Jesus, that was a week. It started with a national feeding frenzy over the minutiae of a series of car journeys, mutated into one of the biggest ‘fcuk you’s I can remember seeing a government giving an electorate since basically Italy in the 80s and 90s (and, er, 00s), segued into another series of demonstrations of how horrifically broken race relations is in the US (and let’s not lie to ourselves, everywhere else too), and has ended with a totally edifying spat between the President of the United States of America and the…what, sixth-most-popular social network in the world? AND FRIDAY’S NOT EVEN OVER YET!!

I imagine what you really need after such a febrile, jittery, spiky week of creeping enervation and mounting incredulous impotence is something comfy and soothing to take the pain away; instead, what I’m giving you as per usual is far too many words and links, delivered in a style which might best be described as ‘loose-but-relentless’. Sorry about that. 

Still, phase one of lockdown is ALMOST OVER! A BIT! So ‘celebrate’ the last weekend indoors until we all start ill-advisedly rubbing up against each other again with Web Curios – who knows, maybe when this is all over you’ll have found a better way to pass these empty hours between birth and death than this. The sad truth, of course, is that I will not. 

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and if you voted for this shower of cnuts then you’re still a cnut yourself.

(NB I have tried really hard to find a credit for the above photo but with no success, so if anyone knows then please let me know and I’ll add one in)

WHY NOT ACCOMPANY THIS FIRST BIT WITH SOME PHILIP GLASS?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD ENJOY SEEING TWITTER SUSPEND TRUMP’S ACCOUNT FOR A WEEK AS A PETTY, TIT-FOR-TAT RESPONSE:

• Facebook Launches Catchup: Ok, OK, fine, ‘launches’ is perhaps an exaggeration; this is another project by Facebook’s new projects division, meaning it’s got a super-limited release and may never see the light of day caveat caveat caveat. Regardless, it exists! Though, er, I’m not sure why. The best explanation is ‘houseparty, but for phonecalls!’; the idea is that the app gives anyone the ability to advertise the fact they are AVAILABLE FOR CALLS; any of their friends can then join said call, in multiple numbers, for a marvellous free-talking phone jamboree! This basically reminds me of the feature that phone companies developed in the 80s or 90s where if you paid them money you could patch multiple phonecalls together for ‘party calling’ or similar, and I’m not 100% certain why people would want to bring that back, but someone over in Menlo Park obviously thought this was taking a punt on. Literally nothing you can do with this information other than drop it into a few client-facing documents as a vague indication of your being ON THE PULSE – don’t worry, the client will be vaguely-impressed by your zeirgeistyness and then never mention it again, meaning it won’t matter that this is both the first and last time you will ever here about this doubtless-doomed-to-irrelevance failure (feel free to remind me of this when all social media has gone voice-only by 2027).
• Facebook Launches Collab: TWO THINGS IN ONE WEEK! Collab is another experiment by FB, but one with (I think) significantly more potential, and which looks like quite an interesting spin on TikTok’s ‘make videos out of other people’s videos’ schtick. Collab is…oh, here: “Collabs are three independent videos that are playing in sync. With the app, you can create your own arrangement by adding in your own recording or by swiping and discovering an arrangement to complete your composition. No musical experience is required.” Now, I can’t play with this as it’s waitlist-only, but it looks as though it’s effectively an infinite-remix kit, the idea being that you’ll be able to splice together any combination of existing ‘Collabs’ with your own; there’s some detail in here about crediting original creators in here, which is interesting in terms of potentially enticing makers to the platform, and the sharing functionality (to whit, it bugs you to share its output ALL THE TIME, apparently) is a clever leaf from TikTok’s book. Worth keeping an ear out for this, I think.
• Updates To The Facebook Creators’ Studio: I don’t care, this is very boring. Here: “The Creator Studio app is starting to roll out a brand-new experience for creators who want to manage their content on the go. With this update, you can now publish and schedule Facebook posts within the same Creator Studio app where you check content insights and respond to your fans’ messages and comments.” Happy? No, of course you’re not.
• Instagram Makes It Easier For Creators To Earn: It feels ever so slightly like that point in the film in which all those portentous stones with all the carvings and the knife marks and the bloodstains that have been heavily trailed as being of MASSIVE SIGNIFICANCE since the first act start to slowly, grindingly turn on their axes as they move to some sort of universe-shattering alignment. Or at least that’s how it feels to me – ‘it’ in this case being ‘all the stuff Facebook is doing to bring money for individuals and businesses inside of the Big Blue Misery Factory’, which very much looks like the culmination of a lot of long-thought-out bits and pieces starting to coalesce into a very, very solid set of business reasons as to why basically everyone in the world who would like to make money online ought to be on at least one of the company’s apps. This update is about ads coming to Insta TV, with a limited number of creators on the platform getting said ads inserted into their content as 15s ‘swipe up for more content’ promo clips; there’s also some stuff in here about IG Live giving streamers the ability to sell stickers to fans, which work in much the same way as similar systems on Twitch and YouTube (stickers give you special status in the comments, basically, functioning as a massive, glowing ‘PICK ME, SENPAI!’ to whichever blandly-attractive FIAT500 identikit sportswear-endorsing cut-out they happen to be watching at the time.
• Updated Guidelines for Music on IG: Worth a read if you do lots of livestreaming and want to know exactly how much music you can have on in the background before the copyright police take you down.
• YouTube Adds ‘Chapters’ Feature for Easy Timestamping: Not really sure what to add here, but it’s now LOADS easier to add little timestamps to your YT uploads so that viewers can easily find the bits they want to watch. Which, if you think about it, you could probably use for some moderately-clever gags within a video if you could be bothered, but which, now I think about it, almost certainly won’t be funny or smart enough to warrant the time it’ll take you to come up with them in the first place.
• Pinterest Launches Curated Highlights: Have YOU been after a feature on Pinterest which will “bring the expert recommendations of influential fashion and home tastemakers as well as publishers directly to you”? I imagine you have! And now it’s here! This very similar to the Insta announcement from last week – effectively it’s curated editorial by influencers, but potentially makes Pinterest a more appealing platform for publishers than it might have been otherwise. As per, there are literally no details about how this will practically function, but maybe use your imagination and think really hard and you might be able to develop a rough idea.
• The Adobe 99 Conference: Adobe are a company I deeply dislike – not least as I briefly had a pleasantly-lucrative little gig with them where I basically repackaged about 3% of Curios every couple of weeks for the handsome some of £500 a pop, a task which took me approximately 7 minutes and which I would happily have carried on doing forever but which fell victim to some managerial musical chairs at their end (oh, and I hate them for trying to stop us from using photoshop as a verb NO I WILL NOT ADD A ™ AT THE END OF THAT FCUK YOU ADOBE FCUK YOU!!!) – but this year they are offering a virtual version of their annual 99 creativity conference, attendance at which is normally about a grand, for FREE! It’s all about ‘creativity’, apparently, and features keynotes and workshops and might be useful; if nothing else, though, given that it’s free there’s practically no reason why your employer shouldn’t be happy for you to take two days for some personal and professional growth, leaving you free to sack the whole thing off and go and spend 48h drinking 20/20 in a park.
• The Reddit Advertising School: Also free! You are all probably FAR TOO SENIOR to need any of this, but for any more junior advermarketingpr folk, or any students reading this, you might find this genuinely useful: “r/Advertising School is a free portfolio school hosted in Reddit’s r/Advertising community. The 12-week program features courses from industry professionals alongside real assignments to promote diversity in the ad industry.” It looks quite formal and structured, which might be a particular appeal, and given the breadth of what it covers – art direction to copywriting to brief writing to the relationship between advertising and PR – it’s definitely worth sharing with any kids curious about the industry if nothing else.
• Nana by IKEA: If you don’t ordinarily read ‘the boring section at the top about a hateful industry which the world would be better off without’ but just happen to catch this out of the corner of your eye as you scroll past then WAIT STOP WAIT STOP COME BACK! This is, I concede, just a promotional website for furniture from Sweden, but it is SO FUN! Nana is a site created for IKEA Spain (I think), as part of competition to win the perfect bedroom or somesuch; that’s not the important bit. The important bit is that the site is also a competition mechanic, which requires you to sing along to a Swedish lullaby to register your entry; the better you sing the lullaby, the more sleepy your digital neighbours become, with ‘victory’ coming when you successfully lull them to sleep. Look, maybe it’s just a lowering of standards as we reach the fag-end of quarantine (ha! WE’LL ALL BE DOING THIS AGAIN IN A FEW MONTHS!!) but I found this properly charming, and absolutely belted this out when I played it earlier this week. Seriously joyful.

By Flora Yukhnovich

NEXT, ENJOY THIS SUPERB, HIPHOP-HEAVY MIX COMPILED BY THE SUPERB B DOLAN!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PEOPLE INCREDULOUSLY MOUTHING “IT’S LIKE THERE’S ONE RULE FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US” THIS WEEK HAVE EVER STUDIED THE HISTORY OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY OR INDEED READ ONE OF ITS ELECTORAL MANIFESTOS, PT.1:

• Jazz Keys: There was a part of me when I found this that really wanted to see what would happen if I wrote all of Curios in it; the answer, it turns out, as I found when typing this paragraph through the interface, is that I would find it almost impossible to stop typing, as the free-flowing piano does rather encourage the sort of preposterous run-on sentences of which I know I am already too fond for your liking. Right – back to the GDoc in which this is normally composed. WOW THIS IS SO MUCH FUN CLICK THE LINK RIGHT AWAY! Jazz Keys is very simple – you type, and the site turns your keystrokes into jazz piano. That’s it – except, seemingly-miraculously, whatever you type sounds sort-of…ok? I don’t know whether it’s a peculiar characteristic of jazz piano that you can basically cobble any notes together in a vaguely-syncopated rhythm and it’s just-about-listenable, or whether (more likely) there’s something under the hood here that prevents you from creating anything too cacophonic, but, regardless, the sounds this produces are lovely. I promise you, it’s nearly-impossible to feel stressed or annoyed when typing on this website – why not keep it open in a tab and use it as your new Tweet composer? I guarantee all your communications will be 17% cooler as a result.
• It’s Me: I do wonder whether the recent boom in popularity of videocalling will in any way alter our relationship with the concept of the ‘avatar’ in online interactions; whereas a degree of anonymity was an expected and often mandatory part of online life back in the day, are we all becoming generally more accepting of revealing our real identities online? If your immediate answer to that is ‘dear god no, give me all the digital masks to hide behind so I can mask my hideous, disfigured countenance’ then a) hello kindred spirit; and b) you might like It’s Me, a new ‘friend finding’ service whose gimmick is that all interactions by default take place from behind an avatar. It’s designed as a layer on top of Snapchat, with users being able to autogenerate an avatar and jump into chats, which the idea being that if you like people you can move to Snapchat to take the conversation to the next level. I don’t know if I’m just being a bit middle-aged about this, but this does rather scream ‘beware of the paedos’ imho – also, there is something SO SAD about the App Store page featuring an image that reads ‘don’t get judged by your face’. I know that that’s how the world works, but, God.
• Alethea: My boss got the ‘rona, so to cheer him up during his convalescence I popped on Cameo and spent 30 whole quid getting Duncan from Blue to record him a ‘get well soon’ message. Fair play to Duncan from Blue, he delivered within 24h and gave a good 90s of straight-down-the-camera, bronzed, beautiful, cheering inanity – he also, though, saw fit to share some slightly-bizarre and probably-not-totally-medically-accurate bits of wisdom about the importance of fighting COVID-19 with ‘plenty of vitamin C’, which did rather make me wonder whether if I logged onto his Insta I’d see him grifting for some sort of orange juice-based miracle cure. Anyway, that’s by way of pointless, unasked-for preamble to Alethea, which is ‘Cameo, but with people who aren’t real and have been generated by computer’ – basically a sort of deepfake factory, churning out custom content which you script and they render for $50 and upwards. There are some stock models to choose from – a baby Barack Obama (I really don’t want to think about some of the things I worry that baby Barack might have been made to say), a weird mashup of Trump and that bloke off that Netflix programme about the tigers you were all shouting about 11 weeks ago – and all you have to do is send them a script and they’ll do the rest (costs are per 200 words). This is really interesting; the models are ok, but very obviously CG-generated and I can’t imagine why you would ever want a video of a fake person saying made-up stuff straight to camera, but the potential is huge.
• Manova: This is one of the…bolder ideas I’ve seen in a while. Undeterred by the fact that VR worlds haven’t exactly been setting the world alight of late, and the fact that Second Life creators Linden Labs last year shuttered their own planned version of a new digital universe, and the additional and probably more significant fact that Fortnite looks like by far and away the best bet for any sort of persistent metaverse-type-thing right now, a former HTC boss this week announced a standalone VR headset with its own standalone virtual world called Manova. So, er, they are gambling on a VR headset from a brand-new maker that noone has heard of, and a brand-new virtual world with no IP that can only be accessed by the aforementioned headset…no, sorry, this is absolutely never going to be anything other than a colossal failure. Even the website looks like it was cobbled together from unused CG renders from previous versions of the Sims, or by someone who remembers Playstation Home, complete with generic ‘watch films with friends!’ and ‘play games!’ exhortations with no actual detail about how these things will work, and why they will work better than previous versions of this sort of thing that literally noone wanted to use, ever. Still, fair play to whoever’s getting rich off this – someone DEFINITELY is.
• This MP Does Not Exist: Insert your own, lame, moderately-topical gag here about whether the website name refers to members of the cabinet with a sense of shame or integrity. This is the latest project by Matt Round, whose trained a GAN on all the MP’s portraits and trained it to spit out new, imaginary ones at the push of a button – brilliantly, it does names and constituencies too (these must have been edited a bit, they are TOO perfect – I am sure Sir Edward Mole MP, Westworth and Dulsea, is a real person). I presume that these are all pre-generated and hosted somewhere in the background and that you would eventually run out of new, imaginary MPs to generate if you clicked long enough, but there are enough in here that you can keep going for quite a while. I feel there’s a pointless-but-fun bot you could make with this which automatically replies to people complaining about petty local matters on Twitter with one of these, along with a made-up .parliament.uk email address exhortation for the complainant to contact their MP and really vent.
• Teooh: One thing I’ve learned about WORKING LIFE since it’s all gone virtual is that people really love having events. Love them. “We must do a webinar!”, they say, “we must do this conference!” Why, though? Be honest, how many work events or conferences have you ever been to that were anything other than, at best, a marginally-less painful way of wasting your time than being at work? Has anyone, ever, said anything useful or interesting on stage at an industry event (I talk specifically about advermarketingpr here – you may well do something less hatefully stupid for a living, and your conferences may be shining beacons of worth and meaning)? Yes, that’s right, I really am this much of a hateful misanthrope and a pleasure to have as a colleague! Now, imagine the horror of attending an event, but now it’s happening VIRTUALLY in what looks like a cross between The Sims circa 2005 and Habbo Hotel – yes, that’s right, it’s a VIRTUAL EVENTS SPACE! You can have a DIGITAL STAGE and everyone can have their OWN AVATAR and there will be little emotes you can do, and…NOOONE WANTS THIS! Noone, literally noone, wants to have to learn a whole new series of inputs and a new UI and to customise their own avatar using totally unfamiliar settings and controls and to be dumped into a virtual space with a few dozen other avatars all flailing spastically and shouting things like “DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO PUT MYSELF ON MUTE???”. Look, a small piece of advice – JUST MAKE STUFF WORK PROPERLY IT IS ALL THE USER ASKS DO NOT TRY AND MAKE IT SHINY AND FUN WHEN IT DOESN’T EVEN DO THE BASICS RIGHT.
• The Lost Horizon Festival: Thanks to Gill for sending this to me; I have literally no idea how this will work, but Lost Horizon is a festival happening virtually next month, run by the people behind Shangri-La which many of you won’t remember very clearly at all from Glastonburys past. It’s presenting itself as ‘the world’s largest festival in virtual reality’, but details on exactly what flavour of VR or what the experience will be like or who’s playing are…nonexistent. Still, they’ve got til 3-4 July to sort it all out – you can sign up for updates and, doubtless, aggressively-consistent Instagram advertising.
• Stayk: This is a sweepstake generator, of which there are myriad on the web; the neat twist here is that you can use Stayk to create your very own deathpool tournament with friends, which is kept automatically up-to-date with regular Wikipedia data pulls – the site basically checks the Wikipedia entries of the famouses in question and alerts the players when one of them carks it and ends the game. Obviously this is VERY TASTELESS but I’ve always found the prospect of celebrity deathpools sort-of funny (blame it on all my time on Popbitch bitd) and the Wikipedia scraping is a smart little hack so WELL DONE Niall Beard for making it.
• Vera Sebert: Vera Sebert is a digital artist; this link takes you to her online portfolio, which itself then links out to a range of small projects she’s built across the web over the years and which are all (well, the ones I’ve tried at least) interesting and engaging and interactive in inventive ways. Some of them are also in German, but, well, nothing’s perfect.
• GTA Bike: THIS is the future of exercise. Honestly, if open world games don’t start coming with official ways of connecting your now-connected exercise equipment to them in some way, I will be amazed. This is a very technical set of instructions on how to link your domestic training bike to your computer so that you can PEDAL YOUR WAY THROUGH GTA!! This looks SO much fun – I know that there are various systems that let you ride digital races, etc, but I guarantee none of them will be anywhere near as fun as that bit in GTAV when you go careening down the hill from the observatory on the dirtbike. Seriously, this looks brilliant, to the extent that I could almost imagine wanting to get on an exercise bike were I able to give it a go (though I am not sure I could deal with the humiliation of dying of cardiac arrest whilst effectively playing a videogame).
• Birds Taking The Train: A subReddit devoted to photographs of birds – mainly pigeons, as you might expect, on trains. Fare-dodging little fcukers.
• Eight360: I know I’ve been a bit bear-ish about VR on here of late – I still think I’m right, by the way, it still lacks a killer reason to buy – but there really are some interesting developments coming up. This is onesuch thing – Eight360 is basically a real-life version of every single one of those ‘360-degree simulator-type immersive control systems for VR’ things that you’ve seen in every single VR film ever, from Lawnmower Man to Ready Player One, and it looks AMAZING. It also looks like it would make you incredibly ill very quickly, but in a fun way if that makes sense. Finally, it appears to be designed and developed by a pair of kids from New Zealand, which makes me want it to succeed quite a lot – GOOD LUCK, KIDS FROM NEW ZEALAND!
• Extreme Mercator: A little toy which uses Google Earth (I think) to create weird-looking perspectives based on Mercator map projections – you know the ones, they’re all elongated at the poles. Plug in any location you want and it will create this weird, stretched, slightly-abstract but equally almost-recognisable aerial landscape. It’s…quite hard to describe, so I suggest you click the link and point it at the city of your choosing and see what happens.
• Radio Recliner: This is a BRILLIANT idea, and exactly the sort of thing that literally ALL of you can almost certainly steal as an idea for a project you’re working on – it’s so good you can probably bend it to fit any client you like, with a bit of work. Radio Recliner is a US initiative, creating a ‘pirate’ radio station run by residents at old people’s homes across the country, each getting a ‘slot’ each day which are stitched together into continuous programming and OH MY WORD what a great project. Can someone please, please do this in the UK, in conjunction with Age UK or similar; I would totally tune in to a station playing old music and with some top-quality nana-reminiscence thrown in as between-tracks banter. Let’s resurrect the concept of Zoo Radio but with a zoo populated by venerable, elegant animals rather than the sh1t-flinging chimps of the Chris Evans era (this is a VERY old gag/reference which probably didn’t need to go in here, sorry).
• The Ickabog: I am sure you all know that JK Rowling’s releasing a new, non-Potter story called The Ickabog; it’s being released chapter-by-chapter online, and they’re upto part 7 now (which, if you’re reading this via the Twitter bot next week, will be hopelessly out-of-date, sorry).
• Global Hypercolour: In Swindon in 1992 there was literally NOTHING cooler than Global Hypercolour; a range of clothing which came in light pastel shades, was sold at M&S (I think) and which was MIND-MELTINGLY able to change colour based on temperature. Teenagers were seemingly unbothered by the fact that what this practically resulted in was your armpits standing out as massive colourbeacons of hormonal heat production and bought this stuff like there was no tomorrow (or at least their parents did, except my mum who wanted no truck with it, leaving me very bitter for a good few weeks), until everyone realised that the tshirts were terrible quality and the heat reactive qualities of the fabric sort of stopped working after a bit, after which you were simply left with a tshirt with weird blue sweat stains. MEMORIES! Anyway, for those of you for whom the preceding 100 words were a pleasing time machine of nostalgia – or for those of you to whom they meant nothing but who quite like the idea of having really standout armpits – there’s now someone selling them right here in 2020. Except the name’s now ‘Shadow Shifter’ (I presume someone somewhere still has the oh-so-valuable ‘global hypercolour’ trademark) and you have to buy them on Amazon (sorry) – I imagine the appalling quality and short-lived quality of the colour change will be EXACTLY the same, though.

By Christine Twang

NEXT UP, HAVE THIS MIX OF AFRO/LATINATE BEATS WHICH IS LITERALLY PERFECT FOR A SUNNY WEEKEND!!

