton: Yes, that Michael Keaton – he’s promoting several films including the bound-to-be-dreadful Robocop reboot – the one who was the first Batman. This is a sort of remarkable profile of him in US Esquire in which he comes across as really quite mad, in a sort of nice, helpful fashion. Great read. 
• A Brief History Of Class And Faeces In India: Sanitation in India is a very complicated business, not least because of the caste system. This is a VERY long but equally interesting examination of said caste system and the steps that are being taken by some to try and change the manner in which the lowest rung of Indian society relate to the waste products of the highest. WARNING: contains quite a lot of talk about faeces. 
• Too Poor For Pop Culture: Probably the best individual piece of writing on here this week, this is a Baltimore academic’s essay about the people he lives and grew up with, and what it’s like being part of a culture which simply doesn’t have the luxury of understanding what all the ephemeral crap which makes up 90% of the media, and indeed this blog, is. 
• Street Fighter 2 – An Oral History: A kilometric remembrance of the origins and development of the daddy of all beat’em’ups Street Fighter 2. Obviously one for the gamers, but I promise that it’s interesting even if you’re not a fanboy (although I concede it probably does help). 
• Posters And Stories From The Golden Age of Magic: ANOTHER great piece on Collector’s Weekly, collecting images of posters from the days when Houdini was king, and people really did used to believe in bulletcatching. If you’ve ever read Carter Beats The Devil (and it is very good indeed), then you will love this. 
• Things That Sound Like Bullsh*t But Which In Fact Aren’t: If even 20% of these things are actually true (and it’s Reddit, and it’s the internet, so large ladlefuls of salt are advised) then you will be SURPRISED and AMAZED.
• The Homophobia Of Men’s Figure Skating: It’s nothing new to comment on how…well…camp much of the Winter Olympics sporting panoply is; this is a slightly sad look at one of the more obviously flamboyant sports and the strange and old-fashioned homophobia which exists around it. 
• Making A Living From YouTube: It basically looks like NO FUN whatsoever, is the upshot – there’s quite a lot of GOOGLE IS EVIL subtext (not even that sub, to be honest) in this, but the main thing I got from it is that these poor buggers are just trapped in an endless cycle of having to dance EVERY DAY for the watchers if they want to eat. Which is a bit grim, really. 
• American Football – The Review: American Football, reviewed as if it were a videogame, at great length, by the inimitable Tim Rogers. You sort of need to like either games or American Football to get this, otherwise you can skip it without fear. 
• On Tour With The Sex Pistols: Anecdotes from their 1978 tour of Texas. My favourite line is the one about them all having skin ‘like lizards’ – even by the standards of late-70s Britain, these are some PROPERLY unhealthy looking young men.

By Seung Hoon Park

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

2) Next, an animation which struck me as sort of appropriate in the wake of the Superbowl and all the adgasming which followed. This is called ‘Love In The Time Of Advertising’, and it’s just charming – beautifully animated, and the song/narration is really very good indeed. Take 8 minutes while you have a cup of tea and enjoy it:

3) This is an advert. Sorry. It’s for a Norwegian company that does filming with drones – JUST LOOK HOW GORGEOUS THIS STUFF IS. It’s almost worth accepting 24h airborne surveillance in exchange for this sort of video (it’s really not, I promise):

4) This is really quite mental. So below is a video by what is apparently a subversive, non-officially-sanctioned alternative Winter Olympics mascot, all trippy and countercultural…except, as this article explains, it’s actually a faux-countercultural mascot supported and bankrolled by the Russian administration. I know we’re living in a BELIEVE NOTHING era, but even by those standards this is pretty creepy:

5) More American Football – this is called Game Day, it’s by Uncle Funkle (no, me neither), and it’s sort of half song and half poem and it reminds me of all sorts of rather good Americana and basically I REALLY LIKE IT, and I hope you do too:

6) Another week, another application of the Doge meme to another corner of popular culture. This time it’s gender politics and pornography, as brought to you by Bright Desire, a company which apparently makes female-friendly / focused bongo (the site’s not very SFW, as you might expect). The video below examines the prevalence of the male gaze in mainstream pr0n, with Doge-ish commentary. It’s obviously really not at all safe for work, despite the Doge heads helpfully obscuring the erogenous zones, but it is funnier than it ought to be. Honest:

7) By contrast, this isn’t pr0n but is still the sexiest thing I’ve seen in ages and ages. Telling the story of a pair of former lovers who see each other again on the tube when they’re with their new partners, it accompanies a song called ‘Alternate World’ by a band called Son Lux, and the performances by the leads are really rather excellent. Or at least I think so; feel free to disagree:

8) Another animation, this time for the song ‘Son’ by Concorde – I’ve just realised that there’s quite a lot of sex or at least nudity in here this week, for which apologies, but this also contains (cartoon) breasts from the outset, so caveat emptor and all that. Anyway, it’s a good song and I think the video tells a story very well (admitted;y not a very happy one) – the artwork’s apparently based on that by this man, in case you like it:

9) WARNING: THIS ISN’T IN ANY WAY FUNNY OR ‘WEIRD’ OR IN ANY WAY NICE. Bit conflicted about posting this, but it’s by far the most powerful thing I’ve seen in ages. I know that on many levels this is propaganda, and I also know that the conflict in Syria is complex and horrendous and none of the main factions involved are in any way blameless for the mess that the country finds itself in, but with those caveats in place…this video’s called ‘Assad Barrels’, and is in two parts – the first shows barrels full of TNT being dropped on Damascus, over and over and over again, with a very minimal backing score. It’s just relentless and incredibly, incredibly sad. The second part then shows some of the aftermath of said barrels – I strongly advise that you don’t watch past 5:30 if you’re feeling sensitive, as there’s some very graphic stuff there. Happy Friday. 

THAT’S IT FOR NOW

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Happy Year of the Horse! By The One Cam

THE SECTION WHICH, DESPITE CONTINUING TO RAIL ABOUT HOW POINTLESS MUCH OF THIS STUFF IS, THIS WEEK TOOK A LOOK AT FACEBOOK’S 2013 RESULTS AND JUST FELT SAD INSIDE (AND, LET’S BE FRANK, NOT A LITTLE WISTFUL ABOUT WHAT IT MIGHT BE LIKE TO BE REALLY, REALLY WEALTHY) WHILST AT THE SAME TIME NOT REALLY DOING ANYTHING PRODUCTIVE TO IMPROVE ITS LOT IN LIFE:  

• What Brands Can Know About You When You Login To Facebook: Sorry, this is a link to a picture in a tweet which is a bit crappy, I know. Anyhow, this is actually quite a useful list of information about Facebook users which Apps can use; useful as a little aide memoir as to what is and isn’t possible with Facebook’s APIs. 
• Facebook Launches Improves Retargeting Ads: This is quite big and potentially useful. I think I trailed this in October when it was announced, but apparently FB’s rolling this out to everyone(ish) as of the now; you can now target ads at people based on their actions on your website or mobile app – so you can take all the people who came to your website and DIDN’T buy anything with video ads displaying the tearful CEO repeatedly asking “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE US?’ whilst crying and smearing their naked body with KY. Or, er something like that. Sorry. Erm, you can also add call-to-action buttons to ads as well (“BUY MORE STUFF”; “PLAY MORE GAMES”; “LIVE MORE”; “STOP CRYING”, etc). Powerful and, whilst not revolutionary or groundbreaking, also sort of saddening. 
• FB To Flog Data About TV ‘Chatter’: Facebook’s increasingly unsubtle ripping of leaves from Twitter’s book continues apace, with the announcement this week that they were partnering with social TV data company SeconSync to give people (aka advertisers) access to anonymised information about how people use Facebook whilst watching certain TV shows in the UK, US and Australia. Obviously if you work in TV, or want to do something smart around FB use in ad breaks, then you should probably be paying attention to this. WAKE UP. 
• Facebook To Launch Paper: So on Monday 3rd Feb, Facebook is launching Paper, a new app product (I think) which effectively seems to turn your Facebook newsfeed into Flipboard or similar. Click the link, and be impressed at the very nice webpage they’ve set up to promote it, and how frankly GORGEOUS the UX/UI of the thing looks. And then take a step back, and ask yourself why everyone in the promo video seems to be some sort of weird analogue-fetishising hipster-Jesus craftsperson; how everyone in the video is a grown adult (have they just given up on teens?); how there’s no immediate sense of how the everliving fcuk all you wonderful advermarketingpr folk are going to push out your MESSAGES and CONTENT to people through this (although admittedly the ‘discover new stuff’ bits could offer one route, but a VERY congested one – advertisers wanting to promote stuff through this will, I imagine, pay top, top dollar); and how noone in the clip is paying anything more than very cursory attention to anything (it basically looks like Tinder for information, sort of). Anyway, this is all just fluff as we won’t have proper details til Monday. Speculate away until then as to how this will work and how it will let humanity’s primary narcissism engine make even more eye-watering amounts of money.
• Twitter Search Gets Marginally Better: Erm, basically that. You can now do better searches from the Twitter website, allowing you to search by media type, account type and from within your followers. Actually, the media-differentiated searching is very useful indeed, I shouldn’t scoff.
• Twitter Partners With Dataminr (Again) For News: Very big news, this – Twitter partnered with Dataminr previously to provide bespoke information feeds from the Twitter firehose to financial services organisations and the public sector (ie Governments); they’re now extending this service to news organisations. Think of this as some sort of major Tweetdeck-on-steroids offering, which if you’re the Guardian or NYT or BBC or Sky is pretty useful. It will be available globally ‘soon’ – £10 says that a similar product for advermarketingpr behemoths (hello Sir Martin! Hello Publicis people!) will be on the shelves before the end of the year.
• Twitter Mobile Apps Improve Photosharing (But Also Recommendations): Nice little tweaks to the way in which the Twitter mobile app lets users interact with photos (crop, rotate, zoom, etc) before posting; useful for community managers ON THE GO. Also in this update, which is maybe more significant, is the fact that users who refresh their feed and for whom no new Tweets are queued will now be served trending topics, suggested articles, suggested follows and…yes! That’s right! Almost certainly some ADS! In terms of a way to serve ads which places them front-of-mind, this is quite powerful I think. 
• Twitter Visualises the State of the Union: Very nicely done by Twitter’s data team, this takes Obama’s speech from earlier this week and runs analysison it, paragraph by paragraph, as to what was being said on Twitter at each stage, where in the US. I expect to see this becoming standard for all big political speeches sooner rather than later, even if it’s only Government collecting this for internal use WHICH THEY MAY WELL BE ALREADY. 
• Best Branded Vines of 2014: There are some very good ones here, much as it pains me to say so. 
• Tumblr Updates Terms of Service: Boring, but useful to know. You’re now meant to attribute reshares, and it’s also explicitly not allowed to impersonate companies or famouses, which might be useful if you’re a brand with a lot of people pretending to be you on the platform. 
• Order Food Through 4sq (In The US): I’m not 100% sure why I’m bothering to include this as a) there’s no guarantee it will ever come to Europe; b) 4sq. Anyway, in another sort of pivoty-feeling move, 4sq users in the States can use the app to order food from restaurants on the platform. Just FYI really.
• Pinterest Surpasses Email For Sharing? REALLY?: I’m including this because this is a stat which some of you may find that you can bend to your purposes (and I’m nice like that), but really? REALLY? I don’t believe this for a second. US-only data, but still – it just screams ‘bollocks’, frankly. 
• The Relative Size of Social Platforms: Clever old Mat Morrison has played around with platform usage data and done some analysis as to which platforms are largest AND stickiest. You can read the whole thing on his site, but SURPRISE Facebook (at least in the West) wins. STOP CHASING THE SHINY SHINY NEW ALL THE TIME. 
• The Snapchat Pitch: Are you a young, hungry student, eager to make your way in the world of advermarketingpr? If so, it’s not too late to change your mind and pursue a worthwhile career – save yourselves! Failing that, take a look at this competition by DDB Oslo which invites students to submit an idea in 10 seconds via snapchat for the chance to win…a job interview. Hm. 
• Chipotle’s Content Budget Is Bigger Than Yours: Brands have ‘done’ indie films; now they’re branching out into comedy series. Chipotle, purveyor of (I’m told) sub-standard tex-mex fare and of cutesy narratives about their sustainable food production practices, have paid what looks like an INSANE amount of money to create an original comedy series, to air through Hulu in the US, called Farmed & Dangerous – all about the ‘outrageously twisted and utterly unsustainable world of industrial agriculture’. FUNNY PROPAGANDA, starring a bloke from Twin Peaks. From what I can tell, the branding’s actually pretty light – it doesn’t air til mid-February, and it will be interesting to see if the millions invested (because it will be millions) were well-spent. Oh, and next time someone says something about NEEDING QUALITY CONTENT, gently mention this and ask about budgets.
• Oh Alright Then, Have The Bloody Superbowl Ads If You Really Want Them: THEY’RE STILL JUST SODDING ADVERTS, THOUGH, OK?

By Ezo Renier

THE SECTION WHICH CONTAINS ALL THE LINKS YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT, AND AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR WHICH YOU REALLY DON’T; I LIKE TO IMAGINE THAT IT MIMICS YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR WORKPLACE OR YOUR FAMILIES OR SOMETHING, AND IS IN SOME WAY A STRANGE AND AFFECTING METAPHOR FOR LIFE ITSELF ALTHOUGH IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT THAT’S JUST THE FEVERED IMAGINATION OF A MAN WHO DIDN’T GET QUITE AS MUCH SLEEP AS HE SHOULD HAVE DONE LAST NIGHT AND, FRANKLY, IS STARTING TO FLAG A LITTLE (SO ADVANCED APOLOGIES FOR WHAT FOLLOWS), PT1:

• How The Chinese Move For Chinese New Year: Happy imminent new year, China! This is a rather nice visualisation of human movements within the country in the leadup to the NYE celebrations, tracking short-term migrations as people head to visit friends and families. What’s interesting here isn’t just the viz, which is nice enough, but also how Baidu (for it is they) got the data – it’s tracking where people have been logging into stuff and how that’s changed day by day. There’s stuff you can do on the site to cut the data in different ways, but it’s obviously all in Chinese and therefore I have no idea what it says. Imagine what Google could do in this vein (and then turn off GPS tracking on your phone). 
• Make LEGO Models In Chrome: You’ve seen this by now, right? This is a Chrome/LEGO collaboration, extended globally after its previous Australia-only incarnation, which lets users build stuff with virtual LEGO in Chrome. So much loveliness here, from the simple fact of LOOK, LEGO! to the fact that you can choose your own ‘plot’ of land, mapped on Google maps, on which to build – which creation will then be browsable by other users. Surprisingly few towering phalli so far, which is pleasing. 
• Some Rather Nice Photos From China: Sina’s the parent company of Weibo, China’s closest analogue to Twitter and a massive media powerhouse – this is its selection of the best images posted by its users in (I think) 2013. Oh, ok, I don’t really understand what this is because my aforementioned inability to read Chinese, but I think that’s what it is, and I like that explanation so I’m sticking with it. Anyway, there’s loads of really great photos in there if you click through, and it’s actually a really interesting window into Chinese life and culture and mores and STUFF. 
• The New Awards: Voting’s now open for this year’s Net Awards, celebrating cool/interesting/technically great webstuff. It’s a really, really good source of *ahem* ‘inspiration’ if you’re a deisgner, developer or ‘creative’, and there’s some truly excellent stuff if you dive down within the categories. Web Curios would personally exhort you to cast a vote for Cachemonet, one of my favourite web-art projects of 2013. Thanks!
• Reasons To Live: A website which collects people’s REASONS TO LIVE in one place. It’s not particularly great in terms of either design or idea or execution, but I’m including it because the occasional juxtaposition of Hallmark-style aphorisms, utter idiocy and occasional poignancy is quite curious. 
• Scratchy Grooves: Crate-digger types should love this. Bill Chambles hosted a local radio show for nearly 20 years in Delaware in the US which he called Scratchy Grooves, playing music from 1900 to the 1940s from vinyl (hence the name of the show). Following his death, his son’s putting the recordings online – there’s some crazily great stuff buried in these, and I say that based on a relatively superficial perusal. Come on, someone, invent flappercore with this stuff.
• Sexualitics: What do you get if you cross Big Data with bongo? This is what you get! Sexualitics is a project by a group of Frenchmen which seeks to take large data from pr0n sites and apply academic rigour to it in an attempt to understand more about human sexuality. They’ve published one paper already, outlining their approach and some of the techniques they plan to use – just FYI, there is literally NOTHING erotic about any of this, but if you’ve got a Kinsey-style obsession with people’s sexquirks and a bit of a datafetish then you might like this. 
• Phone My Phone: Years ago, when I was doing work for the soon-to-be-defunct Tech City Investment Authority, I met a very young man who was coding as part of a project called Apps for Good. He is called Dylan, and he was terrifyingly smart and is part of the generation of people who will laugh cruelly at 45-year-old me’s attempts to find a job. He’s made this, which is a really, really useful site which calls your phone if you can’t find it. If you’re like my ex-flatmate this may well be the most useful thing on here this week. 
• Oscar-nominated Scripts: PDFs of Oscar-nominated scripts, from this year and years past, going back to 2007. Cinemascholars should appreciate.
• Oculus Rift + Game Of Thrones = Wow: There’s something slightly odd about the amount of attention Oculus Rift is getting from the mainstream, to the extent that it feels a little like it’s 1994/5 and The Lawnmower Man has just come out and we’re all excited about Virtual Reality again. Except this does actually look really cool, and this stunt/demo by HBO to promote the latest series of GoT to media is both very clever and a fairly incredible trail for the sort of stuff which people will eventually be able to do with repurposed CGI content and an immersive viewing rig. BETTER THAN LIFE!
• The Ninth Floor: These, let’s say it upfront, are some properly harrowing pictures. Telling the stories of a group of addicts who squatted in an abandoned rich person’s apartment in NYC, it’s a fairly unflinching portrayal of exactly how degrading the life of a fulltime needlejunkie can be. Pretty much the opposite of glamourising intravenous drug abuse. 
• The Sensory Book: Have you ever read a novel and thought whilst doing so ‘you know what would really enhance this literary experience? Wearing a mechanical vest which would whirr and clunk and move and stuff in order to better help me FEEL the emotions this book is supposed to be provoking’? No, me neither funnily enough. That sad, that’s exactly what this prototype does – obviously this looks clunky and terrible, but there’s an interesting set of augmented reading ideas which you could spin out of this…OOH, HERE’S ONE – whoever it is who makes those ghastly plugin scent thingies (Glade?), how about releasing limited-edition ranges designed to complement certain books, authors, etc…tobacco and whisky and horses for Hemingway, linen and halitosis for Austen, etc etc etc. YOU’RE WELCOME!
• Dipify: I think that this might be genius. Dipify is an app which connects users based on shared media consumption; that is, if two users are watching the same video, reading the same article, sharing the same links, etc, it will put them in touch. It’s both slightly more limited and slightly more complicated than that, but effectively the premise is as described. SO MANY POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS. It’s not a wholly novel idea, but I don’t think that this particular execution, which seems to make a lot of sense, has been done before. 
• Men Looking Sad Whilst Shopping: This should be a Tumblr, but it’s not. Anyway, an Instagram account collecting images of men looking sad whilst shopping. Why not take this base concept, PR/marketing people, and make it the basis for the next inevitable idea you present in a pitch which involves some sort of surprise experiential activity in a shopping centre? Oh, what’s the use.
• James Edition Luxury Marketplace: This seems to be real, from what I can tell. James Edition (their lack of possessive apostrophe, not mine) appears to be a sort of eBay for really, really rich people who like fast cars and white leather sofas and stuff like that. They’re selling an urban camo Lamborghini Gallardo for 60k Euros, which seems like a steal to me. GO ON! RUIN YOURSELVES!
• Copy Characters: I couldn’t work out how to do the Euro sign in that last entry. I should have used this – very useful website which contains all the esoteric non-English language punctuation characters you could hope for on one easily C&P-able page. Useful. 
• US Book Covers Vs UK Book Covers: A more-interesting-than-you’d-think comparison of book marketing on both sides of the Atlantic. We get better covers overall, I reckon.
• Sand-Writing Robot Machine Thingy: Skryf is a project by Dutch artist Gijs van Bon, which is a sort of sand-dribbling bicycle contraption which can write BEAUTIFULLY on flat surfaces using sand. The video explains this better than I ever could, but this is beautifully ephemeral (and if you’re looking to publicise holidays, messages written in golden sand could be a nice way to do it. Maybe). 
• Beautiful Macro Photos of TERRIFYING SPIDERS: Apparently jumping spiders are ‘insatiably curious’ when it comes to humans. Insatiably’s not a word I feel wholly comfortable with when discussing arachnids, I must say, but these pictures are rather lovely if a little bit formication-inducing to anyone even a little bit arachnophobic (ie me). 
• Convert Webpages to PDF: Exactly as tediously practical as it sounds. 
• TL;DR: This is basically the anti-Curios, or Twitter for people who think that Twitter’s too verbose. TLDR is a site which lets people curate and share links, with the simple caveat that each is accompanied by a short explanatory summary and no more. I think this is actually very, very useful, damn them. OBVIOUSLY you’d all rather read my prose, though. Obviously. Hello? HELLO? 🙁
• Human Skin Couture: Obviously, er, not real human skin – this is just an art project by Nicola Costantino which creates handbags, shoes, etc, with human-sized nipples, etc, as though they were made from human skin. I find the arsehole shoes particularly appealing, personally, although your mileage may vary. 

By Sarah Renard

THE SECTION WHICH CONTAINS ALL THE LINKS YOU COULD POSSIBLY WANT, AND AT LEAST THREE OR FOUR WHICH YOU REALLY DON’T; I LIKE TO IMAGINE THAT IT MIMICS YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT YOUR WORKPLACE OR YOUR FAMILIES OR SOMETHING, AND IS IN SOME WAY A STRANGE AND AFFECTING METAPHOR FOR LIFE ITSELF ALTHOUGH IT’S VERY POSSIBLE THAT THAT’S JUST THE FEVERED IMAGINATION OF A MAN WHO DIDN’T GET QUITE AS MUCH SLEEP AS HE SHOULD HAVE DONE LAST NIGHT AND, FRANKLY, IS STARTING TO FLAG A LITTLE (SO ADVANCED APOLOGIES FOR WHAT FOLLOWS), PT1:

• Set This As Your Least Favourite And Least Internet-Savvy Colleague’s Homepage TODAY: No need to thank me. 
• The Doge Shipping Forecast: Despite my confidently predicting the death of this particular meme at the start of the year, it continues unabated – this did make me laugh, though, so it’s sort of OK. Website which doge-ifies the shipping forecast – SUCH VEER.
• Electromagnetic Table Science Madness: I’m not sure quite how amazingly groundbreaking this is, but when I first saw it I got quite excited and OWOWFUTURE-y, so here I share it with you – basically an electromagnetic table which produces a field which can light flourescent tubes at distance with no contact required. Time required until electromagnetic pavements? 30 years. 
• A Truly Odd Artist’s Website: I’ve featured Geoffrey Lillemon’s work on here before, but I don’t think I’ve ever linked to his hugely odd (but actually quite well-coded) website before. Lillemon is an artist who operates primarily in digital media and who attempts to bring certain elements of classical style to life through interaction with technology. This is called ‘She Hisses’, but go and check out the rest of the site as well; it’s a hell of a weird timesink. 
• My Abandonware: If you were a teenager in the 90s (and probably a man – sorry, but on balance men were more into videogames BACK IN THE DAY than women) then this website may well be the end of you. Featuring free-to-download copies of all sorts of 90s classics including Doom and Sensible World of Soccer (it’s still really, really good, fyi), this could make your weekend (if, er, you’ve nothing better planned which I sort of hope you do to be honest). 
• The Poetry of Sims Patching: Remember the surreal world of Sims patch updates as revealed in last week’s Curios? No? Jesus, what’s WRONG with you. Anyway, for those of you who were paying attention, someone has turned them into poetry which makes me rather happy. 
• Play/Create Particulate Webcam Art: A site which uses your webcam to create a sort of moving particulate effect based on your movements. Weirdly and upsettingly it keeps making me look like sort of some sort of grinning skull-creature, which I hope isn’t some sort of dreadful portent of doom. OH HERE’S AN IDEA – given that the effect sort of mirrors the way that Guinness looks as a pint settles, why don’t the Guinness people take this and apply it in some way – for Hallowe’en! Your spooky face in a settling pint of Guinness! What’s that? Noone from Guinness or their agencies reads this crap, and that’s a terrible idea anyway? Oh. Ok. 
• The Ministry of Magic: Bit of a puzzler, this one. It’s a Harry Potter site for the Ministry of Magic, which appears to be quite new (like a month or so), yet it doesn’t seem to be linked to Pottermore or anything and there’s no new film to promote. SO WHO MADE IT? Oh, it’s a fansite made by a bloke called Andy Brown apparently. Anyway, my friend Catherine who is probably the biggest Potter fan I have ever met says it’s good, so there’s your endorsement. 
• A Collection Of 100s Of Webcams: None of which, as far as I can tell, are of the creepy / ‘sexy’ sort, although I confess to not having looked at any of them. There’s still something strangely compelling about webcams in public places; I lost about 10 minutes when I found this on Monday looking at what was happening in a Hungarian shopping centre (I believe that this is what is referred to as ‘living the 21st Century dream’), so who knows what will tweak your metaphorical nipples?
• 3d Printed Flowers Which Sort Of Inflate: Another slightly mental futuretechy invention, this. Not so much the flowers themselves, which are cute and quite cool, but the fact that 3d printing is now able to create components which can move like this. 
• How Much Time Have You Wasted On Facebook: I’m not sure I’d 100% agree with anyone who considers ‘looking at photographs of ex-girlfriends, past schoolmates and former colleagues whilst simultaneously crying and masturbating’ as a waste of time, but still – analyses your Facebook profile for number of posts, etc etc, and throws out some totally made-up number based on your activity on the site. By Time Magazine, weirdly enough.
• The Digital Streaker: A website which, for no discernible reason, allows you to send a fat, naked man cavorting across any website of your choice. I can think of no conceivable use for this, but I sort of hope that one of you might be able to.
• Authentic Weather: A weather app (and website) for Android and iPhone which confronts you with fairly stark assessments of exactly what it’s like outdoors. Amusing for about 5 minutes, although I think there may be a crowdsourcing elements to the descriptions which could improve it immeasurably. Or we also have Doge Weather, if you’re so inclined. 
• Fishy Film Titles: Fishfinger are a digital creative agency in London, apparently. In a piece of nakedly link-baity marketing, they’ve created a whole page of film posters based on fishy title puns – I am linking to this largely because ‘Anenome at the Gates’ made me laugh like a drain. 
• Silence The Shadows: I think that this is just another agency promo, this one of the slick HTML video variety. I don’t quite see the point of it, though – it’s meant to be sort of scary, but isn’t’; it’s well-made, but not amazingly so, and the supposed Facebook integration (presuming that that’s what they were going for with ‘Connect with Facebook’ doesn’t seem to do anything. Can one of you take a look and let me know if I’m missing something? Ta.
• Beautiful Photos of Methan Bubbles Trapped in a Frozen Lake: So cold in America. SO COLD. Pretty, though.
• GoPro Heroes: It’s hard to tell whether this is affiliated with GoPro or not – if it’s not, they should sign whoever’s behind it up asap. Nice collection of the best GoPro recordings on YouTube, seemingly updated pretty regularly – nice both if you’re an EXTREME SPORTS junkie and if you’re after some decent videos. 
• Gallerrit: A very clever little Reddit hack which takes any subreddit of your choosing and turns it into an infinite feed of all the images linked to in said subreddit. If you’re testing this at work, can I suggest you exercise a degree of judicious caution as to which subreddits you choose to experiment with? You’re welcome. 
• Objects in Faux-2d: Cynthia Greig is an artist who takes 3 dimensional objects and paints / outlines them to make them look 2d. Not only a cool effect, but the sort of thing which could prove the basis of quite a cool trompe l’oeil vidoe I think.
• The Virtual Steel Drum: Let’s be honest, does anyone REALLY like the sound of steel drums? They don’t, do they? Anyway, this is a digital version with which you can upset your coworkers this afternoon. 
• A Truly Staggering Collection Of Weird Documentaries: There are literally dozens linked to from here, and they are all sort of insane. Worthwhile if you’re into yoga, meditation, conspiracy theories or, let’s be honest, smoking eye-gouging quantities of weed and watching weird stuff on the internet. 
• The Last Photo Project: A rather lovely little artproject in which artist Ivan Cash goes round US cities asking passers-by to share the last photo they took on their phone. Watch at least one of them, they are BRILLIANT and I would like this to come to London please thankyou someone. 
• Dating App Which Kills Romance: You know how lovely it is when you are going out with someone and they do things for you which they have really thought about, or arrange things which you know they’ve put a lot of consideration and effort into? Yeah, well, screw that – Delightful describes itself as a ‘date concierge’, and effectively allows TIME POOR couples to outsource the effort of putting the spark back into their relationship by letting a piece of software pick ‘interesting’ dates for them. I’m possibly being a little unfair here, but it strikes me as sort of soulless and horrible (although my girlfriend could well argue that it’s not like I’m a stellar example of romance myself, to which I’d probably just grunt and scratch my testicles or something). 
• How Do Websites Make Money: Just that – page explaining the revenue models of a variety of sites. Actually full of stuff that’s quite useful to know. 
• The Sounds of London’s Waterways: Such a lovely project and a couple of years old now; a London Underground-style map of London’s canals, with accompanying sound recordings. If there are any musicians reading this, there’s probably quite a nice EP project to be made from this; use the samples from each waterway asthe basis of themed tracks for each one. Maybe. Or maybe it would be terrible? Bob, I know you’re bored – the world needs the Boella Ambient Waterways Series.
• 3d Printing With Lego Blocks: More 3d printing cleverness, this is a very smart little hack which lets users input their designs into a programme which then shows them which bits need to be 3d printed – and does so – and which bits can be prototyped in LEGO. The clever bit is how it works out which LEGOS are needed to make the prototype – look, just watch the video and it will make sense, I promise. 
• Really, Russia?: I don’t normally do ‘WTF?’ picture collections, but this one (purporting to be a collection of oddities from Russia, but it’s hard to tell provenance) really is quite weird (SFW). 
• A Parody Red Hot Chili Peppers Song Which Is Frighteningly Plausible: It’s only the fact that it doesn’t sound like Kiedis singing which makes you certain it’s a parody.
• Forgotify: This was on the Today programme this morning (which is quite odd really), so I’m presuming you all know about it already. Anyway, Forgetify plays songs from Spotify which have had 0 plays, ever. Quite an esoteric internet radio station, as I’ve discovered whilst writing this. 
• The Grand Budapest Hotel Website: I have to confess that I really don’t like the films of Wes Anderson. They look beautiful, and I can appreciate the craft and the artistry and all that, but they are cold and lifeless and lacking in anything resembling human affect (which may well be the point, in which case well done Mr Anderson). I feel much the same way about this website for his latest effort, which is beautifully made and full of rich backstory and CONTENT but which didn’t really compel me to dig as much as I felt it should. Oh, and as pointed out by someone else who’s smarter than me, the UX is a car-crash. 
• Project Makeout: Jedediah Johnson has an amazing down-South name. He also takes photographs of strangers after he’s just kissed them whilst wearingh much lipstick. I’m unclear as to whether these facts are related, although I suspect not. In any case, the pictures are GREAT. 
• The Taxonomy of Tagging: Maybe my favourite site of the week, this is a gorgeous piece of design – you can explore all sorts of evolutions and variants on graffiti tags from around the world, exploring the development of artists’ styles and the like. The only thing it’s missing is some sort of geographical indicator as to where they were found, but it’s so nicely made that I forgive them (they will be thrilled).
• Silhouette Letter Heads: No real idea why this exists, but it’s nicely made and plays with shadow quite cleverly (sorry, it’s quite hard to describe – imagine a digital inetractive-ish version of those artworks which form shadow panoramas from collections of seemingly randomly placed objects. That help?).
• Amazing Long-Exposure Pictures Of Dancers: Incredible technique, and I would love to see this applied to moving images too. These are gorgeous shots, particularly (I imagine) if you’ve done ‘proper’ dance yourself at any point in the past.
• The Philosopher’s Mail: I was convinced that this was a joke when I found it, and then I read last night’s Standard which suggested that it was a REAL THING and not just some sort of slightly snobbish undergraduate snook-cocking at the Daily Mail. Scratch that, I don’t care if it’s real and whether it’s by philosophy caricature Alain de Botton – it’s still undergraduate snook-cocking. Made me laugh quite a lot, though I really can’t see anything beyond parody here. 
• Fuzmo: Have you ever wanted a social network which exists solely for the purpose of sharing cute animal pictures? OH GOOD. 
• If You Like Sudoku, You’ll Like This Game

By Egon Schiele

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Dimly Lit Meals For One: It’s been all over the place this week, but there is SO MUCH POIGNANCY in here. I would really love to know where this person’s getting the pictures from (and maybe find the man in question and stage some sort of intervention). 
• Embed With Games: This is a bit of an unusual Tumblr – rather than being the throwaway home of a one-note gag, it’s the home of games journalist Cara Ellison’s series of writings where she goes and hangs out with some of the world’s best game developers and gets under their skin. Or at least it will be, once she starts doing more. Anyhow, if you’re in or into the games industry this is very good indeed. 
• Matching Monsters: Maybe my favourite site of the week, this invites people to submit photographs which will then be subtly altered to include a drawing of a monster which the illustrator feels fits / matches the original image. SO CUTE. 
• Scrap PDX Finds: Weird stuff donated to a creative reuse dump in Portland, Oregon. 
• The Art Of Truck Torrance: The weirdly-named Mr Torrance does a very nice line indeed in cutesy illustrations. I’d commission the fcuk out of him if I had anything to commission for. 
• Architecture of Doom: A collection of photos of depressed, distressed and depressing architecture from around the world. Ah, brutalism!
• Too Long, Didn’t See: Fun project in which Henry Davis gets given descriptions of films he hasn’t seen and then turns them into comic strips based on his interpretation of said descriptions. Or rather used to, as it’s not been updated for ages, which is sort of a shame.
• Adidas Originals: Hugely tedious unless you’re an Adidas fanboy/girl, but I’m including it because I absolutely adore the way it scrolls.
• Me And My ZX Spectrum: Kids in the 80s, photographed with their supercomputers. All of the hair and the fashion you’d expect. Oh, and if you want to play Jet Set Willy then you can do so here.
• LOL MY Thesis: Students post short, mocking descriptions of their theses, as they prepare for a long life of intermittent work and fundamental disappointment. 
• Animals Riding Animals: I’m not offering any further description, you don’t need it.
• Fat Animals: See previous link.
• Hey, Are You Cool?: Documenting the other players met by one person playing post-apocalyptic zombie shooter DayZ (details here if that means nothing to you). Seroiusly, art based on in-game experience will be BIG in 2014, mark my words (please don’t remind me about this when I am wrong). 
• Metal Albums With Googly Eyes: See animal links passim.
• DBA Reactions: I’m including this mainly as proof that every single profession has its unique thrills and crosses to bear. This is one of those ‘when a client’s like X and you’re all like Y’ tumblrs which did the rounds last year for the PR, advertising, marketing, etc etc etc industries, but this time for the (it’s fair to say) less ‘glamorous’ world of database administration.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH YOU SHOULD READ AS SOME SORT OF HEDGE AGAINST THE INEVITABLE MENTAL DECLINE WHICH WILL SOON SET IN AFTER YOU’VE CLICKED ‘LIKE’ ON THE 356000th PICTURE OF FUNNY ANIMALS OR YOUR MATE’S FAT KID ON FACEBOOK:

• Desert Island Graphic Novels: A series of luminaries from the world of scifi and assorted geekery pick their favourite graphic novels. There are some great recommendations on this list, and some equally obscure ones – if you’re into the medium, this is a wonderul place to find new recommendations; if you’re not, it’s a good place to start (and you should, dammit, they are ART). 
• On Being The Writer of Mega Shark VS Mecha Shark: A great interview with Jose Prendes, who has written some of Aslyum Films’ ‘best’ output. Really interesting, and it’s nice that the man is refreshingly sanguine about the value of his output. Probably the only film–related interview you’re likely to read this month which contains the question “Was there ever a point during the process when you thought “I just don’t see how I’m going to get this shark to destroy the Sphinx”?”.
• Remembering Days Of Thunder: Such a good piece of writing, and a wonderful skewering of not only the film but the whole Tom Cruise ouvre as well. Part of a regular series in which The Dissolve looks back at forgotten films, this is a merciless look at the sheer idiocy of a film which even at the time was described as ‘Top Gun with planes’ and is now chiefly remembered for that bloody ‘Show Me Heaven‘ song (which I now have earworming all over the place, dammit). 
• Demon Camp – An Extract: The most powerful (read: sort of upsetting) read of the week, this is an extra from forthcoming book Demon Camp, which speaks to US veterans of the conflict in the Middle East and seeks to investigate what exact common factors combine to contribute to the insanely high suicide rate amongst vets. This is seriously good, and not a little creepy, writing. 
• What It’s Like Being The World’s 13th Best Donkey Kong Player: Apparently there’s been a boom in competitive Donkey Kong playing in the wake of King of Kong’s release a few years back (which is weird, as it didn’t exactly paint the ‘scene’ in a flattering light. Anyway, this is a look at the life of a man who’s very good at the game, but not quite good enough – I’ll be honest, I’d hazard a guess that his life’s lacking something in some way. 
• Why Beats Music Matters: This is sort of a review and sort of a puff piece of new Spotify-beater Beats Music, but it’s really interesting if you are into curation and the automation thereof. Or, you know, if you just want to know if Beats Music is any good. 
• The World Of Bespoke Drug Design: A facsinating look at the history of designer drug creation, which then segues into a slightly jaw-dropping account of quite how easy it is to get a lab in China to manufacture quantities of whatever you want with very few questions asked. Seriously, the journalist basically sends them an email saying ‘can you synthesise me something with this sort of chemical profile, please?’, and then gets a baggie full of white powder fedexed to him a few weeks later. Madness.
• Medical Horrors of Reddit: Do you want a Reddit thread which is full of medical professionals recounting the most stomach-churning experiences of their careers? OH GOOD. No joke, these are quite vile and should be approached with caution. 
• PRing the Pope: Probably the first and last time that something from PR Week gets in here, but this look at the man behind the best PR campaign of recent years (because really) is actually quite interesting, as is this fairly hagiographic profile of the Pontiff in Rolling Stone (See?!).
• Disney and Datatracking: A look at the future of datagathering with Disney’s latest innovation – armbands for visitors to its US parks which are loaded with data about you – birthday, gender, age, predetermined preferences, etc – and simultaneously collect information about what you do on your visit. Ostensibly helping create a better, more personal experience, this is also sort of intensely creepy and simultaneously inevitably going to be EVERYWHERE in a few years. 
• William Burroughs In Profile: I must confess to never having really got on with Burroughs’ writing – I always preferred his son’s, which probably says very little good about my literary sensibilities. This, though, is a great piece profiling a fascinating and fairly dreadful man – worth a read just for the ever-incredible and tragic ‘William Tell’ episode. 
• The Perils Of Social Interaction: A consistently funny webcomic look at social awkwardness in its many multifarious forms. 
• The Rob Ford Story: So we all know that Rob Ford’s a crack-taking drunk. This, though, is the first part of the Toronto Star’s EXHAUSTIVE recap of their mayor’s story, and it’s just…mental, really. It’s very, very long – and this is only the first part – but it’s car-crash compelling and gives you the context and backstory which the videos of a cracked-out Ford don’t quite give you. It almost makes you feel warmly towards Boris for a second or two, until you actually listen to the man. 
• The Bot Poetry of Darius Kazemi: Interesting profile of web artist Darius Kazemi, who’s made all sorts of projects which seek to find beauty in the random nature of the web, and draw it out through automated processes. About as wanky as I just made it sound, but there are interesting parallels with broader literary / artistic traditions which I found interesting. 
• I Bought The Brixton Academy For £1: Basically a big trail / plug for the guy’s book, but this is a crazy story. Doesn’t explain why the soundsystem’s always been so ropey, though. 