THE SECTION WHICH WONDERS WHETHER PEOPLE INCREDULOUSLY MOUTHING “IT’S LIKE THERE’S ONE RULE FOR THEM AND ANOTHER FOR US” THIS WEEK HAVE EVER STUDIED THE HISTORY OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY OR INDEED READ ONE OF ITS ELECTORAL MANIFESTOS, PT.2:

• Soviet Design: This is a lovely site, by a Ukrainian digital agency, which presents a history of design from the Soviet era (specifically from 1922-1991). This contains all the elements you’d expect – Communist-era typographical styles, profiles of the architects and designers whose work characterised the aesthetic of the era, and some really nice webwork alongside it, which manages to elevate rather than confuse the overall content and which is designed in such a way as to reinforce all the themes you’re discovering as you read. This is genuinely lovely, and I would absolutely hire these people based on this, were I ever able to work on something more interesting than sub-£10k ephemeral content repositories.
• You Shall Not Pass: Reminiscent in theme of that nightmare UX website from last year which I can’t be bothered to dig out bu- see, I was typing that and I found myself compelled to dig out the link and put it in here for you – JESUS I HAVE A PROBLEM) except more limited in scope, this site asks you to do one simple thing and choose a password. This is funny partly because of how accurate it is, and neatly highlights one of my personal pet hates when it comes to webform UI – PLEASE IF THERE ARE NECESSARY CONDITIONS REQUIRED FOR MY PASSWORD TO BE ACCEPTABLE THEN TELL ME WHAT THOSE ARE BEFORE I TRY AND CREATE ONE YOU FCUKING CNUTS. It’s…a bugbear.
• MS Dos in VR: It’s astonishing to me how much I still remember of MS Dos commands, born of the JOYFUL (not joyful at all) process that one used to have to go through when one wanted to play a game on a PC in the days before Windows – this is a brilliant little browsertoy (not VR at all, in fact) which lets you play around with an actual old PC on a virtual desktop, complete with several completely-playable games, and the ability to root around in all the subfolders. If you want a time machine back to the early-90s (there’s a lot of early-90s nostalgia in here this week, it seems – sorry, I promise I’ll stop fetishising the pre-web past soon, it’s just, well, IT WAS A BETTER TIME (I know it wasn’t a better time)) then this will scratch that itch perfectly.
• Black Photo Booth: A found photo project collecting images of black people taken in photo booths through the 20th century, composed of found imagery. “I’ve been collecting found images of Black people for many years. Some of my favorites are photo booth portraits. They often show Black people of different ages, genders, classes in serious and also playful poses. Usually, there are no names listed so these anonymous people invite the viewer to use their imagination in crafting a story about their lives.” This is a beautiful project, and if you click the ‘download’ button in the top-right you can get the images as a PDF booklet for ease-of-viewing.
• Choose Your Plant: Have you gotten REALLY into caring for plants over the course of the past few months indoors? Are they now more real to you than those half-remembered fleshy shapes you used to refer to as ‘friends’ and ‘family’? Would you like to meet a community of fellow plant enthusiasts, ready to discuss all things flora with you and offer you support when the Cyclamen just won’t take? If so, welcome to your new favourite place on the internet. There’s also LOADS of useful information on helping the bloody things stay alive – always the problem I have – along with a useful tool to help you choose appropriate greeney for whatever domestic setup you might have with regard to light, humidity, etc. I would hope that the associated community pages are a wonderful, nurturing community where your love for your vegetal friends can blossom (sorry), but obviously Web Curios takes no responsibility whatsoever should you discover that it’s been taken over by actual Nazis or something.
• Dancing Horse Friends: It was suggested to me last year that I might want to swap out the sadly dying ‘Tumblrs’ mini-section of Curios with one dedicated to TikToks – the problem with that is that I would have to spend more time on TikTok, and I don’t really want to. Occasionally though I find an account that really is worth sharing with you – such an account is Dancing Horse Friends, which is pretty much the apogee of ‘weird meme TikTok’; ‘relatable’ content about horses, all of it made through what looks like some sort of godawful free-to-play game about grooming ponies. I have no idea, basically, which I imagine is sort of the point (I also imagine that whoever makes these would be devastated if a 40 year old man did understand tbh).
• What Sylvia Ate: The juxtaposition between this and the previous link is sort of the ur-example of the difference between TikTok and Twitter – TikTok, a series of videos of poor-quality CG horses to Lorde about their living conditions; Twitter, a series of Tweets listing stuff that Sylvia Plath ate based on her diary entries. There’s a reason why one is significantly more popular than the other, isn’t there?
• Toledo Miniatures: I once read a really good an involved article that explained exactly what it was about miniaturism that exerted such a strong and powerful hold over the human psyche – there’s something quite primal it awakens in us, apparently, which is why we all to a greater or lesser degree find VERY SMOL things fascinating and, occasionally, a bit unsettling. Sadly I’ve forgotten everything about the article other than the fact I once read it, so I can’t explain what that something is – know, though, that that is what is causing you to react to this site. Toledo Miniatures is, I think, just one very talented craftsperson, Chris Toledo, who makes these INSANELY high-quality, high-detail models of individual rooms. Honestly these are INCREDIBLE, although I don’t really understand why anyone would want to commission a tiny, perfectly-formed model of a very, very nice bathroom for approximately $6k.
• If I Knew Then: This is interesting, in part for its banality; If I Knew Then is a project collecting ‘wisdom’ and life lessons from the Harvard Business School’s class of 1963, with the idea being that this generation of graduates lived and worked through so much significant change that their perspectives will doubtless be invaluable. The site acknowledges the fact that a bunch of old white blokes might not seem like the most intriguingly-relevant spokespeople to educate current generations, but then goes on to present a bunch of reasonably-boring bromides as noteworthy fact. There’s nothing bad about this per se, it’s just it’s slightly depressing to find that all the ‘advice’ these people can impart basically boils down to things like ‘don’t make rash decisions’ and ‘don’t be a cnut’ (actually these are scions of American business – they probably don’t even believe the latter, let alone say it) – I find the whole project more interesting as a potential training source for a neural net tbh, to create a bot that will automatically spit out some hoary, old-timey business and life chat at the press of a button. Or, and here’s a project for one of you, why not take this and make it your entire LinkedIn persona for the coming year? Why not live your digital business life as an HBS alumni? Actually, that would be quite fun – I bet those dead-eyed no-soul cnuts on LinkedIn would lap this up.
• Icon Rewind: ANOTHER MSCHF project, this time letting you download old versions of all the app icons on your (i)phone so you can pretend it’s still a simpler, kinder time, when the Snapchat ghost had a face and Insta was still a camera and we’d never even heard the term ‘social distancing’.
• Hey JTree: A website for you to find and befriend a Joshua Tree. “Hey JTree is an ongoing participatory art research project that utilizes social media, and an on-line dating site for meeting Joshua trees. The goal of Hey JTree is to actively enhance interaction between research, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park, and on-line audiences with collected data from individual trees using text, photographs, art, and short video clips of charismatic Joshua trees set to music.” Let me repeat that last line – CHARISMATIC JOSHUA TREES SET TO MUSIC. Never let it be said that Web Curios doesn’t provide the very finest entertainment content to be found online.
• Unfun Facts: This is a genuinely GREAT Reddit thread which I must at the same time offer you quite a stern warning about – this contains quite a few upsetting truths which once learned can’t be unknown. It also, though, contains SO MANY AMAZING FACTS, like one about the exploding corpse of Henry VIII, and the fact that scallops have TWO HUNDRED TINY EYES and, er, a whole load of really horrible ones about death and stuff. Still, if you want a seemingly neverending supply of things to horrify and amaze teenage boys, this is pretty much perfect.
• Constancia: A small web game all about the value of perseverence, playable in Spanish or English. This is lovely, and despite the slightly nose/pointy nature of the theme and message I found it rather beautiful.
• Zelda Sudoku: I don’t do SuDoku, but I am informed by people who do that this is both a very good example of the genre and one which becomes pleasingly-tricky around about level 3 – basically it’s SuDoku with chests and powerups and a simple Zelda-style theming, if you’d like a little bit of additional scene-setting with your numbers.
• All Things Equal: To give it its full title, “all things equal i would prefer it if we were safe & lonely instead of together & afraid but i cannot deny that it is hard” – this is a small game about loneliness and lockdown and fear and it is very, very lovely indeed.
• Out For Delivery: Finally in the miscellania this week, this is something you’ll have to download but I promise it’s worth it; all filmed in first person, and presented as an interactive 3d video which is part-documentary, part-game, this is “an interactive documentary in 360 degree video following a slice-of-life story of a food delivery courier in Beijing on Jan 23, 2020. It was filmed the day before Lunar New Year and the same day when Wuhan City shut down due to COVID-19.” SO interesting, so well-made, and so much something that I feel ought to spawn a whole new genre of interactive entertainment. This is really, really good.

By Liu Ye

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE THIS DOWNTEMPO, AMBIENT, LOUNGE-Y SET BY ROMAIN FX!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things: OH I LOVE THIS! Fine, it’s not technically a Tumblr, but it absolutely could be, which makes it taxonomically fine, right? Right! “For those with a taste for the peculiar (AUTHORIAL NOTE: IT ME!), The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things is an imaginary museum that explores the strange place between art and curiosities. The museum celebrates the odd, the creative, the spooky and the eccentric. We value the special magic that draws people toward weird and wonderful things, and we believe it can be used to foster more creativity, compassion and curiosity in the world.” Curated by Dr Chelsea Nichols, this is just FULL of great stuff and incredibly creepy victoriana in particular.
• Pacific Voyages: This, though, really is a Tumblr! Pacific Voyages is an odd site which collects the writings of one Jamis Macniven, all about his opinions on various places around the Pacific. It’s…very odd. I can’t quite tell whether this is fiction and Macniven is a construct being used as some sort of creative writing project or if they really exist and are really like this; both are quite appealing prospects. I suggest you jump in and have a nose around – there are a few entries on there covering a variety of places, so see if it grabs you.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• The New Museum: The New Museum in Manhattan’s Insta feed is currently posting a story a day, read by various artists as part of a project by Maurizio Cattelan; they range from poetry to novel fragments to short stories, but there’s something lovely about getting a three-minute auditory pause in your feed (the rest of it’s good too, but the stories are why I’m linking).
• Karens Going Wild: Repeat after me: KAREN. IS. NOT. A. SLUR. KAREN. IS. NOT. HATESPEECH. (now take a moment to imagine that this edition of Web Curios slips through a wormhole and ends up in 2016, and how you’d explain this opening to someone – four years is a LONG time in The Culture). Anyway, you’re probably one of the 1.7m people who’s already followed this since it launched a week or so ago; you know what the score is. I imagine the comments on these posts are quite the thing.
• David Allen: David Allen is a tattoo artist who specialises in work on women who’ve had mastectomies, and much of his feed features body art used as part of the process of recovery from surgery. This is BEAUTIFUL.
• Igor Sandimirov: 3d animation IN YOUR FEED. Lovely work, this.
• Kathleen Roberts: I can only leave you the description – you will have to then decide whether you want this in your life: “I am a physical medium and wife of Michael Jackson the ghost. I am also an adult model on Only Fans. I put my ghost channelings on there as well.” IT IS ABSOLUTELY AS GOOD AS YOU WOULD EXPECT.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The NYT’s Cover Story From Last Weekend: You will, I am sure, have seen images of the cover – which the NYT on Sunday dedicated to listing names of those killed by COVID-19 in the US, along with a single line of biography to humanise and render them real – but it’s also worth looking at the online version, which manages to pack a similar punch to the gut but in a way that uses the properties of a webpage to make its point rather than the confines of a printed sheet. Such superb design, totally in service of the story it’s telling. The Guardian this week launched an adjacent project to commemorate some of those who’ve lost their lives to the pandemic in the UK, which lives here should you wish to take a look – this feels unnecessary to say, but, well, it’s obviously heartbreakingly sad, just f your i.
• COVID in Mongolia: I met up with my friend Fat Bob for SOCIALLY DISTANCED PARK BEERS yesterday afternoon, along with what seemed like everyone else in SW9 (seriously, there is no way in HELL everyone is going to go back to being stuck in the office all summer now that we’ve realised that we can slack off whenever we want and NOONE WILL EVER BE ABLE TO TELL), and we were having a conversation about how one of the most infuriating aspects of the UK’s response to the pandemic has been the weird, clunky sense of British snobbery and exceptionalism and superiority that’s imbued much of our response. We won’t just have an app – we’ll have a WORLD LEADING app (we won’t); we won’t just collaborate on finding a vaccine – it will be BORN AND BRED IN WORLD-BEATING BRITISH LABS (it won’t); we will follow our own path because WE KNOW BEST (we don’t)…it’s hard for me to disentangle this attitude from the fact we’re being run by a bunch of Etonian Conservatives, frankly. Contrast this with Mongolia, as profiled in this piece – noone’s idea of a top-tier nation, least of all Mongolia’s, the country has quietly and sensibly gone about the business of protecting itself from the pandemic with staggering success so far, to the point of having NO deaths at all at the time of the article’s writing. The piece looks at what steps Mongolia took, when it took them, and what other countries could have learned – the lesson to us at least seems very much to be ‘not to be such crushingly arrogant relics of a colonial past that no longer exists and a world order that no longer maintains’.
• Cocaine In A Time of Pandemic: A fascinating look at how cartels in South America are working to ensure that London’s favourite pick-me-up continues to be available in the industrial quantities to which so many seem to be accustomed. Mainly interesting to me as an object-lesson in the importance of maintaining a relatively-flexible logistics operation, but also a useful reminder of exactly how the cocaine you take at the weekend gets to you and how many people it’s killing along the way (I should probably point out here that whilst I don’t buy coke I do buy other drugs and therefore have literally no moral high ground here whatsoever, nor indeed am I trying to claim any).
• The Restaurant Reopening Guide: This is fascinating. Black Sheep Restaurants in Hong Kong have made their guidance on how they are going about reopening their establishments publicly available online – this links to a PDF of their guidelines for restaurants on how to operate, communicate and administer themselves as they attempt to work out a viable business model alongside social distancing. Worth reading if you have any interest at all in how, practically, we might go about restoring some semblance of pre-COVID normalcy to life.
• Will Corona Save Facebook?: Forums are basically the cockroaches of online life – THEY WILL NEVER DIE. This is evidenced by the fact that, as this article points out as its central point, Facebook has basically pivoted HARD to forums in the past few years (what are Groups? Forums! Facebook is basically Reddit but for stuff from Past Reddit), and its that functionality that has seen its usage amongst younger demographics – the ones, don’t forget, that we were assured a few years ago would NEVER use Facebook – soar over the past three months. Fundamentally-speaking, Facebook has attained a size and scale that makes it part of human infrastructure, infrastructure which becomes significantly more important at times of crisis; as plenty of people are finding out, for better or worse, life is simply easier for many people with Facebook plugged into it, which is why it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
• Return of the Drive-In: This is a news article about Keith Urban doing a gig at a drive-in in the US and it’s not hugely interesting beyond that, but I’m including it as I became convinced this week that in-car group socialising could be a temporary thing and I want someone at NCP to see this and pay me a fat consultancy fee to make it reality.
• Coronagrifting: This is a superb essay, but one that made me feel a but guitility queasy, as it probably should you too – if you work in advermarketingpr and have been lucky enough to still have a job over the past few months, chances are you’ve been involved in a brainstorm or some other meeting in which you’ve ‘thrown around some ideas’ (or, perhaps ‘th’rona round’ ahahahahazzzzzzzzzzzzz) pertaining to the pandemic and stuff that clients could do do get attention as a result of it. You might have used the phrase ‘thought leadership’ or ‘futurology’ (don’t worry, don’t worry, I have to demean myself like this too. Although to my credit, at least I don’t try and hide my self-loathing as I do so), or even considered ‘getting some CG mockups of what it might look like’. Well done, you’ve been ‘coronagrifting’ – the term, coined by Kate Wagner to cover the sort of made-up, obviously-just-bullsh1t COVID-related stuff you’ve seen all over the web; the Burger King social distancing crown, for example, or those preposterous hanging perspex ceiling domes that no restaurant will ever install, or anything else that masquerades as a solution to a corona problem but which is self-evidently just, well, bullsh1t. So, so true. This made me feel quite bad, both about myself and the sh1t I choose to do to pay my mortgage, so I thought I’d share!
• Lessons From Record Labels: A really interesting essay, this, by Jarrod Dicker, in which he argues that social media platforms should take a leaf from record companies’ books by seeing themselves effectively as talent agencies rather than content platforms. It’s a smart argument that makes sense, and which you can see happening RIGHT NOW, with Spotify paying all that money for the thinking troglodyte’s thinking troglodyte Joe Rogan, and Twitch, Facebook and YouTube (and a few others) squabbling over Ninja et al; it’s also the sort of thing which, I worry, would probably have negative repercussions in terms of the barriers to entry that this sort of setup seemingly inevitably engenders. Remember what it was like attempting to make a career in music pre-web? Whilst it might make sense for the platforms, I’m not 100% sure that the consumer would benefit from this – artists, I’m unsure.
• Meth In Afghanistan: You’d think Afghanistan might catch a break one of these decades, but seemingly not – next on the looong list of things deciding they are going to mess with the country is meth addiction! This is a fascinating article examining how Afghan drug cartels have relatively-recently discovered that they can extract ephedrine from the locally-abundant plant ephedra, meaning they can start cooking a LOT of meth; the piece gives an overview of the history of the drug’s entry into the country, and gives an idea of how quickly it could become a very popular export commodity.
• Design Notes on Tactics Games: If you’re not into videogames or games design, skip this one. If you are, though, it’s a really interesting series of observations on design choices made in a pair of tactical shooter games, how they work, why some choices are better than others, how they impact player choice and overall gameplay…basically this is an object lesson on how to think critically about systems and processes, which is something I find really interesting but am yet to find a way to communicate about without sounding crushingly, biblically dull.
• The TikTok Cult: This is very, very odd, and it’s hard not to end up imagining the episode of Black Mirror that takes the overall conceit of this piece and runs with it as far as it can. The Step Chickens is the name given to fans of TikTok star Melissa Ong, who’s basically discovered that she can get thousands and thousands of kids to go and do stuff on her behalf online, and is mobilising them to do just that. It’s a bit like the old-school habit of messageboard drivebys, where a forum would decide to ‘invade’ another community for lulz (there was a period when Popbitch had a pleasingly-antagonistic beef with an online community for residents of Liphook, iirc), except with SO MANY MORE PEOPLE. So far it’s all been quite benign, and there was even someone smart enough to use this as part of marketing for an app launch, but it doesn’t take an imagination as miserably inclined towards disaster as mine is to see how this could go quite wrong quite quickly. Still, ABSOLUTELY one to add to your marketing trends presentation under the heading ‘INFLUENCERS – THE NEXT EVOLUTION’ or some other awful, hyperbolic guff.
• The Many Faces of Housekeeping: This is a brilliant piece of journalism by Ed Gillett in The Quietus, ostensibly a review of the new album by house purveyors Housekeeping which then pivots to become an excellent discussion and critique of the extent to which quite a lot of aspects of mainstream dance culture have been coopted by the rich, and how a culture born out of black and queer experience is being repackaged as something to sell to middle-class white ‘creatives’ alongside the Cowshed cosmetics and a Soho Farmhouse weekend. Good writing, and pleasingly angry about the whole thing.
• The Coffee Grounds Fortune Telling App: Sorry, I really can’t think of a decent heading for this one. Still, it’s a fascinating story – I love reading about popular digital stuff that is HUGE in a particular part of the world but utterly unknown (oh, ok, utterly unknown to me) outside of it. The ‘digital stuff’ in question here is the hugely-popular Turkish app Faladdin, which takes the centuries-old practise of divining one’s fortune by reading coffee grounds and makes it an app – users snap a photo of the bottom of their coffee, upload it to the app and are rewarded with a personal reading, conducted by ‘AI’, within 15 minutes. To be clear how big this is, let me quote you this line: “In Turkey, it ranks first in the Google Play store’s Lifestyle category, ahead of Tinder.” BIG BUSINESS. This is a genuinely interesting piece, telling a familiar story – disruption! Privacy concerns! The dismantling of heritage by modernity! – in an unfamiliar setting.
• Ate My Balls: This is a piece from 1997 – 1997! LITERALLY 23 YEARS AGO – in Salon Magazine, all about the trend for webpages that were all about a certain pop culture figure or celebrity and their love of EATING BALLS. Mickey Mouse, Elmo, Captain Planet…anyone and everyone in the mid-90s had a site where it was claimed that they love to EAT BALLS. It was a meme, basically, and this article tries to explain it to readers – what’s wonderful about this is that it is EXACTLY the same article you have read 100 times, in which a ‘serious’ publication interviews a meme creator only to find that there is nothing whatsoever to say about their creation other than ‘yeah, it’s sort-of funny how big it got’. When it seems that internet culture moves at a pace just a shade over lightspeed, it’s nice to occasionally be reminded that some things don’t change at all.
• Pr0n and the Pandemic: Taking as its starting point the explosion in popularity of OnlyFans and the growing number of people seemingly considering taking up some form of sex work as an income generator, this piece looks at how quarantine and the limitations it’s imposed are seeing a possible shift in the model for the industry away from studio shoots towards a preponderance of self-shot content. I am personally fascinated about what this might mean for human sexual appetites, particularly amongst the young; as we all know, bongo shapes desire as much as desire shapes bongo, and I do wonder what a new emphasis to cracking one off to images of other people cracking one off are going to do for people’s attitudes to sex featuring more than one person.
• The 9 Year Old Who Dreams of Grandmasterdom: I don’t normally, if ever, feature anything on Curios that could be described as ‘heartwarming’, but I’ll make an exception for this piece, which only a dead person could fail to be cheered by. Meet Tani Adewume, a refugee from Nigeria to the US, formerly homeless, who’s one of the most exciting minds in US chess right now and whose entire story will honestly make you do a small, happy weep it’s so sweet.
• Food, Culture and Gatekeeping: The ‘extremely online’ amongst you – ha, like anyone other than the extremely online would EVER look at this – will probably be aware of the Alison Roman / Marie Kondo / Chrissy Teigen thing (those of you who aren’t, it’s explained in the piece); this is a superb essay in Eater by Navneet Alang, which does a better job of almost anything I’ve read at explaining the importance of conversations about cultural appropriation in food, the whiteness of food media and culture, and how the two interrelate. Really, really well-written, and probably the best explanation I’ve read about why this stuff matters.
• Steve Buscemi: It is impossible to read this profile of Steve Buscemi without falling slightly in love with him. Try it, you won’t succeed.
• Eels: The highest compliment I can pay this piece is that it’s an extract from a book all about eels whose title is ‘The Book of Eels’ and which talks exclusively about eels, their lives and their general…eeliness, and yet despite that it is SO GOOD that it has led me to pre-order the thing. Honestly, this is superb writing; the language is wonderful (credit to both author and translator) and, er, it really, really made me want to eat some smoked eel. Sorry lads.
• The Lie of One Last Time With My Ex: Finally this week, I absolutely adored this essay, which is all about the different times the author had the last ever sex they would ever have with their ex, and captures absolutely perfectly the very specific, intense self-absorbtion of relationships in ones teens and twenties. Beautiful, beautiful writing by Ella Dawson; read this with a glass of wine.

By Kelly Beeman

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is called ‘Selfies’; it’s done the rounds a bit this week, but if you’ve not yet seen it it’s beautifully grotesque:

1. Oh this is JOYOUS. It is by South Sudanese musician Gordon Koang, remixed by Ginoli, and it’s called ‘Mal Mi Goa’, and it is PERFECT for this weather:

1. Beautiful, Feist-ish vocal on this track by Lucy Rose, called ‘Question It All’:

1. Let’s be honest – the song here’s not really the draw, unless you REALLY like Liam Lynch. It’s by Scott Lavene and it’s called ‘Lover’, but the real draw here is the video. I want to see lots more by this person:

1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! New Manga, predictably ace, this is ‘Turning in my Grave’ feat. Blay Vision:

1. Finally this week, this is a few weeks old now but it fcuking BANGS. This is Cupcakke, the song is called ‘Grilling N****s’, and there are SO many killer lines in this, it’s worth paying particular attention; the Shrek one’s lovely, but it gets better from thereon in and OH HANG ON THAT’S IT THAT’S THE END I AM DONE AND I HOPE YOU ENJOYED IT AND I HOPE YOU FELT IT AT LEAST IN SOME WAY WORTHWHILE AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A NICE WEEKEND PLANNED AND THAT YOU KEEP STAYING SAFE AND DON’T TAKE ANY UNNECESSARY RISKS AND THAT YOU GET TO ENJOY THE SUNSHINE BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT YOU AND I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY TAKE CARE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I LOVE YOU BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BYE!:

How are we? I mean, how are we all really?

I’ll start – I’m…I’m quite tired of this, I think it’s fair to say, and it’s starting to make me fray at the edges slightly. I was approximately 15 seconds away from committing professional suicide on a client call yesterday; it was honestly so, so tempting to interrupt the people briefing me to say “Look, sorry, I’ve actually just realised that there is no amount of money available in the known universe, no sum of which I can possibly conceive, that would induce me to spend another second feigning interest in your stupid, pointless non-problem or indeed the pathetic, made-up reasons you have invented to convince yourself that any of this matters; I would honestly rather die in penury than spend another second listening to your voice, you double-figure-IQ waste-of-cells.” 

I didn’t, though, mainly as I worry with that sort of speech that I’ll just flub it halfway through, like making an attempted dramatic exit by turning sharply on one’s heel and, by so doing, walking straight into a doorjamb. 

Basically what I’m saying is that I could do with a bit of a break and I’m sure you could too. THANK GOD, THEN, FOR THE BANK HOLIDAY! Let’s enjoy our apparently-restored freedoms while we still can – but, inbetween, why not take the extra time to do a really deep dive into this week’s Curios? Go spelunking in my infocaves, my pretties, there is SO MUCH TO DISCOVER. 

I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and you really ought to know better by now. 