By Johan Thornqvist

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

By Eric White

THE SECTION ABOUT WORK-TYPE THINGS WHICH, I AM AFRAID TO SAY AFTER A FEW LEAN WEEKS, IS RATHER BIG THIS TIME AROUND AND WHICH I WILL TOTALLY UNDERSTAND IF THOSE OF YOU WHO DON’T HAVE SOME SORT OF SILLY MEDIA JOB SKIP OVER AS, QUITE FRANKLY, NO ONE SHOULD READ MOST OF THIS STUFF UNLESS SOMEONE SOMEWHERE IS PAYING THEM FOR IT:

• Facebook! Facebook is DYING! Oh, Wait, Hang On, Maybe It’s Not After All (Although Perhaps Journalism Is): This week’s ‘FACEBOOK IS DYING’-bleating came in the shape of a report from academics at Princeton, who published a paper suggesting that, based on analysis of what happened to MySpace, Google Trends, and some rather half-baked comparisons with epidemiological data, Facebook is destined to lose something like 80% of its userbase in the next 24 months. You don’t need to be some sort of massive academic datanerd to be a little sceptical about this claim – the most obvious rebuttal comes from the simple fact that comparing MySpace in 2007ish with Facebook in 2014 is a little like comparing apples with machetes, and that correlation does not equal causation – and yet this didn’t stop quite a few sections of the global media spazzing out about this left right and centre. Read this rebuttal for the full, academic-ese version of why it’s rubbish; or alternatively read this one, for unexpected proof of Facebook actually having a sense of humour.
• FB Newsfeed Tweak Penalises Brands: Well, it does a bit. In the never-ending quest for QUALITY CONTENT (sigh), Facebook’s slightly altered its newsfeed algorithm so as to mean that text-heavy posts from brands will be de-prioritised, whereas textual posts from actual real human beings will be given a bit of a boost. In practice, what that means is a) if you’re a Page and your updates are text-heavy, (even) fewer people will see them; b) if you’ve hired an expensive copywriter to pen your Page’s prose, you may want to reconsider that; c) Facebook are effectively telling brands to spam people’s walls with even more crap pictures and image macros. QUALITY CONTENT!!!! Thanks, Facebook!
• FB Launches New App Insights: If you make / shill Facebook apps, this is useful to know – more data on how, where, when, etc, people are ENGAGING with your app. 
• Deadline Approaching For Facebook Studio Awards: If you’ve done anything to make the world a better place using Facebook in the past year, then y…ahaha, who are we kidding? If, on the other hand, you’ve made something shiny and exciting which has got a lot of other industry people frothing at the mouth with glee, you may want to nominate your work for a Facebook Studio Award – deadline for entries is next Friday, so get to it. 
• Google Makes Changes To Guestblogging / SEO Stuff: So this is searchgeeky but worth knowing – Google announced this week that it was going to start penalising websites which consist solely of low-quality ‘guestblogging’ posts; obviously this doesn’t mean that having guest blogs per se is bad, just that it needs to be decent copy. Frankly if this announcement screws you in any way you were probably doing something a little shady already, so I’ve minimal sympathy. 
• Google Adds ‘Extra Info’ To Search: Google’s going to start offering expandable ‘more info’ bits in its search results, apparently, meaning you can click on a link to get a little expandable dropdown of additional details on any site before clicking through. It’s not 100% clear where this info is going to come from – the example on the Mashable (sorry) piece suggests Wikipedia, but I doubt this will be the sole source. Anyway, worth knowing from a reputation management / PR point of view. 
• Twitter To Launch TV Ratings Info In Europe (But Not UK) (Yet): This already exists in the US courtesy of Twitter’s partnership with Nielsen; this is the European equivalent, launching in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany and giving TV networks (and advertisers, obviously) a whole load of extra data on people’s Twitter usage during and around specific TV shows (themes, reach, INFLUENCERS, etc etc etc). The ad potential for this is obviously huge; I imagine it will come to the UK before the end of the year. 
• Analytics Now Available For Twitter Cards: Remember Twitter Cards, the things which let you do all sorts of ‘exciting’ things within tweets like email signups, ‘watch later’ buttons, RICH MEDIA EXPERIENCES, etc? Well you can now get SUPER IN-DEPTH analytics for them. Useful / interesting, and even more of a rationale to explore the possibilities afforded by cards – details here, in case you need reminding.
• Vine’s 1st Birthday: Who can remember what the world was like a whole 13 months ago, before we were granted the almost infinite power of being able to make 6-second looping videoclips with our mobile devices? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Anyway, in celebration of their service’s 1st birthday, Vine (aka Twitter) has released this rather nice collection of some of the highlights from the service. 
• A Guide To Analysing LinkedIn Ads’ Performance: In case you might need / want such a thing, here it is. 
• Pinterest Testing Ability To Pin Gifs: Not really much more to add to this, to be honest. Sorry. 
• Pinterest Also Testing Personalised Homepages: This is a bit more interesting; Pinterest is looking into giving users a personalised Home/Landing page based on stuff they have previously pinned, accounts they have followed, etc etc etc. What does this mean? That’s right, kids, more exciting opportunities for ADVERTISING! Watch this space, and be sure to recommend that your clients set aside another £300,000 or so NOW to fire their promoted pictures of pugs wearing their clothing into the eyes of impressionable consumers of visual content. 
• Brands Using Jelly: Biz Stone must be delighted that, just two short weeks from his new Q&A service Jelly launching, brands have already swarmed onto it to fill it with such ENGAGING and RELEVANT questions as ‘Do you like KitKat?’ or ‘How Do You Eat Yours?’. Truly, we live in a blessed age. 
• Brand On Snapchat: This is purportedly a site to help people find popular accounts on Snapchat. It’s not great for that, but it does link to quite a few branded accounts which is quite interesting / useful from a ‘look, let’s see what other people are doing and try and derive some sort of half-hearted inspiration from it’ point of view. 
• Oh, And There’s A Snapchat Variant For Desktop Macs Too If You Need One: Just in case, you know. 
• Arsenal Reach 1/2 Million Followers On Soundcloud: Just a little aside here – audio is QUITE POPULAR, you know, despite the fact that no one ever seems to consider it as part of the CONTENT MIX (perhaps because it doesn’t go viral). Anyway, maybe worth thinking of next time you’re wanging on about this stuff. 
• Brand As Patron pt 3029387 – The Dove Edition: First it was Grolsch teaming with Harmony Korine and VICE (did anyone actually see the film that resulted?) a few years back, now we have Dove, bringing its ‘real beauty’ schtick to Sundance courtesy of a film all about ’empowering the selfie’ (Jesus) directed by an Oscar-nominee. Leaving aside the slightly queasy nature of the premise, it’s quite a neat concept which ties into Dove’s BRAND IDENTITY and stuff – they have spent a LOT of money on this, though.
• Macklemore, On A Bus, For The Grammys: It’s the Grammys on Sunday, apparently – as part of the buildup for it, the ceremony released a video of Mackelmore performing on a bus. That in and of itself is cute, but not revolutionary; what’s interesting about this piece is the fact that it was all filmed on cameraphones and hidden GoPros, which meant that (leaving aside what you’d have to pay for any talent), this sort of thing is actually really quite cheap to do. 
• VISA Annual Report: Obviously VISA Europe’s Annual Report is a work of skull-crushing tediousness to the average punter, but I’m noting it here simply as the manner in which its been presented online is actually quite nice; clean, fresh, and slightly less painful to look at than your more traditional 157-page PDF. It really is dull, though (sorry). 
• All The Old Spice Prank Websites: Another year, another concerted bid for Lions glory by W&K, presuming it’s still them, on the Old Spice account. This year they’ve gone for a selection of spoof websites promoting hideous, tasteless products – all of which when visited eventually morph into a video of the now familiar bare-chested Isiah Mustapha berating users for their lack of taste and distinction (this lack of taste and distinction can, of course, be rectified through judicious use of P&G’s stinkgel). As ever, these are really nicely made and the writing’s actually very good throughout. Although I am sure that they have lifted the one with him on rollerskates from Shadrack and Abendigo. 
• Newcastle Brown Spoof Admania: Last week I railed against the obsession with Superbowl ads, and the weirdness of people watching trailers for adverts. The people at Newcastle Brown Ale OBVIOUSLY read Web Curios (they don’t), as they’ve made this the centrepiece of this rather nice piece of work for the US market. Amazing that ‘bollocks’ really doesn’t seem to be a profanity in the US. 
• Denham Jeans ‘Does’ American Psycho: In case you’ve not seen this already, this is very, very good indeed – great ‘content’, guys! Although I do worry that it makes its target audience out to be complete cnuts. Well, ‘worry’ is a bit strong, but you know what I mean. 
• Canal+ Offers An Interactive Greeting Card for 2014: STROKE THE PONY! This actually rather nice, although eerily reminiscent of the mental Shakira perfume website from last year. 
• Good Campaigns Of 2013: A good Slideshare, this, pulled together by Gregory Pouy and containing some decent and not overexposed examples.
• 70% Of Marketing / Marketers Fail To Drive Sales: You have to laugh, don’t you? Don’t you? Stop looking like that. It will be fine, honest. 
• Imperica New Horizons Event – Lineup Now Confirmed: It’s looking very good indeed. Get your tickets at that link there, and don’t spare the horses. 

By Mary Pratt

WOULD YOU LIKE TO LISTEN TO A MIX BY GERMAN SUPERSTAR PRODUCER DJ KOZE? OH GOOD

A COLLECTION OF OTHER THINGS WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY ACT AS SOME SORT OF PALATE-CLEANSING ANTIDOTE TO THE BRAND-ISH-TYPE STUFF UP THERE AND WHICH, I PROMISE, CONTAINS AT LEAST THREE REALLY, REALLY GOOD LINKS THIS WEEK, HONEST, Pt. 1:

• Clever API-Scraper For Any Website: This is potentially very useful indeed if you’re a developer; called ‘Kimono’, this apparently ‘lets you turn websites into structured APIs from your browser in seconds’. To the 9 of you for whom that is any use, you’re welcome. 
• The Huffington Post Launches WorldPost: Just FYI, really – the Huffington Post this week announced its foray into what they hope will be a truly global journalistic offering (at Davos, no less). We’ll see how this goes – lots of grandiose rhetoric from Arianna in the announcement, but time will tell…
• Everyone Attending Davos This Year: Well, the delegates at any rate – it doesn’t mention all the assembled flaks, flunkies and other parasites rooting around the tables and waiting for the metaphorical crumbs to fall (bitter at not attending? Me?) – but this is still interesting not only for the way in which it presents the information (which is rather lovely) but also when you start to drill down into the demographics of attendees. WHAT GLASS CEILING?
• A Drone You Can Fit In Your Pocket: How do you feel about the idea of a future in which people can carry tiny flying robots in their pocket, which they can unleash at any time to fly around recording stuff? Well it doesn’t matter, because they’re coming anyway and there’s probably nothing at all that you can do about it other than hope that this Kickstarter doesn’t meet it’s fu…oh, no, too late, it’s coming. On one level this is all sorts of ‘ooh!’ and ‘wow!’ and ‘so future!’ (sorry for the dogespeak), and on several others it’s a bit scary. Let’s not think about that, though. 
• The Ticking, Knitting Clock: This, though, isn’t creepy at all; quite the reverse. Designed by Siren Elise Wilhelmson, a Norwegian designer, this is a clock which, as time passes, automatically knits. It doesn’t admittedly, knit anything other than a  massive tube, but I don’t think this detracts from the loveliness of it. Anyway, hipsters, this could be this season’s onesie. Get on it. 
• BBC Launches ‘iWonder’: This is the BBC’s proprietary template for creating multimedia articles on-site, a la Snowfall (The NYT’s now-legendary multimedia page which sort of kicked off the increasingly ubiquitous longform multimedia parallax HTML-style presentation of journalism). Anyway, they’ve obviously created a back-end for journalists to use which relatively easily creates these sorts of things – expect to see other publishers following suit. Anyone who can create a white label-able one of these for brands and others will do quite well, I think. 
• Typeface Glasses: Designers will, I think, like these. Spectacles designed to mimic core elements of Garamond and Helvetica; rather wanky, but I can imagine that there are quite a few people out there who would secretly (or openly; who am I to judge?) like a pair. Wait for the inevitable ‘comic sans glasses’ comedy variant. 
• Gorgeous Cut-out Book-type Paper Art Things: An early contender for clunkiest descriptor of the week, these are, in my defence, quite hard to describe. Japanese artist Yusuke Oono makes these gorgeous works which are a cross between books and papercraft dioramas, telling stories through intricately cut-out paperscapes. Click on the link and marvel at the beauty; if I had kids, this is exactly the sort of thing I would buy them and which they would absolutely fail to appreciate, the jam-fingered little ingrates (it’s such a good thing I don’t have kids). 
• A World Map Displaying Viral Outbreaks Which Could Have Been Prevented Through Vaccination: This takes us from 2008 to the present. Aside from the fact that this is another example of BIG DATA being mapped quite well (I know, I know, so 2013), this is just here so we can all look at Big Pharma and applaud their neverending altruism (and for Big Pharma to summarily ignore our disapproval and carry on making unconscionably large sums of money each minute). 
• Tennis (The Band) Have A Nice Website: I have no idea whether this has been this way for ages, and I don’t really care. I found it this week and I like it, so it’s going in. Tennis, featured in the videos section of Web Curios passim, have a rather nice conceit on their webpage which is done out to look like Windows 95. Cute, and actually still pretty good functionally. 
• Metagaming In GTA V: Now that all the fuss has died down around GTA V (a game which, on reflection, I didn’t actually enjoy playing anywhere near as much as I feel I ought to have done – I blame the horrendous protagonists and the on-reflection sub-par radio stations, but maybe I’m just not the target audience any more) and the online component is sort of working OK, we’re starting to see some interesting stuff emerging – not least this trend, identified via this sub-thread on Reddit, of people playing the online game as journalists, simply running around documenting the madness through screenshots and photos. What’s particularly interesting is the meta-game developing within it, with people role-playing being hacks down to driving around in particular vans, etc. Expect to see this stuff, or something VERY close to it, at at least one art fair in 2014. MARK MY WORDS (unless I’m wrong). Although someone mentioned online that this has actually been going on for a little while, so what do I know?
• 8-bit Music Cover Version Motherlode: You want a whole YouTube channel dedicated to cover versions (vocal and instrumental) of some of your favourite music in chiptune style? OH GOOD. 
• The Tate Wants Your GIFS: Following from the Rijksmuseum the other week, now it’s the turn of the Tate to get people messing with its archives. On this occasion, the venerable institution is asking that people make gifs of some of its catalogue works and submit them to their website. These will then be screened, along with some commissioned works by ACTUAL ARTISTS (not that you’re not actual artists, but, you know), at a LATES event on 7th Feb. I like this idea, and I hope you do too – they’re taking submissions for another 10 days, so have at it. 
• Glass And Sex: We’re now on wave 2 of the sexyapps for Google’s imminent facecomputer, but their not getting any less creepy. This one’s from the UK, though, so GO TECH CITY. The website really does seem rather parodyish (to stop the app from working, the vocal instruction is apparently ‘Ok Glass, pull out’ – REALLY?!?) but is apparently all real; it allows partners to stream the glass-view of their coitus, see each other’s perspective on the whole event, etc. Leaving aside the peculiar sort of narcissism that would compel someone to have their partner’s view of sex whilst having sex (“sweetheart, how would you like to get off this time?”; “Well darling, what I’d really like to do is for you to wear these glasses so that I can look at what I look like when we have sex while we’re having sex”; HMMMM), this is very clearly just a promopuffsite for something which will probably never be made. Something like it will, though, so don’t stop feeling a little bit grossed out by the whole thing. 
• Wellcome Images: Have I mentioned on here how much I love the Wellcome Collection? I love the Wellcome Collection. They have SO MUCH interesting stuff there – it’s worth a trip for the shrunken heads, antique false limbs and slightly peculiar 18th-century Japanese sex toys alone. Anyway, as is now increasingly the norm for museums and archives, the Wellcome have put 10,000 images of their collection online; have a browse, there’s some awesomely odd stuff in there. 
• Translate Upworthy Headlines With This Plugin: Downworthy takes clickbaity headlines (“Think you know about cheese? You won’t know what to think after you’ve listen to this fish sing the blues”. Hang on, that one doesn’t seem quite right) and de-clickbaitifies them. More novelty than anything else, but there’s definitely an idea in here somewhere for some decent satire (mabe). 
• Cross-Platform Music Search: Quite a useful little toy which simultaneously searches for songs across YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify and others. 
• Odd-flavour Doritos From Japan:Japan is a country which quite evidently doesn’t have the same anti-MSG prejudices as we do. This is a collection of frankly mental flavours which Doritos have released in Japan over the years. Caramel? Sweet Christ. 
• Strange Image Manipulation Toy Thing: I’m going to quote the blurb here: “Utilizing the infinite resources from the internet as a medium and WebGL as the canvas, Club Rothko Builder gives users the chance to build, experiment and share online digital sculptures”.  So there. You can actually produce some rather interesting images with this, although playing around with your webcam with it at 7am does, as I discovered this morning, lead to quite a lot of soul-searching about quite how bad you look when you first wake up. 
• App Signals Death Of Romance: Those of you who have ever been in a relationship will know that receiving messages from your partner at odd times of the day saying they are thinking of you is rather nice (except a) when those messages come at 5am when they are obviously jacked off their tits on drugs; b) when you’re with the person with whom you’re having an affair; or c) when you’ve got to that point in the relationship where the mere thought of your significant other makes you physically shake with revulsion). Now take that idea, and imagine that rather than coming from your partner, these messages are automated by an iPhone app. How does that make you feel. Yes, well, quite. 
• Google Image Colouring Book: Simple but rather nice little site which searches Google for line-drawings and then presents them as things to be coloured-in. As with almost everything these days, there’s an MS-Paint-style art project waiting to be made of this (I am ashamed to say that one of the first thing I checked is whether it defaults to Google safe search – it does). 
• Pictures of Britain From Above: Feauturing images captured between 1919 and 1953 and held in the Aerofilms collection, a repository of aerial photography which contains pictures up until 2006 (apparently – I suppose Google sort of superseded it from that point onwards). Anyway, this is brilliant as a look at what the UK looked like during and immediately post 2 World Wars – as with the National Archives War Diaries project from the other week, this also invites people to identify certain areas / details to assist with the classification and mapping of the pictures. So much good stuff in here. 
• Shazam For Samples, Basically: Samplify (hideous name) is a clever mobile app which will listen to whatever song’s playing on your mobile at any given time and, apparently, identify the individual songs which it’s sampling. Good for DJs, musos and copyright lawyers, I would imagine. 
• Teju Cole’s RT Narrative: Teju Cole is one of those people on Twitter who tells very short stories very well indeed. You should follow him. The link back there is to a piece about a little storytelling game he played the other day, building a story fragment by fragment from RTs of other, unconnected, users’ tweets. Does that make sense? Sorry if not, the article explains it better I promise. Anyway, trhe first brand to copy this / rip this off in some way is officially hideous and an enemy of all that is beautiful and pure.
• Arctic Snow Trees: Trees in very cold weather look AMAZING. 
• Drake Weather: Ever wanted to know / see what the weather’s like where you are via the medium of an oil-painting of musician Drake’s head, in profile, with a backdrop showing the meteorological conditions currently prevailing around your computer or mobile device? OH GOOD. 
• The Chandelier Of Lost Earrings: I love love love this. An art installation currently on display in St Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, this takes hundreds of single earrings, donated by women who’d lost one of the pairs, and crafts them into a rather beautiful chandelier. Each earrings of the earrings is attached to a small tag, telling a tiny story about who and where it’s from. SO MANY FEELS. 
• Design The Perfect Logo: Despite regularly wanging on about design and related things on here, the amount I actually know about the practice can be written on the back of a very small envelope., As such, I have no idea whether this set of instructions for creating a perfect logo is bollocks or not; it..er…looks quite nice, though.
• WTF Is My Wearable Strategy: This is a whole week old now, so I imagine you’ve all seen it; if not, though, some zeitgeisty 2014 agencyLOLs for you, right here. 
• Beautiful Fcucking Sh1t: If you’re a designer (see ignorance caveat above) who wants a repository of slightly trippy graphics, or if you’re a psytrance head who had their heyday in 1996, this website will be right up your street. Oh, the same applies if you still make club fliers and want a whole host of psychedelic backdrops. 
• Your Name On A Spaceship: NASA is, apparently, sending a spaceship on a round-trip to visit the asteroid Bennu (a great name for an asteroid – say it aloud, go on; does’t it sound pleasingly Tellytubby-ish?) – if you want, you too can have your name etched onto the outside of said spaceship. Web Curios bears no responsibility for what may happen should alien life forms intercept the craft and decide that the names on it are the list of ‘chosen ones’ earmarked for abduction. 
• Twitter ‘Flashmobs’: This is silly and childish but did make me laugh quite a lot. The idea is that someone with rather a lot of Twitter followers takes a mundane tweet from a total stranger, tweets it to their followers and encourages them all to RT / favourite it, to the utter bafflement and confusion of the initial person. Obviously this is only funny if people are NICE, which given that this is THE INTERNET (sorry, Evgeny) is pretty unlikely. Still, the concept amused me and I’m pretty sure that there are twists on this for brands should they want to employ them.
• Nice-looking Beta Recipe Site: This is called Counter Chef, and whilst it’s not yet live you can see enough of how it looks / works to get a feel; it uses a rather nice visual representation of ingredients, etc, which I think make recipes a lot easier to scan; imagine this will be very good for in-kitchen tablet use. Clever UI. 
• TINY BATMAN ACROSS THE WORLD: Look at his little ears. LOOK AT THEM.