By Subhelic

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH MY LOVELY COLLEAGUE JULES’ EXCELLENT MIX OF DIRTY DISCO, WHICH IS PRETTY MUCH PERFECT FOR A FRIDAY!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS FACEBOOK’S PIVOT TOWARDS BECOMING E-COMMERCE FOR EVERY SINGLE SMALL SHOP IN THE WORLD IS, MISERABLY, A VERY SMART BUSINESS DECISION AND THE SORT OF THING THAT MEANS THAT THE FCUKING COMPANY ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE ANYTIME SOON:

• Facebook Shops: It’s remarkable it’s taken so long really, but, finally, the long-awaited ‘Facebook turns itself into what is effectively an ecommerce platform for every single one-person business in the world’ move is here. Announced this week, and accompanied by quite a bullish Zuckerbergian media tour (there’s a piece in the longreads later about Nick Clegg’s first 18-24m in the comms gig there, by the way, which is very much worth reading in the context of all this), this is rolling out in the US now and spreading globally as soon as the poor little localisation peons can manage. It will work as you’d expect; ‘Shop’ becomes an additional tab on a business’ Page, through which they can display inventory and pricing and with inbuilt-checkout via Facebook Pay for merchants who’ve signed up. And, given then alternative is having to manage payments via a third-party site and making users do ONE MORE CLICK, it makes perfect sense for everyone who signs up to use Facebook Pay – thereby making room for one more Zuckerbergian hook in their soft, soft flesh. It adds a bunch of customer service features to enable transaction-specific queries via chat across platforms, and this will eventually expand to work within Messenger. Oh, and there’s object-recognition AI built in (or at least their will be), to enable businesses to upload images and have available products in said images identified and linked for purchase directly. Even better, “soon, sellers, brands and creators will be able to tag products from their Facebook Shop or catalog before going live and those products will be shown at the bottom of the video so people can easily tap to learn more and purchase.” Look, obviously if you’re a small business somewhere, this is wonderful stuff – FB’s charging (I think) 5% fees on transactions over $5, and a flat $0.40 fee on transactions under, which I think is comparable, and obviously all of this will work seamlessly with the already-superb ad product, and it’s probably useful for consumers too…I get it, I get it, I just really don’t like the increasingly obvious slicing up of life into neat parcels clearly labeled ‘Jeff’ and ‘Mark’ and ‘Sunder’ and ‘whoever runs Epic’. So it goes.
• Updates to Facebook Workplace: I really don’t get on with FB Workplace, but for those of you who do and who use it regularly (or who don’t, but are forced to by your employers’ caprices) then this might be useful – basically the big thing here is the integration of videocalling gubbins ‘Rooms’ into the Workplace platform, meaning it’s easy to create Workplace videomeetings which anyone can access via a url, but there’s also updated functionality for better and more interactive livestreams with Q&As, etc, and some quite interesting stuff about increased Oculus integration for any companies that want to experiment with VR as part of the working environment. There’s something a bit prosaically-bleak about that, isn’t there? There’s a part of me that still likes to imagine VR as the doorway to magical playground of the imagination, so the idea of being told to ‘strap on this headset and do the filing, but, er, in VR!’ is a bit of a buzzkill.
• Facebook Buys Giphy: This came in last week just after Curios dropped, hence the week delay, and frankly it’s been rather superseded by all the Shop stuff; still, Facebook bought Giphy! For $400m! Which is interesting mainly if you’d like another datapoint to add to the increasingly mad-looking red string map on your wall (I know you’ve ALL got one) depicting all the different pies in which Mark has his increasingly berry-stained fingers, or if you’re Facebook and you want some wide-ranging and potentially useful data about how users across a very, very wide range of platforms are using gifs and in what context. IT’S ALL ABOUT FEEDING THE AI, HAVE WE NOT REALISED YET??
• FB Expands Brand Safety Controls for Advertisers: Basically this is just an expansion of whitelisting for FB advertisers. If you care about this more than I do, click the link.
• Instagram Launches Guides: This is interesting, and I’m not 100% certain how it will work; Instagram Guides is (I think – there’s a more detailed explanation here if you want one) a new feature which will present curated content selections from various users on the platform, “a way to more easily discover recommendations, tips and other content from your favorite creators, public figures, organizations and publishers on Instagram…When viewing a Guide, you can see posts and videos that the creator has curated, paired with helpful tips and advice. If you want to learn more about a specific post, you can tap on the image or video to view the original Instagram post. You can also share a Guide to your story or in Direct by tapping on the share button in the upper right corner.”. They’re kicking off with mental health stuff, because a) it’s been mental health awareness week; and b) they have to be seen to do this stuff first and then move onto the more fun and nakedly-commercial stuff later on – the long-term play here, though, will almost certainly be more frivolous, lifestyle-y type stuff, centred around music and hobbies and fashion and whatever, and the sort of thing that there will almost certainly be an influencer market for in short order as brands work out that they can get their stuff featured in highly-eyeballed sections of the app if they can only get the famous du jour to extol their products or service’s virtues in a Guide. Add it to your influencer marketing ‘deck’ today! Or don’t, and make a small contribution towards ameliorating society for a change, go on.
• TikTok Introduces Youth Portal: It’s a whole load of other stuff about safety and privacy in the app, basically, as the company does an impressive job of staying just ahead of what I get the impression is a tsunami of very iffy stories about its app. The Youth Portal will exist “to give teens and parents a single destination for safety resources, best practices and guides to the video-creation application’s tools. The new Youth Portal will roll out globally in over 15 languages, including English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Thai, and more educational resources will be added in the coming months.” It’s exactly the sort of stuff you’d expect – explaining password security, privacy controls, etc – and is all well and good, but, as ever, seems a touch disingenuous from a company whose expansion strategy is quite clearly ‘we want everyone, yesterday, and we will pay whatever it takes’.
• A List of Publishers and Journos on TikTok: More for curiosity than anything else, though don’t be surprised if you see a guide to pitching media on TikTok at some point in the next 6m. These are very odd – the Daily Mail’s account is just them reposting other people’s moderately-viral videos for no immediately-apparent reason, whilst the Daily Star’s is…just some bloke in his house, which makes me think that these accounts haven’t been vetted quite as assiduously as one might hope (this doesn’t look like the official account of a national newspaper, does it? Not even one as risible as the Star). Interesting mainly as proof that very few publishers or journalists have the first inkling as to why they ought to be using TikTok, just that it’s VERY IMPORTANT that they do.
• Google Maps Adds Wheelchair Accessibility Information: No brand angle for this at all I don’t think, but it’s a really good addition that it might be useful for some of you to know about.
• Microsoft Updates Teams: I think that this is the first time I’ve had an update about Teams – how miserable that I’ve had to break this duck. Still, now that more and more of us are being forced to use Microsoft’s (surprisingly good) online coworking and videocalling platform, I figured it might be useful to include this update – it’s all quite dull and I can’t really be fcuked to enumerate the various bits, but the most interesting thing is the improved ability to livestream from Teams out to other platforms (via third-party software), which might be of interest to those of you who work at companies who mistakenly think anyone wants to watch a bunch of small talking heads wanging on about their jobs from their home offices, LIVE.
• Dropbox Care Packages: This is a really nice bit of work by Dropbox – useful and ON-BRAND. The platform commissioned a bunch of ‘influencers’ to create their own Dropbox folders full of things that they think are interesting, fun, useful, etc, all made open to the public – it’s nothing more inventive than ‘hey, why don’t we get famous X to curate something??’, but the fact that it heroes the product they are flogging so perfectly is a rare example of execution working almost perfectly; not only that, but the lineup of curators really is strong, with some really impressive names from a wide-ranging variety of fields. I was sold at Roxanne Gay’s involvement, but there are big names from dance, music, design, visual art, food…honestly, these are really good and I would probably have featured them in the actual proper bit of Curios too.
• GroupThink Fest: I imagine quite a few of those of you who bother to read this initial bit – and, in fact, the rest of this bstard thing – work in advermarketingpr and probably suffer under the dubious, ambiguous job title of ‘planner’ or ‘strategist’ or ‘how the fcuk do they manage to get away with spending all their time on the internet looking at stuff? And why are they always crying at PowerPoint slides?’. If so, you might like this – my (FULL DISCLOSURE) friend Rob is involved with GroupThink, which is a community for planners and strategists and people like that – they are running a VIRTUAL EVENT on June 4th, with speakers from across the agency spectrum talking about…er…planning and strategy and stuff like that. If I were less biliously-inclined towards the ‘profession’ I ‘work’ in right now I would be tempted to take a look – it’s £25 (or £15 for students, grads and interns) and I reckon is the sort of thing you really ought to be able to swing the afternoon off for under the guise of ‘personal and professional development’.

By Espen Kluge

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS ALL-VINYL MIX OF SOUL AND JAZZ AND R’N’B PUT TOGETHER BY TOM SPOONER WHO USED TO LIVE ACROSS THE ROAD FROM ME WHEN I WAS SMALL AND WHO I HAVEN’T SEEN IN LITERALLY TWO DECADES!

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES IT HAD GOT IN ON SOME OF THAT HOT COVID-TRACKING-APP-DEVELOPMENT ACTION BASED ON SOME OF THE MONEY BEING QUOTED TODAY, PT.1:

• People of the Pandemic: Not the first of these I’ve seen, but it’s the prettiest and that what counts. People of the Pandemic (it sounds a lot more grandiose than it is, trust me) is an interactive simulator letting you – yes YOU! – play around with policy to see how taking different personal approaches to the easing lockdown conditions might affect viral transmission, SECOND WAVES and all that jazz. The nice touch here is that you can choose to see how your choices work in concert with the choices of other, previous players, giving you a cumulative impression of the impact of decisions taken in isolation on the overall levels of infection, etc. A CAVEAT – I don’t know what science this is based on because I DON’T CARE.
• The New Normal: I am breaking my personal ban on that phrase to introduce this website – not least as that’s what it’s called and it would be quite hard to introduce it were I to ban myself from typing its name. The New Normal (imagine me typing this through the most gritted of teeth) is a digiart project by Tobias Revell collecting Tweets from around the world which use the term and presenting them as one, unbroken screed. It’s sort of wonderful – I would love a realtime feed of this, updating a la Twitterfall at a conference circa 2011 – but also a slightly-miserable indication of the crushing banality of almost everyone’s observations about all this (and those that aren’t banal are often hateful or just staggeringly stupid). Also, there’s quite a lot of this sort of stuff – “’The new normal’ is the same old control model used to subjugate and conquer, with fear and persistent media broadcast repeating the same msg ..over and over until imprinted on your brains. break the cycle and switch off the media!? Your futures are being destroyed. Your choice.” – which is quite interesting and makes me think we’ve not seen the end (or even the beginning of the end) of the mad ‘WE WANT TO BE FREE TO EAT ICECREAM!’ protests quite yet.
• Outside Simulator: This is great, and a really interesting demonstration of quite how much the enforced inside-ness might have altered your attitude towards public spaces. Reminiscent of the ‘ride around a foreign city in a taxi’ site from a few weeks ago, this instead simulates the experience of walking around various cities, which you can select from a menu. The link I’ve included here defaults to London, but there’s a wide range – Amsterdam, Rome, NYS, San Francisco… – and each offers you a first-person view of someone wandering through the streets of your chosen destination. The London one was obviously shot at Oxford Circus in the runup to Christmas, meaning that it’s dark and there are festive illuminations suspended from t the buildings and FUCK ME THAT’S A LOT OF PEOPLE AND WHY ARE THEY ALL SO CLOSE?!?!?! I found this over the weekend, and was honestly sweaty-palmed and moderately-nervous after watching about 15s of this; I think it’s the fact that I’ve not experienced a stranger brushing past me for nearly three months, and there’s something quite jarring about the invasion of personal space (or at least the illusion of said invasion) that this experience presents. Try it out, I promise you that you’ll either find it quite amazing and a bit freeing or, at worst, interestingly-uncomfortable.
• Stream Informer: Courtesy of Jed, this is a great Twitter feed which keeps followers updated as to which livestreams are coming up, by which artists, where and when. It’s literally just a Tweet every day offering listings of who’s playing on which platform. There’s an accompanying newsletter too, which might be worth a look, and if you’re in the market for a more varied selection of tunes to accompany you as you stare desultorily out of the window and wonder what the point of making another 70-slide horrorshow really is.
• Tree Talk: Occasionally I learn something about myself when writing Curios – not often, though, as I don’t really believe in self-reflection or self-improvement – such as this week, when I realised that I obviously have something of an arboreal fetish, what with all the repeated times I feature things like ‘tree of the year’ or ‘trees which you can attach personal stories to via geotagging’ and stuff like that. Hence my inclusion here of Tree Talk, a website which not only will generate walks for you at random based on your postcode or your intended starting point/destination but which will also provide you with a guide to ALL THE TREES you are likely to pass on the way. Honestly, I am SO BORED of walking out of my front door and having nothing to think about other than the growing mountain fly-tipped detritus – next time I’m going to fire this up and learn about my local EXTREMELY RARE Pineapple Guava, of which there are apparently only 10 or so in the whole of London. So pure, so beautiful.
• Friends and Astronauts: This is lovely and perhaps just the sort of thing you might be needing now as this whole thing starts to drag rather. Friends and Astronauts is a project which offers FREE teaching on how to do magic tricks, presented in a series of bundles which are released on a regular basis – each bundle is up for a short while before being retired forever, thereby doing a small bit to preserve the mystery of magic whilst at the same time helping you learn some sleight of hand. They’re on to bundle #2 at the time of writing, which features various card tricks being taught to you by ACTUAL MAGICIANS, and the whole thing is presented in a really nice, accessible, friendly tone. You’re encouraged to donate some money to charity – or, where applicable, to the magicians in question – but this is all free and a pretty good way of spending an hour or so this weekend as you try and stop the walls from closing in again.
• Follow The Butterfly: This is more conceptually impressive than it is practically impressive, but still – the site uses eye-tracking within your browser to let you move a digital butterfly across your screen ONLY USING THE POWER OF YOUR EYES!! Except, well, I don’t actually think it’s eye-tracking at all, I think it’s a bit of a fudge based on tracking the end of your nose or similar, but perhaps I’m wrong. Regardless, it’s impressive that this can be done on the fly, in Chrome, on my underpowered laptop, and makes me wonder when this stuff will be good enough that it’s worth building actual experiences/interfaces based on it (‘a while’, is my ignorant half-guess – if you hire me, you too can gain access to this sort of trenchant analysis and insight!). Oh, and seeing as we’re here, why not try this too – it’s a similar proof-of-concept thing which demonstrates facemapping and meshing in-browser in relatime (it’s a bit chunkier, this one, so perhaps close a few tabs first).
• Hawkeye: Nothing to do with either tennis or nobody’s favorite MCU character – instead, this is an app for Macs that lets you implement headtracking as an additional interface. It’s easier to watch in action than to explain, but basically it allows you to use small head movements to do simple actions like scrolling, dragging, etc, within your standard Mac interface – obviously it looks seamless in all the promo videos, but I guarantee you’ll be gurning like Christie Brown (I sort-of hope noone gets this, on reflection) when you try and move files around your desktop with your chin.
• BYOM: Or, ‘masks, but design’! “BYOM is a project initiated by HyperAktiv.li. The goal of this project is to propose a design that goes in the direction of excellence, to exhibit our Swiss know-how in terms of innovation while combining cutting-edge aesthetics, avant-garde support and ingenious functionality. The brief was completely open and the interpretations were free, the aim is above all to offer a showcase for our Swiss designers. There were no technical, material or industrial reality constraints. Despite the sensitive subject, the invited designers were able to restore strong values and overcome the anxiety-provoking connotation of the object by the force of the design, the poetry of the aesthetics and the beauty of the concepts.” Some of these are great – many are totally impractical, but that’s not really the point – and I am slightly amazed that I’ve not seen any actual design competitions for masks by anyone yet – ‘get your design mass-produced and a cut of the proceeds go to you or the charity of your choice’ seems like something of an obvious one, no? This one’s my favourite, fwiw, but you pick your own.
• Music Taste: This is SO clever, and not as far as I can tell an official Spotify thing – Music Taste is built by Australian Computer Science and Marketing student Kalana Vithana, and is a site which takes your listening history, analyses it, and then lets you compare it to that of other Spotify users to help determine your musical compatibility based on which artists, tracks or genres you have a shared affinity for. So simple and so nicely-executed, this is the sort of thing that I feel ought to be baked into dating apps as standard and which, if any of them have any sense, will be before too long.
• The Yes: This is potentially really interesting – The Yes is a new shopping app, launched this week (or practically this week – look, it’s new, leave it at that) whose gimmick is that it ‘learns’ your taste by asking you a series of yes or no questions about fashion and then determining the sort of stuff you’re likely to want to buy based on this (and a bunch of other signals from elsewhere, I don’t doubt). The lineup of brands onboard at the start seems impressive, and one of the people behind it has a hell of a pedigree in clothes (Nordstrom, Urban Outfitters, etc), but I do wonder whether there’s currently room for A N Other way of buying clothes, even one with a slightly-Tinder-y mechanic behind it. This is iOS and US-only at the moment, but it’s worth taking a look at the interface as it’s reasonably-interesting from a conceptual and UI point of view.
• The Most Incredible Minecraft City Ever: No, really, just look at this. Clicking on it takes you to a reasonably-zoomed-out view that looks quite a lot like SimCity – zoom in, though, and it quickly becomes clear that this has all been built in Minecraft. All of it. LOOK HOW MASSIVE IT IS!! It’s at something insane like 1:1 scale, and is some sort of crazy collective labour of love by literally hundreds of builders; what’s even more incredible is when you scroll to the edges of the extant built-up environment and realise that they’re not finished yet. Seriously, I know that ‘Minecraft is digital LEGO’ is a simplistic explanation, but this is effectively the greatest collaborative LEGO building project I have ever seen, ever. Wonderful, mad, and the product of almost a decade of building, you can read more about the project here – apparently regular players will be able to get access to it ‘soon’, so you can wander around these empty, virtual streets to your heart’s content, which feels like a Frieze exhibit waiting to happen.
• North Korean Telly: Is this real, or is it some sort of sophisticated misdirection propaganda by that madman in Pyongyang? WHO KNOWS? Still, if we take it at face value then this site is offering visitors a window into life inside the dictatorship – or, more accurately, the televisual version of life inside the dictatorship. Broadcasts run from approximately 8am-330pm UK time, with news bulletins at 10am, 1pm and last thing, so should you want to check in on the version of reality currently being peddled to the poor denizens of North Korea then this is your chance. I only found this this morning so haven’t been able to investigate properly, but as I type they’re playing a football match, complete with crowd and featuring enough non-Korean players that it makes me think it’s the Malaysian league or something; does NK have COVID-19? Do North Koreans have any idea? ARE THEY PLAYING OLD REPLAYS OF FOOTBALL WITH SPECTATORS AND PRETENDING IT’S CURRENT? Honestly, I have so many questions – this really is quite odd, and I would like someone to do a proper analysis of it that I can read at my leisure later on. Ok? GREAT!
• Drive Me Insane: I was convinced this had been in Curios before, but apparently not – Drive Me Insane is something of a classic of the old web which I was reminded of this week, and which I think someone really ought to update for 2020. The premise is very simple – it’s a webcam, set up to film a room in a house somewhere in the US which can be controlled almost entirely remotely by anyone logged on to the url. So you can change the lighting, the music, the text displayed on the computer screen, all in realtime…I really want to play with this idea a bit, as I reckon there’s LOTS you could do with it, not least (this might be a terrible idea, so bear with me) creating giant, real-world Tower Defence-type games using Nerfs or water guns or similar, or alternatively some sort of massively-masochistic performance art in which someone does actually live in a house like this whilst being tormented by the web…honestly, I am captivated by the (almost entirely slightly dark) possibilities here, can someone put some thought into what might be done with it? Again, GREAT!
• The Best COVID-19 Tattoos: It may not surprise you to learn that these are not, in fact, universally-recognisable as ‘the best’ anything. To all those of you who’ve marked this unique occasion in modern human history by having a toilet roll tattooed on yourselves – really?
• Share Your Dream: This is actually a small part of a wider initiative raising money for COVID initiatives worldwide and which is having some big livestream gig on 29 May featuring ubiquity’s Dua Lipa and girth’s Jason Derulo and a bunch of other kid-friendly names, but this particular bit was sent to me by Rina (hi Rina!) and amused me for a second. For some reason, this organisation has the following mission: “We believe that everyone on this planet has the right to dream. And now more than ever we need the dreams of humanity to be heard. Our mission at Constellation is to connect 1 billion shared and collective dreams and use this as the context to reshape the future of our planet.” No real idea what that means in practice, but you go, kids! As part of this, anyone can write down their own personal dream and the website will add it to the global collection – there’s some code in here which takes the text of your dream and turns it into some sort of sub-Kandinsky abstract based on the words and spacing and stuff, meaning everyone gets their own unique dreamart based on what they type. You can browse other people’s submissions on the site and, whilst obviously I don’t want to slag off anyone’s INNER HOPES, WOW are there some amazing bromides on here. Well done everyone who ‘dreams of a better and more peaceful humanity’ and seeks to achieve that by, er, posting these words on a website!
• The Old Timey Computer Show: Twitch as Telly, part x of y – this is a Twitch stream which broadcasts three times a day and which shows a selection of old (90s, mainly, insofar as I can tell) TV shows about videogames. A lot of the stuff I’ve seen on here seem to be Japanese, but if you’re at all interested in the history of gaming then there’s almost certainly something to interest you here; the streams are compiled by people rather than pulled from YT using an algo, so there should be a decent, continual stream of interesting stuff over time; worth bookmarking if you’re a particular sort of old geek.
• Textmoji: Create your own text-based emoji that you can then export and use in Slack or anywhere else that you care to. Small, but if you’ve always wanted to have a special character that says, I don’t know, “Darren Is A Nonce” that you can use in the groupchat, then well isn’t this your lucky day!
• The Drinking Game Zone: I think I’m one of the few people in the UK who can reasonably be said to be drinking less in lockdown; this isn’t down to anything other than my spectacularly-dipso pre-pandemic habits, and certainly isn’t a result of abstemiousness, but it does mean that I think I’m probably not quite as well-equipped to cope with A SESH as I might have been a few months back. If you’re itching to get back into the swing of PROPER AGGRESSIVE BOOZING, though, then you might enjoy this site which collects drinking games from around the world and offers instructions on how to play them. From the relatively-benign to things like this, which I honestly think might kill you, if you’re looking for a way to up your chances of cirrhosis then this is the site for YOU.
• Gravity: I love this site. Create planets and asteroids with your mouse, flick them around space, create orbits and solar systems and learn, gently, about interplanetary physics while you’re there. This is a lot of fun, in a slightly-godlike power trip sort of fashion, and is pleasingly-rendered and generally a bit like one of those 80s executive toys except digital and ALL ABOUT SPACE.

By Ina Jang

THIS IS THE COMPLETE SELECTION OF ALL OF QUESTLOVE’S LOCKDOWN DJ SETS SO FAR AND THEY ARE ALL EXCELLENT SO WHY NOT JUST PICK ONE?

THE SECTION WHICH REALLY WISHES IT HAD GOT IN ON SOME OF THAT HOT COVID-TRACKING-APP-DEVELOPMENT ACTION BASED ON SOME OF THE MONEY BEING QUOTED TODAY, PT.2:

• Crossword Hobbyist: I think I’ve mentioned here before that I simply cannot do cryptic crosswords at all, despite very much wishing I could – they are TOO HARD, basically, which means I’m reduced to only being able to do simple crosswords for thickies (and even then I often fail – back in the day when I used to get the Sun and the Guardian for maximum contrast, I would regularly do the Guardian’s quick crossword in about 10m and then find myself utterly banjaxed by the Sun’s, whose clues were inevitably things like “dog (3)”). If you like yourself a cruciverb, this site will be a GODSEND – not only does it feature loads of puzzles for you to complete, which is a pretty good way of passing the time while you wait for the allocated ‘pretending to work’ time to be over with, but it also lets you MAKE YOUR OWN CROSSWORDS! Yep, you just type in the clues and the answers you want to include and the website will MAGICALLY turn them into a puzzle for you that you can share with whoever you like. Which means that you have NO EXCUSE for either hiding an elaborate proposal in a crossword and sending it to your partner, or alternatively creating one that starts out relatively benign but which slowly reveals itself to be a full-on evisceration of the intended recipient’s character as it develops.
• UK Rave Comments: Thankyou Paul for this EXCELLENT Twitter account which does nothing other than post comments from oldschool rave videos on YouTube. I think there needs to be a special, extremely-online name for this specific class of person: “Wish i could go back to 92 with a bag of snowballs from back then, absolutely savage E’s, for all those that were there, we had something pretty special, we almost changed this world for the better, so fcuking close”. I mean, you’ve met him, right?
• Squadded: Picked this up from Paddy’s newsletter this morning – Squadded (horrid name) is an interesting group-online-shopping platform which, as far as I can make out, lets retailers add an additional layer to their sites which enables visitors to enjoy a ‘collaborative’ shopping experience including chat around specific items, ‘community’, etc etc. It’s interesting – the site’s blurb suggests that the reason that online conversion rates are lower than in-store is because real-life shopping is a social event which results in a more fulfilling retail experience and which thereby encourages purchase which, honestly, sounds like bunkum to me – surely a large part of this is the opportunity cost of real-world shopping (time, effort, energy) meaning that you’re more likely to feel you ought to buy something, whereas digital browsing is frictionless and costs you no time/effort, and as such makes it easier to ‘waste’ time browsing without in fact feeling you’ve wasted anything? Anyway, those of you working in and around fashion and retail might find this of interest (or, more likely, probably know about it already).
• Uncertain Times New Roman: THE CORONAFONT! It’s distanced, and all the letters are wearing masks!
• Malicious Masks: Facemasks! But fashion! And horror! Malicious is a Japanese company that makes accessories and which is currently retailing a bunch of masks accessorised with slightly-scary horror teeth. If you’re after a mask which demonstrates your EDGY credentials whilst at the same time being actual proper fashion then these might be up your street – in fact, everything on here is sort-of wonderful, including the superb eye-in-the-pyramid necklaces in which the pyramid is…fleshy. So unpleasant, so good!
• Drawn to Sex: I’ve featured the comics of Oh Joy Sex Toy before – they’re cutely-drawn but wonderfully matter-of-fact guides to various aspects of sex, particularly focusing on queer and fringe/fetish stuff but covering the whole wide gaunt of sexuality in a pleasingly-down-to-earth fashion. This Kickstarter – fully funded with a month to go – is for their second sex-ed book, this one designed to educate people about ther biology and health when it comes to fcuking the way they want; honestly, I can’t recommend these people’s work enough. This is absolutely the sort of sex-positive guidance that kids need but don’t get ANYWHERE, and exactly the sort of antidote to growing up getting all your sex-ed from bongo that I would imagine kids could probably do with.
• Buzzfeed Quiz Party: There’s something very sad about Buzzfeed having launched this shortly after shuttering their UK journalistic operation – the site had quietly become one of the UK’s best investigative reporting outlets over the past few years, surprisingly so, and (in my head at least) was no longer associated with clickbait and quizzes as it had been a decade or so ago. Sadly, though, Jonah Peretti joins the long list of people who have as yet failed to solve the ‘so, what’s the future of journalism then?’ question, so Buzzfeed UK is left as a repository for the sort of content that noone really cares about anymore and which is available everywhere else now because it’s 2020 and the whole internet is basically the same. Still, at least now you can pretend it’s 2011 all over again and get really excited by QUIZZES on Buzzfeed – quizzes which you can now play along with your mates! So if you want to simultaneously answer 33 questions about all the times Joey said “Heyyyy!” in Friends then WOW is it your lucky day! I wonder if one of the quizzes is ‘how do you burn through half-a-billion dollars of VC funding in a decade?”?
• Asian Cinema Streaming Repository: That’s obviously not what this site is called – instead it’s AMP, the Asian Movie Project, which is here collecting links to a HUGE collection of Asian cinema from across the web. Some of these are freely available on YouTube whilst others might not be available depending on where you are in the world, but all are in theory free to stream; there are 100-or-so films here, skewing Japanese, mainly from the past couple of decades but with a reasonable selection of stuff from the 70s and 80s thrown in. I have no idea how good these are – I have heard of about 3 of them, and that’s being generous – but they can’t be worse than what you’re left with on Netflix and the rest.
• The Big Box Collection: Back in the olden days (the 80s and 90s) videogames on PC were sold in massive, overly-elaborate cardboard boxes, which featured occasionally-excellent cover art and design. The person behind this site, Benjamin Wimmer, is meticulously cataloguing these boxes, putting up 3d scans of his collection as it grows over time; you can browse ALL of them, and, if you’re me, transport yourself back in time to being 13 or 14 and going into town after school and spending time in the one games shop that didn’t chase you out after 5 minutes and just looking at all the boxes and reading the blurb on the back and staring at the screenshots and imagining what it would be like to play them (and then never doing so, because £50? You’re having a laugh).
• Deaf Power: I love this. Why shouldn’t the auditorily-impaired have their own symbol of power and pride and defiance? This is it: <0/ – “The symbol is based on the written form of Deaf Power, which is signed with an open palm over an ear and with other hand forming a closed fist in the air.” Were I a graffiti artist (which I am definitely, definitely not) I would totally take to tagging this EVERYWHERE, not least because I quite like the idea of the police being slightly confused as to why there were a lot of militant deaf people suddenly deciding to come out of the woodwork.
• Memex: I ought to find bookmarking and information organisation software useful, but I never really do; I think it’s because the inside of my head is reasonably good at the taxonomy and recall bits on its own, and I can’t really be fcuked to corral it into a more user-friendly interface (basically, as anyone who’s ever worked with me will (un)happily attest, I am far too lazy and arrogant to bother changing the way that I do things for other people, which is yet another reason I am expecting to be pretty much unemployable once I hit about 45). If you’re different, though (and I do hope you are), you might find Memex useful – it’s a service that effectively creates a local, searchable log of every single webpage you visit, meaning you can keyword search your browsing history, which, judging by the number of you who get in touch asking ‘do you remember that site on Curios once, that one with the pictures?’ you could all sort-of do with a bit.
• DAF Beirut: “The Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) is a Beirut-based visual arts institution dedicated to making modern and contemporary Arab art accessible to local and international audiences through archiving, exhibitions, education, publications, public programs, and research. Its aim is to preserve and disseminate its permanent collection which includes works in drawing, installation, mixed-media, painting, photography, ceramics, and sculpture.” The museum has recently put its collection online to browse, and there’s a wonderful breadth to the work they feature; I would love to visit Beirut, and almost certainly never will, so this is a pleasing opportunity to visit a superbly-curated gallery with some genuinely interesting artists from countries one doesn’t ordinarily see much work from in the West – honestly, select ‘browse by country’, it’s fascinating to be able to browse work by Alegrian artists, or Sudanese, and see thematic similarities that emerge.
• Titonic Fishermen: A N Other musical browsertoy, this one enlivened by the interface which is presented as a digitised drawing – cute in style, like a kid’s book illustration – which you can interact with elements of to create your song. If you’ve a kid of around 5, I reckon they will LOVE this – but, er, you might want to put headphones on them as it will doubtless sound atrocious.
• The Tank Museum: A YouTube channel that is nothing but videos about tanks. This is for all the dads, who might just want something incredibly boring and history-focused to zone out in front of whilst drinking the nth bottle of Spitfire and failing to pull their weight around the house.
• RoboArcade: This is GREAT – a bit clunky, fine, but it’s FUN and it sort of taps into the ‘drive me insane’ thing from a few dozen links ago. This is an arcade machine that anyone can play via a web interface – you wait your turn and eventually get control of the cabinet, moving around and playing a slightly-crap but very-colourful version of Space Invaders, complete with power-ups and a big boss ship and everything. I am not 100% certain exactly how this setup runs, but I really, really want to see more of these things now, please. If nothing else, we’ve all got the bandwidth to make it sort-of work properly, so why not?
• Gotta Eat The Plums: A very smol, gently funny, slightly arch game about William Carlos Williams’ Twitter-iconic poem about the plums in the icebox (you know the one).
• JSTRIS: OH YES. Competitive Tetris (except they obviously can’t call it that for legal reasons). Play against strangers in an attempt to survive the longest; you’re matched against strangers of wildly-varying skills, meaning you’ll often only last a few seconds, but this is an active community and there are always people playing, so you never have to wait too long to get a new game. Or you can play against bots, or in 1v1 games against anyone you like; this is really, really good fun, and the best way of wasting the rest of your afternoon that I’ve found all week.
• Orb Farm: Last up in the miscellanea, Orb Farm is a beautiful little browsertoygamething which lets you create your own bespoke little aquatic ecosystem – pour in water and sand and vegetation, add algae and Daphnia and bacteria and goldfish, and try and create a self-sustaining waterworld, watching it evolve and change as you go. This is SO SOOTHING and very satisfying and, best of all, is persistent – close the tab and then open it again and your little world is saved, making it something you can totally keep open in a tab to check on once or twice a day. I promise you, this is significantly more appealing than you might imagine from my description – give it a try, it will charm you.

By Irini Karayannapoulou

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, ENJOY THIS DARK, TRAP-ISH SELECTION BY UGANDA’S SLIKBACK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS IS CLOSED THIS WEEK, POSSIBLY DUE TO THE ‘RONA!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• The Shelter in Place Gallery: Oh, this is glorious: “Shelter In Place is a miniature gallery, measuring 20 by 30 inches and exhibiting scaled-down works in a model structure created using foam core, mat board, balsa wood, and plexiglass. Artists can submit works at a 1:12 or one inch to the foot scale, allowing them to create and show even ambitious, seemingly large-scale pieces — a romantic, suspended latex installation by Mary Pedicini; wall-to-wall canvases by B. Chehayeb — while traditional exhibition spaces remain closed. With high ceilings and skylights that flood the space with sunshine, the condensed gallery is impressively lifelike, giving artists room to get particularly creative. In some photographs, it is nearly impossible to tell apart from larger galleries.” Beautiful, and a nice antidote to all the people making smol pseudo-galleries for their totally disinterested pets because they think it will get them 100+ likes on Insta.
• Yatzil Elizalde: These are some quite remarkable tattoos – the ones giving the illusion of blurred vision are the most striking, but the line work overall is superb.
• Robert Hodgin: The artist’s Insta feed presents their works, much cartographical and featuring maps that have been slightly altered, digitally or otherwise, to make new pieces. I really, really like this stuff, and I would love to buy some if I knew how and if it were anywhere near affordable.
• Glamour Shots: The Insta feed of a South Korean photographic studio, showcasing some of the ‘glamour’ shots that its patrons pay for. Not, to be clear, ‘glamour’ in the British tabloid sense, but instead ‘glamour’ in the ‘weirdly acid-tinged photoshop and greenscreen fantasy’ sense. Are…are all the cross-eyed people in these photos doing it on purpose, or does South Korea have some sort of strabismus epidemic that they’ve been keeping hidden? Regardless, these are JOYFUL.
• Ines Alpha: Ines Alpha is a digital makeup artist making weird aesthetic filters for Insta. Honestly, these are amazing and I would totally be exploring this sort of thing were I particular type of brand.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Mumbai In Lockdown: As we’re all encouraged to move towards a mindset whereby ‘we’re over the worst!’ and we all get back to work like the good oil in the filthy economic machine we at heart we know we are, it’s interesting to look at other nations whose experience with the virus is at a slightly different stage. This NYT photoessay looks at how Mumbai – ‘Maximum City’, as defined by its inhabitants and the truly excellent book of the same name on the city, its people and its history – is attempting to manage the pandemic. It’s…it’s a mind-fcukingly big place, and a mind-fcukingly big task, and it amused me momentarily to imagine how Mr Johnson and his friends might have coped with that scenario given their stellar performance in what really can only be described as the comparative shallow end of disaster mitigation.
• Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage: OK, this is a bit financially knotty, but you don’t need to have a working knowledge of the term ‘arbitrage’ to get what it’s about and what it’s saying – which is basically that VC money is SO STUPID in many respects that it’s technically possible for restaurant owners who are new to delivery platform Doordash in the US to order food from their own restaurants and make reasonable profit. If you ever needed a decent explanation of why there’s a massive, throbbing digital business bubble at the moment, and why and how it might pop, this is worth reading.
• Fandoms on Zoom: If one of the accepted truths of the web is ‘bongo comes first’ (apologies for the unintended pun), surely one of the others is ‘fan communities will absolutely define and determine platform usage’ – admittedly it’s not catchy, but. This piece looks at how various fandoms are using Zoom to host listening parties of their favourite stars’ music, shared viewings of music videos, and generally integrating videochat into the extant panoply of fan community comms. This is fascinating to me, partly as a natural extension of ‘this is what people want to do and they will bend/tweak any platform they find to fit that desire’ and ‘why the fcuk is video being employed here, what does it add to the experience, and will it persist once the relative novelty has worn off?’ Anecdotally I’m finding that there’s been a significant dropoff in people using video on work calls as they realise that it adds very little, and that it’s tiring to have to contort your face into a simulacrum of interest and maintain that for 45m x8 per day; I don’t know whether I quite buy into the idea of a universal videochat revolution just yet, but we shall see.
• The Virtual Economy: Another thanks to Rina (THANKS RINA) for this piece – if you’re after a decent overview of WHERE WE ALL ARE with regards to digital goods and virtual spaces and monetisation of the virtual and people becoming professional skin designers for Fortnite as an actual job, then this is worth reading. Two points to note – if you’re reasonably up on this stuff there won’t be anything in here that you don’t already know, and, secondly, it’s been dressed up with SO much unnecessary parallax that it’s borderline-headache-inducing. Still, give it to an intern to summarise in more sober format.
• When SimCity Got Serious: This is a great piece of minor software history that I had no idea about whatsoever. Apparently when SimCity got famous, developers Maxis were inundated with enquiries from large organisations asking ‘could you make SimCity, but for tedious-but-complex-field X?’ – so, for a few years at least, they tried to do just that. Thanks to this, the world of oil got SimRefinery, a training tool designed to help greenhorns get to grips with the running of an oil refinery safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t in fact be able to dump 3m litres of crude into the Western Seaboard, however badly they messed up; the world of energy production got SimPower; and, inexplicably, everyone was offered Think2000, which would allow them to simulate the effects of the Millennium Bug on their systems. Unsurprisingly that last example killed the offshoot professional-Sim-building business, but this is a really interesting look at a niche which I reckon you could probably resurrect with far greater success in 2020 (which, as I regularly remind readers, is why I am not in charge of businesses or budgets or people or, really much of anything at all).
• Meet Nick Clegg: Wow, ok, so I just checked some dates and I really have been doing Web Curios in some capacity for over a decade now. WELL DONE ME! Also, Christ what a waste of time! I remember one of the first ones I did at H+K made reference to the surprise advent of the coalition government in the UK back in May 2010, and made reference to the imaginary beast called ‘The Cleggeron’ which would now be leading our country. And now look at us – I am a pseudo-freelancer typing from his pants in the midst of a global pandemic, still doing jobs I largely despise for clients I disdain, writing a newsletter for God knows what reason; Clegg is running comms for Facebook. Clegg, it’s fair to say, has done more with the past decade than I have. Anyway, this is a really interesting read, which is partly about Clegg as a person and partly about the role he’s undertaken at Facebook and how his influence has manifested itself in the 18m or so since he took up the position. I know it’s unfashionable to say so, but I quite like Nick Clegg and I think he comes across pretty well here; also, imagine what a fascinating job it is. I mean, I couldn’t do it – I would be terrible, and also I would hate myself so much – but, objectively, it’s one of the most interesting comms gigs on the planet, no question. One thing, though – that photoshoot! Oh Nick!
• Inside The TikTok Hype Houses: A look at the proliferation of TikTok community houses for CONTENT CREATORS in LA – this isn’t particularly insightful, and you won’t learn much about the kids or the life that you won’t have seen in a dozen other similar articles – but I found the photos interesting; I have said this before, and I am not the only one to mention it, but LOOK HOW WHITE THESE KIDS ARE! In the US in 2020 this is quite weird, and speaks (I think) to the platform’s clear strategy to embed itself in affluent communities first by promoting content from affluent, attractive, young people. Look at all these kids – they’re all the bland pretty of Abercrombie models, which is the sort of aesthetic I honestly thought youth culture had broadly decided to repudiate. I would be interested to read something about what this all means, if anyone has any links; I am genuinely fascinated about what the renewed popularity of this look amongst young people means/presages, should anyone have any ideas.
• What Were Sports?: Imagining people of the future looking back at the strange, largely-pointless, often-inexplicable pastime that was ‘sports’. Funny, unless you really like and miss sport, in which case this might still be TOO SOON.
• TikTok Fame In Quarantine: Less about TikTok per se and more about how ‘being a creator’ works in 2020; this piece profiles a bunch of people who’ve gone a bit viral on TikTok since the pandemic began, and who are now finding that they have been pigeonholed and that their only chance of recapturing that highpoint is to double-down on their particular ‘thing’, whether or not they want to or otherwise. It’s interesting to me what this says about the platform – if you accept that TikTok, YT et al are TV (you know what I mean), then in the same way that you would be annoyed if you tuned into Hollyoaks to discover it had one day pivoted hard to political analysis you might well be annoyed if your favourite TikToker who always uses that EXCELLENT catchphrase attempts to, I don’t know, do a dance or something. Basically, the crowd is a tyrant and the massive disbenefit in being a DIRECT-TO-FANS-CREATOR is that, as with all human beings, many of your ‘fans’ will be selfish, demanding cnuts who don’t care that you are an actual human being or indeed that this is actual labour and instead just expect you to DO THAT THING and will actively abuse you if you don’t. GOOD TIMES! EVERYONE IS A CREATOR! FAMOUS FOR 15 PEOPLE!!!
• Oops, I Did It Again: You may not have thought that the red catsuit video warranted a 20-year retrospective, but this piece will convince you of its necessity. Takes a very wide-ranging look at the song and the time into which it was born – take a moment to imagine 2000, a new millennium, no 9/11 or war on terror or all-consuming fear of The Other sweeping across the Western world…no large-scale mainstream web to speak of… – as well as offering interesting commentary on the Swedish hit factory Cheiron and the whole slightly-iffy-even-at-the-time-but-definitely-feels-very-wrong-now presentation of Spears as an actual, bona-fide jailbait sexkitten. Brilliant, especially if you’re old enough to remember it first time around.
• Paris Hilton, Left Behind: I wouldn’t ordinarily point you at a Buzzfeed article about Paris Hilton and contrasting her fame with that of friend and protegee Kim Kardashian but this is surprisingly interesting in terms of its analysis of the changing nature of the celebrity industrial complex and the way in which the Kardashians, with their obsessive and steely-eyed focus on The Dollar and The Brand, changed the game forever.
• Botch on the Rhine: The New York Review of Books reviews a history of the Battle of Arnhem in WWII, one of the great British humiliations of the war despite occurring at a point when the conflict had been largely decided in the Allies’ favour. This is a brilliant article – I have limited interest in the history of battles, but it manages to impart knowledge without feeling like a tedious Boy’s Own fantasy of warfare, instead managing to communicate the very peculiar and very British reasons why it all went so wrong. As we stare down the barrel of 40,000 dead here in the UK, this is full of absolutely wonderful quotes which could as well be applied today as 80 years ago – this in particular struck me as miserably apt after two months of ‘blitz spirit’ and ‘pull together’ and ‘we’re a world-leader’ and ‘our app will be the best’ rhetoric: “The idea that Britain remained a first-rate power was a fantasy which Churchill desperately tried to promote, even though he knew in his heart that it was not the case…. One could argue that September 1944 was the origin of that disastrous cliché which lingers on even today about the country punching above its weight.” Quite.
• Ignoring The Internet In Fiction: An excellent essay by Joyce Hinnefeld on why, in the main, the internet tends to remain unrendered in fiction (or at least ‘literature’). I don’t know why it is that novelistic descriptions of online life feel to me flat and dissatisfying – and I wonder whether it’s the same for younger readers, or whether it’s just a function of my not being used to it meaning that writing about being online feeling rather like dancing about architecture. Regardless, this is very well-written and asks interesting questions about the relationship of the written to the internal and, in turn, to the real.
• Facetime With Lipstick: On being at home, and being online, and makeup and self-image and ‘self-care’ and how in this as in so many other things there is a significant gender differential that we’re perhaps not thinking about enough. I loved this, although it made me feel, guiltily, grateful that I am a bloke.
• 36,000 Feet Under The Sea: Oh oh oh this is SO GOOD. It’s also super-long, but it’s worth every moment, I promise you – this is all about a reclusive millionaire’s attempts to build a vessel that will enable him to reach the lowest points in the ocean. It features peril and incredible characters, an exhibition crewed by a classic ‘cast of misfits’, and so much casual, throwaway derring do that you could have written seven articles and had material left over. Honestly, even if you don’t normally care about ACTION and EXPEDITIONS, this is superbly-written and compelling on a human level rather than just in terms of adventure. Also contains this anecdote, which I would very much like to apply to certain rich businessmen seeking government bailouts right about now: “But every age of exploration runs its course. “When Shackleton sailed for the Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduction to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s diary. “The concept of heroism evaporated in the trenches of the First World War.” While Shackleton was missing in Antarctica, a member of his expedition cabled for help. Winston Churchill responded, “When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not till then wd. I concern myself with these penguins.””
• Self-Portrait With iPhone: Finally in the longreads, this is truly wonderful and I urge you to click. Pam Mendel, in her 50s, discusses online dating and quarantine and getting older and looking older and feeling older and, honestly, this is beautiful.

By JC Gotting

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, a new Shardcore joint – what happens if you use Avatarify (that realtime deepgfake-y facemapping toy I put in Curios a few weeks back, do keep up!) to get a bunch of people and things to sing ‘Kiss’ by Prince? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS:

1. I have literally NO IDEA why this exists or how long it can possibly have taken to create, but I found out this week that someone made the whole of Titanic – really, all of it – in The Sims. Look, here it is!:

1. I don’t think I’ve ever featured a song sung in Hebrew here before; this is called ‘Pni’nim’ (apparently it means ‘pearls’) and it’s by Daniela Spector, and “is a multi-dimensional piece: about a dream, a memory and departure. Elusive and fluid, time functions as the fourth element, allowing the transitioning between the other dimensions. The music video tries to capture time, not by stopping it, rather than placing the character on the timeline, emphasizing its constant flow” Er, so there. Regardless, I think that this is beautiful and you might do too:

1. A quarantine music video! This is Carseat Headrest, with their new song ‘Martin’ (on which – is it just me who finds that there’s something inherently sinister about the name ‘martin’? No? Oh), which is something of a jangly little earworm and I like rather a lot:

1. OH THIS IS SO GOOD! Another of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, this is a group called Cimafunk from Cuba – this is a couple of months old, but I don’t care; open the windows and turn this right up, it is fcuking GREAT:

1. This is, hands-down, the most amazing drone-shot thing I have ever seen. JUST LOOK AT IT. Seriously, I promise you, however jaded you are, you will be in awe:

1. This is called The Encounter. I saw it several years ago at the Barbican, and it remains one of the most incredible pieces of theatre I’ve seen in recent years. If you’ve got a spare couple of hours and a good pair of headphones – I mean it about the headphones – then I really can’t recommend this enough. I have honestly never experienced anything quite like it – it’s available til Monday, so watch it while you have the chance:

1. Last up this week, you might have seen this doing the rounds over the past few days; if you’re yet to watch it, though, please do. It is literally a video of a man completing a Sudoku – but it is the most mind-flayingly difficult Sudoku you will ever have seen, and going on the journey of completion with the presenter is, I promise, the sweetest and most wholesome thing I’ve seen in months. This will, I guarantee, make everything marginally better for a little while. Oh, and THAT’S IT THAT’S ALL WE’VE GOT TIME FOR HAVE A LOVELY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND AND ENJOY THE WEATHER PRESUMING IT’S OK AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND BE NICE TO EACH OTHER AND GENERALLY JUST TRY AND SORT OF NOT WORRY TOO MUCH BECAUSE, HONESTLY, THERE’S NO POINT AS THERE’S LITERALLY FCUK ALL YOU CAN DO ABOUT MOST THINGS SO WHY NOT JUST LIE BACK AND EMBRACE FATALISM AND I’LL SEE YOU ALL NEXT WEEK OK THEN BYE I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Gah! I am late, and, look, it’s nice outside and now that it’s ok to be outside – OR IS IT? – and go to the park and shout at someone I know from a distance of 2m – IS IT THOUGH? IS IT??? – then that’s what I think I am going to do. 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, you know what to do by now (but don’t do that; why not change the habit of a lifetime and read this week’s edition instead?). 

By Ahn Jun

LET’S START WITH SOME PLEASINGLY INDUSTRIAL TECHNO FROM JULIANA HUXTABLE!