Not sure who this is by, but found it here

A COLLECTION OF OTHER THINGS WHICH WILL HOPEFULLY ACT AS SOME SORT OF PALATE-CLEANSING ANTIDOTE TO THE BRAND-ISH-TYPE STUFF UP THERE AND WHICH, I PROMISE, CONTAINS AT LEAST THREE REALLY, REALLY GOOD LINKS THIS WEEK, HONEST, Pt. 2:

• A Selection Of Images From Kiev: It’s not been a great week in the Ukraine; this Livejournal page has collected some pretty amazing photos of the civil unrest that’s been seen there this week. Obviously I can’t read Russian so I have no idea what the accompanying text says; apologies if it’s anything dreadful. Here are some other excellent pics from The Atlantic, while we’re about it. 
• Buster Keaton Was Amazing: He did all of these stunts himself. All of them. Tom Cruise can do one, frankly.
• Marijuana-based Fine Dining: You know what, I personally can’t think of anything worse than getting stoned out of my gourd with a bunch of strangers as I’m confronted with a selection of elaborate marijuana-based dishes; the intense couchlock I can imagine kicking in around the third course, and the subsequent conversational ‘issues’ that might entail’ make the whole exercise sound like an exercise in horror. Nonetheless, this website for an LA-based stoner dining experience offers exactly that – come on London, don’t let illegality stand in your way.
• Yeezianity: Were this website dedicated to anyone else I would suggest it’s a not particularly funny gag; the fact that it purports to be about Kanye West’s status as a godhead, though, there’s every possibility that West’s actually behind it himself in some small way (seriously, read the interview with him down there. The man’s self-confidence is INCREDIBLE). 
• Diabetes Deutschland Has The Website Of The Week: Diabetes is obviously a serious issue, but this website makes me laugh SO MUCH. The video which loops on the homepage is amazing – check out the woman on the left, getting increasingly perplexed as to exactly why she’s holding a couple of apples. 
• The Selfie Police: Quite a nice idea, encouraging people to donate money to charity to atone for their narcissism, and encouraging their friends to do the same. There’s a charity spin on this for Comic Relief or similar waiting to be exploited, although obviously I haven’t bothered to think through the mechanics as frankly that’s your job. 
• NYC Audio As Sculpture: Tying with the earring chandelier for the title of ‘best artthing I found this week’, this project by Erica Sellers takes sound files from New York locations, turns them into 3d wave models, and then grinds those 3d wave models into wood which has been reclaimed from the same area as the audiofiles were recorded to make sonically-influenced sculptures. Aside from the clever-clever HIGH CONCEPT, they look lovely too. 
• Abandoned Italian Discos Of The 80s/90s: This brings back memories of me being on Summer holidays in Italy in the mid-90s and being just too young to really feel comfortable in these sorts of places. It also brings back memories of seeing Italian men dancing AT THEMSELVES in the mirror of a club in Perugia a few years later. 
• The GIF-y Awards: There’s an awards ceremony for GIFS, it turns out. Inevitably it’s an ad agency side-project, but it’s actually a cute idea although if I’d pulled my finger out 12 months ago this would have existed then instead (but I didn’t, obviously). 
• Impressive Art On Coffee Cups: This man draws some rather incredible things on standard coffee cups. Costa / Starbucks / Nero / AN Other coffee chain – this one’s just waiting for you to jump all over it and shower the man with the monies. 
• Nursing Home Residents As Film Stars: I’m not 100% sure why these exist – they’re from Germany, but I don’t know whether it’s a promo for anything or simply a lovely initiative from a senior residential home – but these pictures showing senior citizens dressed as film stars are lovely. Also a lovely alternative to Bill Hicks’ ‘Let your grandma meet Chuck Norris‘ bit. 
• NYC Really Was Scary In The 80s: There was an article the other week about how there’s a lot of false nostalgia about for THE GOOD OLD DAYS on New York, when it was all edgy and real. These photos rather fantastically point out that it was also very, very scary-looking indeed. Would you go on that subway after dark? You’re braver than I am (admittedly not a huge accolade, but still). 
• Fashion For Pregnant People: Not something that I’m personally interested in, but this is a very nicely done website indeed. The homepage in particular is excellent – the video really works well. 
• The Surreal World Of The Sims: Personally I think that this is one of the best things in here this week. The Sims, as I’m sure you all know, is the long-running videogame in which players can create their own miniature people living in their miniature houses with miniature furniture and miniature relationships while you play GOD above them. This is a list of some of the more bizarre software patches which have been released for the game in the past few years; they make the BEST starting point for surreal stories / images I have seen in ages. If you’re not amused / inspired by gems such as ‘The Murphy Bed Has Been Made Less Lethal’ then we probably can’t be friends. 
• Get Your Hallowe’en Mask In Early: Animal masks. Really, really creepy animal masks.
• Instagram Experiments: A collection of cute / clever drawings which integrate real-world objects, photographed and collected. Again, crap description – click the link, it’s actually really quite good.
• An Incredible Collection Of Light Painting Photos: Long-exposure photography of light stuff isn’t really very cool, is it? It always feels a little bit like the photo equivalent of white people with dreads, waving poi. Still, ‘cool’ is something with which Web Curios (or at least its author) has no truck whatsoever, and as such I have no shame in presenting this AWESOME collection; some great stuff and really interesting techniques here, I think. 
• The Machine To Be Another: A really interesting project, using the now-ubiquitous Oculus Rift in order to play with ideas of self-perception and gender. Effectively it uses cameras and the Rift device to present a different first person view to an individual, which presents a different body to their own whilst still ostensibly mimicking their movements, etc. Oh dear God, that was nonsensical – sorry, early start this morning. Just look. 
• The Bum Alphabet: This is more my speed. An app for tablets / phones which attempts to teach kids the alphabet via the medium of a font made up of…er…bums. I imagine small children would find this HILARIOUS (and some adults too, to be honest).
• Behind The Scenes Pictures From Ghostbusters: You know the drill by now. These are pretty good, though, particularly the ones of the Slimer model (they called it Onionhead? Really?).
• Personalised Carved Ice Lollies: Very clever – using facescanning and a carving drillbit, this project aims to create a portable machine which will carve bespoke icelollies into whatever shape is placed in front of it. Coming to a marketing campaign near you later this year, no doubt. 
• Rub Lutter Cycles The World: Rob Lutter’s an OCD man who’s cycling around the world to raise money for charity. It’s an interesting project, and the website which accompanies it is really rather nicely put together; well-designed, clear, and with lots of decent pictures, info, etc. 
• 5TFU: Quite an interesting idea, this one. Sort of like Chatroulette for audio, this site allows anyone to upload an audiofile anonymously; visitors to the site get streamed a file at random, which they can either listen to or downvote in favour of moving on to the next one. All the files are available to download, too, which is obviously legally quite tricky, but a nice touch. I’ve had it on for the past 20 minutes, and there’s some really, really interesting stuff on there, and quite a lot which sounds like washing machines having angry sex. I like it (the website, not the sound of washing machines having angry sex). 
• Edgar – The Story Builder: Another week, another website which purports to let users create multi,edia narratives in an easy, attractive fashion. This one’s called Edgar, for some reason – it actually looks very nice, and the interface is pretty decent. It’s not quite the ‘make your own snowfall in 3 minutes!’ magical doohickey I allude to above, though. 
• Best / Worst Headline Of The Year So Far: Frankly it’s hard to tell how it could be bettered. 
• Wages For Facebook: A manifesto, really, demanding that people start claiming remuneration for the data which they have given up to companies like FB. Obviously that’s not ACTUALLY what it’s asking for – it’s about how we consider value in the context of information, and how we consider labour in a digital age, and all sorts of other things. The unskippable autoscroll irritates me no end, but the prose is actually very interesting whether or not you agree with its central premise.
• A Very Strange Hollwood Photoshoot: Jeremy Cowart is a photographer in the US who photographs famouses. He did a shoot recently for some TV show or another in which he felt a strange ‘connection’ with one of said famouses. I’m just going to leave this here – I have my own thoughts about this, but, y’know, who am I to judge. I just find it all VERY WEIRD as a way of reacting to some pretty bad news. 
• Stork Fountain: Finally this week, a poem. It’s from 2013, but I only saw it this week and anyway, it’s very good indeed. All about online activism and activity and inactivity and clickbait and news and information DOING THINGS and and and. Read it. 

By Louis Draper

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS! (IT’S JUST AS FCUKED AS FACEBOOK, APPARENTLY):

• Animals Sitting On Capybaras: We must surely be fast approaching a point where we’re going to need another addition to the Laws of the Internet which states ‘if it can be conceived of and articulated in writing, there will be a Tumblr of it’. 
• 80s Art: Photos of fine art, often in-situ, in the 1980s. Some quite remarkable stuff in here. 
• 70s Sci Fi Art: Erm, scifi art, from the 70s. These descriptors are sort of redundant really, aren’t they? People who make mood boards and STUFF might find this useful. 
• The Videogame Art Archive: A collection of art from videogames – not concept art, but depictions of art. Interesting and , as  per the GTA thing above, I would be AMAZED if this stuff isn’t actually *ahem* ‘reapppropriated’ by the fine art establishment this year.
• Critical Hand Gestures: See how many you can use at work this afternoon.
• Tate Collectives: Seeing as we mentioned Tategifs above, here’s a whole Tumblr of them (and other things too). Some really nice things on here. 
• Deep Dark Fears: Cartoon depictions of people’s deepest, darkest fears. You can even submit your own, if you like. This is simultaneously sort of cute and funny and really, really distressing in a low-key sort of fashion. 
• The Association Sketchbook: An interesting little project, using word-association through prose, poetry, images and video. Will be interesting to see what results over time, but I like the concept. 
• Then & Now Photos: If these are yet to be in the Mail, it can’t be long. Two English brothers recreate their childhood photographs, to comedic and occasionally slightly creepy effect.
• Truthgraphs: Graphs which…er…tell the truth. Sort of. 
• Datasonfication: Here we go – turning data into sound is officially a THING – it has its own Tumblr and name and everything. Anyway, this collects examples of audiomanipulation of datasets; I was wondering the other day to what extent audio could be used as an predictor of things / alerts system, from a datamonitoring sort of way. Then I started boring myself, so I stopped. 
• The Invisible Men: Finishing on a less than cheery note here, but this is a sobering and rather excellent / sad project. The Invisible Men collects critical reviews written by men who use prostitutes, and presents them as a series of texts pasted onto blank female masks, each with a pricetag showing how much each man paid for the right to complain about his experience. Not going to lie, this is very grubby indeed. 

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND REALLY, THIS WEEK ESPECIALLY, ARE QUITE EXCEPTIONALLY GOOD AS WELL AS BEING SORT OF INSTRUCTIVE IF YOU’LL EXCUSE MY IRRITATING DIDACTICISM FOR A SECOND:

• Stoya On Sex: Hopefully acting as a slight antidote to the last Tumblr, this is a great piece of writing in the New Statesman of all places by pr0nstar Stoya, who’s moderately famous in the non-bongo world for being a prolific writer and commentator on all sorts of things. Anyway, this is her guide to sex for young people, which I would modestly suggest should be required reading for anyone 12 and above. 
• Bill Murray AMA: Another week, another famous getting intimate with Reddit. This time it’s the turn of internet favourite Bill Murray, who gives a wonderfully candid series of answers; dear God, wouldn’t it be nice if all famouses were able to be this honest and unguarded about stuff, eh?
• The Death Of The Expert: A great piece on the troubling rise of the dilettante in almost every field, and how it’s increasingly seen as somehow rude and patronising to claim a superior or more valid perspective on any issue based on expertise or increased knowledge of said issue (it’s not rude; it’s just true). A great piece, with a slightly depressing overall tone which suggests that we’ve crossed the Rubicon on this one.
• Some TED Talks Are Just Wrong: It’ll be interesting to see whether the mainstream TED backlash gathers any real weight or not; nevertheless, this piece on The Awl neatly skewers one of the reasons why people are often uncomfortable with the format and premise; that is, the presentation of what are at best theories and at worst factoids as fact, in an environment which offers no opportunity to challenge and presents the speaker’s thesis as gospel. Obviously this only looks at a few examples – not all TED talks are like this, obviously – but it’s worth bearing in mind the next time you hear Gladwell or someone else wanging on about something INCREDIBLE and REVELATORY. 
• McQueen Vs Kanye: I do wonder what Steve McQueen, who lest we forget was a visual artist before he was a Hollywood filmmaker, thought of Kanye’s assertion that he was from a tradition of visual artists himself, but that noone had ever been smart enough to see it. Anyway, as ever West gives GREAT hubris here; whatever you may think of the man, personally or in terms of output, he’s very entertaining indeed. I wouldn’t really like to be stuck in a room with him, though, which feeling I am sure would be mutual were he to have any inkling who the everliving fcuk I am.
• The Best Music Journalism Of 2013: The last ‘Best Of 2013’ thing I will post here, honest, but there’s some really good writing linked to from this Red Bull Academy post. 
• Why Friends Ruined Everything: VICE doing what it does best here, skewering popular culture in slightly self-conscious and affectionate fashion. Thing is, and this is why Buzzfeed is less good than VICE, they could have done this too but it would have been ‘7 Reasons Why Friends Killed The 90s’ or something, and it would have been dreadful. In fact, maybe they’ve aready done it and VICE have just ripped it off, which sort of invalidates my thesis. Oh. Whoops. 
• Virtual Girlfriends And Slightly Sad Men: Wow, well this is quite bleak too. All about the increasing number of men in the Far East (although let’s be honest, it’s still a VERY small number overall) who are becoming more comfortable having relationships with virtual girlfriends than with the real thing. Although having recently witnessed a friend trawling through OK Cupid, I can almost begin to see their point. 
• Hacking OK Cupid: Speaking of that…one VERY geeky man applied algorithms to his search for love. Inspiring and a bit saddening in equal measure.
• An Oral History Of ‘Swingers’: Before Jon Favreau made millions directing the Iron Man films, and before Vince Vaughan decided to become th go-to guy for every mediocre romantic comedy made from 2006 onwards (or so it feels), there was Swingers. If you watched this when you were in your teens / early 20s, you probably wanted to be a bit like the characters in it (watching it now, you’re really glad you’re not). This is a really interesting piece, with the principals all talking about how it got made – interestingly, whilst there’s obviously LOADS of hard work and stuff in here, there’s also a healthy slice of familial money – note the passing references to ‘my dad got me a Hollywood scriptwriting course as a gift’, and ‘$200,000 from my father’s business associate’. Every little helps. 
• What It’s Like Being A Drug Dealer: Clue: a massive logistical nightmare, and really not very much fun at all, it turns out. BONUS: a similar but different piece on what it’s like selling through the Silk Road, which frankly sounds LOADS easier. 
• Indian Sex Tourism In Uzbekhistan: This is REALLY long, but very interesting indeed – not least as it shows sides to Indian culture that I personally haven’t read about before, and also tells you quite a lot about Uzbekhistan (it doesn’t sound fantastic, to be honest). 
• The Poignancy of Sad YouTube: Long-term readers may remember Sad Youtube from the Tumblrs section a few months back; anyway, this is Buzzfeed’s in-depth look at the site and the commentors whose poignant memories sparked the whole thing. You want to get poncey, you call it Proustian; you don’t want to, then it’s just a really interesting read. Your call. 
• Obama’s Second Term: Again very long, but SCH good political writing / profiling. Maybe I don’t read as much as I ought, but I struggle to think of profiling like this on UK leaders whilst they’re still in situ, although maybe that’s just because noone cares quite as much. In any case, this is a great look at Obama as he enters the final 2.5 years of his leadership; a very good close-up look at a man doing what I can only imagine is the worst job in the world (slight hyperbole, but only slight). 
• On Not Knowing Anything About Bob Dylan: Esquire, on the absolute inscrutable unknowability of Mr Dylan. Fans will lap this up; others will be slightly perplexed about how it’s possible to write this much about very, very little indeed. 
• The Evolution of Tarzan’s Roar: This is silly and fun and very OLD HOLLYWOOD, and also autplays the roar when you click the link. Go on, go to the toilets and practice it NOW.

By Korneel Detailleur

FINALLY, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

By @Cloudyrhodes

THE SECTION ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA WHICH IS STILL PRETTY SMALL THIS WEEK AND IS LEADING ME TO HOPE THAT PERHAPS THIS MIGHT BE THE YEAR IN WHICH WE ALL COLLECTIVELY DECIDE THAT WE POSSIBLY GOT A BIT OVEREXCITED ABOUT ALL THIS RUBBISH AND THAT WE SHOULD MAYBE LEAVE IT FOR A BIT, TURN OFF THE INTERNET AND GO FOR A NICE LONG WALK TO CLEAR OUR HEADS, BUT WHICH IS MORE LIKELY NOTHING BUT THE OMINOUS SILENCE BEFORE SOME SORT OF CATACLYSMIC FACEBOOK AVALANCHE:

• More Evidence That Facebook Is Just Laughing At The Concept Of ‘Organic Reach’: Another week, another piece demonstrating just how little Zuckerberg’s bland nation-state cares about your ability to reach an audience without spending LOTS of money on ads. Without them, organic reach appears pegged at around 7% – so 7% of all those people who you worked so hard to entice into ‘liking’ your Page will actually ever see anything you write on there. Unless you pay Mark some money. Anyone working client-side who reads this – if you want to really mess up your Community Manager’s weekend, send them this piece at about 430pm today and ask them what strategies they have to address this that don’t involve spending more money (clue: there is no right answer to that question).
• Trending Topics Coming To Facebook: But don’t worry! Facebook’s getting trending topics! In a move which is in NO WAY a copy of Twitter’s own trending topics, Facebook is starting to roll out a ‘what people are talking about’ feature to certain countries. In fairness it is slightly different, as topics displayed will apparently be tailored to a user’s interests, friendship base, etc – which sort of makes me question its utility as a world barometer, but then what do I know? Let’s be honest, this is just going to be A N Other ad product in a few months’ time, isn’t it?
• Google Image Search Adds ‘Usage Rights’ Option: Unexciting but useful, Google Images now lets you filter results by usage options – reusable, reusable for commercial ends, etc. Very useful indeed for anyone who spends a lot of time nicking pictures off the internet to use in other stuff (ie mostly everyone who does anything communications-y), and especially for those for whom the whole Creative Commons thing is just a little too complicated. 
• YouTube Makes Comment Management Easier: Again, dull – sorry, I can only work with what I’m given. YouTube’s now introduced a more streamlined comment-management, flagging and moderation system, which if you’re the poor bugger who has to deal with a herd of mouth-breathers writing “DIE FAGS YOLO” underneath everything you post probably comes as something of a relief. 
• The YouTube SuperBowl Ad Blitz: Well this has served to make me more miserable than I feel I ought to be at 8:06am. We live in a world in which people are meant to be so excited and moist with anticipation at the prospect of FRESH, HIGH-BUDGET ADVERTISING MESSAGES around this year’s display of pituitary meatheads’ athletic prowess that YouTube’s created a whole section for people to see the ads in advance. Leaving aside the total and utter weirdness of this – or, actually, maybe it’s not that weird; the rise of TVOD means that adverts are now an optional watch, which means that we inevitably see them less as something we’re forced to consume and more something we can choose to ‘enjoy’ and thus do so with a critical eye. Or something. Anyway, from an ad/media point of view this is obviously quite big news; expect a similar thing for the parade of Christmas ads come December 2014 (dear Christ, week 2 of Web Curios in 2014 and I’ve already mentioned the ‘C’ word). 
• Twitter Ads Mailing List Ad Targeting: Of course, it’s not just Facebook copying Twitter; Twitter’s now  aping Facebook in allowing advertisers to import mailing lists into its ad sales platform and cross-reference this dataset with Twitter’s own. That’s a horribly clunky way of saying that you can, in theory, target ads on Twitter to just people whose email addresses you have, or to exclude people whose email addresses you have (for example, to prevent card-based datacap tweets being shown to people who’ve already surrendered their email addresses to you), and other stuff like that. Actually quite a big deal.
• Tumblr Adds @Mentions: These were sort of there already actually, but now you get alerts and stuff; from a brand point of view this allows for far more ENGAGEMENT with your FANBASE – makes the whole thing I bit more interesting, I think, and there are some interesting possibilities for competitions and the like, not to mention Tumblr relations (for that is now a thing which will appear in PR agency pitches – I have decreed it to be so and thus so it shall be. Sorry about that). 
• Quite Nice Branded Content #1: Oh, dear God, parallax-scrolling HTML5 is SO 2013. Nonetheless, this little site by Sony is very, very nicely done indeed. Promoting the artistry behind its engineering, the design and build is very, very slick indeed. The underwater bit in particular actually elicited a small ‘oooh’ from me when I first saw it – admittedly it was Monday and it was a pretty dull afternoon, but still.
• Quite Nice Branded Content #2: I like this because I can sort of see the thought processes behind it. Spices are multicoloured. People love seeing multicoloured stuff flying about (witness the rise in interest in Holi over the past 3 years). If we explode spices in slow-motion we’ll have INTERNET GOLD! Anyway, this is cute from Schwartz. 
• Quite Nice Branded Content #3: Guinness are of course old masters at this sort of thing, but even by their standards this short film about the incredibly stylish men (Sapeurs) of the Congo is rather nicely done – designed and filmed to appeal squarely to the fashion/design/culture/hipster crowd, as well as being ON-BRAND and stuff. 
• Lessons In Realtime Content: Some notes on how Buzzfeed ‘did’ the Golden Globes; nothing startling in here, but good, common-sense stuff on how one might approach REAL-TIME ACTIVATION these days. 
• STATS! ASIA-PACIFIC SOCIAL MEDIA STATS!: Do you work for an agency? Do you occasionally need to feign an in-depth knowledge of markets far, far away? How convenient, then, for this 200+ page presentation which gives you exactly those in frankly fatigue-inducing quantities. 