THE SECTION WHICH DOES RATHER WISH FACEBOOK HAD BROUGHT OUT AN ‘I FEEL ALERT!’ REACTION JUST TO REALLY HELP CLARIFY MATTERS:

• FB & Insta Add New Local Business Features: Nothing hugely exciting here, if I’m honest, but you don’t come here for excitement these days – you come here for the banal reassurance that even in the fluxy swell of A WORLD GONE MAD there are some constants, such as Facebook making small, incremental feature tweaks to make it even easier and more advantageous for literally every company in the world, however small, to give them that sweet, sweet admoney nectar. This time it’s a bunch of (reasonably minimal) tweaks to functionality which will let users ‘find businesses nearby’ when searching for local services, setting a radius up to 150m (Americans have a…different concept of proximity, turns out), allows them to use hashtags and stickers in support of small businesses which pulls aggregated content under that hashtag, lets local influencers tag their support for specific small businesses in their posts and Stories, and..oh, look, here, it will “make it easier for businesses to communicate with customers by adding a dedicated Business Inbox in the Messenger app — allowing them to use Messenger to answer questions sent to their Facebook Page — and by allowing businesses to tag all their COVID-19-related posts from the Page composer.” I hope all the doubtless dozens of small business owners who I know come here each week in search of the nugget of information which will give them that longed-for hockey-stick-shaped growth-erection find that useful.
• Do Facebook’s Anti-Hatespeech Work For It, Win $100k: Obviously there’s nothing wrong with giving talented engineers the ability to demonstrate their chops solving hard problems in exchange for cash prizes. When you’re Facebook, though, and you’ve spent a couple of years quite explicitly ‘fessing up to the fact that your AI systems really aren’t up to the task of dealing with all the horror on your platform (including again this week, when the company admitted it its moderation update that the tech at its disposal is “far from perfect”, and acknowledging that “the adversarial nature of these challenges means the work will never be done”), I personally think that you might want to be a bit more generous with the carrot here. Anyway, if you think you’re up to the challenge of developing a bit of code that can identify ‘hateful’ memes, then step right up and try your chances. I might suggest, though, that you bargain a bit harder considering the spectacular amounts of cash that something like this would save Facebook in both staff salaries and legal/therapeutic fees.
• It’s Now Easier To Bulk-Delete Nasty Comments from Insta: “Good” is basically the only comment I can bring myself to make here.
• Twitter Updates Misleading Policy Information: As per usual, this bit of news isn’t aimed at people like you, people who Tweet only the truth and who would never in a million years mislead people for commercial or personal gain (ha! PSYCH! If you’re reading this section I have a reasonable idea of what you probably do for a living, which means that you obviously mislead people for personal gain ALL THE TIME, because that’s what you get paid to do! Live with the whoredom, it gets easier). To quote the update: “Earlier this year, we introduced a new label for Tweets containing synthetic and manipulated media. Similar labels will now appear on Tweets containing potentially harmful, misleading information related to COVID-19. This will also apply to Tweets sent before today.” Again, sensible.
• Reddit Goes Crypto: This is very much something I have only got half-a-handle on at the time of writing, but in my defence it’s 706am and I only saw this 20-odd minutes ago, and it’s about cryptocurrency which is a topic I find has that uniquely difficult combination of boring and complicated and the preserve of really, really dull people that makes me sort-of incapable of ever really getting it. Still, let’s try – Reddit is experimenting with offering a new ‘rewards’ type system, a-la Reddit Gold, called ‘Community Points’…which will be on the blockchain! It’s only a small trial on a couple of specific subs, but it will be fascinating to see whether this works, and whether there develops a small crypto marketplace alongside Reddit; the site’s scale and ubiquity amongst a certain demographic of younger web users means that if you’re interested in the INEVITABLE RISE OF THE BITCOIN then a) you’re insufferably tedious, please don’t talk to me about it; and b) you might want to keep an eye on how this progresses.
• Twitch Launches Safety Advisory Council: Impressive, this, from Twitch; Facebook only launched its version of something similar this year, so for Twitch to set it up so quickly is fast-paced governance. The idea is that the Council, made up of online experts and Twitch creators, will work to establish policies and feature updates for the platform designed to foster safe growth and community – this is of interest mainly to those of you who want to try and pitch things on Twitch to terrified clients, as a way of reassuring them that it’s BRAND SAFE (ish).
• Tinder Testing Trivia: I don’t normally write about dating apps in this section, but I find Tinder’s increasing move towards CONTENT an interesting one; this story suggests it’s looking at trialing live video trivia games to help match users and also help them test their videochat features; if you’re a particular sort of brand, though (a REALLY rich one), this is the sort of thing it might be worth tentatively approaching them about with partnership ideas. Tinder games with a bit of light sponsorship sounds…well, it sounds hideous to me, but, as is increasingly apparent from every passing day, I am a know-nothing bozo whose advice and opinions should be ignored wherever possible.
• LinkedIn Adds Polls and Live Video Events: Polls! You can ask the rest of your PROFESSIONAL NETWORK questions! Just like on other platforms! But four years later! Oh, and there’s a live event feature which is being trialed with a few invite-only users and businesses, so speak to your dead-eyed sales rep if you’d like access to this doubtless-thrilling new featureset. Actually, my miserable cynicism aside, I think the ‘live events’ thing is a smart idea – if nothing else the LinkedIn brand is probably something of a kitemark (I know, ridiculous, but) and so running an event through it might confer a small degree of professional gloss compared to, say, Facebook Rooms.
• Google Chrome Launches Better Tab Organisation: Yes, ok, this is incredibly fcuking boring, but if you are me then it is also something that will absolutely improve the quality of my life for the approximately 10 hours a day of it I spend online.
• Snacks Dot Com: Stuff that THE RONA has changed – our ability to just pop to the shops and pick up a dozen packets of Skips on a whim. Still, as part of the growing direct-to-consumer boom brought about by the quarantine, there’s a solution (or at least there is in the states) – SNACKS DOT COM! Honestly, the sheer power of that url! SNACKS DOT COM (sorry, but it’s hard for me not to read it in my head in the voice of one of those US sports announcers with the gravel-gargling tones) lets you buy snacks from the Frito-Lay Group (massive junkfood company outside the UK) delivered directly to your home, for the low, low minimum order of $15. Leaving aside that $15 seems like a LOT of corn snacks – I have just done the maths on the site and it buys you ONE FCUKING KILOGRAMME of Cheetos; dear God, THAT IS WHY YOU ARE ALL FCUKING OBESE FFS!! – this seems like a huge move. I know Heinz started doing something similar in the UK a month or so back, but this feels significantly more likely to catch on – crisps get eaten faster, and more regularly, and it’s far easier to imagine signing up to a fortnightly delivery of Quavers than it is to receiving a crate of ketchup every six months. I would personally be very surprised if Walkers or KP weren’t exploring something very similar about now.
• A True Statement: I don’t ordinarily link to ‘funny things people said about the field I sort-of work in on Twitter’, but I’ll make an exception for this as it made me feel very seen.

By Fitacola

NEXT, TRY AN HOUR OF AMAPIANO, WHICH IS APPARENTLY A SORT OF AFRICAN HOUSE AND WHICH IS ABSOLUTELY ACE, TURNS OUT!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD WE’VE NOW FOUND AN ANSWER TO THE PERENNIAL QUESTION ‘WHAT TYPE OF BONGO WOULD MACHINES IMAGINE IF MACHINES WERE ABLE TO IMAGINE BONGO?’, PT.1:

• Appeasement: I got quite bored of Led by Donkeys’ stuff during Brexit, I confess; whilst I agreed broadly with their point of view that the people in charge of it were dreadful, lying cnuts, I was increasingly of the impression that using giant printouts of Tweets to make that point was possibly not broadening that message as much as they thought it was (turns out that using a platform that most normal people think is the sole preserve of a vanishingly-small proportion of weirdos in media and politics to tell said normal people that what they think is wrong doesn’t do much to persuade said normal people that everyone telling them that what they think is wrong isn’t just a member of a whinging Westminster liberal elite). This is their latest thing, though, and it’s rather good imho. Appeasement presents a simple timeline of known facts about the spread of COVID internationally, contrasting the events taking place and other governments’ response to them with the steps taken by our own. Regardless of whether you think our leaders have made a massive mess of this – and, if you don’t, HA!! – this is, objectively, a really good piece of communications; simple, effective and clear.
• The Machine Gaze: This is, no contest, my favourite website of the week – FULL DISCLOSURE, though, that I was in-part involved with its creation. Over the past year or so, Shardcore’s been messing around with GANs (you know them by now – that form of AI whereby you train a machine on a set of visuals and then use what it ‘learns’ to seed new images) and bongo, with the idea of seeing what would happen if you trained a machine just on pr0n and asked it to ‘imagine’ new stuff. Well, this is it. The Machine Gaze is a website collecting images and video from the collection – everything you see on there was created by a machine which had previously been exposed to hundreds of thousands of pictures of naked people, either alone or together. The results are…honestly, they’re not quite like anything I’ve seen before, part Bacon, part Zoo Magazine, and wholly unerotic. They are, it goes without saying, not entirely kid-friendly, and they are on occasion a bit…disturbing, but there’s also something weirdly beautiful about them and the questions they ask – about what machines ‘see’, and what we are training them on – are interesting and pertinent. Oh, we tried doing this with male-centric bongo, by the way, but it turns out that for quite a few reasons it’s significantly harder (ahem) to get decent results, not least because of the fact that it tends to be a little more aesthetically varied and therefore the machines have real trouble imagining where the cocks ought to go (no, really). Please, please do take a look at this – I think it’s amazing, and you might too (or you might think it’s honestly horrid, for which sincere apologies).
• This Word Does Not Exist: My second favourite website of the week, this is another AI-generated…thing-repository, which rather than presenting imaginary people or cats or anima girlfriends that have all been imagined by machine instead offers up a selection of words and their definitions that have been generated by a machine (in this case, it’s the GPT-2 code underpinning it). Honestly, I could sit here all day and click refresh and be happy. So far it’s offered me ‘slipsub: a short burst of light on a surface’ and ‘gaière: a small goose raised for protection by its owner or a keeper’, and ‘tripship: a person who travels through space on specially designed rides’ and each of them is wonderful. So, so pleasing for any of you who are into words for their own sake.
• The Houseparty Festival: I am very much not the target demographic for this, as evidenced by the fact that I think I recognise approximately six of the named artists performing over the course of the upcoming three-day festival. Taking place inside the titular app, this is a really interesting idea which I am fascinated to see in action (whilst at the same time having no real desire whatsoever to actually participate in); the deal is that from this evening (Friday 15 May) til Sunday night over 40 artists will be appearing live on the app, doing…no idea, actually, and given the mix of people (there are musicians like Doja Cat and Dua Lipa and Katy Perry and others, but also people like Zooey Deschanel and Neil Patrick Harris and the bafflingly-ubiquitous Chef Mike who I presume will…I don’t know, just be famous and hope that that’s entertaining enough? Anyway, the idea is that these streams will all exist for a set amount of time; Houseparty users can jump on calls with their friends, per the app’s standard mechanic, and then watch these famousstreams together as a shared experience. Which strikes me as a really decent way of running these things – no mass-instances, with your friends, but with the opportunity to mix with strangers if you feel like it…honestly, whilst I honestly couldn’t think of much I’d like to do less than watch a jerky, pixellated stream of Katy Perry gurning her way through one of her ‘hits’ while wearing a ‘comedy’ lockdown outfit, the way they are running the whole thing seems very future indeed.
• Wongle: ANOTHER excellent website (I really am spoiling you today), this needs to be launched on a phone or on a tablet to work – once you do, though, prepare to be slightly-amazed (well, if you’re me). Wongle is a really simple game that plays through your mobile browser and camera; it simply tasks you with finding things around you that you can photograph which begin with the letter the site’s suggesting – so just now, for example, it asked me to take a picture of something beginning with an ‘a’, so I snapped a wrinkled, shrivelled apple and felt momentarily-guilty about my fruit intake. That’s literally it – it doesn’t get more complicated than this – but it’s honestly a bit magical how good the image recognition is, and as a game for kids who are learning the alphabet it’s a possibly perfect distraction (honestly, you could just give them a tablet with this loaded on it and go to sleep for an hour! JUST IMAGINE). Lots of fun, and nicely-made to boot by agency Hello Monday.
• Twitch Roulette: I’ve featured things in here before looking at the slightly odd loneliness of the streaming experience for the vast majority of people on platforms like Twitch, performing nightly for an audience of, well, often literally noone. Twitch Roulette takes that concept and makes it a feature, promising to match you with a random streamer from the site, at random, at the click of a button. The particular nature of Twitch makes this surprisingly fun – whilst the quality of the streamers varies enormously, the fact that you’re never going to end up being confronted by a naked man worrying at his disappointing foreskin makes the whole experience an interesting journey of discovery rather than a more penile variant on ‘Pop Up Pirate’. You can choose to limit streamers to particular games, should you simply want to browse within a category, but otherwise this is a wonderful way of dipping your toe into the odd multiverse that is the streaming ecosystem. I just popped in now and had a few Animal Crossing streamers on in the background whilst typing – there’s something fascinating to me about the sort of person who can maintain a measured, constant descriptive monologue about their virtual farming activities at 3am on a Friday morning to an audience of literally two people.
• The Office (On Slack): Blah blah blah anothe MSCHF project blah blah. You know the drill by now – this is the latest in NYC creative funsters MSCHF’s series of mysterious experimental digiprojects, and to my mind one of the more interesting ones they’ve done lately. Because we’re all now experiencing the office digitally rather than physically, MSCHF made the sensible decision to take the entirety of the US series of The Office and play it out on Slack, in realtime, between the hours of 9-5 (US time). So you can sign up and join the channels to see the scripts being played out between the characters, dip in and out to see how the plotlines are developing, and genreally experience the show as a sort-of minimalist readthrough. This is such a clever idea – as far as I’m aware, this isn’t actually that hard to build; all it needs is the script of the office split between characters and uploaded to a series of Slack bots built to spit out the dialogue in turn, which, fine, I couldn’t personally build but which I know is possible. I really think there’s something interesting about the idea of making stuff like this available as Easter Eggs – could owners of creative properties not license Slack bots for purchase, so you could buy characters from your favourite shows to live in your virtual chats? Is that an appealing idea or just really, really sad? I honestly have no idea any more.
• ISS Docking: I’m not proud of what I’m about to type, but I feel we’ve known each other for long enough that I can be honest with you. This has been in the notes for Curios since Monday, and every time I have opened it up to add a new link I have giggled to myself at the fact that it reads like the term ‘ice docking’ – long-term readers of Popbitch (and, if she’s reading this, Lisa Stansfield) will know what I am talking about here, but can I please encourage those of you that don’t to please not google the term? Thanks! Anyway, that largely-pointless digression done with, this is a newly-released in-broswer simulation of what it’s like to dock with the International Space Station – YOU are in control! YOU are piloting thousands of tonnes of space vehicle as it attempts to connect with another massive hunk of metal somewhere out in the cosmos! This is VERY hard – although I appreciate that the fact I can’t drive a car, let alone a massive spaceboi might count against me here – but it’s also very slow and quite meditative and possibly the sort of thing that you might want to have on while you deal with the latest round of pointless calls with stupid people about things that don’t matter (ie your job).
• Life In Quarantine: Another project collecting people’s personal thoughts and experiences of their time in lockdown; the project is being run by Stanford University’s Poetic Media Lab, and anyone can contribute their words – they want contributions in multiple languages from across the world, so please do add your own and share this with anyone you know who might be minded to contribute; I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I would hate for the majority record of…all this to be nothing but TikTok dances and Stories about how much you need a haircut.
• COVID and You: In fact, while we’re doing this sort of thing, COVID and You is a similar project being conducted by The Young Foundation and the Open University, specifically to track the emotional impact of the lockdown on people in the UK. Again, collecting this sort of stuff is important I think, so do consider getting involved if you have a spare 5 minutes to tell them how you’re doing.
• Pose Animator: Another week, another piece of technology that should make animators look nervously over their shoulders and possibly start to consider alternative careers. Pose Animator is a little proof-of-concept toy which users your webcam to identify your face and limbs and then maps those to a small, simple cartoon character, which tracks your movements and facial expressions with a remarkable degree of fidelity considering quite how homebrew the whole thing is. You wouldn’t, fine, expect Pixar to be using this stuff anytime soon, but it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility to imagine this sort of thing being used quite widely to create a welcoming, non-threatening digital onboarding assistant for A N Other software, or to allow for realtime avatar creation for live digital events – in fact (and bear with me here), a combination of this sort of stuff and virtual clubbing starts to feel really interesting to me.
• Mojo: “Meet Mojo Lens, a smart contact lens with a built-in display that gives you timely information without interrupting your focus. By understanding your real-world context, Mojo Lens provides relevant, eyes-up notifications and answers. Designed by optometrists, technologists, and medical experts, Mojo Lens gives you the knowledge you need—exactly when it’s needed.” Or so speaks the blurb – the reality is that this stuff is nowhere near ready, and the website is basically a collection of stock photos of people looking a bit future and a couple of videos of how it might work in the future, which are very much all ‘hey, look, it’s like Minority Report but significantly more benign!’ Interesting less for what it is now, and more for how it’s being sold as what will be; when this stuff really does come to market – a decade or so? – expect the really interesting questions to be around who gets all that LOVELY VISION TRACKING DATA.
• I’m Back 35: I am a truly terrible photographer – annoyingly, mobile telephony has now reached the point where software corrects my nonexistent eye to such an extent that my phone now won’t let me take bad pictures anymore, altering everything I snap into some sort of borderline-CGI improved-simulacrum of real life. STOP LYING TO ME ABOUT MY PROWESS, MOBILE PHONE! This is how Brooklyn Beckham ended up believing he was a photographer, isn’t it? Anyway, if you’re someone who still enjoys the CRAFT and PRECISION of manual photography but who also quite likes the convenience and photoshop of digital, then you may want to chuck some money at this (already-funded) Kickstarter (an update to a previous iteration of similar tech), which lets you augment your analogue machine with all sorts of digital photos. “The main innovation…is the software, that gives now the possibility to take photos with the MANUAL mode, leaving the user full control of the shutter speed and the diaphragm aperture of the camera. I’m Back 35 will then record the images as it was set through the analog camera!” I don’t, I confess, totally understand what this means, but I imagine that those of you who actually own cameras might be able to make more sense of it than I can.
• Stream: I’ve seen a lot of people in and around the hiphop community getting annoyed that there aren’t currently any decent solutions in place to allow them to monetise their Insta Lives during lockdown, which is a fair point; this software, a plugin for Zoom, does exactly that (except, er, not for Insta) – it basically lets a users set up a stream with a paywall, requiring a fee before users are able to access it. You can add tip donations too should you so desire – is it terrible of me that the first thing I thought of was that this would enjoy a brief, not-quite-legal life as an Onlyfans equivalent for people who wanted to avoid platform charges? Who knows! Anyway, if you’re looking for a way to monetise your digital streams, events, etc, this is a potential way of doing that very thing.
• The Big Picture Competition 2020 Winners: The competition’s ethos is, I am told, to “celebrate and illustrate the rich diversity of life on Earth and inspire action to protect and conserve it through the power of imagery.” Judging by the selection of winning pictures this year, they’ve succeeded admirably – LOOK AT THE BAT! Honestly, it really is worth clicking through to see the finalists from each category, these are spectacular (and, weirdly, more pleasing than usual after 7 weeks of being stuck in a very urban environment indeed).

By Miriam Tolke 

NOW HAVE SOME DRUM’N’BASS WHICH IS LITERALLY PERFECT MUSIC TO DO JUST ABOUT ANYTHING TO!

THE SECTION WHICH IS GLAD WE’VE NOW FOUND AN ANSWER TO THE PERENNIAL QUESTION ‘WHAT TYPE OF BONGO WOULD MACHINES IMAGINE IF MACHINES WERE ABLE TO IMAGINE BONGO?’, PT.22:

• Postcards from Isolation: Beautiful collection of small interactive digital art experiences designed to communicate in a series of tiny ways some of the changes brought about by quarantine and the pandemic. Pulled together by (I think) one-person design outfit Studio Sabato, these black and white digital experiments each feature a toggle allowing you to experience them from a ‘before’ and ‘after’ perspective, and each offering a very small artistic response to an aspect of the change in our circumstances. I love everything about this, not least the self-contained nature of each of the works which nonetheless cohere quite wonderfully.
• This Long Century: This is a wonderful, long-runnning project which, at the time of writing, has collected nearly 400 of these…things. It’s almost-indescribable, but let’s try: This Long Century is “an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over. Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work, THIS LONG CENTURY serves as a direct line to the contributors themselves.” The best articulation I can give is that it feels quite a lot like browsing through an exhibition catalogue, except one where the catalogue is the exhibition (I’m not doing this very well, am I?). You could absolutely get lost in here, as I did the other afternoon; the sheer breadth of material and perspective and subject and work is a little dizzying.
• Live Rave In Half-Life: This is really very inventive indeed. Graham Dunning (I think) has modded the game Half Life and replaced all the game’s audio files with samples from 90s rave tracks; in this video, he uses these modified sounds to effectively play a live gig on Twitch by playing his altered version of the game; every action he takes, every environmental reaction, is accompanied by whatever synth stab or 404 he’s appended to it in the code, making the whole thing like some sort of live electro improv rave-type-thing. If you ever happened to see dance improv troupe The Bays play back in the day (and if you didn’t, check them out here), it’s not a million miles away from that (but totally different). I could imagine something like this done by a famous DJ/producer in a bigger game engine – imagine, I don’t know, this but my Deadmau5 (or someone the kids actually like), in Fortnite. See? HUGE.
• Ogmios: I don’t know who this person is; they have had this YouTube Channel for 8 years, but with minimal output and certainly no breakout hits. I think Marcus might have pointed me at this – thanks Marcus – but, whoever it was, I am very grateful indeed. Ogmios’ last two videos have been entitled ‘School of Zen Motoring’ and, honestly, they are the most relaxing and gently hilarious things I have seen in an age. Ogmios (for I presume it is he) drives around doing very gentle, very slow commentary on his route around (I think) East London. It’s perfect, I promise you, and is definitely worth 20 minutes of your time; he is SO NICE AND SO PURE.
• TV Chart: I presume the majority of you are at the point of quarantine now where you’ve exhausted all the ‘quality’ entertainments on the major streaming platforms and are now looking nervously at the more ‘niche’ series, the ones that have seemingly managed to rack up six seasons without you or anyone you know having ever watched an episode, or knowing anyone who’s watched an episode. If you are looking through the unknown dregs to find the next medium through which to avoid thinking or talking, you might find TV Chart useful – type in the title of any (no idea how comprehensive it actually is, but let’s just say ‘very’) series and it will pull data on its episode-by-episode rating on IMDB, thereby offering you a useful overview of its perceived quality trajectory so you can decided whether or not to watch a show that falls off a quality cliff come season 4 (like you care – this is literally just chewing gum for the eyes and brain and you know it).
• 36 Cinema: Another interesting idea – 36 Cinema is a new project offering you the opportunity to pay to watch a livestream of a classic film along with key principles involved in its making. The first they did was Shaolin Vs Wu Tang, which was live commented by (as you might expect) RZA from the Wu and some guy from the Hollywood Theatre which is also involved; that’s being rerun again tomorrow night for UK audiences, but there will doubtless be other similar screenings as time progresses. The price for the initial one was $10, which on the one hand isn’t super-cheap, but on the other hand what the fcuk else are you going to spend your funmonies on?
• The Saul Steinberg Foundation: You might recognise the art style but not the name – Saul Steinberg, I learned this week, was a hugely-influential 20thC artist and designer whose style basically became the de facto blueprint for the New Yorker’s cover art style, but who was also an acclaimed and respected fine artist beyond that. This website presents his life and work, and is SO full of wonderful history and drawings and sketches that you could happily lose a few hours in the New York art scene of the 50s, 60s and 70s.
• Birdsound Finder: Now that we’re allowed outside again – ALONE! NO TOUCHING! – we all need to remember what it’s like being surrounded by the cacophonous sounds of nature. If you’d like some help reacclimatising yourself to the terrifying racket that is birdsong (something I don’t need, what with the fcuking cnuts deciding to start shouting on my roof every morning from about 6am, unbidden), this site might help – pulling data from a bunch of different places, it will find your location and, at the push of a button, give you information on locally-prevalent bird species as well as an aduiofile of what those combined birdsongs might sound like. It’s really quite lovely, not least zooming around London to see how the birds of Tooting differ from the birds of, say, Hammersmith (the birds of Hammersmith are probably a touch more emphysemic, I’d guess).
• MegaNighwatch: Rembrandt’s Nightwatch has been SUPERDIGITISED by the Rijksmuseum and put online for you to gawp at up-close-and-personal. This is quite, quite remarkable – the extent to which you can magnify the image is such that even individual brushstrokes are clearly visible, and you can get so intimate with the work that you can literally see the whites of the patrol’s eyes. Wonderful, particularly if you’re experience of the painting has previously been the classic museum-y one of being surrounded by 200 w4nkers attempting to take poor-quality digital photos.
• Shutdown Gallery: After a bit of a hiatus in recent years, it’s really been a boom period for 3d representations of physical galleries in digital space. Shutdown Gallery is the latest version to cross my field of vision; Patrick Hubner has created this space which he intends to act as a rotating showcase for the work of international artists and designers over the coming months as real-world gallery space continues to be impossible to access: “The digital gallery adapts to the physical situation of the viewer and is freely accessible: On mobile devices such as telephones or tablets, the visitor can view the room directly and from all perspectives by tilting the device or moving it freely in the room – the boundaries between the physical and the digital disappear suddenly and intuitively. As a web-based project, the gallery is publicly accessible worldwide. Every week there will be a new exhibition with works that move the world of art and design, thus maintaining the fertile environment of constant change. A growing list of world-renowned designers and artists has already confirmed their participation in what is the start of a new chapter for galleries.” I rather like the explicitly-game-y interface, and the way the works are arranged with proper notes, etc, gives this an air of legitimacy that many of these projects lack; on the other hand, it’s (at present, at least) not doing anything hugely innovative with the concept of ‘virtual white cube’. Still, worth a look for those interested in how digital art presents in 2020.
• Spamflix: One of the miserable things about the way media ownership has worked out is that it’s nigh-on impossible to find decent, obscure, old, arthouse cinema on any of the streaming platforms. You want any number of straight-to-DVD 4.8*IMDB abortions? GREAT! You want anything from pre-2000 that isn’t super=famous? LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE! Which is why Spamflix appeals so much – it’s a pay-per-rental site rather than a streaming subscription offer, but it’s promise is that it provides access to the obscure, the weird, the indie and the offbeat, all the stuff that Netflix and Amazon won’t necessarily have. A cursory glance suggests that, yes, there is a lot of odd and obscure – it also suggests that ‘odd’ and ‘obscure’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘worth watching’, as evidenced by the inclusion of 2006 ‘classic’ Italian comedy romp ‘Fascists on Mars’, which is noone’s idea of good in any country. Still, this will still be better than approximately 90% of what you see after three right-side-scrolls on Netflix.
• Bimble Space: Small, digital toys built by Amy Goodchild which are small, colourful and very pleasing indeed.
• The Psy Trance Guide: I think I might have alluded in here before to having spent a not-insignificant chunk of my youth being very into psytrance, the least-cool of all the dance music genres (although personally I think that title rests with happy hardcore, but wevs) and the one most-indelibly-associated with white men with dreadlocks, dogs on strings, UV paint and aggressively-skeletal men with very, very blue eyes dancing at you at around 180 BPM (they were GOOD TIMES, man). This website – Christ knows why it’s still live given the only two places where psytrance is still a thing are seemingly Oxford and Tel Aviv – seeks to provide a deep taxonomical guide to all the different subgenres of wibbly 404-and-pounding-beats and MY GOD did I just fall into a hole and do some hard reminiscing. You probably won’t like what most of this sounds like – it’s fair to say that most people don’t, and I had some…robust conversations with housemates at university about the exact volume at which it was acceptable to play this stuff at when drying oneself off of a morning – but please have a listen as it is THE SOUND OF MY YOUTH. I know I am too old, but I am absolutely getting boxed off my tits on cheap speed and going to one more of these before I die (it might kill me tbh).
• All The Peel Sessions: This may be the best lockdown link yet. Every single Peel Session, linked from this one webpage. Except it’s not every single session – there are a few missing, as seemingly dozens of massively joyless pr1cks from around the web have seemingly decided to tell the kind stranger who bothered pulling this together. Imagine – you find this, an incredible labour of love put together for the general enjoyment of music fans worldwide, and your sole desire is to inform its creator that they missed a bit over there. People, Jesus Christ. Anyway, this is a truly spectacular resource for anyone who’s into any sort of music from about 1960-2000, and if you can’t find anything to enjoy in this list then you are basically dead or deaf.
• Have You Seen This Dog?: You have now. You’ll get the joke when you click – it’s not a very sophisticated joke, fine, but I think you could probably keep a five year old amused with this for approximately three minutes or so, which is probably enough to pop out for a fag or to get a swift drink down you if you hurry.
• Dinos Tomato Pie: Old-school websites are one of Web Curios’ favourite things, and this one, for Dino’s, a VERY trad-sounding pizza pie joint in Seattle, is SO LOVABLE. Look, just read this from the homepage and try not to fall in Love: “The truth is people sometimes wanna have a good time with their friends and family. And to tell the truth, pizza and drinks can help with that! Most of my friends agree that Dino’s is the right place to enjoy these things.” YES DINO THAT IS THE TRUTH! Can we all make a collective agreement that we’re going to enter into a sustained period where this is the accepted standard of webdesign again? Please?
• The Bug’s Life Fleshlight: Does anyone remember Pixar’s ‘A Bug’s Life’ fondly? No, they don’t, do they? That and ‘Antz’ are both largely forgotten by audiences – which is perhaps why this STELLAR bit of tie-in merch is still unsold on eBay, despite being listed for the low, low price of $2,000. Would YOU like to own a wanktorch (aka a fleshlight) which has been fashioned to resemble cuddly German worm-creature Heimlich from the 1998 cartoon? Would YOU like to bring yourself to sticky completion betwixt the rubberised lips of an anthropomorphic grub? I really, really hope not, for your sake. This is horrible, but, equally, almost entirely perfect – such is the dichotomy of the web.
• Hideous Cave: This is quite astonishingly clever. Pico-8 is the 8-bit games creation engine that I often feature stuff built in; someone has used it to create a pseudo-3d adventure game, and the skill and scope here is quite remarkable. Honestly, I am agog at what they have managed to achieve here with such basic code and kit.
• The World Was Sad Since Tuesday: Also built in Pico-8, this is a far-more-traditional piece of top-down interactive storytelling, but I loved the story it tells and the manner in which it’s delivered. This is very beautiful indeed.
• Deathtrap Dungeon: Finally in this week’s miscellany, something that is PEAK DAD. Are you of an age where you remember Ian Livingstone and Peter Jackson and Fighting Fantasy adventure books, and staying up late under the covers with a torch and a pencil trying to work out how the fcuk to find the ending in that bloody space one that I never, ever managed to complete? Do you miss the storytelling and comforting familiarity of the interface? Would you basically like a version of it that’s modern and a bit interactive and also a bit like Jackanory? WELL GREAT! This is a demo, fine, but it gives you enough of an idea and is long enough to be fun to play – the idea is that it’s a standard Fighting Fantasy setup, with a quest and branching narratives and a bit of light-RPGing, but the gimmick is that the whole thing is played as though you’re being read a story, with the game narrated by Actual Proper Actor Eddie Marsan. The whole thing works superbly, and if I have ⅞ year old kids I would absolutely be preordering the fcuk out of this as I think it would captivate them. Also, it would captivate me. I want this to come out now, SO MUCH, and I am too excited to be ashamed.