By Dan Arnold

THIS WEEK’S LARGELY UNCONNECTED COLLECTION OF WEBSITES AND STUFF WHICH ALTHOUGH SEEMINGLY SELECTED AT RANDOM ARE IN FACT EVIDENCE OF A SOPHISTICATED AND UNIQUE CURATORIAL INSTINCT, HONEST GUV, IT’S NOT JUST ME LINKING TO WHATEVER’S PASSED ACROSS THE FRONTPAGE OF REDDIT AT VARIOUS POINTS THIS WEEK WHATEVER SOME OF YOU MAY THINK DAMN YOUR DOUBTING EYES, PT1:

• Some Tech Trends For 2014: Are we still allowed to do TRENDS? Hm, I’m in two minds. No matter, here they are anyway – this is actually a pretty decent overview of some stuff you might be seeing more of in 2014, courtesy of Frog Design. The further down the list you go, the more interesting these become; I think the point about art and the internet of things is a very good one, and something I look forward to seeing more of (meaning, inevitably, it won’t happen. GAUGIN UP MY FRIDGE YOU BASTARDS). 
• Crowdsourcing War Diary Analysis: Earlier this week, the National Archives published a selection of WWI diaries as part of its centenary remembrance of the conflict. They make for fascinating reading – do go and take a look – and the Archives are also allowing the public to get involved in classifying and tagging additional scanned diaries through this rather cool interface. It’s a very worthwhile project, and the UI/UX is, I think, excellent for what is a very complex body of work indeed. 
• The Wold Online Orchestra: Another excellent project, this is by the Copenhagen Philharmonic (and partners) and is sort of hard to describe with any sort of brevity whatsoever. As they put it, it allows users to explore an excerpt from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony by allowing them to see it being played by a variety of different orchestral members at any one time; to listen to collages made up of various orchestra members, selected by them; or indeed to upload their own contribution to the orchestra by recording themselves playing some of the 7th and submitting it for inclusion into the project. Collaborative and playful and technically excellent, I really do love this (and I’m not even a fan of the 7th). 
• The Refugee Project: Somewhat more sober in tone, this is a rather good piece of datavisualisation depicting refugee movements worldwide from the mid-1970s to the present day. Taking UN data and adding political backstories and multimedia, it does an excellent job of demonstrating the displacement of peoples, and of showing quite neatly that the countries most affected by refugee movements are not large, affluent ones but instead the oft-times equally banjaxed republics next door. 
• British Ghost Trains From The 70s: So, so creepy. A selection of photographs of ghost train facades from British funfairs of the 70s (and 80s, actually) which give off the sort of vibe which suggests that terrible, terrible things may be about to happen. Maybe it’s just the washed-out colours which put me in mind of those sort of safety at work films in which people lose limbs and eyes through seemingly casual acts of in-work carelessness.
• Making Windows 8 Work: Noone likes Windows 8. It’s horrid. This website is really, really useful though, containing as it does a selection of useful tips and shortcuts for making the thing marginally less awful. It’s still a dog’s dinner, let’s be clear, but this site really does help. 
• The Data Chandelier: This is so clever. Built for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, it’s a collection of lights which move and light up / shut down based on the data which is pushed through them – GDP, birth rates, death rates, etc. There’s obviously going to be some way of taking this and using it in a shopping centre to sell more soap or something, but let’s ignore that for the moment and bask in the temporary purity of an as-yet unsullied concept.
• The Faces Of Shotputters: When I was a kid at international school, there was a very weird American kid called Graham who wore suits ALL THE TIME, liked to think of himself as a pimp, took an awful lot of ecstasy and had a video (VHS! Olden days!) called ‘Faces of Death‘, which were notorious for being like ‘You’ve Been Framed’ clips but where people actually died in gruesome fashion. It was pretty horrible, to be honest – Graham, what were you thinking? Anyway, this isn’t like that at all – it’s people throwing shotputs and looking quite silly whilst doing so. Don’t be scared. 
• Post-mortem Photography: Speaking of pictures of people’s faces and the dead, this is a very macabre collection of shots from (mostly) the 19th Century, where it was reasonably common practice to immortalised the recently deceased in photographic form, often pictured with other family members. This is, let’s be clear, a selection of photos of dead people, often posing (or, more accurately, being posed) with their still-living familials, and it’s exactly as strange as that sounds. 
• Behind-The-Scenes Pics Of Star Wars: How many more of these sets can there be? Anyway, the bloke who played Chewbacca posted a load of them to Twitter last weekend; the link goes to his Twitter media page, so you may need to scroll a bit, but there are some rather nice ones if you’re a Lucas-phile. 
• The Marvel Comics Fitness Guide: Ah, January – the month in which people continue to labour under the mistaken belief that this will be the year in which they turn their lives around and in which they get themselves the miracle body which for years they have been dreaming of. If you are one of those harbouring that particular illusion (don’t worry, reality will kick in in a couple of weeks time and you’ll be back on the cake and meths), why not try out some of the exercises depicted by Spiderman and chums in the Mighty Marvel Strength and Fitness Book from yesteryear? Oh, please yourselves.
• Infinite Seinfeld: Seinfeld appears to be everywhere at the beginning of 2014, what with his AMA and all that. This site claims to be an infinite loop of Seinfeld episodes – I’m not really in a position to comment, having checked it out for a grand total of about 7 minutes – if it turns into wee-based bongo in the 8th, then I am truly, truly sorry. 
• The Visa Mapper: Not flashy, just useful. Select where you’re from and this page shows you what you need to travel to any other country in the world. It’s collaborative too, allowing people to suggest amendments to the data and helpful links. More than anything, though, it’s a pretty stark and distressing realisation as to how little freedom of movement so many people worldwide have – check out what the world looks like if you’re from Surinam as opposed to the UK, for example.
• The Encrypted Phone: The Blackphone is coming, apparently. Available for pre-order a Mobile World Congress next month, this is apparently going to be the first carrier-neutral phone which offers base levels of encryption, etc, as standard. Obviously as with all these things your security is only ever as good as the security of the people you’re communicating with, but it’s an interesting idea; I think we’ll see people swapping reduced functionality for better security more and more in the mobile space, not least as we now know that the NSA is reading our texts ALL THE TIME too. 
• The Colour Magician: Another parallax-y scroll-y site, but this one’s not only sort of well-made but it’s also a slightly obsessional paean to the cuttlefish, which frankly is a cephalopod which doesn’t get enough recognition. 
• Drum Pants: This can’t be real, can it? This is a tool which purports to turn any surface – in this case, you’re clothing – into a touch-sensitive interface and, by so doing, allow users to play the drums by tapping themselves. It’s…it’s…just a bit silly looking, really – you sort of have to watch the video to get it. Of course, the potential is actually pretty big – you could freak people out BEAUTIFULLY with one of these, a hidden speaker and a decent setup, for example…
• The Scariest Rubber Band Gun You Will Ever See: “Oh, rubber band guns”, I imagine you thinking, “what a cute throwback to a bygone age in which everything was analogue and more innocent, and health and safety hadn’t ruined everything”. Hold that thought. Imagine what you’re thinking of when you think ‘rubber band gun’. Now click that link, and think of exactly what would happen if that were to be applied to someone’s face. SWEET JESUS GOD. This is soon going to be on sale, publicly. Don’t buy one for your kids. 
• Origins of Common UI Symbols: Designgeek types will like this, as will webgeeks, as will anyone with a passing interest in language and form and communication. So that should be most of you, then. A nicely made series of slides on how all the UI symbols we see daily arrived at their ubiquity. 
• What The World Is Reading At The Moment: Sort of a bit like a real-time-ish version of StumbleUpon, Reading.am shows people what users who have the plugin enabled are reading online at any given moment. Presuming that the people who use it are a relatively self-selecting bunch, and having spent a bit of time lurking on it, it’s a generally good source for some rather more recherche pieces of writing, but that’s not to say that you might not come across the browsing habits of some slightly distressing / disturbing people. Still, though, that’s got to be part of the fun. I think that there’s an interesting twist on this here for TASTEMAKERS – I think it would be really, really interesting to have a similar sort of thing (possibly in a full ‘I want to see your screen’ sort of way) for a cycling selection of people like Cory Doctorow, Jonah Peretti, etc, showing 24h in their browsing life. Can someone make this happen, please? Ta.
• Make 8-bit Art: Browser-based tool which lets you…er…make 8-bit style artworks. No more, no less, potentially useful, potentially not. Less underwhelming, though, than this particularly flat piece of dialed-in prose may make it seem.
• REAL Citrus Booze: When I was young I was very excited by the concept of Absolut Citron (the power of marketing), and was inevitably hugely disappointed whenever I drank it and it still basically tasted like crap vodka (note to younger self – drinking half a bottle in 10 minutes is a dreadful, dreadful idea and you really shouldn’t do it; you will be picking bits of sick-covered rice from under your bed for weeks). This contraption seems designed to make citrus-y booze properly – can a bar in London set one up please? Ta. 

By Peng Yangjun

THIS WEEK’S LARGELY UNCONNECTED COLLECTION OF WEBSITES AND STUFF WHICH ALTHOUGH SEEMINGLY SELECTED AT RANDOM ARE IN FACT EVIDENCE OF A SOPHISTICATED AND UNIQUE CURATORIAL INSTINCT, HONEST GUV, IT’S NOT JUST ME LINKING TO WHATEVER’S PASSED ACROSS THE FRONTPAGE OF REDDIT AT VARIOUS POINTS THIS WEEK WHATEVER SOME OF YOU MAY THINK DAMN YOUR DOUBTING EYES, PT2:

• 20 Things Off The Internet: The nice people at digital agency Syzygy (they are nice, I have worked with them) have been making these annually for a few years now – this is 2014’s version. A picture within which are captured 20 of the internet’s biggest ‘things’ from 2013 – can you spot them all? I have no idea, that was a rhetorical question, although let it be known that I can’t and given the fact that I spend more time on the sodding internet than most people that would suggest that this is reasonably challenging. 
• The Dodo: A new online magazine featuring news and features about (exclusively) animals. Nothing else. If you are an animal lover, this will be the best site on here this week. If you’re not, this may make you a little bit irrationally cross. Sorry.
• The Rap Pad: Obviously as a white, middle-class, increasingly middle-aged male from the UK I am well into rap. Obviously. Fortunately for the world, though, I have never wished to inflict this interest on anyone in real life. Had I done, though, I might have found this site very useful indeed – contains all sorts of decent resources for people who want to write rhymes (and not just rap – if you’re an aspiring spoken word artist there’s lots of useful stuff in here too). The stuff about polysyllabic internal rhyming structures is really clear, for example, and the syllable counters could be useful. Have a play.
• Crowdsourced Dating: Google Glass + Dating + Feedback mechanisms, basically. I do love this project. Artist Lauren McCarthy has Google Glass, and had an idea – what would it be like to go on dates, stream the footage through glass, and pay anonymous contributors to give her real-time feedback through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk project. This is SO BRILLIANT – like the evolution of what Chris Morris used to do on his radio show 20 years ago, where he’d send a man out with a very early mobile phone to have increasingly surreal interactions with shopkeepers as directed by Morris on the other end of the line (“Tell him you don’t want the coin. Tell him it scares you. Tell him it has a harris on it. Tell him the coins are HOT AAARGH IT’S BURNING MY HAND AAARGH” – you get the gist). Anyway, this ticks a lot of my personal boxes and I am pretty much convinced that this is going to be a dating show in 2 years’ time. Let’s see, shall we?
• Children As Golden Globe Nominees: Toddlewood is, apparently, an NYC photographic studio which specialises in taking Hollywood-style photos of little kids. Leaving aside how we all feel about that, these publicity shots they released this week with kids styled to look like the famouses on the red carpet at the Golden Globes are AMAZING. LOOK AT LITTLE CHIWETEL!
• Autogenererated Academese: Textual autogenerator of the week, this creates snippets of faux-academic prose. FUN GAME: know anyone doing a PHd? Mail them bits of this stuff and ask them their opinion. Even better, if you are doing a PHd then see how many of these you can slip into your next update email to your supervisor. Go on (Phil, I’m looking at you).
• The Pattern Library: This makes me very, very happy indeed, though I have no real idea as to why. This is a collection of designed patterns / backgrounds, freely available to use, and collected in a rather nice website (HTML5 again – are we bored of all these now? Not quite, I don’t think) – it’s really pleasing, possibly because it does have the feel of turning pages without actually trying to mimic the feel of turning pages. Maybe.
• Annotating The Margins Of Dan Brown: Two very funny people make annotations in the margins of Dan Brown’s ‘Inferno’. It’s true that mocking Brown’s prose style is a bit ‘fish in a barrel’, but this is very sharp indeed. Also I like the project in general – the idea that they will give it to more and more people until there is more commentary than Brown on each page is rather lovely. 
• Chef Goldblum: Have you ever wanted to play Where’s Wally? but instead of looking for Wally amongst a crowd of people you’re looking for a picture of Jeff Goldblum wearing a chef’s hat in amongst a whole load of pictures of Jeff Goldblum not wearing a chef’s hat? OH GOOD. 
• All Of The Buildings In New York City: James Gulliver Hancock is the fantastically named illustrator behind this project, whose stated and impossible aim is to sketch every building in New York. No matter – the drawings are lovely, and Hancock’s style is charming. 
• All The People In New York City: Apparently unconnected to the above, this is Jason Polan’s attempt to draw everyone in the city. Even more futile than Hancock’s, this is every bit as lovely – I am sure that someone is doing something similar in London, so if anyone knows of it can they let me know? Ta.
• Card & Tape Sculptures: Dylan Shields is a sculptor who works primarily in cardboard and brown tape, recreating classical sculptures in unfamiliar media. They look AWESOME. UPS / Parcelforce / Royal Mail / etc – one of you commission this man for your next ad campaign, please, he deserves it (although he may not want to take your filthy money, in which case more power to him).
• No More Vertical Videos: Vertical videos are horrible, it is widely agreed. This little video showcases a new app for the iPhone called Horizon, which gives letterbox-format video regardless of the camera’s orientation; this is going to become standard on all new phones, isn’t it – at the very least an opt-out rather than opt-in? Very clever. 
• The Google Music Timeline: A clever use of Google’s Play data, from all the stuff people have bought and chucked into the cloud, looking at genre and artist popularity over time. Nicely made, as you’d expect, and there’s some interesting information buried in there. This really is one which Amazon should rip off, though, what with their stupid amounts of global music sales info. 
• 40 Maps Which Explain The World: From the Washington Post, a great collection of data maps. There are another 40 here – look at them and learn stuff.
• Aquarium Landscaping: Did you even know that there was such a thing as an annual aquarium and aquatic plant layout competition? I’m guessing not. Anyway, these are the winners of the most recent edition of this contest, and there are some amazing examples of underwater topiary. Obsessional if rather cool – come on, though, do the fish really care?
• One Man’s Backyard Ice Fort: You may have heard that it’s been a touch chilly in the US of late. This is the response of one man who decided that the only right and proper thing to do was to construct a big sort of walled structure made out of coloured blocks of ice and fairy lights in his back garden. Why not, eh?
• Name My Daughter: This isn’t actually as stupid as it at first seems – the people behind this have made no actual commitment that they will in fact accept whatever name for their as-yet-unborn child the internet decides upon. That said, there are some inspired suggestions on there – ‘Streetlamp’ made me laugh out loud, though I am saddened that an early front-runner (‘Slagathor’) seems to have lost traction. I’m pretty sure that this couple won’t be calling their daughter ‘Cthulhu’, though.
• MMO Laserquest: So it’s not really quite that, but almost. Dustcloud is currently seeking funding to bring its vision of mobile, GPS-enabled laser tag gaming to reality. There are quite a few barriers to entry here which makes me think it won’t happen (namely that I’m not 100% convinced that enough people want this to shell out for a bespoke piece of kit), but it does give me the excuse to link to Street Wars, of which this reminded me somewhat and which I am reliably reassured will be coming back after a lengthy hiatus this Summer.
• The Dead Man’s Switch: Another in the growing list of ‘solutions for real life death online’, this is a service which allows you to draft an email, with attachments and a mailing list, and which will then email you every few days to make sure you’re still alive. If it doesn’t hear from you in 30 days, the email gets sent. Obviously massively flawed as an idea for lots of reasons which I can’t be bothered to explore in-depth, but interesting nonetheless.
• A Really Quite Mad Look At The Beatles Catalogue: I am sure that the man (come on, it’s not going to be a woman) behind this is a lovely person with a full and rich social life; nonetheless, this truly insane collection of information and insight into the anomalies and oddities around the Beatles’ work gives off their air of sweaty-palmed obsession like few other sites. If you like the Beatles, though, it may well be sort of Nirvanaish.
• Photos Of Astronauts Taking Photos: You may wish to listen to ‘Space Oddity‘ whilst looking at these. 
• The 500 Worst Rolling Stone Reviews Of All Time: This one too’s pretty swivel-eyed in its one-track obsession; this is an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of the reviews which the author has, subjectively, decided exemplify the worst editorial judgments and weird nepotistic quirks of Rolling Stone magazines reviews history. You’ll need to be a proper muso to get the most out of this, but those of you who are will find much to amuse yourselves with, I think. 
• The Logic Puzzle Motherlode: I know two women in their 30s who are obsessed with the sort of logic puzzle magazines traditionally aimed at octogenarians and traditionally consumed on long train / coach journeys along with a packet of boiled sweets. Neither of them read this, though, which does make me wonder why I’m including it. Hey ho. If you like wordsearches and stuff then this will be GOLD for you. 
• Famous Film Quotes As Charts: Some of these you will have seen before, others not – the design, though, is very nice indeed. These really should be available as posters.
• Guantanamail: Self-destructing email. Which obviously doesn’t work because screencaps, but, y’know, I’m including it for completeness’ sake.
• Habit – The RPG: Remember gamification? Of course you do! Well it’s stubbornly refusing to die – this is a web-based game which applies role-playing dynamics to your life to MAKE YOU BETTER. In fairness, this was funded through Kickstarter and so there’s evidently a market for it – maybe give it a try as you attempt to make it beyond January with the exercise / no booze / no tears / fidelity / whatever goals.
• Life Through A Leica: Art Shay was married for 67 years. Over that time, he photographed many different things, but, most poignantly, his wife. This collection of pictures he took of her will make you tear up a little bit; you simply couldn’t imagine a collection of digital pictures having the same sort of emotional resonance, I don’t think. 
• The Loneliest Town In America: Or at least that’s what they say. Loyalton California has awarded itself this accolade, based on its lack of visitors combined with its proximity to other big stuff. They explain a little more of why they make this claim on the website, which in itself is also INCREDIBLY SAD. It’s sort of the digital equivalent of tumbleweeds. Tell you what, planners who work for mobile brands (or even who work for Coca Cola) – use these people next time you want a ‘connecting people’/happiness-type vibe. 
• Nasty Icons: Free, unpleasant icons for you to use however you see fit. The one of the little man peeing joyously is my personal favourite. 
• The Womb: Last up this week is Project Womb, a fascinating idea which once again has a very direct and explicit connection to the concept of the creation, maintenance and development of the personal ‘Life Story’ (inverted commas intentional, pace Houellebecq. It’s a ‘media-driven’ time capsule, and a beautiful piece of design, which will allow users to upload multimedia content to it and thus allow it to act as a physical and digital memento mori. There is an artist now living whose greatest work will be based on this sort of idea; a work which will not be complete until they die. And on that STARTLINGLY pretentious note, let’s move on.

By Alicia Martin Lopez

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Internet Narcissists On TV: From a project up there which I think should be on TV, to one which apparently will but I’m not sure should be. This is Project Follow Me, a project looking for digital creators (specifically people who make stuff on the internet which GOES VIRAL, I think) to be part of a show which documents one of their projects. I can’t think of ANYTHING I would rather watch less, but then again I’m just a grumpy old sod to whom noone should, or indeed does, listen.
• Internet Poetry: Poetry published as image macros, screenshots, etc, with textual overlay. So internet, much poignant. ARGH BLOODY DOGESPEAK. 
• Popeye Panels: One a day, decontextualised. There’s quite a lot of TRUTH in these, I think. 
• Great Naps: Vintage-ish photos of people napping and seeming quite happy to be doing so. May induce somnolence.
• Tales You Lose: Popular culture figures, painted onto coins, by Frankfurt-based Brazilian artist Andre Levy.
• Lego Albums: Album cover art, remade in Lego. I’m pretty sure that these are made digitally and automatically, as I’m pretty sure that you can’t get Lego in all those shades, but maybe I’m just being miserable (again). 
• Craigslist Mirrors: Mirrors for sale on Craigslist. Almost certainly going to be for sale at Frieze this year for tens of thousands of pounds.
• I Still Shoot Film: A Tumblr all about the art of shooting photos on film, and with hints and tips on how to be better at it. Fcuk off, Instagram. 
• All About Socks: One woman’s obsession with sock design. No, I have no idea.
• Tiny Little Love Stories: I have featured these before, but they weren’t on Tumblr (I don’t think – oh, who cares). Anway, these are brilliant, twisted vignettes of surreal love and sex. Recommended.
• No Wrong Way To Play: A Tumblr collecting examples of people playing videogames in usual ways – no-kill playthroughs, glitch exploitation, etc.  
• Brushes With Strangers: A collection of sketches of strangers, drawn using the ‘Brushes’ app on the iPad. 
• PR Is Difficult: A collection of dreadful promo photos issued by American theatres. Are these all real? If so, Jesus Christ. 
• Life Advice From Machines: More poignancy, juxtaposing the unintentionally profound nuggets of advice occasionally found in technical documentation with wistful pictures. These will be a 2015 calendar (or even 2014, if you hurry). 
• Brutal Knitting: The occasionally distressing knitted art of Tracy Widdess.

THE LONG THINGS WHICH I AM ALREADY SEEING EVEN MORE OF THIS YEAR, SUGGESTING THAT LONGFORM AS A TREND ISN’T REALLY GOING ANYWHERE BUT WHICH, LRB ASIDE, I’M STILL NOT SEEING ANYWHERE NEAR ENOUGH OF FROM THE UK FOR REASONS WHICH I STILL DO NOT ADEQUATELY UNDERSTAND BUT WHICH I WOULD BE VERY GRATEFUL IF SOMEONE COULD EXPLAIN TO ME PLEASE:

• What Would Yellow Ranger Do?: Kicking off this week with a not-particularly-long comic, this is cartoonist Shin Yin Khor’s exploration of growing up Asian American and role models and racism and all sorts of other stuff. Really rather good. 
• Travel – A Moving Experience: An excellent essay about the essentially lonely and alienating nature of travel, and the false promises we’re sold by the media and the world at large around what it entails and can offer people. 
• An Interview With John Waters: The Wall Street Journal chats with the perennially odd Mr Waters, who as ever has quite a lot of interesting things to say about all sorts of stuff, not least the idea of people in their 60s still being rebellious and ‘angry’ and how ridiculous he finds that idea when applied to successful auteurs. 
• The Archive Is A Campsite: An interesting piece by one of the founders of Longform about how the resurgence in longer writing has meant a more reflective approach to content and as such a renewed degree of importance for archiving. Interesting if you’re in any way into or connected to the world of publishing, writing or curating – and sort of subtextually has a lot to say about the relative value or lack thereof of some of the more ephemeral content providers. What would an archive of Buzzfeed look like? Would we want one?
• Artisanal Toast: This has been everywhere this week, so sorry if you’ve already read it; anyway, this is ostensibly a look at San Francisco’s hipster food culture reaching its apotheosis – $4 toast. In reality, though, it’s more about the woman behind the cafe which pioneered the (ridiculous sounding) concept of artisanal toast and the way in which running the place has helped her sort her life out. It’s far more inspirational and heartwarming than a story about really expensive bread should be, although be warned – it will make you a bit annoyed at points, and the lady portrayed does have tattooed freckles which is just silly really.
• An Interview With The Inventor of Karaoke: The nicest person to be featured in Curios this week, Daisuke Inoue is the man whose fault it was that you now know all the words to ‘I Will Survive’. This interview which him, in which he explains how he came to invent karaoke, is just lovely. 
• Whatever Happened To Tim Tebow: So this one’s less long than kilometric, and not helped by the unnecessary HTML5 formatting, but it really is interesting. You may recall a few years ago that the sporting world, and in particular the American one, was obsessed with a bloke called Tim Tebow, the not-particularly-great quarterback for the Denver Broncos who had unshakeable faith in the Christian idea of God and who, for a few short months at least, seemed to see that faith amply repayed by some really quite spooky last-minute game-winning performances. Tebow was a poster child for a whole swathe of right-wing Christian Americans, and his remarkable rise and subsequent crazy fall are brought to life very well indeed in this piece. You probably need to know a little about NFL for it to make sense, but not too much. 
• The Inevitable Childish Gambino Piece: I’m not obsessed, he’s just about a lot at the moment. A good interview, this.
• The Architecture Of The Incredibles: A slightly obsessive but really interesting look at the architectural depiction of the world in Pixar’s classic animation. If nothing else it will leave you slightly boggling at the sheer amount of thought and detail and STUFF that those guys pack into things which the average viewer will literally never, ever notice. 
• Growing Up Clown: What would it be like growing up in and around clowns, with a mother in greasepaint? Like this, apparently. Brilliantly written and elegiac and sad, this is worth reading for many reasons but mostly for the line ‘sometimes in life one just ends up cuddling on a couch with the ringmaster’.
• The Crucial and Unexpected Role Played By Monopoly in WWII: This one too is very long, but bear with it – it develops into a truly mental boys’ own tale of crazy escape attempts and spies and…er…board games. 
• Hoop Dreams – An Oral History: Hoop Dreams is unquestionably the greatest documentary about sport ever made, ever, and potentially one of the greatest documentaries ever full stop. It’s 20 years old this year, and this piece looks back at the film, the characters and the story behind it in brilliant, loving depth. If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favour and book out some hours this weekend to do so; it really is that good, I promise – you can get the whole thing here.
• Spending 24h In A Dive Bar: The concept of a dive bar is sort of uniquely American – does it mean anything more than ‘a bit scuzzy’? – but this account of a 24h cycle in one such venue’s life is the sort of lovely microcosmic portrait of a Cheers-style boozehole that you will want it to be your local. 
• The Online Avengers Of Anonymous: A great piece from the New York Times looking at some of the (self-styled) White Knights of the anonymous movement, those who make it their mission to track down bullies, abusers and rapists and make their lives hell – you may not be surprised to know that the piece reveals them to be slightly odd bunch, and the world to be a marginally more complicated place than they think it is, but it’s a very good read in any case.
• When Ads Hated Women: More great stuff from Collector’s Weekly, this time looking at ads from the 40s and 50s which basically told women that they stank and that they were ugly (so that’s different from today how, exactly?). Some of these are truly incredible, and the accompanying interview with the collector / curator is fascinating from a cultural / social mores point of view. 
• The Top 100 Things On Medium in December: In case you want more reading. Of COURSE you do. 