By Vicki Ling

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, HAVE THIS SET OF SLOW TRACKS MIXED BY DJ SUPERMKT, PERFECT FOR A SUMMER EVENING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Gatos Y Respeto: Cats and respect? The blog’s named after Albert Schweizer, apparently a byword for respect to animals and indeed all living things, and basically exists to celebrate animals, especially cats, in Spanish. WHY THE FCUK NOT, EH?
• Topher Chris: This came to me via the genuinely superb Garbage Day newsletter, which I almost want to keep to myself it’s so godd but which I will generously recommend to you because I am nice like that. Garbage Day is written by Ryan Broderick and each week it finds awful meme-type stuff from around the web, and this week it included this Tumblr and my God these memes my GOD. So cursed.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Sunset Selfies: Look, this isn’t really my sort of thing at all, but I accept that whilst everything’s a bit crap you might be in the market for something a bit Hallmark and twee; these are silhouetted cutout artworks photographed against pretty sunsets, which is very Fiat500 Insta but, well, sometimes that’s ok.
• Mouse Magic: ‘The art of Victorian taxidermy, with a modern twist’. SO MANY CUTE LITTLE STUFFED MICE OH ME OH MY THAT ONE LOOKS LIKE SUPERMAN!
• Fashion Can Drag: I fcuking love Insta accounts like this one; I have no interest in or understanding of fashion, but reading this feed – which takes images from queer and high fashion and explains their significance in the context of the wider fashion world, the history of the catwalk, etc – is fascinating and informative in a way I could never have imagined.
• Vic Lee London: Via Simon, this might be my favourite quarantine record to date; Vic Lee is recording their experiences of lockdown via illustrations in their notebook, and is sharing said illustrations via Instagram. I would LOVE to be able to buy a copy of these when this is all over; as a personal illustrated history I find this fascinating.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 162 Benefits of Coronavirus: No, don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly gone all moron-Pollyanna and bought into the canard that ‘this is the greatest time in the history of all human endeavour to be alive’ (DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT CANDIDE WAS A SATIRICAL EXERCISE YOU FCUKING IDIOTS???); I’m just presenting this as a potential corrective to some of the more doom-ish commentary doing the round at present. This list has been pulled together by Ben Finn, who’ss a VC-type person and (I think) violently rich – as such, a lot of what is in here is, I would respectfully-argue, rubbish, or at the very least based on a worldview that isn’t exactly anchored in reality (his assertion in a footnote that the growth in online shopping is a net positive because he doesn’t believe that conditions for workers are as bad as people say is…well, give me the confidence to make assertions about minimum wage work like a multi-millionaire does, is all I can say). Still, though, it’s interesting in an intellectual-exercise sort-of-way to try and think of things that you could reasonably categorise as ‘good’ about this situation, and there are a few things in here that made me pause for reflection; it’s worth reading through, if only to force yourself to consider things from a cost/benefit point of view.
• I Just Flew: This account of what it was like for the author taking a flight across the US the other week is an excellent series of reasons to believe we won’t be going on mass holidays anytime soon, whatever Mr O’Leary might want the market to believe. It sounds…horrible, frankly, and even less pleasant than flying currently feels. Every single element of this seems miserable, most of all the interaction with other people; I firmly believe that remembering how messy and unpleasant dealing with actual meatsacks is on a day-to-day basis is going to be one of the hardest and most jarring and, over time, most problematic elements of any reduction in quarantine measures; we are awful, and, frankly, maybe we should all just hide away and be alone.
• How The Pandemic Is Messing With AI: Or, how building systems which work based on the evaluation of data and predictive models based on said evaluations tends not to work perfectly when confronted with instances where behaviour or need changes significantly and at pace. Another one of these pieces – alongside the one about supplychains from a week or two back – which indicates that one of the main shifts we might end up making as a result of COVID is around the way in which we try and govern systems; I wouldn’t be surprised to see a significant rise in interest in ‘fuzzy’-type systems (blast from 25 years ago there) to attempt to hedge against stuff like this.
• Sometimes A Bot Is Just A Bot: I love this story. The basic thrust here is that all the people who regularly get upset at seeing multiple versions of the same pro-Government text on Twitter and start frothily screaming COORDINATED BOT ACTIVITY BY THE EVIL MEKON GENIUS CUMMINGS DID YOU SEE THE GREAT HACK CAROLE CAROLE COME QUICKLY are perhaps being a bit too quick to jump to conclusions, and that in fact a lot of these duplicate messages are just being posted by normal people who really do just want to c&p a pro-Johnson bit of copy into a status update and share it, and who don’t want to write their own. There’s just such a wonderful rabbithole here – firstly in terms of the fact that this sort-of proves that, by certain measures, the disinformation campaigns have absolutely achieved their goal, leaving us all totally confused as to what is real and what isn’t; secondly, in terms of the fact that you should never overestimate the British people; and thirdly, around the fact that there’s another explanation whereby these people are totally real but are also being paid to act as organic bots. I appreciate that this is on some level a sad expression of defeat, but I have totally stopped caring about this in any meaningful sense beyond just sort of rubbernecking from the sidelines – at this stage it’s just another layer of pomo ‘entertainment’.
• Experiencing Online Experiences: Nora Caplan-Bricker explores some of the ‘experiences’ available to enjoy through Airbnb as part of its lockdown offering, where you can pay a set amount of money to join a virtual event with a host in which they’ll tell you about their world-leading collection of echidna phalluses, say, or show you some sleight-of-hand over webcam. The article opens as a sort-of investigation as to whether these offerings will ‘work’ for the company, but it becomes a wider meditation on what a virtual guided experience can give you in a time of isolation.
• Squad Shopping: A trend coming from China but which I could see gaining popularity here, as the prospect of being able to go shopping for stuff, with friends, as a leisure activity, grows more remote by the day. The gimmick here is Chinese shops and platforms creating opportunities for virtual shopping in groups; so vouchers for multi-person online discounts, say, or interfaces which allow for groups of multiple users to browse, chat, etc, together; add this to the growing trend for livestreamed shopping assistance and there’s a really interesting intersection; I can imagine a Houseparty-type app whereby a limited number of attentive assistants guide a group of well-heeled virtual buyers through an empty Hermes concessionary, talking them through next-season’s must-have tooled leathers.
• The VR Winter: I presume you all read Benedict Evans’ newsletter (I can’t bring myself to; it’s not that it’s not good, it’s more that the idea of someone making that much money just from writing a newsletter does something so caustic to my own sense of self-worth that it takes me literally days to recover) and so you might have seen this already; if not, though, it’s a very good piece looking at why this might still not be the age for VR as a mainstream entertainment, despite the lockin and the isolation and the boredom. Evans’ main assertion is a compelling one – that all the stuff people talk about when they discuss the killer use-case for VR as a mainstream thing is predicated on an idea of VR tech which is practically a couple of decades away, and that that sort of barrier is too big for it to make the leap to normies just yet.
• 2014 Nostalgia: When I was at school and university, it was seemingly a fact that nostalgia ran at about a twenty-year lag; so by the time I was finishing my undergrad, the most-popular terrible student disco was a late-70s disco revival night called ‘Carwash’; now, though, it seems that nostalgia’s on about a 5-year delay, meaning all the GenZers are apparently waxing wistful about those halcyon days around 2014 when everything was SO MUCH SIMPLER. This piece looks at exactly what cultural artefacts and tropes are most-affectionately recalled – if you’re old, you will find this utterly risible, but know that we were ALL like this once and that it is a beautiful and blessed state to be in; old enough to know that there is stuff worth missing, but not old enough to know that everything really does tend to entropy and that it really is all downhill. I did get a genuine moment of rage when I read the author describing the ‘twee as fcuk’ pop of the 2000s, though – DEAR GOD DO YOU HAVE NO FCUKING HISTORY OR CULTURE GO AND LEARN ABOUT C86 YOU PRICK etc etc.
• Memers & TikTok: The slow, inevitable loss of TikTok’s innocence continues apace, this time with the news that it’s being invaded by meme accounts, which is basically the point at which the content=stealing and grifting starts in earnest, if Insta’s anything to go by. Another step in the platform’s evolution, but I found it interesting mainly as a sign that being conversant with online culture is now going to require me to keep up with a whole load of NEW, video-based visual signifiers whose semiotics I need to internalise if I’mn going to be able to keep up and OH GOD SO TIRED. There’s a Tweet that’s been doing the rounds recently in which some woman tries to explain a meme to a guy and, after she does so, he asks ‘so what, I’m expected to memorise all these pictures you keep in your phone so we can communicate?’ and, well, I FEEL THIS VERY STRONGLY.
• Ways We Are Annoying Each Other: I think this is quite a useful piece for you and anyone you are living with at the moment to read together, or possibly to each other; in it, a selection of individuals share the small things that are annoying them about their partner during isolation; these are small, benign and mostly said with love, but might afford you the opportunity to broach ‘the fcuking way you make tea every seven minutes’, say, or, if my girlfriend’s cat was capable of reasoned argument, ‘the 6am morning wakeupcall during which you demand treats with increasingly-frenzied howls of despair and occasional assaults on the toes’. It’s full of stuff like this, and it’s very, very pleasing: “My boyfriend eats almonds by slowly nibbling on the end of one, then shoving it gently into the side of his cheek until his face is bursting with them like a cartoon squirrel. I hate it! I hate him! It’s driving me insane.”
• 50 Ideas That Changed My Life: I don’t, as a rule, go in for stuff that might be considered ‘improving’ or ‘self-reflective’ or ‘instructional’ – as I think I’ve previously alluded to, I simply don’t care enough about my life to want to expend any effort optimising it – but I thought I might make an exception for this; it’s by a David Perrell (no idea), and whilst some of it set my teeth on edge slightly (I get the sense that Mr Perrell is somewhat more of a ‘go-getter’ than I am, and that he and I probably wouldn’t have an awful lot in common) there is enough in here which struck me as common sense as to be worth sharing. In particular, this is my personal lodestone and I will stand by it forever: “Avoid competition. Stop copying what everybody else is doing. If you work at a for-profit company, work on problems that would not otherwise be solved. If you’re at a non-profit, fix unpopular problems. Life is easier when you don’t compete. (Hint: don’t start another bottled water company).”
• The Fascinating Origins of Greyhound Racing: A wonderful history of how greyhound racing in its modern form came to be – I loved, in particular, the detail that the mechanical hare was invented because the cries of an actual hare being dismembered by hounds is too upsetting for audiences by dint of its uncanny resemblance to the sounds made by a small child undergoing a similar fate. Also, the newspapermens’ description of the new sport – ‘the hounds of the endless oval’ – is pure poetry and I love it.
• Don’t Fear The Robot: For complicated reasons, I have an unusually-emotional response to the Roomba; this piece is by its inventor, and explains how they came to invent and perfect the machine that is still by far and away the most successful domestic robot in history. Unlikely to be surpassed for quite a few years yet, Roomba’s success is its simplicity; this piece offers practical recollections of how it came together as a project, but is more enjoyable for the simple-but-pleasing prose, and the more general teachings it can impart about focusing on simplicity and easily-solvable/improvable problems.
• Reading James Joyce: I read Portrait of the Artist for my IB and, honestly, even as a kid who’d spent most of his life to that point at Catholic school staffed and attended by mostly-Irish people, it was a fcuking slog; I have never attempted Ulysses, and as for Finnegan’s Wake…still, this essay Brianna Rennix is a lovely ode to the pleasure of reading Ulysses in particular, and Joyce more generally, and how one might go about it, and how Joyce himself viewed readers’ responses to his work during his lifetime. I didn’t realise that Nora refused to read Ulysses, which does go some way to explaining some of Joyce’s…particular obsessions.
• Party in GDocs: The author of this piece, Marie Foulston, curated the V&A’s videogames exhibition last year and is a supremely creative individual; in this piece,she describes holding a houseparty in Google Docs one weekend recently, from the setup to how it went, and in so doing tells a series of beautiful small stories about how the social impulse finds a way to express itself regardless of medium. I love this very much indeed – it’s beautiful writing and I love the playfulness of the subject – but I can’t help but feel sad when I read stuff like this, that I lack the creativity and imagination to either create or participate in the same way. Still, I write a massive thing on the internet that noone reads, so I am special in my own way.
• The Paternoster: My colleagues and I were discussing office space recently, and how it might change, and lifts came up; I mentioned a Paternoster as a possibly viable replacement for current lift setups and NOONE knew what I was talking about, which is frankly a terrible indictment of the education received by the youth of today. If you don’t know what a paternoster is, read this NOW and then look up videos of them on YouTube and start lobbing your employer to get them installed as post-pandemic antiviral transportation devices. This is a lovely read, which teaches you more about the history of design and architecture than you might realise.
• Carrot Bread: This is a very short piece of writing about what it feels like when your brain stops working the way you feel like it ought to; it’s beautifully-written, and, as someone who’s discussed what having brain cancer feels like with someone with brain cancer, incredibly reminiscent of some very sad, very distant conversations.
• My Appetites: Finally this week, a triumphant piece of writing and a weird callback to a piece I featured in here a month or so ago. You may recall I featured a very funny, slightly-ranty piece by some guy in New York getting incredibly annoyed at the way in which NYT art critic Jerry Saltz consumed coffee, and going into forensic detail about why Saltz was not only wrong to drink coffee like that but was in fact an ar$ehole for so doing. I have no idea whether this article is in response to that piece or just a coincidence, but here Saltz explains in long detail exactly how he has arrived at his peculiar, individual attitude to food, and how it works within the context of his life and his marriage. I am not ashamed to say that I stopped reading this at various points to have what I believe is known as a good old cry – honestly, this is beautiful and if I read a better piece of prose about love this year I will be amazed. Please, please take the time, this is utterly sublime.

By Gideon Rubin

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. ART VIDEO! This is very good, and I normally hate videoart: “Employing the method of single frame editing, primarily focused on sound, the realistic film image transforms into a surreal, structuralist and finally even abstract film. It creates a musical composition while experimenting with the human voice and transforming language into sound and music. DONT KNOW WHAT questions classical rules of different film genres by combining elements of avant-garde film / video art and entertainment cinema.”:

1. My notes for this just say ‘french’, which shows you some of the curatorial rigour being employed here these days. Still, a re-listen suggests I included it because it’s a glorious bit of French loungepop called ‘Les Choses Invisibles’ by Alfa Rococo – the video’s a beautiful combination of animation and art styles, and the whole is very stylish in a ‘play with the windows open to the sunny streets below’ kind of way:

1. It’s meant to be Eurovision this weekend I think – is it happening? Is it not? Regardless, if you’re in the market for something that is both Eurovision AND very Curios, why not enjoy the AI Eurovision Song Contest, which took place this week and which presented AI-penned tracks by a variety of countries competing for the coveted title of Europe’s Best AI songsmith. The songs are of questionable quality, fine, but at least the whole thing’s over in 30m:

1. I love the way this is animated, and the song’s not bad at all. This is Manhorse (also, GREAT NAME) with ‘Husbands’:

1. Finally this week, this was just made live on YouTube and you should all spend the afternoon blasting it LOUD – it’s Prince, in concert in the early 90s, for the first time ever available online. It went up overnight and I’ve had it on in the background for much of this morning, and it’s as good as you’d expect – turn it up LOUD and dance around your house and play air guitar and HAVE FUN SEE YOU NEXT WEEK WE’RE OUT OF TIME AND MORE IMPORTANTLY LINKS BUT I WILL BE BACK AND THERE WILL BE MORE AND IN THE MEANTIME TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND STAY SAFE AND TRY NOT TO WORRY AND INSTEAD JUST RELAX AND TRUST IN THE FACT THAT IT WILL ALL BE FINE AND, IN ANY CASE, IT’S ALL OUT OF YOUR CONTROL ANYWAY SO YOU MAY AS WELL JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS THAT’S RIGHT KIDS LET’S EMBRACE FATALISM I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT TIME I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT TIME BYE!:

It’s almost over! We’re almost free! Summer is here! 

It’s not almost over! Shut up with your chat! NO TOUCHING OR FRATERNISING!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know who believe – the famously trustworthy and reliable gentleman currently in charge of the country, the simillarly reliable tabloid and right-wing press…It’s all so tricky! 

Still, it’s a bank holiday weekend! Which, er, means that I am writing this on a day when I can pretty much guarantee no fcuker will actually read it (plus ca changezzzzzzzzzzz) – so I’ll keep the intro mercifully short. If you do happen to see this, I hope you have a lovely three days off but that you don’t do anything stupid like have a fcuking street party; if you don’t, my wishes for you are largely immaterial so I shall keep them to myself (but know that they involve creative punishments and a long, long time). 

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and this is either the middle or the end of the beginning but not, probably, the beginning of the end (although it conceivably might still be in a more all-encompassing, pan-human sense).

OH GOD I WANT A BARBECUE SO MUCH IT PHYSICALLY HURTS. 

By Salman Khoshroo

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MUSICAL SELECTIONS, THE NEW LIL SIMZ EP WHICH IS REALLY VERY GOOD INDEED!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO FORMALLY, RESPECTFULLY AND SINCERELY ASK ANY BRANDS PLANNING ANY SORT OF ANTICIPATORY ‘WE CAN REBUILD THIS IF WE ALL WORK TOGETHER!’-STYLE INSPIROCONTENT FOR ANY POST-LOCKDOWN FUTURE TO PLEASE, PLEASE FCUK OFF:

• Facebook Is The Internet And There’s Nothing We Can Do About It: Yes, ok, fine, there’s perhaps a touch of authorial license going on my interpretation of the headline here, but at these strained and difficult times I think it’s still quite important to stare into the gaping, ravening maw of the Zuckerbergian gift horse to see exactly what’s lurking within its suspiciously wooden-feeling exterior (“Wood? Nah mate, real Arabian horse, that, honest guv”). Basically I can’t shake the feeling that we’re all going to emerge from…this even further in thrall to big tech than we were before, as evidenced by headlines like these; Facebook has launched (in a small, localised trial in Peru) Discover, an app which effectively lets users access limited quantities of text-based information from websites for free (as in, no data). This had previously been trialed as Free Basics in India and other countries, but this is a more wide-ranging service which is effectively designed as an entry-level portal to the wonderful world of the web for those shrinking percentiles of the global population who aren’t already hooked on 1s and 0s. What does Facebook get out of this? Well, aside from an unspecified amount of information on the browsing habits and interests of a whole new coterie of web users, it also gets to inculcate a load of people with the subtle-but-important message that WEB=FACEBOOK, which is sort-of important to them in the long-term. Am I being paranoid? Has my mistrust of the Big Blue Misery Factory begun to impede my ability to engage in rational commentary? I can’t even tell anymore tbh.
• Make Comedically Long Images On Insta: I fear that this is going to be wasted, what with this being a bank holiday and all, but HERE’S AN EXCITING AND VAGUELY-VOGUEISH THING YOU CAN DO ON INSTA RIGHT NOW! You can currently (I think this still works at the time of writing) use a small bug on Insta to post pictures of extraordinary length; this video shows you how. Basically if you’re a community manager you have a few hours til they shut this off to think of a BRANDED FUNNY for your client and win the fleeting-but-oh-so-comforting temporary online approval of literally thousands of clap-like-seal morons who have literally never seen anything better than, I don’t know, a REALLY LONG pint (“Can’t wait to have one of these on the next #bankholiday!!! #staysafe #isitoveryet”). I’m feeling positive about the industry I work in this week, can you tell?
• Twitter’s Rolling Out Its Threaded Conversations Thing: As trailed repeatedly since last year. It makes little practical difference to anything, other than making it marginally easier to follow the train of a multiparticipant thread, although given that every third conversation on Twitter at the moment seems to be people shouting into the ether about WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT AND FEEL you might want to give it a miss for a bit.
• Twitter Testing Profanity Warning Before Tweeting: Only a test, but given it’s sort-of worked a bit to reduce bullying on Insta, it seems reasonable that Twitter consider a similar sort of tactic to try and take a bit of the hate off the platform; it’s testing a feature whereby if you hit send on a message calling someone an ‘effing see’ you will be gently asked whether you’ve thought through the potential effect of those words on the effing see in question and whether you really want to say that. You will still be free to carry on defining the effing see in your own choice of anglo-saxon, but the idea is that you’ll pause and maybe take the opportunity to #bekind (oh god) instead. I think that this is obviously a non-terrible idea, though I equally worry that it’s going to see a resurgence in the sort of appalling compound tweeswears that were rampant a few years back as people try and get round the automated hatecatching software.
• Make Hirst Paintings On Snapchat: Kudos to Damien Hirst, who by creating a (fun and quite impressive) digital version of his famous ‘Spin’ series of paintings as an AR toy in Snapchat (snarkier critics than me might point and laugh at the fact that once again Hirst is trailing in the wake of Jeff Koons, whose AR balloon dog sculpture was the inaugural Snap art project a couple of years back) has managed to shamelessly demonstrate exactly how laughable that they have sold as well and for as much as they have. It’s really quite fun, though – select your colours, spin the canvas, hang it wherever you want – and, well, it’s something to do, isn’t it?
• Twitch Revamps Channel Pages: Useful for streamers, less interesting for anyone else; this redesign does make it easier to see a streamers past content, when they’re next live, etc, in a move that makes it slightly more adjacent to actual, old-school scheduled broadcasting.
• Insta Influencer Engagement Discovery Tool: Thanks to Alex for sending this to me; no idea how long this is going to work for, as Insta’s famously disinclined to let stuff like this exist for long, but while it does it might be of use; this Chrome plugin lets you analyse any Insta account you like for its average engagement rate; useful when trying to decide which relentlessly upbeat content-monkey you’re going to hire to shill your gambling site this week.
• The VICE Guide to 2030: Ordinarily I’d put this in the longreads section, being as it is a collection of writings and essays speculating on what the next decade is going to look like, particularly from the point of view of GenZ; on the other, the essays aren’t, if I’m honest, that interesting, and to my mind the main value comes from all the survey data that they’ve gathered to gauge young people’s attitudes to work, leisure, etc etc, now and in the future, which you can use to pad out all of your strategy work for any youth-focused brand for at least the next few months.
• Spotify Listen Together: This is a nice idea by Spotify, riffing both on the fact that SO MANY PEOPLE EVERYWHERE use it, and the fact that everyone feels a bit lonely and isolated right now; the site shows you instances around the world when two users started listening to the same song at EXACTLY THE SAME TIME, thereby illustrating something really important and fundamental about the human connection to music and each other (or something; sorry, I start to drift off at the high concept, in general). The ungrateful, selfish part of me wishes that there was a build here that allowed for the creation of temporary chat connections between two simultaneous listeners – maybe a 60s window, during which you were allowed to only communicate via song titles or something, just to try and limit the trolling potential – but that’s just me being greedy; this is really cute.
• Airbnb Talent: Airbnb, you may have heard, canned a whole bunch of staff this week, in one of the less-surprising events of the past few weeks. Its founder, Bryan Chesky, was widely-praised for the comms around it, and this statement in particular; on the one hand, it’s well-written, sounds sincere, and attempts to be reassuring to the remaining 75% of staff that there is a plan to secure the business and their futures; on the other, well, he’s still a billionaire (yes, yes, I know, fcuk off you tedious pinko, etc etc etc). Regardless, I think this site is a really nice touch – it’s effectively a shop window for all the staff that they have laid off, letting other employers who might be hiring browse a list of people who have Airbnb experience and who are now available. I feel the word ‘classy’ has literally lost all meaning through online overuse over the past decade, but this almost approaches it.
• The Gucci Mascara Hunt: Look, you may not think that the best way to finish off this brief section about updates to s*c**l m*d** platforms and general brand communications news is with a Gucci-themed bowling game in which you attempt to…er…roll over mascaras with a pink bowling ball, but let me reassure you that it really is (this is…not very good, but at the same time I spent 10+ minutes messing with it the other day, which suggests either that it’s got some sort of surprisingly-effective gameplay hooks or that my critical faculties have been forever-fcuked by the past couple of months).