By Randy Martin

By BJ Heinley

THIS FIRST BIT IS MERCIFULLY SHORT THIS WEEK DUE TO THE FACT THAT WE’RE ONLY 10 DAYS INTO THE NEW YEAR AND PEOPLE ARE CURRENTLY TOO BUSY GAWPING AT SHINY EXAMPLES OF THE FUTURE IN LAS VEGAS TO CARE ABOUT A MINOR UPDATE TO A PARTICULAR FACET OF SOME SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM’S API, BUT DON’T GET COMPLACENT AS THIS IS ALMOST CERTAINLY ANOMALOUS AND THERE WILL BE MUCH MORE OF THIS CRAP BEFORE THE YEAR’S OUT, MARK MY WORDS:

• Vine Gets A Web Version: The video-viewing platform for the terminally ADD-afflicted is now even more compelling for BRANDS. Effectively this is just a profile page for any account-holder on the platform, but this means that users (BRANDS) can have their own (branded) page presence on the platform where all their videos can sit, browsable from any where and looking all nice and coherent and with logos and profile descriptions and STUFF. SO EXCITE!
• Vine’s Social Media Superstars: A piece on B*zzf**d looking at some people who have become very popular on the platform. I’m including this up here solely because at some point this year someone is going to mention ‘Vine influencers’ at you in a meeting, and hopefully having read this and had a bit of a think about it will mean that you won’t give in to your initial desire to push their nose through the back of their head in retaliation. I’m doing it for you, dear readers. Look, I’m not condoning this sort of thing, but if you’re doing YOUTH-FOCUSED stuff then perhaps it’s worth thinking about using some of these sorts of people for something. Sorry. 
• Jelly Launches: So this is in here more for completeness’ sake than anything else; this week Biz Stone (and other people, but he’s the only one anyone’s heard of) launched Jelly, a new SOCIAL NETWORK which effectively lets people ask, share and answer shortform questions. It’s all of 3 days old at the time of writing, so I’m going to refrain from making any sweeping statements about it and how BRANDS can and should be using it (actual authorial opinion here: maybe just let actual real people work out how they want to use it first, eh? Oh, no, hang on, here’s the first post from someone who’s already decided it’s pointless) – anyhow, it’s a thing and it exists.
• Fox Uses Tinder To Promote Some Dreadful TV Show: There’s a programme on TV called The Mindy Project – it’s apparently a sitcom, but having never seen it I’m in no position to offer any comment on its quality or otherwise (like you care). Fox in the US has used Tinder to promote it, which is quite smart – they’ve created profiles for the titular character and other bit-players from the show on the media’s favourite shallow ‘you’re hot, let’s bang!’ dating app. Cheap and clever, not unlike the way in which other US TV show Girls has used Snapchat to promote its latest series. Although, now that I come to think about it, isn’t the Mindy thing just going to reach blokes, who (unless I’m massively misjudging the show) aren’t necessarily target audience for it? Oh, what do I know (rhetorical)?
• Rapgenius And SEO: Sorry, this is VERY technical. Rapgenius (the lyrics (and lyrical analysis) site) recently got penalised by Google for what the search engine saw as slightly shonky SEO tactics. The website went off and fixed some stuff to reinstate its search ranking status, and all was then well – this is a look at why they were penalised and what they did to reverse said penalisation. Unless you need to know (or need to pretend to know) about SEO you can probably skip this one, but it’s actually pretty useful / interesting (I use that word advisedly, but still).
• TARGET’s Pinterest Shop: The US retailer of discount homeware and terrible employee relations fame has made this rather nice Pinterest hack to peddle its wares, highlighting products that are most pinned, reviewed, shared, etc on Pinterest and using the network as a curated shop window. Simple and clever and the sort of thing that pretty much any retailer could in theory do and maybe should. 
• The Evolution of Memes: Research from Facebook looking at the manner in which memes move and alter – specifically on that platform, but with findings which are of relevance in a more general context. Interesting in and of itself, but also if you fancy taking a slightly more academic approach to your attempts to invade the popular consciousness with your branded messaging; there’s some quite interesting stuff about the sorts of things which get assimilated / appropriated most seamlessly into general culture which you can probably use if you’re feeling a bit evil. 
• Things To Watch In 2014: There are obviously LOADS of these floating around at the moment – in fact, here’s Imperica’s nicely spreadsheeted collection of predictions for the year – but JWT get the dubious distinction of being the ones featured on here. As with all of these trendlists, this is overlong and hugely repetitious, but it contains some generally interesting things and some decent food for thought, as well as a whole load of stuff that you can use to phone in your brainstorm performances for the next 6-8 weeks.
• STATS MOTHERLODE: Continuing the spirit of 2014 portmanteau collections of STUFF, this post from We Are Social collects a whole load of bullsh1t statistics on social media from around the world in one easy place. You know the drill by now – read, digest, and vomit out to suit whatever half-baked argument you’re making to whichever client at any given time. IT’S THE YEAR OF MOBILE!!!
• Content Is Like Crystal Meth: So much about this annoys me – the use of the term ‘content’, the Breaking Bad theme, etc – but I’m forced to also concede that it contains quite a lot of not-stupid things about making STUFF for the internet; it’s actually a pretty good 101-primer for getting people to look at the stuff that you make. That said, can we just stop with the Breaking Bad stuff now? Thanks. 

By Chill Photographie

WHY NOT LISTEN TO A MIX OF HIPHOP MUSIC WHICH SAMPLES GOSPEL?

THINGS ON THE INTERNET WHICH ARE FOR THE MOST PART TOTALLY EPHEMERAL AND WHICH WILL MAKE NO LASTING DIFFERENCE TO YOU OR YOUR LIFE WHATSOEVER BUT WHICH WILL I HOPE PROVIDE AT LEAST A TEMPORARY DISTRACTION FROM THE CRUEL AND PERSISTENT REALISATION THAT THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER AND THIS  – THIS TEDIOUS, GREY REALITY OF 9-5 DRUDGERY – IS PRETTY MUCH ALL YOU HAVE BETWEEN NOW AND DEATH, PT.1:

• The Instagram Time Capsule: I think that this is very clever and eminently stealable, although I’m not 100% sure to what end. This is an app called Pic Moment which effectively allows users to see images posted to Instagram at certain physical locations across time – so you could, for example, scroll back day by day through pictures taken at, say, the London Eye (god knows why you’d want to, but still). At the very least, some sort of hacked website plugin for venues / locations could be a fun execution, but I’m sure you clever folk can think of other, better ones. 
• FolioShack: Full disclosure – I met the founder of this in the pub last night and he bought me a beer (Web Curios is happy to enter into tentative negotiations around coverage-for-booze hookups). I think it’s a good idea regardless, though – FolioShack is a service which allows people to publish documents online in a responsive, device-neutral way, but the thing that I think is really clever and interesting about it is the analytics you can get from said documents. Users can see who has read what they publish – whether someone’s read it, how long they spent doing so, which page they got to, etc. This is potentially hugely valuable for all sorts of industries, not least PRs; I reckon this could really take off. Which is almost certainly a kiss of death. Sorry. 
• Massive Directory of Online Radio Stations: Pretty much every single musical genre ever is represented on this site,. Can someone explain to me what exactly ‘Quiet Storm’ is, genrewise?
• StoryMap: The homepage of this site has the beautiful descriptor ‘maps that tell stories’; er, thanks guys, hugely helpful. Snark aside, though, this is a rather neat tool which allows users to map narratives using pictures, text, audio and video – it’s very beta at the moment and so isn’t 100% stable, but the concept is neat and if the people at Northwestern University who made it can make it embeddable then they may have a very useful thing indeed.
• Frienlibs: This is a dreadful, Satanic invention which I sort of wish I had thought of. Aside from anything else, it has a truly hideous name. Friendlibs (ugh) is a little webtoy which lets users create their own listicles – yes, that’s right, you too can find out exactly how it feels to reduce anything and everything in the field of human existence to a series of comedic images and pop-culture references! The site plugs into Facebook, letting you pull pics from the site and share with friends (it also has a gif search, naturally). This could become early 2014’s equivalent of those horrible bloody cartoon strips that every fat failure you went to school with has been posting incessantly since late October. GREAT!
•  Your Face On Fantasy Drawings: Have you ever wanted to be immortalised in a pencil drawing with the sort of rippling musculature that would put Conan-era Arnie to shame, or wearing a skimpy chainmail bikini (or why not both simultaneously?)? OH GOOD! A wonderful service from Daniel David Freeman where he, for a fee, will draw a fantasy-style piece of artwork with your face on it. I am very upset I didn’t see this before Christmas. 
• Self-Destructing Texts: On all sorts of 2014 trend lists I’ve seen has been temporary communications – that is, Snapchat-style self-destructing communiques. This is an app called Confide, which does the Snapchat thing with text messages. This is all well and good, but WHERE IS THE TRUST, PEOPLE? Maybe, and this is just a thought, if you’re worried that the person you’re sending super-confidential messages to is going to use said super-confidential messages to somehow incriminate you in the future then you should possibly reconsider your relationship with them. Maybe. Oh, do what you like, see if I care. 
• Replace YouTube Comments With Reddit Comments: Seeing as the much-hyped revamp of YouTube comments last year doesn’t as yet seem to have led to the long hoped for amelioration of the below-the-line ecosystem (wow, that’s an early contender for worst sentence of 2014 – sorry), you may find this Chrome plugin useful – Alientube replaces comments on YouTube videos with comments from Reddit, thereby elevating the IQ of the debate to nearly treble figures on one fell swoop. 
• The Rijksstudio Award: Ah, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. I LOVE IT THERE (small note: it’s a museum which really understands UX and UI in all senses; you can tell this by the fact that all the artwork descriptors are placed at eye level. SO SIMPLE AND YET SO CLEVER). This is a rather nice little project called ‘Make Your Own Masterpiece’, which invites people from all over the world to make their own pieces ‘inspired by’ the existing museum collection. Effectively asking people to remix art, the winning piece will be put on sale in the museum’s shop – entries are open til March 2014. This is going to be replicated a lot, I think. 
• Buy A Replica Batman Cowl: Have you ever wanted to wear a Batman mask EXACTLY like the one which slightly overweight caped crusader Adam West wore in the BIFF!-heavy 60s TV show? How fortunate, then, that I found this specimen for you. 
• Facerig: The tech behind this is really impressive, and the whole thing’s very clever, but all I can think of when I look at it is furry webcam sex. Facerig is a piece of software which purports to be able to create live avatars for webcam chat – that is, it will create a CGI face for you which maps your facial expressions, etc, using a webcam. So you can have a Google Hangout with your mate whilst looking like…er…some sort of weird CGI fox character, or some ‘sexy’ anime princess, or…nope, sorry, I can’t get beyond the furry thing here. Fandom is going to LOVE this. The rest of us maybe not o much. 
• Subway Stories: I LOVE this. A New York project which takes sketches of commuters from the NYC subway (not unlike London’s own Commutoons) and then records inner monologues for each drawing. The makers have turned this into a little art installation thing – watch the video and see for yourself. As an aside, the ‘imagine the inner monologue of your fellow tube passengers’ is a great tube game to play, although you have to guard against developing irrational prejudices against completely blameless strangers (sorry, man in the baseball cap from last night – I’m sure you weren’t really thinking the dreadful things I attributed to you). 
• Be-at TV: Live-streaming (and recording and playing back) DJ sets from around the world. There’s a huge array of DJs and festivals represented here, and the whole site’s a very impressive dance music repository. If classical music is more your thing, the World Concert Hall does a similar job. 
• Vintage Pics of NYC: A truly jawdropping collection, featuring literally thousands of photos of New York from the 1990s, all taken by one man. You can lose yourself in these – highly recommended. Oh, as a bonus you can also have this collection of photos of Brooklyn houses in the late 70s, showing that hipsterdom predated actual hipsters by about 30-odd years. 
• The Strangers Project: A collection of anonymous journal (diary, for non-American speakers) entries, collected in person and written on the spot. There’s some lovely output here, and the fact that these are written by people there and then rather than being done online (with the inevitable editing and revision which that would entail) lends them an immediacy that they would otherwise lack. These are another potential timesink, but a very lovely and intensely human one (so that’s ok then). 
• The Year Of Selfies: A brilliant animation made of one man’s year’s worth of self-taken portraits. Annoyingly slick.
• 2013 In Kickstarter: A bit late, this, but still. This is Kickstarter’s ‘That Was The Year That Was’ recap, looking at the platform’s big success stories in the past 12 months. Notable more for the fact that it’s a nicely made website than for any of the information actually contained therein (or that’s what I think, anyway). 
• National Geographic’s 2013 Review: Seeing as we’re doing 2013 reviews, here’s National Geographic’s. THIS is a slick website – lovely interface, integrated video and SO MUCH good stuff arranged in a manner which is a pleasure to navigate and browse through. Worth looking at and copying. 

By Kris Vervaeke

WHY NOT LISTEN TO THE NEW ALBUM BY DEL THA FUNKEE HOMOSAPIEN?

THINGS ON THE INTERNET WHICH ARE FOR THE MOST PART TOTALLY EPHEMERAL AND WHICH WILL MAKE NO LASTING DIFFERENCE TO YOU OR YOUR LIFE WHATSOEVER BUT WHICH WILL I HOPE PROVIDE AT LEAST A TEMPORARY DISTRACTION FROM THE CRUEL AND PERSISTENT REALISATION THAT THE HOLIDAYS ARE OVER AND THIS  – THIS TEDIOUS, GREY REALITY OF 9-5 DRUDGERY – IS PRETTY MUCH ALL YOU HAVE BETWEEN NOW AND DEATH, PT.2:

• Doge For All: So the Doge meme is almost entirely played out, but on the offchance that you want to wring the final few drops of ‘comedy’ from it then you might find this meme generator of use. Much internet, so amaze. 
• Recent Photobucket Uploads: Utterly pointless and as a result pretty compelling, this little hack pulls the most recently uploaded images to Photobucket and displays them on one page. More than anything else, spending 5 minutes with this illustrates that there are some people who really, really, really like uploading pictures of themselves to the internet.
• Headlines Against Humanity: Funny at first, this website very quickly becomes incredibly depressing. Headlines Against Humanity invites users to choose between two headlines to decide which is the real one and which is the fake. There really is a lot of terrible, terrible stuff out there on the internet (yes, I know, part of the problem etc etc).
• Tumblr Argument Generator: A little script which generates a frankly baffling rant in the style of the sorts of arguments you often see on Tumblr. If you need an off-the-shelf rant decrying someones heteronormative cisgendered privilege then this will be right up your street. Here’s a fun game to play in 2014 – why not send these to people throughout your workplace? You can get away with it, because even if they send them to HR noone will have the faintest inkling what any of it means. 
• Olympus Bioscapes: Yet another camera manufacturer runs a competition to showcase impressive microscopic photography, this time Olympus. Unoriginal, but there are some lovely shots in here – not least the one of the embryonic bat, which is simultaneously super-cute and utterly repellent, which is no mean feat. 
• WannaSpend: Things that it would have been really useful to have found before Christmas, part x of y. This site lets users input a cash value (dollars only, sadly, as it’s a US thing) and then spits out a gift suggestion up to that cost, with a link to buy. You can select categories that it will draw products from, and submit your own suggestions – simple but quite clever.
• France In The 50s: A lovely collection of vintage pics of France in the 50s. There is a lot of Gallic brilliance in here. 
• The YouTube Time Machine: I rather like this – a website which lets you select a year and then presents you with YouTube videos featuring content from said year.
• The Colo(u)r Battle: Have you ever wanted to decide which colour is BEST, via the medium of a public internet-based vote? Well of course you have. How fortunate, then, that this website exists  – you can create and name your own colours and let people vote on them, or pull together palettes which can also be judged by colour-nazis worldwide. This seems like the sort of thing that Pantone or Dulux should be doing, really.
• The Twitter Fiction Festival: The Twitter Fiction Festival runs in March, and is a celebration of creative storytelling using the platform. They’re taking submissions now for ideas for stories and ways of telling them – the best ones will be ‘featured’ and promoted over the course of the festival, alongside works by established authors. They’re keen to see MULTIMEDIA STORYTELLING, so expect to see lots of slightly tortuous Vine-based submissions – there could well be some really cool stuff coming out of this, though, and if you have any decent ideas you might as well submit them; the potential exposure is huge. 
• Pointless Diagrams: Drawing utterly pointless diagrams for no purpose whatsoever. Please can someone start using these in presentations to illustrate ‘strategy’? Thanks.
• Flat vs Realism: A rather beautifully made page illustrating the great design war between Ive-style flat-look interfaces and your slightly-2011 realism. Takes an age to load, annoyingly, but it’s very nicely put together and the game at the end is a cute touch. 
• Getting Started With HTML5: A simple-but-clear guide to what HTML5 is and what it can do (sort of – it is very simplified).
• 100 Days Of Leake Street: Leake Street is that little tunnel/alleyway by Waterloo, just where the Old Vic Tunnels used to be, which is home to one of London’s best and most vibrant collections of graffiti. This is a brilliant website tracking the way in which the walls there change over a 100-day period, using gif-ed photographs to track the evolution of the work. 
• The Urban Paper Collective: Grown men who like making toys out of paper (let’s be honest, it’s only ever going to be men) – this is your new favourite website. Containing everything you could ever need or want to know about the artful folding of paper into what are basically dolls for adults. 
• Another Learn To Code Thing: What with coding being introduced to the curriculum this year, we can expect to see a whole load of this sort of stuff. Following in the steps of Code Academy, this is a site that provides short, modular lessons on the principles of coding using a game-based interface and using the principle of building blocks to illustrate the processes. It’s quite smart, though I wouldn’t expect it to turn you or your kids into Notch straight away. 
• Discarded Drug Baggies of South London: Possibly the most VICE photoproject ever, this is a collection of pictures of drug bags found across South London. 
• The Space Engine: My girlfriend’s doing a GCSE in astronomy at the moment (NB – she is not 16) – space is MENTAL. Anyway, this is a very cool programme which, when downloaded, lets you zoom through a detailed recreation of the universe. It’s sort of incredible really – a bit like Elite without the game bits. 
• Emulatos Made Easy For Mac: Videogame emulators have been around for ages, but have always been far too complicated-looking for me to ever bother with. This is a download for Macs which, as far as I can tell, makes the whole thing super-easy and user friendly and stuff. I don’t have a Mac, though, so for all I know it could just be some sort of massive malware scam. Someone else try it out and let me know. 
• Crowdfund Your Holidays: I’m not really sure why anyone would spontaneously offer to contribute cash to someone else’s lavish holiday plans, but apparently some people will do just that. Trevolta is a weirdly-named crowdfunding site designed specifically for people who are going travelling – you put details of your trip on the site, set a goal and strangers can donate money towards your jollies. If anyone wants to bung me £10k to go away and not write anything on the internet for a year or so, I’m open to offers. 
• The Bittorrent Trilogy: God, glitch-art is SO 2013. Anyway, this is a trio of videos made using incompletely downloaded versions of Breaking Bad, Mad Men and Game of Thrones, and contains all the sort of trippy, glitched-out wonderment I like. We need a new digital art thing, though. Make it happen, artpeople. 
• BattleCats: Nothing to do with He-Man, this – instead, it’s actual leather battle armour for cats. I’m no expert on felines, but I can’t imagine any of them being too impressed were you to try shoehorning them into this stuff. 
• 2003 Receipts: For reasons known only to him, this bloke kept alll his receipts from 2003. He is going through them day-by-day, piecing together his life from a decade past via the medium of purchases. Only 10 days in, but I think I can safely say that this is the mundane website Web Curios will feature in 2014, and I love it for that. 
• Insulting YouTube Vids: This is a YouTube channel whose owner seems to do nothing but record short, offensive statements for people like you and me to use however we wish. Beautifully, he also takes request – just think how satisfying it would be to have a video of a total stranger calling your most favourite colleague, say, “a crapulent waste of skin” which you can send to them over and over and over again. Dear God, I almost wish I still had an office job so that I could do this myself. 
• Speakerblast: This is a clever idea but poorly executed. Speakerblast basically lets you assign an audiofile to a single URL which can then be shared to multiple devices and then played simultaneously – so you can have a whole crowd of people playing the same audio from their phones, all synced. There’s a LOT of potential here, although at the moment I’m just sort of fixating on football crowds. Actually, there’s probably some quite fun interactive stuff artists can do in concert with this sort of thing, as well as the inevitable AUDIO FLASHMOB execution – ugh, actually that’s a horrible thought, pretend I never said it. 
• Ian’s Shoelace Site: I don’t know who Ian is, but he knows a LOT about tying shoes. 
• 3d Printing – The Kids’ Book: Leo The Maker Prince is a book for children which also purports to teach them about 3d printing (I’m unsure as to why kids need to be taught about 3d printing, but no matter). The gimmick here is that the book comes with code to print out the characters on your own home printer, presuming you have one – erm, if you do then surely you can just use the printer to teach your kids? Sorry, I’m being critical – anyway, this is the first thing like this that I’ve seen but it will almost certainly not be the last. 
• The Emotional Baggage Check: A place to leave your emotional baggage, and pick up other people’s. Users can leave details of something that’s weighing them down, or respond to other people’s baggage by sharing a song and a few words. A nice spin on the confessional website, and I like the musical twist. 
• Marvel Calendar From 1975: On the offchance you’ve not yet seen this, here’s a Marvel calendar from the mid-70s whose days match perfectly with 2014. Printable, should you want it on your wall.
• Passweird: A website which generates alphanumeric passwords of questionable taste. Why not, eh?
• The Internet Black Market Comes To Berlin: I think I’ve mentioned the concept of the Internet Black Market on here before – in any case, I’m doing so again as I WANT SOMEONE TO DO IT IN LONDON PLEASE. It comes from Japan, and the idea is that it’s a series of stalls selling small gewgaws which are physical manifestations of the web. SO ART! SO COOL! 
• Disney Princess Lingerie: Because it’s almost Valentine’s Day (NB – under no circumstances actually buy this for anyone, Valentine’s Day or otherwise). 
• Behind The Gifs: A subreddit which is far funnier than it ought to be, this collects the imagined backstories to some of the web’s most famous gifs. Many internetLOLs in here, I promise. 
• The Selfie Olympics: These people’s self-taken photos are more impressive / stranger than your self-taken photos, I guarantee you. 
• The Mad Science Museum: A brilliant collection of truly odd science experiments from history. Includes an experiment involving photographing the exact moment that a mule’s head is blown off by a stick of dynamite, which is a phrase I really didn’t imagine myself typing when I woke up this morning. 
• Frozen Soap Bubbles: SO PRETTY!
• Objective Game Reviews: Obviously intended as a joke, but also at the same time one of the best game review sites I’ve seen in ages, which says nothing good about the current state of most games journalism.
• The Conference Call Simulator: Terrifying and bleak and existential and sad and SO ACCURATE. Welcome back to work, everyone!