By Gabriel Alcala

NEXT, HAVE TWO HOURS OF WHAT THE MAN WHO MIXED IT DESCRIBES AS ‘LEVITATING BONGO DISCO’!

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY CRY IF IT SMELLS BARBECUE THIS WEEKEND, PT.1:

• The COVID-19 Research Explorer: Academic-but-useful (if you’re an academic) resource from Google, this, which has created this search engine which is trained specifically on the 50,000+ scholarly articles related to COVID-19 and which is designed to respond well to natural language search queries rather than more traditional keyword-recognition-type ones. So, for example, you might ask it ‘what are the diagnostic markers of COVID and how do they vary by age cohort?’ (or you might if you knew what any of those words practically meant; not sure that I do tbh) rather than ‘COVID diagnostic age’, say. On the offchance that any of you REALLY want to delve into the research literature, or alternatively if you want another weapon with which to win the increasingly tedious online arguments about THE RIGHT STRATEGY, this is potentially helpful.
• The NHS Tracking App Code: It’s all on Github; if this stuff means anything to you, take a look. My timeline seems to be neatly-split between “I am NEVER touching this, Cummings is stealing all my data” and “everyone else already has your data ffs, stop being so precious about it”; fwiw, whilst I’m not personally wild about the idea of having another entity tracking my movements I think it’s important at times like this to distinguish between the party and the machinery of government (to whit: I think the Tories are cnuts and I despise this government and all its previous n iterations, but this is being run by the NHS and civil servants and I am, perhaps naively, still inclined to believe in a degree of separation between the institutions). Also, to that person who @ed me on Twitter with something along the lines of “well, but Google Maps doesn’t take all your data and use it to influence elections, whereas we know that this administration does nudge nudge wink wink” – erm, you really haven’t been paying attention to how any of this works, have you?
• BioVyzr: WE ARE ALL ALLOWED OUT AGAIN! Except we’re not! Yet! Still, regardless, we may well be allowed out again sometime, and so in preparation for that I present to you the BIOVYZER (God I love that spelling – so future! So redolent of the ‘XXXtreme!’ era branding of the early-2010s!), a crowdfunding campaign for which has smashed its funding goal by…lots with five days to go (at the time of writing). Basically this is a giant, clear dome that you wear over your head, making you look almost exactly like a 21C reboot of Lost In Space’s famous, clunking robot assistant ‘Robbie’. There’s a lot to love about this; the fact that they openly state uptop that they only have a ‘working demo’ of this rather than anything that’s actually ready for market or properly-tested (“I DON’T CARE SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!”), the fact that they unashamedly use ‘unprecedented design for unprecedented times’, the fact that it happily shows BUSINESSPEOPLE in SUITS, smiling broadly as they prepare to leave the Terrordome for another productive day at the socially-distanced content mines…Honestly, if you showed this to someone from the 1980s they would tell you that it was a spoof product ad from Total Recall or something (fcuking hell, how much do I wish that it was just a spoof product ad).
• Hypercam: Are you still having fun playing with your Zoom backgrounds and bringing ‘funny’ mugs to show everyone at the 915 standup? Would you like something better? If you can be bothered with the slight jiggerypokery required to run the output from this website through your camera (it’s not actually that difficult and they tell you how), then you can add a wonderful touch of the cyber-surreal to your appearance at your next meeting. Hypercam lets you apply all sorts of odd, slightly-kaleidoscopic effects to your camera feed, turning your face into a sort of weird, infinitely-tesselated pyramidal Godhead, say, or a spinning cube moving infinitely through the void. Which will make a nice change for your workmates if nothing else. By Kim Albrecht, to whom credit and kudos.
• Alan Menken: Look, I know that Web Curios isn’t something which can ordinarily be said to bring much in the way of ‘joy’ or ‘lighthearted relief’ into the lives of its vanishingly-small readership, but I like to think that every now and again I buck the trend and bring you something that is genuinely happymaking. So it is with this website, celebrating the life and work of composer Alan Menken, who worked on musicals like Aladdin, Little Shop of Horrors, Sister Act…If you’re into singalong kids’ movies, or musical theatre in general, or just, generally, if you need a smol pick-me-up, click on the link – I guarantee you you will have a smile on your face within a minute (honestly, I REALLY mean this – it happened to me, and I am a miserable, hopeless, dreamless husk who fcuking despises musical theatre). Absolutely charming, and a really nice website to boot. Oh, turn the volume UP.
• Wonder of Wonder Art: Now turn the volume back down again; this is VERY LOUD. Still, it’s a fun little site that, if you can make sure that they have headphones in, your kids might enjoy; you can draw a simple 2d character and then watch as the site animates it to dance happily in digital space to a Hatsune Miku tune (that, in case you were wondering, is why I suggest you lower the sound). Infuriating within approximately 30s to my middle-aged ears, meaning that if you have <10s they will rinse this til doomsday.
• IN C: This is beautiful little looping piano toy; there was a similar one for Philip Glass a few years back, but this is all its own thing: “Play your own unique version of Terry Riley’s “In C” with the help of five automated bot performers. Every bot plays the same sequence of 53 short musical patterns. Each bot will keep repeating the same pattern until you decide it should move on to the next. Over time, different musical and visual combinations will emerge.” Try having this open in a browser, fiddling a bit and then leaving it for a while, tweaking every five minutes; honestly, the effect is mesmerising and a pretty perfect example of how incredible rule-based compositions can sound.
• The All-In Challenge: When you hear the term ‘challenge’, what does it mean to you? Would you perhaps think that it involves doing something taxing, that pushes you mentally, physically or emotionally, something that you wouldn’t ordinarily do but which you want to achieve for…some reason or another? Would you think that ‘a famous auctioning off an experience with themselves’ counts as a challenge? No, me neither, and yet here we are. The All-In Challenges (NOT A CHALLENGE) is a US thing whereby a bunch of famouses have SACRIFICED themselves by offering up some of their time, or VIP experiences at one of their performances, for people to enter into a charity raffle to win, all in aid of efforts to support health and support workers during the pandemic. So you can buy a $10 ticket to win dinner with Mariah Carey, or a round of golf with Tiger Woods, or to cohost the Ellen show, or alternatively you can not do this and instead continue asking why it is that people who in many cases have net worths that run comfortably into nine fcuking figures seem to think that the best use of their time and money is exhorting people who very much don’t have that sort of money to part with some of it in exchange for the chance at a fleeting, stilted encounter with an actual celebrity. Up to you really.
• The OK Closet Clearout: Growing up in the UK in the 80s, America was still a shiny beacon of glossy excitement, and the place that you were very much convinced that England was a slightly-crap knockoff copy of; everything they did we did too, just on a significantly-smaller budget. So it is with the OK Closet Clearout; just like the All-In Challenge, it’s a celebrity fundraiser – except in this case, rather than a night of gossip’n’luudes with Mariah you get to big on a pair of spangly slingbacks once worn by Jane McDonald off The Cruise. Ok, fine, maybe not that exact thing, but with approximately two days to go til this ends there are some absolute BARGAINS to be had – Alexandra Burke’s DKNY coat, Craig Revel Horwood’s bowtie, SO MANY EVENING GOWNS OWNED (and, hopefully, well-laundered) BY KATIE PRICE!!! Honestly, get in there – you deserve a treat.
• Google Read Along: Parents, how’s it going? Feel like you’ve got the measure of this whole “I am with my kids all the time” thing? Don’t know why, but I think that the response to this might differ quite significantly along gender lines. Anyway, if you feel like you might have read The Tiger Who Came To Tea (or whatever the current obsession in your household is) more times than one human ought to have to bear, perhaps check out this BRAND NEW app from Google and consider outsourcing some of the more onerous, repetitious aspects of bedtime to a machine. “Read Along has an in-app reading buddy that listens to your young learner read aloud, offers assistance when they struggle and rewards them with stars when they do well – guiding them along as they progress. It works best for children who already have some basic knowledge of the alphabet.” I haven’t tried this, so usual caveats apply – I imagine that it’s very American (though there may well be localised versions, no idea), but if you can get past that then it seems like it could be a nice way of perhaps letting your kids do some self-directed reading practice; the Ts&Cs suggest that there’s nothing odd or nefarious happening with the app in terms of data collection, so take a look.
• Nebula 75: I feel the interest Venn Diagram between this and ‘adult men who like Doctor Who’ might be quite circular. Nebula 75 is a BRAND NEW Supermarionation production – for those of you who for some reason don’t remember, Supermarionation was the name given to the production techniques pioneered by Gerry Anderson in Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlett, etc, in which wonderfully-expressive but still, fundamentally, very, very wooden, puppets had all sorts of exciting, retroscifi-themed adventures. NEBULA-75 is “a short-form puppet drama that follows in the tradition of 1960s favourites while offering something brand new at the same time. Although team members from around the world contributed remotely to pre and post production, the entirety of the filming for NEBULA-75 was undertaken by a crew of three who happened to already live together in a small flat in London. Their living room was transformed into a makeshift movie studio – with bookshelves, cardboard boxes and other household objects becoming the interior of the show’s hero spacecraft. This flat was also fortunately home to many of the puppets, props, and costumes that have been accumulated over the course of different productions.” Whether or not you have a warm, nostalgic, Findus Crispy Pancake-scented memory of lying belly-down on a carpet watching Captain Scarlett, or whether you’re really anxious for me to stop using references from a time before you were born, this really is a lot of fun, and there’s something endlessly-charming about the puppetry and the commitment to the whole thing.
• Cheers NHS: Can everyone just agree to stop the clapping now? It’s starting to feel a touch desultory and sad; perhaps (here’s a thought) we could all demonstrate our support for the NHS by, I don’t know, not behaving like feckless cnuts? And paying our taxes? Or, alternatively, but donating to this initiative, which lets you buy a takeaway for frontline staff, provided via JustEat vouchers. This is a nice idea, but I do feel slightly uncomfortable about the fact that once again it seems that the poor fcuks working to deliver this stuff are being gently forgotten and brushed aside. Still, if you want to put a few quid towards getting a frontline worker a pizza, this is a seemingly-efficient way of doing it (thanks to Josh for the tip).
• BBC Backgrounds: I said I wasn’t going to do Zoom backgrounds anymore, but then the BBC released these yesterday afternoon and, well, I relented. I haven’t checked through all of them, but there are various classics like the Queen Vic, the set of Playschool, etc etc. Slightly upset that they didn’t include the Broom Cupboard from my childhood, but then again I am a forty-year-old man and should probably stop with the tedious nostalgia for a time that I will never again know and a youth that is crumbling to dust as I speed away from it towards an increasingly-grey future.
• VOMA: Stuart Semple, who you will know from Curios past as the creator of anti-Anish Kapoor superblack paint amongst other things, launched this Kickstarter this week – it’s to raise the final few quid to finish building VOMA, described as “A fully immersive virtual art museum built to give anyone a chance to connect around great art.” Regular readers (ha!) will know that I’ve featured a variety of these digital art galleries over the years, most of which fall under the heading of ‘interesting concept but I don’t want to spend more than about 5 minutes here’. Details of the exact spec of what Semple’s planning and how it will work are scarce at this stage, but if he’s only after 5k you’d expect that this is nearly-done – if this whets your appetite, and you can afford a few quid, chuck him a fiver: “We are working on a gorgeous amalgamation of considered curation, visionary architecture, game design, CGI, and global community interactivity. We are making a digital institution that’s capable of showcasing art in ways audiences have not had the chance to experience before and if we are lucky, a digital legacy that will live for years to come.” So there.

By Helena Hauss

WHY NOT SPEND THE LONG WEEKEND GETTING ACQUAINTED WITH THE BACK CATALOGUE OF CLASSIC DC PUNK LABEL DISCHORD RECORDS, INCLUDING STRAIGHT EDGE GRANDADDIES FUGAZI? IT’S ALL FREE TO STREAM!

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY CRY IF IT SMELLS BARBECUE THIS WEEKEND, PT.2:

• The Pudding Music Challenge: The Pudding continues to make unparalleled data-y interactive experiment things; this is SUCH a clever idea. Tell it the year of your birth and it will test you on how well you recognise a bunch of different songs from when you grew up; based on the extent to which you do, the site’s compiling a database of which tracks have the most longevity and cross-generational appeal. Not only is it really fun to play with – I recalled far more than I would have expected to – but it’s a really smart way of gathering useful data. You could easily imagine using this sort of technique to create playlists for multigenerational car journeys, populated only by tracks that hit the recognition sweetspot across multiple generations. OOH, that’s a GREAT idea for an internet radio station – Roadtrip Radio, in which you plug in the preferred genres and ages of the travellers, and your destination, and it creates an appropriate playlist, long enough to get you to your destination, populated by tracks pleasing(ish) to all ears. SOMEONE MAKE THIS IT IS A GENUINELY GOOD IDEA.
• AR Bosch: Would you like to experience the grotesqueries from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights via the magic of AR? You’ll need an iPhone to play with it, but there’s probably 5-10m of entertainment in here for you as you make the weird lizard-bird-things march through your livingroom for your amusement.
• This Fursona Does Not Exist: It’s like 2019 all over again! As if we’ve just traveled back in time 12m, this is another of those “Hey look! A whole bunch of Xs, generated by an AI!” websites, where in this case ‘X’ stands for ‘cartoon drawings of anthropomorphised animals, drawn in the style of those ‘fursona’ portraits that furries get done of their animal alter ego’. Want a seemingly-infinite parade of grinning, in-many-cases-unpleasantly-sexual-looking cartoon critters staring at you? Fine, you weirdo, click away (NB I know that furry fandom is mostly not in fact about sex at all, but you have to agree that a weird and distressing number of these cartoons have ‘come-to-bed’ eyes) (does my thinking this mean I’ve crossed something of a line? Is…is…this a Rubicon?)).
• Scunthorpe Sans: Another silly-but-very-well-executed idea by Matt Round at Vole, who’s invented a font based on the old Parliamentarian spellcheck fcukup (for those of you who don’t recall, back in the early-00s an overzealous profanity filter on the House of Commons servers meant that a lot of email for the Honorable Member for Scunthorpe was never delivered); the idea is that the font automatically detects when its being used to write BAD WORDS and redacts the offending letters – except for Scunthorpe, which it leaves intact. Lovely, and the sort of thing I might ask Website Owner Paul ‘Imperica’ Squires to install on here so that I could stop having to bowdlerise myself for the profanity filters (and also, so that Curios might look like a lovely-yet-nonsensical blackout poem).
• Cut & Paste AR: This is just a video demo, but the potential applications are amazing. I won’t try and describe it; just watch, and think about all the AMAZING things you could do with this, and then think about all the terrible things that will end up being done with it. Honestly, this is slightly jaw-droppingly future.
• Marco Polo: This is a nice idea, and might be worth investigating for people who struggle to arrange videocall times, or whose potential interlocutors might struggle with setting it up on their computers. Marco Polo is a video walkie-talkie app (this is a bad description, fine, but bear with me); it’s basically an asynchronous videomessaging service, where you communicate with call-and-response video. Record a video of yourself, send it to your friend via the app, they respond when they have a chance. Nothing that you can’t theoretically do on other apps, but I imagine the very pointed single-function ‘THIS IS HOW THE APP WORKS JUST DO THIS ONE THING’ simplicity might be appealing / useful to certain demographics.
• Puzzlebreak: So how’s all this digital, at-home arts entertainment working out for you? I know someone who did the Moulin Rouge Secret Sofa thing the other week, which apparently ended up being a sort of weird, softcore Zoom-based bawdfest – is that what it’s like? I’m going to try and attend a Nina Conti gig on Sunday, which I imagine will be incredibly awkward and quite possibly personally-humiliating, so I’ll let you know how that goes. If you’re in the market for some slightly more gentle digital fun, this might be an interesting option – Puzzlebreak is an escape room in Seattle which has gone FULLY DIGITAL in lockdown, and is offering Zoom escape rooms, with a live host/gamesmaster, for teams to try – I found this via a glowing writeup somewhere, which praised it for being family-friendly, well-organised and lots of fun, so if you fancy it and can make the appalling time difference to the UK work, might be worth a go (you have to pay, obvs, which is only fair).
• Pinnit: Would you like your calendar reminders and ‘to do’ items to appear as unbudgeable notifications on your phone’s lockscreen til you’ve completed them? No, sounds awful, but that’s exactly what Pinnit does, creating yet another constant reminder of your own weakness and laziness and inadequacy each time you try and procrastinate. The only possible reason I can conceive of to bother with this is to install it covertly on someone else’s phone to then make it start posting a series of increasingly aggressive demands of its owner; perhaps, though, you are a better-if-weaker-willed person than I am and might find it personally-useful.
• Spiritbomb: In a week in which it was announced that digital pinup-type creation Lil Miquela has signed with a talent agency, it seems appropriate to signpost the next evolution of the ‘virtual talent’ concept – VIRTUAL MUSICIANS! Ignoring the fact that this isn’t a new idea at all – hello Hatsune Miku, hello Gorillaz, this is so beautifully, perfectly mad. There’s no actual music on here yet – that will come later, let’s worry about the important stuff first, like the digital avatars and their vibe and their ethos. No, seriously, listen to this – do you reckon you’re going to be a fan of ‘iZi.i’ (I would make more fun of the name were it not seemingly entirely on trend with the Muskspawn), who’s described on the site as “BORN FROM THE APOCALYPTIC TIME-SPACE SCHISM – PROGRAMMER OF THE DEMIURGE ANTIDOTE – FUTURESHOCK-PROOF PEDDLER OF ECSTATIC NOISE”? Or do you think that ANTI-FRAGILE is more your speed, their vibe being thusly encapsulated: “DIETY [sic] OF RENEWAL GROWING FROM DETRITUS – LONE OMNISCIENT CONNECTIVE TISSUE”. This is properly bonkers, but I for one am absolutely stanning for each and every single one of these crazy CG kids.
• The Google Lockdown Triathlon: This came to me via Alex Micu, and after escape rooms is the latest creative use of Google docs I’ve seen since quarantine, using Google Slides to create a multiplayer ‘triathlon’ that you and some colleagues can play. It requires a little bit of setup, but is really nicely done, uses the tech in a couple of neat ways, and is a far better use of your time than whatever you actually did at work this week.
• Yourself Online: Slightly amazed that there aren’t more of these services. Yourself Online is a low-cost reputation-cleaner for socials, which promises to help you clean up the filthy footprint of your disgusting digital past so as to help you appear squeaky-clean to potential employers, spouses, etc. No idea how effective it is, but I couldn’t help imagine when I found this that it was actually a front for a massive blackmail sting, which would be quite funny imho.
• The Diary of Anne Frank: Speaking of Zoom entertainments, this is a really interesting idea which works far, far better than you might expect. Park Square Theatre is a venue (and company) in Minneapolis which has repurposed its production of The Diary of Anne Frank and produced it entirely via Zoom instead. It’s available to watch for free as a videorecording on the site; either in two halves or scene-by-scene; it takes a little while for you to adjust to the concept, but the particular nature of the narrative means that the direct-to-camera windowed delivery actually suits the script rather well, and I found myself getting unexpectedly drawn in after 15m or so. Aside from anything else, it’s a really good example of how to bend the videocalling medium to your will; well done everyone involved, it’s really clever.
• Find Your Local Football Team: This site uses Voronoi diagrams to help you identify which football team is geographically-closest to any given location, thereby letting you determine once-and-for-all whether or not someone is a glory hunting scumbag or a proud supporter of their actual local team. Pointless, other than as a tool by which to really wind up a very particular sort of person on Football Socials.
• Textradio: I can’t remember who it was, but someone produced a platform variant of this a while back; the idea being that you could record text conversations and then play them back in realtime, so you could see what was being typed in a conversation, getting a feel for rhythms of thought, etc, via the pace of the writing, as well as taking in the ostensible meaning of the words. I find the cadence of typing a really interesting indicator of thought, personally, and the idea behind this site – interviews conducted in a Gdoc, replayed in realtime so you can read the interview but also see the errors, the retractions, etc, as they happened – is fascinating to me.
• Most Common Words: Trying to learn a language but not a fan of Duolingo, Rosetta Stone et al? This might be worth a look: “An effective way to start learning a language by learning the most common 1000 words. Learn the top words in Spanish, French, German and more and progress faster than ever before.” I can’t vouch for the ‘effective’ bit, but the rest seems true (this is the standard of journalistic rigour I hope you’ve come to know and love round here).
• Mac-a-Mug: A bit of oldschool Apple Mac emulation here, specifically to give you the chance to design a mugshot in the style of the graphics of crap old Apples in the bad days before Steve made it all OK again. Your mileage on this will vary largely depending on either your nostalgia for the graphics and interface or your ability to actually make decent-looking stuff out of what is basically a mugshot version of MS Paint; if you’ve a modicum of skill, though, there’s an hour or so to be had designing new, old-school criminal avatars for yourself and everyone you know.

By Jordana Kalman

NEXT, CAST ASIDE YOUR SHAME AND INHIBITIONS AND JUST ENJOY THIS TRULY STELLAR COMPILATION MIX OF LATE-90s/EARLY-00s BOY AND GIRLBAND POP WHICH YOU WILL WANT TO HATE AND WHICH YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO HELP BUT FIND STRANGELY ALLURING!