By Brendan George Ko

WHY NOT LISTEN TO A MIX BY THAT WEIRD BLOKE OFF TWITTER CALLED SADEAGLE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• The Gap Mannequin Project: One man dresses in the same outfit as the mannequins in GAP and photographs himself next to them. 
• Moviecode: You know when you see people coding in films? Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that that code does? No, me neither, but the person behind this Tumblr evidently did and so has made it their mission to investigate. 
• Emojis In Real Life: Recreating emojis in photo form. Why not, eh?
• Discarded Vegetables: No more, no less. I’m not sure how much mileage this has as a concept, but I like the single-minded pointlessness of it rather a lot. 
• Japan Photographs: Erm, yes, just that really – photos of Japan. All taken by one Lee Chapman, who’s a very good photographer indeed.
• Amazon Critics: Crap Amazon reviews of films, turned into posters advertising said movies. If these aren’t already available to buy, they really should be soon – also, some publisher really should promote their next DVD release like this. Go on, do it.
• 365 Days of Balloons: Stuff made out of balloons. A different one each day. Surprisingly compelling. 
• Cosplaying While Trans: Transgender people, cosplaying. This may be the most Tumblr Tumblr EVER, on reflection. 
• Traceloops: Rotoscoping, tracing and animation. Cool examples of different techniques for those interesting in animation and the like. 
• Problem Glyphs: I LOVE THESE. A Tumblr in which ‘symbolic illustrations are drawn in response to problems sent in by Tumblr users’. If the one for ‘I’m Gay’ doesn’t make you laugh then you’re probably dead. 
• Fcuk Yeah Internet Fridge: This week saw the latest attempt by a company to convince us that fridges that can talk to our phones are THE FUTURE. This Tumblr collects examples of other people telling us the same thing and also being wrong. 
• Mestre Fungo: Acid-coloured animations, with illustrations which very much recall the work of Charles Burns.
• Louis CK One: I don’t really need to explain this gag, do I?
• Romain Laurent: Brilliant, high-quality loop portraits. Someone please create a free way for anyone to make these easily, please. Ta.
• Pentametron: Iambic poetry cobbled together from tweets. Not the first of these machine-generated versebots, but rather a nice one. 
• Ladies Against Humanity: I’m not 100% sure what this is (yes, I know it’s a riff on cards against humanity, I mean beyond that), but there are half a dozen gags that made me laugh out loud so on that basis it’s in (ha, like there’s any sort of editorial filter at play here). 

THIS WEEK’S SELECTION OF LONGFORM READS WHICH MAY I HUMBLY SUGGEST YOU MAKE IT ONE OF YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS TO ACTUALLY READ THIS YEAR RATHER THAN JUST SKIPPING THROUGH AS THEY ARE PROBABLY THE BEST THING IN THIS BLOODY MESS OF A MISCELLANY? THANKS:

• Goodbye To Cameras: Pro-photographer Craig Mod writes in the New Yorker about why he may not need an actual camera any more. Interesting if you’re a photographer, but also a slightly sad and elegiac piece on the near-inevitable death of a piece of technology.   
• Sterling and Lebkwosky ‘do’ 2014: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky’s annual back-and-forth on the state of the world, courtesy The Well. Ignore the hideously user-unfriendly formatting and slightly wilful technoobscurantism of some of what they’re talking about – as ever, it’s one of the more intelligent pieces of broad ‘where we are as a civilisation’ pieces of writing (or, more accurately, conversations) you’ll read this year. 
• The Top Quora Answers of 2013: Oh my, there are some truly BRILLIANT things buried in here. You really can lose the rest of the day in here if you’re so inclined – some of them were in Web Curios last year, but most weren’t. The broadest collection of generally interesting stuff you’re likely to see (Curios aside, OBVIOUSLY). 
• The 4 Reasons Viral Content Stopped Mattering In 2013: There have been quite a few Buzzfeed-related pieces so far already this year, but this from Cracked is my personal pick of the bunch. Similar in tone to Esquire’s ‘We Broke The Internet’ rant, but significantly funnier, it’s an excellent look at why endless lists and hyperbole are in the process of breaking the concept of virality. Seeing as we’re on the subject, this Wired piece on Buzzfeed is also pretty good, although scholars won’t find anything particularly new in it. 
• Reddit Talks To The Man With Two Penises: You really do have to click on the link to the picture. It’s not in any way safe for work, obviously, but it’s also incredibly hypnotic. The man’s pleasingly candid discussion of the mechanics of his peculiar anatomy are pretty jawdropping too. I don’t think I’m jealous of him, though. 
• How Netflix Reverse-Engineered Hollywood: A really, really interesting look at how Netflix has used data and tagging and categorisation to map tastes and improve recommendations. Much less about cinema and much more about taxonomy (but still interesting, I promise) – if you have anything to do with datagathering and analysis then this is pretty much a must-read.
• The Best Review Of The Beyonce Album You Are Likely To Read: Nico Muhly is a singer, songrwiter and composer, and a massive Beyonce fan. His review of her last album is epic, and very, very funny indeed. 
• The Books of 2014: A HUGE list breaking down 2014’s forthcoming novels, month-by-month. I got very excited about a lot of these, and I imagine you will too. 
• Creepypasta: If you have heard of Slenderman then you will be aware of the concept of Creepypasta – this is a brilliant overview of the phenomenon (basically: creepy folk tales told and shared online), and will give you lots of pointers towards things you can search for to scare the living daylights out yourself. 
• Evgeny vs “The Internet”: A great profile of serial provoker and perennial Curios favourite Evgeny Morosov – a fascinating man with some very interesting opinions, as showcased in this recent essay on the politics of maker culture (and the fetishisation thereof). Read him, he will make you smarter.
• On Online News and Web Design: A very smart piece looking at the New York Times’ recent redesign and how people consume online news in 2014 and what the means for layouts and user flow and STUFF. Honestly really interesting, even if you’re not into design stuff – if you’re in any way in the business of producing CONTENT (sorry), or getting people to read it, you should probably take a read. 
• On Paul Dacre: A brilliant and fascinating profile of Paul Dacre. Whatever you think of the man (you can probably guess my opinion), this is a compelling read. 

 

By Lucy Glendinning

By Deborah Simon

THIS IS THE LAST TIME I AM GOING TO HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA IN 2013 AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE IN WORDS QUITE HOW HAPPY THAT FACT MAKES ME SO INSTEAD ENVISAGE ME DOING AN INTERPRETATIVE DANCE TO CONVEY THE ENDORPHIN FLOODS I AM CURRENTLY FEELING:

• Facebook Launches Autoplay Video On Mobile: And, as it happens, on desktop too. This isn’t new news (I think they first alluded to this over the Summer, although I can’t be bothered to check exactly when). So yes – videos uploaded to Facebook through its own video player (and this is an important point – not YouTube (or indeed any other platform) embeds) will now autoplay as users scroll past them on the newsfeed (although audio won’t automatically play, which is a smart design decision). So, yes, MORE ENGAGEMENT! As I wrote when they announced this: “BRANDS! Here’s your opportunity to do something marginally creative with this! Perhaps people trapped in the videos, desperately beckoning scrolling people to stop and click on a link. Or something. Jesus, I don’t know, you lot are supposed to be the creative ones, I just write this crap. 
• Facebook’s 2013 In Review: Facebook’s wrapup of the year data here, which you will almost certainly already have seen but I include through a possibly missplaced sense of completeness. It’s a lot less interesting than Tumblr’s, I think. You can also do ‘Your Year In Review’, whereby Facebook scrapes your page for those updates and photos that have elicited most slack-jawed clicking from people you no longer remember but which you were ever friends with in real life. Which is cute, but unremarkable. Overall, underwhelming. You’d think that knowing more about humanity’s likes and behaviours than any company in history (bar one) would enable them to say something more interesting.
• Page Yourself Lets You Build Websites Inside Facebook: Well, not quite. What it actually seems to do is enable Pages to create quite rich tabs with website-like functionality, but what’s really interesting is that it’s free. It seems legitimate, but I can’t help but be a little skeptical about the functionality, etc. There might, though, be useful creative applications for it if you play around, and it could be helpful if you’re a small business owner. Maybe.
• Instagram Messaging!!!!: I’m finding it really hard to be anything other than totally indifferent to this news. ANOTHER way in which we can send personal messages through yet another platform? With pictures? Oh god. HOW MANY DIFFERENT BLOODY WAYS? TOP TIP FOR 2014: a service which offers an aggregated message alert service for all 213 separate networks on which people can contact you, including your home phone and doorbell, called “Please, everyone, I just want to find a space where noone can reach me”. Anyway, in a move which is so unsurprising as to feel like it was actually announced last year, Instagram yesterday announced that users will be able to send private picture messages and conduct private conversations on the platform. There’s more info in the link – interesting for brands, though, is the opportunity to allow users to contact them directly with images (competition entries, etc), and the fact that images can be sent privately to up to 15 users simultaneously, which if you are famous or a famous brand ambassador actually opens up some semi-interesting possibilities when it comes to SURPRISING AND DELIGHTING your BRAND FANS (you can lift those words directly, if you want – frankly I feel dirty having just typed them, so you’re welcome to take them off my hands). Oh look, and here’s GAP being the first brand to use it and doing exactly what I said (ie photo submissions).
• 2013 On Twitter: I like this a little more than Facebook’s, largely because the nature of Twitter means that they’re able to show you the way in which the platform was used to share information about significant moments. Anyway, this is their little nifty HTML roundup of the year as they saw it (strangely there’s no apparent mention of anything that’s not English language, which seems a bit odd to me). 
• Twitter Launches Broad Match Ad Targeting: If you buy ads on Twitter (and if you do comms-type stuff on social media there’s really very little reason why you shouldn’t, given they’ve killed the minimum spend) this is very useful. Basically they’ve made it easier to target people who post broadly relevant stuff around an issue – so if you want to target people who ‘love coffee’, you will now also be able to target people who ‘luv coffee’, ‘*heart* coffee’, ‘really need to perhaps apply these romantic feelings to a member of the same species rather than a caffeinated beverage’, etc etc., automatically rather than having to set this stuff up yourself. A move, not unlike Facebook’s simplification of its ad buying process the other week, designed to make it easier for anyone, particularly small businesses, to participate in the promotional jamboree, but which is as useful for larger brands. 
• Send Pictures As Embeds in DMs: Yep, that. Like the Instagram thing, sort of, except it only works on the Twitter website and own apps rather than on 3rd party clients at the moment. 
• They Changed How You Block People On Twitter And People Got Angry So They Changed It Back: There is nothing more to say about this. 
• Tumblr Adds Trending Blogs Ad Option: Starting January, brands will be able to buy trending slots on Tumblr. Starting as a mobile-only ad offer, the ad unit includes the name of the advertiser – or whatever they’re flogging – a follow button and three recent images from the Tumblr in question. It will almost certainly cost A LOT of money. 
• Google + Launches Social Ads: Hm, this confuses me slightly. Basically you can now turn any Google+ post into an ad unit, which you can then pay to be displayed elsewhere on the web. There’s a degree of interactive functionality included in the eventual ads – comments, the option to join a hangout, etc – but it feels quite a lot like this is more an advert for Google+ than for the actual thing that’s being advertised. 
• Google Knows Where You Have Been: For some of you this may be a little bit creepy. Say hello to Google’s location history which, if you’re logged in to your Google account, can show you where you were on any given day based on data collected from your Android phone and other associated data. WE DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR TH…oh, no, hang on, we did, we just didn’t bother reading the T&Cs. Damnation! Anyway, leaving aside the really quite sinister subtext of this stuff, there’s got to be some interesting hacks possible here – I am guessing (hoping?) that the data’s fairly private to you, but would be interesting to see what API stuff you can do with it. 
• YouTube In 2013: YouTube’s nice little self-referential video looking back at the biggest vids of 2013. You read about the 10 most popular here; interesting and impressive that there are two piece of brand stuff in here (the Carrie promo and another sodding creepy baby video by some water brand).
• YouTube Lets Verified Accounts Livestream: Or do on-air hangouts. Useful to know – you can do quite a lot of fun things with this, I think. Just for clarity, you don’t actually need to do very much at all to get a verified YouTube channel – it’s not like Twitter / Facebook. 
• Google Tips: Google launched this yesterday (I think) – a useful guide to some of its consumer facing products and how to get the most out of them. Very nicely put together as you’d expect, and I guarantee that there will be stuff on there that you didn’t know you could do. 
• A Cheat Sheet For Ad Types On Social Media: No more, no less. You probably ought to know this already if this sort of stuff is your job, but in case you need a reminder. 
• Kik Reaches 100million Users: The news in itself isn’t that interesting, but the piece is actually a good overview of the service and has some interesting stuff about how the platform might develop. A useful one to bring out in the first client meeting of 2014 when you’re struggling to remember why it is you do this stuff in the first place and just need something newish to wave at a client.
• WeChat Has 500million Users: This one too – WeChat is a Chinese site which takes elements of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc, and is very popular. Your client won’t have heard of it, probably, and you can make yourself seem all future and stuff by mentioning it. YOU CAN THANK ME IN THE NEW YEAR. 
• Some Social Media Awards Thingy You Can Vote In Should You Be So Minded: I’m nothing to do with them, fyi, I just thought I should include a link to one of the myriad of these things are out there if you are the sort of person who likes to vote for ‘campaign of the year’ and that sort of stuff.
• Oh, and seeing as it’s the end of the year, a prediction – next year will see at least one major global brand leaving Facebook as they consider it to be no longer relevant to their core target audience. Probably. Maybe.

By Tim Bird

THE LAST SELECTION OF LINKS YOU WILL GET FROM ME IN 2013 AND WHICH THEREFORE YOU SHOULD SAVOUR LIKE SOME SORT OF FINE WINE OR SINGLE-ESTATE COCOA BEAN CHOCOLATE WHILST SECRETLY BEING QUITE GLAD THAT YOU CAN SPEND THE HOLIDAYS IGNORING THE INTERNET COMPLETELY (OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT I PLAN TO DO – I REALLY COULD DO WITH A BREAK FROM ALL THIS, WEBMONGS, IF I’M HONEST WITH YOU, BECAUSE SOMETIMES I WORRY IT’S NOT REALLY VERY GOOD FOR ME OR INDEED PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY TO READ THIS MUCH INTERNET), PT.1:

• If This Then That Launches Location Triggers For Mobile: If This Then That (IFTT) is a great thing in many respects – if you don’t use it already (although I think that if you’re reading this then you probably do), it’s a service which lets you set up sequential processes using digital social media – so for example you can set it to upload all your Instagram pictures to Facebook, for example. This week they launched a location-based service for mobile, which effectively lets you set up triggers which will make stuff happen when you’re in a certain place (according to your phone). So you could set it to, for example, turn your heating on when you leave the office (if you have fancy housing). I KNOW THIS IS MENTAL IT’S THE FUTURE. There have to be some very cool hacks around this – have a think / play. 
• The 4sq Map: A hack for Foursquare which takes the data the app knows about you and potentially makes it a lot more useful than it might otherwise be, through mapping, etc. Have a play, if you use the service.
• Ampp3d: So this launched – Martin Belam’s next project for Trinity Mirror, applying the learnings from ubersuccessful experiment Us Vs Th3m (profiled on Radio4 this morning, no less) to data journalism. It will be interesting to see how this one compares – the Mirror branding is a lot more overt, and I wonder to what extent they will do paid-for datajournalism from brands. Anyway, you can read the very clever Mr Belam’s thoughts on launching it here – interesting stuff. 
• Mandela’s Walk: Lovely piece of work by the Economist, bringing together a lot of their archived writing about Mandela over the past 70-odd years into a very deep chronology of the man’s life and achievement. Not only a nice piece of webwork, but a very clever way of using its archive and also, subtly, emphasising the publication’s heritage. 
• Because The Internet: The Childish Gambino thing is sort of mind-meltingly meta media (that was unintentional alliteration, I promise) – is it a joke? Is it a legitimate side-project by a very talented man? Is it BOTH OF THOSE THINGS AT ONCE??? Actually I think Donald Glover’s a very good musician so I’m inclined to lean towards the side-project explanation. Anyway, his latest album is called ‘Because The Internet’ and is all sorts of levels of interesting about the web and culture and STUFF – the accompanying website, though, is just crazy – effectively a full-length film script designed to accompany the album, with embedded videos and set directions and all sorts of general meta-commentary (that meta word again) on the album and life. It’s quite staggering in its length and breadth, and I would very much recommend saving this one and having a look through when you have a spare hour or so (do people even have spare hours any more? I can’t tell).
• Circuit Stickers: These are stickers which let you add electronics to anything – paper, fabric, whatever you fancy. Which means all sorts of rather cool potential applications for design and fashion, in a sort of homely, homespun, papercraft-y Etsy-type way. If you like a bit of twee AND a bit of electricity (and who doesn’t?) then these may well be right up your alley. 
• iPet Companion: This may well make your Friday afternoon. A service to promote animal shelters in North America which, thanks to webcams and a few plugins, lets people from all over the world play with kittens in their browswers. That’s right, PLAY WITH KITTENS. Be honest with yourself – you have a stinking hangover (I know you), you’re not going to do any work…why not make yourself feel better with cats? Has the added bonus that they’ll probably just be waking up when you read this (presuming it’s Friday) and thus may well be at peak cute. 
• The NYC Crime Map: Another interesting use of public data from NYC, and another chance for me to whinge about how in London we don’t have anywhere near the same access to and ability to mess with information about the city in which we live (although I am reliably informed by people in the know that this is being addressed – something else to look forward to in 2014, although perhaps ‘look forward to’ is a slight exaggeration). Oh, and if you’re into this sort of thing, this is the US Government’s Open Data archive. 
• The Ex-Boyfriend Revenge Kit: This is just sinister. Effectively this is a just a handbag, but for promotional purposes this Aussie company are packaging it with a whole load of other stuff (crowbar, rope, syringe, truth serum, etc) and offering the whole as a means of getting back at a man who wronged you. Good luck with the legal issues, guys!
• London On Trend: Instagram pics from London, mapped as they are taken onto a Google map. Nice little hack and properly hypnotic in a weird sort of way.
• Autodissociate.me: A web-art project by 19 year-old Mary Bond, which consists of a selection of written elements (composed, sourced and randomly generated) overlayed on a series of webcam-style posted shots (often nudes). Don’t know why, but I rather liked this – the metacommentary (that word again) above the images is a nice accompaniment to them, and there’s something rather compelling about the random juxtapositions which it can throw up. Slightly NSFW, just so’s you know. 
• A Collection Of Virtual Yule Logs: I didn’t know this, but apparently it’s a *thing* in the US for small / local TV channels to show a picture of a burning log in a hearth on Christmas day instead of refgular programming, to allow families to create the illusion of Olde Worlde comfort and warmth in their sterile modern homes. This is a virtual equivalent – a whole load of differently designed and presented vanimations of burning logs, as imagined by artists around the world. There are some very nice designs in here. 
• Pompeiian Graffiti: A collection of translated graffiti from Pompeii. Man, those ancient Romans were a bawdy lot. I’d leave some of these scrawled in the bathroom at work, were I you lot. 
• Crowded VS Empty: A lovely page on the Smithsonian Magazine website collecting pictures and information of the world’s most crowded and most overcrowded places around the world, made mapped and navigable. Simple but does a lovely job at reminding us of how incredibly BIG and diverse the planet is (you’d have thought that at the age of 34 I’d have stopped being surprised by this sort of thing). 
• The Walk: I’ve mentioned game design agency 6 To Start on here many times before – they made the now-legendary fitness game ‘Zombies, Run!’, which introduced game elements to the act of going for a jog in a more sophisticated way than Nike had done at the time. Anyway, they’ve got a new one which launched this week – called The Walk, and developed in partnership with the NHS, it’s basically more story than game; the smart thing about it is the way it uses a compelling narrative and the desire to find out what happens next to drive participation (and thus physical activity) rather than some sort of badge system. Clever – will be interesting to see whether Government looks at this and tries to apply the technique to other things (“Go to the jobcentre to access the next episode of your favourite soap!”? Hm, maybe not). 
• Comics + Music Player: I know that there’s a name for that music whichis presented on big rolls of paper with holes in it and which was fed into old pianos to make them autoplay, but I can’t for the life of me recall what that name is. Balls. Anyway, this is SUPER CUTE – a miniature version of that technology, from Japan, in which the tiny rolls of music also have comic strips printed on them – so as you wind the machine you get to read the comic strip and hear the soundtrack play along in time. It probably doesn’t work *quite* perfectly in practice, but the device itself is adorable so I forgive it any failings (how magnanimous of me). 
• Reverse-Inspiration Band Tshirts: I’ve featured quite a lot of Butcher Billy’s work on here before – his latest project is a collection of pictures of ICONIC musicians, wearing band tshirts depicting the logos of artists who came long after them. Because, you know, SATIRE. I rather like these, and would like to be able to buy them as posters please. You could really, really annoy music purists with them, which is never a bad thing in general. 
• French Subway Etiquette: They’re just so stylish, aren’t they? This is an official document by a French rail company – you couldn’t imagine TFL or FIrst Great Western coming up with something this cool, could you? It’s in French, but if you’re not a Francophone the illustrations will still nice up your eyes. 
• Rijksmuseum Releases Its API: In the wake of the Tate doing the same thing earlier this year, this week Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, one of the most digitally savvy cultural organisations in Europe to my mind, has done the same thing. I would like someone to make something from both, please – perhaps a catalogue-masher which takes descriptions of modern art from the Tate’s collection and applies them to the Dutch museum’s unparalleled collection of 17thC Northern European works for dissonance-LOLs. Shardcore?
• Create Your Own Minute Of Silence: Exactly that, with timer. If it was your office Christmas party last night, perhaps you might need to do this for your dignity.
• Old Vids + New Music = This: Let’s Dance is a webproject by…someone (actually Edward Forshaw, it turns out)…which is collecting videos of people dancing from yesteryear and syncing them with modern music for COMEDY EFFECT. It’s fun, uses Echonest, and could only be improved by letting you select tracks and then trawling YouTube for potential video matches. COME ON ED SORT IT OUT PLEASE THANKS. 

I have no idea, sorry. Anyone?

THE LAST SELECTION OF LINKS YOU WILL GET FROM ME IN 2013 AND WHICH THEREFORE YOU SHOULD SAVOUR LIKE SOME SORT OF FINE WINE OR SINGLE-ESTATE COCOA BEAN CHOCOLATE WHILST SECRETLY BEING QUITE GLAD THAT YOU CAN SPEND THE HOLIDAYS IGNORING THE INTERNET COMPLETELY (OR AT LEAST THAT’S WHAT I PLAN TO DO – I REALLY COULD DO WITH A BREAK FROM ALL THIS, WEBMONGS, IF I’M HONEST WITH YOU, BECAUSE SOMETIMES I WORRY IT’S NOT REALLY VERY GOOD FOR ME OR INDEED PSYCHOLOGICALLY HEALTHY TO READ THIS MUCH INTERNET), PT.2:

• The Gif Lenticular: We’ve had the Gif flipbook, and the gif mechanised toy – now we have the Gif lenticular. This service lets you turn any Gif you want into a small lenticular print which you can then order. Use this in pitches as leavebehinds, you know you want to. 
• The Picfair Pics Of The Year: Picfair is one of my favourite things of the year, and it seems to be going well which makes me happy. In case you missed it, it’s a service which allows anyone to upload any of their pics to the site, set a single-use licensing cost, and then lets others buy use of that image under certain pre-agreed licensing terms. Effectively it lets anyone monetise their photography (as long as there’s a market for it), and is INNOVATIVE and DISRUPTIVE and all those other words which we’re all sick of. Anyway, these are their best shots of the year – there are some crackers on there. 
• Pictures Of US Presidents Hanging Out: I love these. A selection of shots from Obama, Bush and Clinton’s trip to South Africa this week to attend Mandela’s memorial (on which note, if you’ve not read the account by the man who took THAT selfie shot of Obama, Cameron and Thorning Schmidt of the context around it, then go do so now) which demonstrates just how staged and agenda-led political photography can be, and that being POTUS is the sort of experience which creates relationships which transcend Democratic/GOP boundaries. 
• The Best / Worst Santa Costume Ever: If you’re yet to have your office shindig, you may wish to consider this. Just imagine it in Extra Large. JUST IMAGINE. 
• A 360-degree Lap With The Stig: I hate Top Gear. Sorry. Anyway, if you like cars and stuff then this video by the bloke in the helmet driving fast might be up your street – it’s one of those ‘look, you can watch in 360 degrees!’ things, and for all I know is quite exciting if you can drive. 
• Ship A Dcik: Have you ever wanted to ship a giant cardboard penis to someone? OH GOOD!
• Examining Technologically Dubious Kickstarter Projects: A website which looks at all those Kickstarters which look SO FUTURE and which as a result are perhaps at best overambitious and at worst outright fantasy. Clever and interesting, but will also in part kill quite a few of your dreams. Also contains at least one thing I have featured on here, which suggests I am an idiot who understands nothing and should apply a little more editorial rigour in 2014 (*adds to resolutions list*). 
• GifWrapping: Artists share animated Gif art projects with each other for Christmas. We get to look at them, which is almost like getting a present ourselves. Almost, maybe, a bit. 
• Cheerify: A website / plugin which lets you CHRISTMASIFY (not a word) any website you choose with WRAPPING PAPER and CHRISTMAS EFFECTS and MUSIC. When I say ‘Christmasify’ I of course mean ‘render dreadful, unnavigable and migraine-inducing’ – as a promo for digital agency AMP I am frankly unimpressed. 
• The Amiga Workbench Emulator: I don’t really know what you’re meant to do with this, if I’m 100% honest with you, but if anyone can show me how I can make it play Sensible Soccer then I will love you forever. 
• Highway One: This week’s ‘best example of HTML parallax scrolling thingy’ is this, a guide to America’s Highway One, made in the style of a road trip. Such lovely design, and it’s informative and functional too. 100,000,000 points. 
• Fred Bassett + Slayer: This should be a Tumblr. Why isn’t it a Tumblr? Anyway, this takes what is officially the least funny strip cartoon IN THE WORLD (seriously though, has anyone ever laughed at Fred Bassett? Is it a dog-lover thing? Maybe you need to be a closed minded, bigoted twat who reads the Mail (and if you ‘only’ read the Mail Online then YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM) to laugh at it – I just don’t know) and combines it with the sensitively poetic lyrics of Slayer in a move which makes the strip both funny and sort of terrifying. 
• The NYC Taxi Calendar of 2014: A calendar collecting the sexy cab drivers of the Big Apple in sexy poses. I use the term ‘sexy’ pretty loosely, but I really do think that Hailo should jump on this and knock one out quickly for London – can you IMAGINE the specimens? 
• The Future Of UI: Not the first of these that I’ve seen, but it’s a pretty comprehensive collection of examples of ‘OH WOW LOOK AT THE FUTURE’ interface design from films. I think that we might see some stuff like this almost starting to nearly become reality in the next 12 months or so (way to hedge my bets) – if the XBox One takes off as a home entertainment / multemedia hub THING, with all its gestural interface stuff, you might start to see web designers experimenting with some of these things for Kinect-specfic browsing experiences. They’ll be horrible at first, obviously, but we’re almost at a point where it could work.
• A Sound Map Of The World: I think that this is an amazing project. As far as I can tell, this is a totally personal project which invites people to send in ambient recordings of their surroundings and then maps them across Google Maps – creating an audiopicture of the world. The volume of contributions is really, really impressive, and I just lost about 20 minutes’ writing time listening to what Germany, France and Japan sound like. Things like this are why the internet is, occasionally, brilliant. 
• Dai Lyn’s Photos Of Old People Wearing B-Boy Clothes: No more, no less. Great pictures. I did a GCSE in Religious Education (Catholic school, had no choice) in which I suggested that the church should combat ageism by getting pensioners into Bhangra and hardcore and dressing them accordingly – God, I was ahead of my time. 
• A Photoessay About North Korea: We’ve learned a lot about North Korea this year – not much of it pleasant, to be honest. This is a great photoessay about the country – loads of great pictures and definitely worth a scroll through. 
• 214 Music Tips for 2014: Selected by website Crack In The Road, this is a truly EPIC collection of recommendations for interesting listening material next year. I have no idea how much of this is good, but the bits I’ve skimmed over / listened to suggest a massively eclectic collection of a whole load of stuff you may not have heard of. Take a punt and see what you hear (wow, that’s a hideous phrase, sorry). 
• The Good Bits From The Comments: It’s a widely held truism that everything that happens below the line is bad and evil and idiotic (and on YouTube that’s still largely true, despite Google’s recent efforts). Blorpy, though, is a (horribly named) website which collects interesting, thoughtful and heartwarming comments from blogs and news articles around the web in one place. Fascinating – there’s loads of really interesting stuff in here about all sorts of things. 
• The 8-bit Selfie: A neat little website, the Interstellar Selfie Station uses your webcam to take a picture of you and then 8-bits the fcuk out of it, with all sorts of contrast and definition filters to make your image look like the loading screen of a ZX Spectrum game circa 1987. Actually looks rather cool, and might be nice if you’re bored of your social media avatar and are of a retro-gaming bent. 
• Why Is The Sky Blue?: I sort of know the answer to this, in a really loose, crap, unscientific way – I really liked this site which explained it to me in simple words and pictures that even someone who’s a bit crap at science could understand. Nice design. 
• Turning A Building Into A Rubik’s Cube: This is just mental really. 3d projection and very clever tech combined – it’s clunky but also very impressive indeed. 
• Crap Gift Picker: I really should have putall the Christmas stuff in its own section, shouldn’t I? Oh well. This is a rather nice little promotoy by interactive agency Traction, which allows you to randomly pick a slightly rubbish gift for someone you ought to get a present for but really don’t care about enough to think about what to get them. 
• Least Helpful: A website collecting the least helpful, most curmudgeonly reviews on Amazon (and other sites, probably). It does make you wonder about the sort of people who actively choose to take time from their lives to post things like ‘FEATURES THE WORD ‘QUEER’. DISGUSTING’ under a review. You hope that most of these are jokes, but fear that they’re not. 
• Your Own Private Video Archive: Mindlogr is a platform which allows people to record video of themselves and then store it in a private archive – the idea being that you will develop a personal, persistent video journal of your life, stored in one place, against which you can map all sorts of other quantified self data (it connects with Nike+, Fitbit, etc) and general information like the news or the weather. For any of you who’ve read Houllebecq’s ‘The Possibility of an Island’, the concept of the LIFE STORY as he defines it is pretty much a variant on this very thing; an interesting idea overall. 
• Buy A Private Island: What to get for the person who has everything. Amazingly this appears to be real.
• World In Love: This is a very sweet project indeed, looking to find examples of couples which cover every single possible match of nationalities available. It’s probably doomed to failure unless it gets a big publicity injection, but I think the ethos behind it is lovely. 
• Aluminium Casts of Anthills: This bloke basically pours molten aluminium into ants’ nests which then solidifies and creates amazing sculptures which match the dimensions of the insane network of tunnels and chambers within. AND ALSO KILLS ALL THE ANTS. I presume the hot metal just sort of disintegrates them on impact – or is your sculpture full of ant corpses. WHY HAS NOONE CONSIDERED THIS?
• Lots Of Little Webgames In One Place: Because you’re not doing any more work between now and Christmas, let’s be honest. 
• The Junk Drawer Project: Picturs of the crap we store and the stories behind why we do so. More interesting than it probably ought to be (at least to me, who has about 17 variants on this around the house which I’m sort of too scared to open in case BAD MEMORIES leap out). 
• Depression Quest: A text and music game about living with depression. Christmas isn’t a fun time for the depressed. Now might be a good time to consider donating some of the money you were going to spend on useless sh1t noone really needs or wants to a charity instead. Try Mind, or maybe Shelter. 
• WikiGif: All of the Gifs from Wikipedia on one website. Man, there’s some odd stuff on Wikipedia. 
• The Vagine Decal For Trackpads: There’s no other way to describe it. It’s purportedly a feminist statement. I’m not really sure what to think. 
• The 50 Worst Things On The Internet in 2013: Finally, a roundup of a load of pictures and Gifs which will make you hope that some sort of meteorite strikes between now and January 1st 2014 and puts a stop to us once and for all. Although I’m surprised that the above-mentioned vagina decal’s not on the list. 

By James Whitlow Delano

MAYBE YOU WOULD LIKE TO LISTEN TO THE NEW BUSTA RHYMES/QTIP MIXTAPE NOW?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS:

• Respectful Rappers: What if rap lyrics were a little less angry and misogynistic and a little more feminist? This might be what they would be like, maybe.
• King James Programming: This is VERY geeky. Algorithmically mashing text from the King James Bible with The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmes for ‘comic’ effect. Programmers might like this; the rest of you, skip to the next one which has Macauley Culkin in it.
• The Pizza Underground: What would YOU do if you were former child star Macauley Culkin? Would you descend into a drink and drug fueled hell and set up a dreadful, morally-questionable venture seeking to exploit your former ‘fame’ so as to get into the pants of a lot of desperate women seeking some tawdry variant on fame in the Hollywood hills (HELLO COREY FELDMAN!)? NO YOU WOULD NOT! You would form pizza-themed Velvet Underground tribute band called The Pizza Underground. Of course you would. You can listen to the music here if you want (it’s…er…not great). 
• Sports Balls Replaced With Cats: Erm, that.
• Jaden Is Worried: I always though that John Terry’s resting facial expression was the acme of existential sadness (seriously, check out the massively bleak look he always sports), but now there’s a new champion of worry – Will Smith’s kid Jaden. Poor lad. I hope he’s ok. 
• Cloaque: This is a seemingly infinitely scrolling Tumblr art project which collects all sorts of random imagery, gifs, 3d models, etc, and dumps them all onto the page in a way which is weirdly a lot more visually coherent than it ought to be. Its curators call it ‘digital compost’. I like that. Contains 3d modeled genitalia, in case you care.
• 12 Shoes For 12 Lovers: Sebastian Errazuriz is an artist who has designed 12 pairs of shoes, each of which depicts aspects of one of his former lovers. Each is accompanied by a short vignette from their relationship. This might be my favourite thing on here this week. 
• Stop Senior Selfies: A Tumblr campaigning to get OLD PEOPLE to stop taking selfies as it’s only for the kids, YEAH?! Unfortunately the curator’s definition of ‘senior’ seems to encompass people over the age of 30. The young are TYRANTS. 
• Tom Hanks Animals: Tom Hanks’ face, on gifs of animals. That’s all. The one at the top as I write this made me laugh a LOT. 
• Medieval People Of Colour: A collection of images of people of colour from renaissance art.
• UX Critique: Looking at all the reasons why the new iPhone UX is rubbish. 
• Ineffective Chinstraps: A late contender for most weirdly niche Tumblr or the year, this seemingly collects pictures of people wearing headgear with chinstraps that don’t really fit properly. 
• All Staff All Day: Purports to be a collection of actual emails which have been sent to all staff in companies, accompanied by appropriate images. Some gold in here. 
• Yeezus As Art: Lyrics from Kanye’s ‘Yeezus’ album, illustrated by pics from Bing image search. By Shardcore – you can read about it here if you like. 
• My Earliest Memory: A project by Simon White, collecting people’s earliest memories. Contribute one – it’s a lovely project. 

LONG STUFF WHICH IS LONG BUT WHICH YOU WILL HAVE AMPLE TIME TO READ BETWEEN NOW AND NEXT TIME AND AS SUCH WHICH YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO DIVE INTO LIKE SOME SORT OF HAPPY WORD-EATING CORMORANT (NO, ME NEITHER):

• A Lovely, Long Interview With Bill Watterson: After Calvin & Hobbes got megafamous, its creator Bill Watterson didn’t do many interviews. This, though, is from 1989 before it had become quite the worldwide phenomenon it would eventually develop into; this is a long and fascinating interview with the man, which touches on all sorts of fascinating stuff about the strip. To me, though, the best bits are Wattersons slightly testy responses to questions about whether Hobbes is ‘real’ or not, and what that does to the narrative – it’s a lovely example of a creator wanting to give their work to breathe and live in the mind rather than give people answers on a plate, and how that ambiguity creates a depth to the strip that it could never have had otherwise. 
• An AMA With The Semen Chef: There’s a book for sale on Amazon called ‘Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen-based Recipes‘ – if you’ve spent much time on the internet, you’ve probably come across it (sorry). This is a Reddit AMA with the book’s author which is actually sort of legitimately interesting, but which I am including mainly because there are SO MANY QUOTES in here which I suggest that you copy and paste into emails to colleagues over the next week or so. Go on, confuse them a little. 
• Jonah Peretti, Critical Theory and Advertising: I don’t care what Time Magazine says, this was the year of Jonah Peretti, and the year in which the world’s media basically looked at Buzzfeed’s success and just sort of gave up trying to be different (hyperbole, but). This is a fascinating fund, dug out by Critical Theory Magazine (whose summary of it is worth reading if you can’t stomach the academic-ese (not a word)) – an early essay by Peretti on capitalism, queer theory and identity commodification. Read this (or, as I said, the summary) and realise where Buzzfeed came from (and maybe a bit about where we are all going, maybe). Contains the amazing (if you consider the context of who wrote it) observation that we are increasingly obsessing over “isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence” – YOU’RE NOT HELPING, JONAH.
• Why ‘Life’ Doesn’t Exist: Not going to lie, this one’s a bit *hard*. A piece from Scientific American in which the author asserts that to assert that there is some quality called ‘life’ which differentiates certain objects or organisms from others is fallacious, and that instead we should understand distinctions in terms of systemic complexity. Which has all sorts of fairly mental philosophical implications, particularly in terms of AI and stuff. Sort of headbending.
• An Interview With The Creator of Cache Monet: This year’s web art sensation Cache Monet has been linked to EVERYWHERE. This interview with its creator Tim Nolan is fascinating on the manner in which it’s started to bridge the gap between a digital and a physical work, and how offline galleries are trying to get in on the act.
• Why Upworthy Headllines Are Everywhere: Short answer – because they work. Longer answer – because of Twitter and Facebook, and there’s nothing at all that we can do about it. This is a very clever look at the deeper media politics behind Facebook’s recent ‘quality content’-prioritising algorithm change, and how that has basically ruined EVERYTHING (/hyperbole). 
• On The Sad Death Of The Quiet Gig: This is a very good and very true piece from Th Quietus on how it’s no longer possible to go to a gig without having it ruined by some idiot(s) talking constantly throughout it. Does this mean I’m getting old? No, it means that the world is becoming increasingly full of arseholes (I am well aware that writing that sentence means that I am in fact getting old). 
• I Had Sex With My High School Teacher: Not me, obviously, the author of this piece. As a girl, she had a brief affair with her mid-20s teacher; this is her account of what it felt like and what happened. A really beautiful piece of writing which is in no way sensational and which is by turns funny and heartbreakingly sad, and may make you think a little differently about a few of this year’s news stories, maybe. 
• Dasani’s Homeless Life: One of the best pieces of journalism I have read all year, this report by the New York Times into the life of one family on the poverty line in the city will at points move you to tears (guaranteed), but is a brilliant and (I think) pleasingly unsentimental look at what it is like to be very poor in a large Western metropolis. Good multimedia, good photography and excellent writing combine to make this worth taking every single minute it takes to read. Sort-of essential, I think. 
• The PTSD Lobotomies of Post-War America: Some 2,000 men were lobotomised by the US Army Veterans Administration, to treat them for conditions that at the time they didn’t even have names for but which now we’d probably call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This piece on the Wall Street Journal is another great piece of multimedia journalism, looking at how and why it happened. It’s, er, not a very happy story, I warn you. 
• The Rise Of Millennial Writing: I love this very much indeed. It’s a nice summation of where we find ourselves as a civilisation with the internet and our senses of self and individualism, all wrapped up in what Bret Easton Ellis called the ‘Post-Empire’ mindset, and in many ways it’s one of the best summaries of what almost everything I have linked to in 2013 has made me think and feel on one level or another. 

By Kei Meguro