THE SECTION WHICH MIGHT ACTUALLY CRY IF IT SMELLS BARBECUE THIS WEEKEND, PT.3:

• Magic Puzzles: It’s been…what, seven weeks? However long, it’s likely that you might be running a bit low on entertainments, particularly the non-digital sorts; I imagine the appetite for ‘let’s make a fort out of spaghetti!’-type projects is perhaps slightly less than it perhaps was a month ago, put it that way. Still, if you’re in the market for FRESH FAMILY FUN, you might want to look at this Kickstarter for a three-in-one puzzle, which has a whole load of additional mystery metagame stuff built into its design. If you’re the sort of person who fondly remembers Masquerade and wishes they still did things like that, this might be right up your alley; it does look really quite fun, very intricately-plotted, and it’s smashed its target with a month to go, so looks likely to actually get made. Obviously when it might actually show up is unknowable, but I think it’s reasonably safe to predict that jigsaws are going to be a popular pastime for a little while yet.
• Re.ply: This is literally Curiouscat for people who are too embarrassed to have a Curiouscat. I have nothing else to say about it.
• Rainy Day Kids: Thanks to stranger on Twitter ‘Mister Bruce’, who sent me this project they’ve made collecting potentially-useful sites and projects and things to keep kids busy during thes…no, sorry, I can’t be bothered to find a way of expressing the now, make up your own. Anyway, if you’re after another selection of things to do online with your kids that may pass enough time for you to maybe do something that isn’t kidwrangling, this could be useful.
• Rally: Rally is ANOTHER videocalling platform, whose single identifying factor appears to be a Houseparty-ish ability to move easily between conversational spaces as the mood takes you, much as though you were moving between groups of people at a party. Included less because I think it’s a particularly novel application of the technology, and more because I’m interested in the different ways that these platforms are going to try and replicate some of the serendipity and organic movement of real life interactions in digital spaces.
• The GTA Aliens: There’s no sensible way of explaining this – in the videogame Grand Theft Auto Online, players have recently taken to amusing themselves by dividing into two opposing factions, green aliens and purple aliens. Allegiance to either faction is connoted by donning a green or purple jumpsuit in-game, grabbing a baseball bat, and running around beating seven shades of virtual crap out of the other side – that’s literally it. This is a TikTok account run by a member of the green faction, and, honestly, there is something so wonderfully, Keystone Cops-ishly, Benny Hill-esque about watching green and purple videogame men have at each other with sticks. Have…have I been online too long? Maybe I have. Anyway, if your brand has a significant overlap with ‘people who play GTA online’ you can get some low-effort traction by declaring yourselves Team Green or Team Purple – there, that’s your ‘work relevant’ snippet, happy?
• Global Question of the Day: Unexpectedly-compelling site which each day poses a different, simple, multiple-choice question of its visitors, recording the answer and country of origin of each submission to build up a picture of what the world thinks about stuff. At present it’s all relatively low-stakes things like ‘favourite colour of the rainbow’ or ‘best spice girl’, but I’m really hoping they’re going to pivot to things like ‘do you consider man to be free?’ or ‘how many days after the plane crash would you start looking hungrily at the remaining survivors?’ as the site develops.
• Go Book A Trip: This is a really lovely concept by online independent US bookseller bookstore.org; it’s presented as a travel website, offering you trips to a variety of exotic and far-flung locales, at suspiciously-low prices… Click on a destination, however, and discover that OH NO IT’S A BOOK BOOKS HELP YOU TRAVEL IN YOUR MIND DO YOU SEE???? A really nice little idea and execution, this.
• Cruising ‘72: Pure 70s Americana in this photoset of teenagers cruising up and down Van Nuys Boulevard, which according to this piece was THE place for teens to come and show off their cars and their hair to each other while they attempted to find somewhere to do some fingering. These are wonderful photos, but the main reason I’m including them is that looking at these I was struck for the first time about quite how much 17 year old kids right now are missing out on; it’s hard not to look at these and think back to whatever you were doing in your 17th, 18th, 18th summer and feel incredibly sorry for those unable to go out and do really, really stupid things in pursuit of sex and cheap highs.
• All Of Star Wars, With Toys: Do you like Star Wars? Great, click this link! Honestly, it’s impossible for me to find any enthusiasm at all for anything to do with Star Wars – another thing the internet has definitively killed! – but, for those of you for whom the original film is still some sort of Proustian object, this detailed and obsessional (almost) shot-by-shot recreation of the movie using photos of toys (no, really, I promise this is a lot better than it sounds) will probably scratch some sort of primal itch.
• The Stanford Pupper: STILL looking for a lockdown project? Why? Everything will DEFINITELY be back to normal soon! Regardless, if you’re one of those GLOOM-MONGERS still expecting us to be stuck indoors for a little while longer yet and after a long-term engineering project to not only keep you occupied by also to equip you with a quadripedal robot companion then this will be PERFECT for you. Stanford University has published this guide to building an open-sourced little dogrobotthing – a bit like the Boston Dynamics ‘Spot’ robots, but significantly smaller and (at least in the promo video onsite) significantly less reminiscent of a Black Mirror murderbot. You’ll need to spend a few hundred quid on parts to make it, which I appreciate puts it out of the reach of some, but if you can afford it and you’re the sort of person for whom instructions like ‘solder the hydraulics CPU to the motherboard casing’ (yes, I know that that’s nonsensical, please don’t point it out) hold no fear. NB – as ever with these things, Web Curios accepts no liability for potential future sentience and eventual uprising of the Stanford Pupper.
• The Design Squiggle: This was new to me as a concept, but it’s rather wonderful. The design squiggle is a concept proposed by Damien Newman, who came up with it a way of illustrating the design process; you’ll look at this and think it’s a p1sstake, but I promise that the longer you think about it the more it makes sense and starts too look like one of the better illustrations of design, or indeed any creative process, that I’ve seen. If nothing else, this is one to save in your folder of ‘IMAGES I CAN USE TO SOUND LIKE I ABSOLUTELY KNOW WHAT THE FCUK I AM TALKING ABOUT BUT WHICH ARE INTERESTING ENOUGH THAT I ALSO LOOK LIKE I’M SLIGHTLY LEFTFIELD AND THEREFORE ‘CREATIVE’’ (all of you working in ‘strategy’? I know you have one of those, don’t lie to me).
• Boxabl: The concept of this isn’t new – buy a whole, self-contained dwelling which you can have delivered to you, ready-assembled, to plonk wherever you like, dropped off a flatbed truck – but I very much liked the shiny-if-implausible graphic of how the house unfolds, and I figure that this sort of thing is going to become more popular as people look to move their ageing relatives into closer proximity with them in an era of social distance, whilst at the same time definitely not actually wanting said parents inhabiting the same house as them.
• Open Processing: I know that I always make fun of those of you who try and improve yourselves in any way – I am a charming and supportive friend! – but I also know that a few of you are using this time to try and learn a few new skills, and I applaud you for it (no really! I genuinely do!). Those of you who are dabbling in code – or indeed those of you who have already dabbled and are now ankle-deep in the digital waters of Perl or whatever (man, that metaphor really didn’t need to be there, did it?) – might like Open Processing, which is ‘a community of designers and coders focusing on algorithmic design’. There are all sorts of examples and resources on here, but the most interesting bit to my mind is the gallery of live examples that other users can upvote and discuss; there’s so much interesting work here, and so many snippets of gorgeous algodesign to explore. Even if you’re not a codeperson yourself, should you have any interest in what code can make then this is definitely worth exploring a bit.
• Animal Meditations: Thanks Rob for sending me this – I am about as likely to meditate as I am to be canonised, but for those of you of a more reflective and self-caring outlook, you might enjoy this: “Animal Meditations are guided meditations that take listeners inside the experience of being a specific animal in their habitat. Calming and otherworldly, the meditations are exercises in imaginative empathy, connecting the listener to the consciousness and experience of wild animals.” I presume ‘the experience of being a specific animal in their habitat’ doesn’t extend to, say, ‘the experience of being a rabbit being chased by a hungry fox’, as I don’t imagine that would provide the reflective experience they’re advertising; presumably, though, it’s all ‘oh you’re a sleepy dormouse on an ear of corn, feel your earth chakra connect’ so you’ll be fine.
• Violate Geneva: A Twitter account recording whether or not videogames let you break the Geneva Convention whilst playing them. A distressing number, it turns out, absolutely do. Not only funny, but a surprisingly-effective way of learning exactly what the articles of the Geneva Convention in fact are, and thereby of becoming a slightly-better person than you were beforehand.
• The Etymology List Generator: READERS WHO LIKE WORDS AND LANGUAGE! This will absolutely be your favourite thing on here this week, longreads excepted – a site by Angela Pasquino which, wonderfully, lets you plug in any word you like and then offers you ALL of the translations of said word, helping you explore its etymology, seeing how different languages cluster, and helping you gain a topline understanding of how it moves and evolves. It is SO interesting; Pasquino launched it recently and was overwhelmed by the interest; she’s currently seeking small donations and/or tech assistance to help keep it stable and working under the weight of traffic, so if this is a project that appeals then I’d encourage you to offer whatever help you’re able.
• VirusPatterns: My friend Paul sent me a photo the other day of a “5G CONSPIRACY” poster which, amongst other EXCELLENT claims, included the frankly jaw-dropping ‘fact’ that there are no such things as ‘viruses’ and that their very concept is something cooked up by the mainstream media and the lizard elites to keep the good, honest people of the world scared and in thrall. So, er, now you know. Still, if you’re vaguely interested in the LIES, this is an interesting site that uses lightly-interactive video to help you explore the shapes of different viruses (THAT DON’T EXIST) and how their shape determines how they function and what they do. Honestly, this really is fascinating (AND UNTRUE) and is actually quite a nice example of how to present video in an easily-navigable way (LIES).
• Selfie 2 Waifu: Upload a selfie, get a version of yourself as a wide-eyed anime-style woman, or ‘waifu’ to use the parlance of some of the worst people on the internet. On the subject of ‘waifu’, by the way, can I please recommend the article on the concept and its relation to the Japanese concept of ‘otaku’ and ‘hikkikomori’ in the latest Imperica mag? It’s good, honest.
• Design Your Own Animal Crossing Island: I think I featured one of these prior to the game’s launch, but this is MUCH shinier. Even if you’re not in possession of a Switch or in thrall to Nook, you can still get involved with the landscaping ‘action’ via the medium of this browsertoy which lets you create very authentic-looking ACNH islands in a vaguely Sim City-ish way. Either you can use this to create your own idealised world to imagine inhabiting as the world goes to tits or, more amusingly, you can use this to create a perfect-but-better replica of a partner’s island, pointing out to them how much more awesome it would be if they only made it the way you suggest. Up to you really.
• Vertigo: I don’t really want to explain this too much. A tiny little short story-in-a-smol-game-type thing, this is exquisite imho. Very simple, but beautifully-written and the music really works.
• Satellite: I am pretty certain I have included this, or a variant on it, before, but fcuk it; these are extra…no, FFS MATT STOP IT! Ahem. As I was saying, you may recall this from a Curios past, but it appeared again this morning and I lost 20 early minutes to it before I managed to escape its gravity (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE???). Satellite is very simple – you just have to keep your ship in orbit around the planet for as long as possible. Except it’s not simple, at all, and you will keep on coming back to try and eke out another few revolutions. Simple but compelling, I can’t promise it will keep you sane but it will definitely pass some time (which is all we’re hoping for these days, right?).

By Lorenzo Gritti

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, CLOSE OUT THE LONG WEEKEND WITH THIS SLIGHTLY AMBIENT-Y FUNK MIX BY JOHAN SOLO!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Megaestruturas: Only one this week, but it’s a good one; this is a Spanish (I presume) Tumblr collecting designs and illustrations of imagined mass-habitation structures from the past. Some of these designs are GREAT, all of them are very reminiscent of the orange-and-brown 70s, and quite a few might be worth revisiting in an era in which we’re all potentially killer viral nodes.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Ixta Belfrage: This week I have started feeling the absence of restaurants SO KEENLY (I know, I know, middle-class woes, no violins); this Insta feed, property of chef Ixta Belfrage, who works with Ottolenghi as a recipe developer, honestly made me do a very smol hungry sad, but in a good way. GOD I MISS DUCK SOUP.
• The Nook Street Market: Honestly, whilst I couldn’t actually give a fcuk about the actual mechanics of playing the game, I find everything about how people are using Animal Crossing totally fascinating. This Insta account is that of Nook Street Market, which is an outfit designing and selling clothes for use in the game, often replicating real brand designs, and, I think, occasionally in collaboration with the actual designers/labels. If you’re not in part interested in how this is finally normalising a trade in digital goods amongst a whole new coterie of people then, well, you’ve probably got a fuller and more rounded life than I do, fine.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• All Your Questions on Corona, Answered!: Not really! Instead, this is a fabulous piece of writing by Dave Eggers in the New York Times this week, perfectly-skewering the maddeningly-inconsistent rhetoric from almost everyone in a position of authority (or, frankly, not in one) about WHAT SHOULD BE DONE and WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN. Perfect timing, really, after this week’s display of quite stellar central control of the press apparatus by No.10 (as a brief aside, whilst I don’t doubt that the frontpages on Wednesday about the shagging doctor were in-no-small-part helped along by No.10, I’d probably point at the total sh1tshow they’ve made of communicating what may or may not be happening on Monday as evidence that perhaps we shouldn’t give them quite so much credit for being master manipulators of the media) – here’s a taster but, honestly, please do read the whole thing, it’s superb: “P: So why are we easing restrictions? A: Something something the economy? P: Excuse me? A: Mumble mumble the economy maybe? P: We don’t understand. A: Listen. People are fatigued. They want to go back to work. They want to shop. More than anything, they want to roll balls toward white pins and make loud bang-bang sound. And then possibly end up with a tube inserted in their trachea, helping them breathe while their lungs cease to function, until they almost invariably die and die alone.”
• What Happens Next?: Leaving aside here that the only possible answer to this question is “I have no fcuking idea and neither do you; please stop opining on this with the same air of confidence you tend to use when discussing Liverpool’s chances in next season’s Champion’s League”, this is an interesting and actually-quite-helpful interactive which offers quite clear explanations on the sorts of steps that have been taken worldwide to date, and the options for next steps, along with some lightly-modelled interactive elements to help illustrate how different policies might affect likely outcomes over the coming months. Obviously this is just that – ‘illustrative’ – so please don’t use this to go around making huge claims about ‘what the science says’ as a result. Just use it as a way to learn a bit more about what sort of the terms being bandied around practically mean, eh?
• Potential Futures: In the same way as talking about ‘how we feel’ as though ‘we’ were some sort of monolithic entity whose collective response can be predicted and summarised by any cnut on Twitter (doesn’t stop them trying, though!), talk of ‘what the world will be like’-post Corona is sort of moot as there will be a variety of different futures for different people and countries depending on a wide range of factors. This piece in the Atlantic looks at a few different ways in which differential solutions to an afterlockdown world might function, specifically Wuhan, Seoul and Denmark. Interesting, but not wholly congruent with the Johnsonian rhetoric this week (WHODATHUNKIT?).
• Fast Fashion and COVID-19: A brilliant essay in the LRB which examines the impact of the pandemic on the people right at the bottom of the fast fashion supplychain. Us not going on Summer holidays means ASOS, Boohoo et al are all having to adjust their business models to accommodate for the drop in revenue; which, in turn, means that the people in Bangladesh who stitch a lot of their garments are seeing large-scale contracts cancelled, leading to a huge knock on effect for some of the poorest people in the world. You might well be a better person and more coherent thinker than I am – it wouldn’t take much – and might already have thought through all of this stuff, but, personally-speaking, this was something of an eye-opener and made me consider the wider ramifications of the ‘rona far more than I had done prior.
• How Airbnb Might Transform: This is a couple of weeks old now, and so obviously predates this week’s layoffs; still, the thinking behind it, about how Airbnb might conceivably restructure and refocus to salvage some of its business and make itself at least semi-viable in the medium term, is interesting. Its author, Jelke Bosma, offers some clever ideas about how partnerships with civic institutions and global organisations could enable Airbnb to fill its inventory whilst pivoting to a less-uncertain model; it’ll be interesting to see whether any of this ends up coming to pass at any point.
• A Pretty Spectacular Story About Masks: It’s fair to say that the pandemic hasn’t been good for the Trumps (although it’s even fairer to say that it’s been significantly worse for the rest of the country); the only potential bright spot of this whole mess is that it’s conceivable that it might cause That Man to lose, though whether or not there will be an election in November is pretty moot at presnt imho. One of the most amazing stories that’s been slowly coming to light is the astonishing degree of incompetence, corruption and stupidity (thanks Jared!) that’s characterised the country’s attempts to secure protective medical equipment; I promise you, this story (courtesy of editor Paul – thanks Paul!) is worth reading, even if you don’t think you want to read another story of chancers trying to make a quick buck off of death.
• How to Finish the Basketball Season: As people here in the UK try and work out if they can finish the football season, which has a mere 8-odd games left, spare a thought for the people of the NBA, which would need to somehow manage to find a way of playing 259 separate matches to get to the end (people in the UK who don’t like football – if you think its blanket ubiquity is bad, honestly, compared to basketball in the US you have seen nothing. The basketball really is constantly happening, and possibly will continue even after we as a species have long-departed). This ESPN piece examines exactly how that would work, which would include players being quarantined for a minimum of three months while the games were played at a frankly-insane sounding schedule. This is a truly mad logistical nightmare, and the thought of even having to start thinking about how to make it work brings me out in genuine hives.
• The Hiphop Gigs of Insta Live: A really interesting piece about how hiphop’s old guard have discovered Instagram Live during lockdown, and how the whole scene is pioneering new forms of communal entertainment via the DJ sets that are doing massive numbers each night. There’s a lovely line in here about Zuckerberg dropping in one night, like a nightclub impresario popping his head into the back office to check the takings on a Saturday, but the most interesting things is how this is going to develop; BELIEVE that this, combined with the thing about ‘you will soon be able to set paygates up for access to Lives’ that Insta announced last week, and normalised ‘pay-to-access-this-digital-event’ is nearly upon us. Oh, as a bonus on this sort of topic, this is an interesting VICE article about Turntable.fm and how there’s an appetite again for shared-space collaborative listening that isn’t currently being served well by anyone (but which if Fortnite doesn’t end up dominating, at least for a bit, I will be amazed).
• Inside The Clubhouse: I haven’t written anything here about Clubhouse yet, mainly because I can’t get an invite and so am sulking (also, to be clear, I don’t particularly want to try it); still, it’s become buzzy enough to warrant a slew of thinkpieces and so I feel honour-bound to include at least one so that, when it becomes a global sensation in July, you can all say ‘I saw it on Web Curios two months ago!’ to the now-familiar sound of everyone else not giving a fcuk. Clubhouse is a an audio-only chat app, which seemingly works like Houseparty; you can listen in to other people’s conversations if invited, be invited to participate, etc, and this article basically presents it as a way of being able to get access to all the cool, influential people you’d never be able to meet or approach irl. Which is a nice idea, but probably only actually works right now because its total userbase is approximately 30,000 who live within 50 miles of Cupertino; what it looks like when the great unwashed get in is probably very different. Still, as another model of what a future communications platform might look like, it’s an interesting one; I am basically resigned to the fact that all the stuff I like is on the way out, as we pivot even further away from ‘reading and writing’ as preferred communications methods here in the early part of the new millennium.
• Welcome To The Big Market: No, with one ‘g’ – PUT YOUR TIGHTS BACK ON AND PUT DOWN THAT WKD FFS! (did anyone get that joke? Anyone? ffs). The Big Market is the world’s largest VR marketplace, effectively a sort of big shopping mall in which various VR creators hawk their wares as literally hundreds of thousands of punters, mainly from the far east, browse and shop, all in VR. Astonishing, mainly as a proper ‘fcuk me, I feel so behind and so in the past and so much like I will hate and fear the future’ slap in the face; seriously, read this, then tweak the prose in your head slightly and it’s basically Neuromancer, except this is literally right now: “My avatar was immediately placed in the lobby of a traditional-looking conference center with a massive SoftBank booth like you might see at CES. I followed a ramp out into a sprawling urban landscape with multimedia billboards and blimps displaying ads for Audi vehicles and other brands. I saw a booth for Netflix, and before my connection fell apart I was able to stumble into a fully-simulated 7-Eleven convenience store with a few avatars for sale on display. I couldn’t hear any of the other users speaking, and there were only 30 of us scattered across such a large space; for being such a massive event, it felt eerily quiet and lonely.”
• Tolstoy’s Kids Books: This made me laugh a lot – I had no idea that Tolstoy had written children’s literature, but the discovery that he did and that it was very…Tolstoian in its nature pleased me no end. This piece offers a brief runthrough of some of his sunnier tales – I won’t spoil it for you, but suffice it to say that if you found Vronksy to be a bit too much of a lighthearted joker, and yearned for a bit more general bleakness and miserablism from Mr T’s work, you’ll be in luck with these. Oh, look, here, have this one, but please go and check the others too: “The Little Bird.” A boy catches a bird in a cage. His mother says he shouldn’t do that. He leaves the door of the cage open. The bird flies out, straight into a glass window, knocking itself out. It suffers for a few days, then dies. The end.”
• Britain’s Imperial Dreamcatchers: One of those wonderful stories that encapsulates the sheer madness occasionally glimpsed at the heart of empire. In this case, it’s the story of an LSE anthropologist who decided that he wanted to conduct a large-scale analysis of the dreams of the people of the British Empire to see what could be learned about the psychic commonalities that existed amongst different peoples, but who didn’t like what he discovered about the peculiarly-Freudian relationship between many of the subjects analysed and the Empire itself. It feels like this is just waiting to be turned into an historical novel or longform poem or something; there’s SO much in this to unpack, I think.
• The History of OK Soda: I’ve definitely mentioned OK Soda in here before – if you recall, it was Coke’s mid-90s attempt to tap into Gen-X slacker cool, and it went about as well as you’d expect. This is an interesting overview of its genesis and how it was marketed, and a useful thing to have in your pocket next time someone presents ‘brand does millennial ennui’ as somehow innovative.
• Being Butch: On ‘butch’ as an identity in lesbian culture, and what it means; this is something I knew literally nothing about, and I found this piece fascinating and moving in equal measure; also, the accompanying fashionshoot photo is a killer.
• Dropshipping: This is a week old, so you might have seen it already; it tells the story of various people from around the world who are hanging out in Bali trying to make money out of dropshipping businesses (whereby you connect buyers with inventory without ever holding stock; effectively trying to make cash through simply being a front-and-shipping outfit, with no manufacturing or permanent stock liabilities), and not really quite making it. It’s really nicely written, and skewers all the stereotypes you’d expect; the flipflop-wearing, sunglasses bros, late to the party on a wave of confidence, the jaded old stager who’s out of the game, and the locals looking slightly-bemusedly at the kids who pass in and out in search of…what? If you take anything from this piece, it’s that by the time you’ve heard about this sort of thing it’s almost certainly too late to get rich as a result of it.
• The Proboscis Monkey: A profile of the proboscis monkey, a beast you’ll recognise because of its massive schnozz; this is lovely, and taught me SO MUCH about rainforest ecology and conservation, and made me wish very fervently indeed that I was the sort of person who could find fulfilment and peace by being in, and helping with, nature, rather than instead being a muddled bag of addictions and neuroses who’s terminally hooked on information.
• Wh0res at the End of the World: Do email filters mind the word ‘wh0res’? No idea, but let’s err on the side of caution. One of the interesting side effects of the past few months has been how it’s affected our relationship with sex and sexwork. I imagine pr0nhub has seen traffic the like of which it could previously have only dreamed, and there are all sorts of crazy stats doing the rounds about OnlyFans’ user growth, as the world and its mother decides that it too can make a living w4nking for strangers, and there’s been a lot of interesting writing by sex workers and adjacent people about how they’re coping in a time which you might think spelled thedeath of their income stream. This piece is from the point of view of such a worker; the author’s a cishet woman who talks openly and emotionally about how her job and relationships and feelings of safety have fluctuated over the course of the pandemic, and how this might all affect our conception of sexwork and the rights of sexworkers. Interesting, thoughtful and smart.
• Secret Museums: A beautiful essay about coming to terms with your sexuality via the medium of bongo; this is so, so lovely, and sad, and really wonderfully written.
• How We Got To Sesame Street: Finally this week, it is a truth known to all that it is literally impossible to feel bad about anything when thinking about Sesame Street. So this is a history of the show, as told in the New Yorker. I promise, it will cheer you right up, and might prompt you to go and watch some old episodes which I can heartily recommend as a way of chasing the blues away while you get very, very stoned. All together now, “Sunny day, sweeping the – CLOUDS a-way!”.

By Haruhiko Kawaguchi

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, a home-shot quarantinevid by Glass Animals, for their rather good new track ‘Dreamland’:

1. Ok, this isn’t usually my sort of thing – it’s a barely recognisable cover of ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ by Belinda Carlisle, of all things – but, honestly, combine this with the video, which is all made up of found footage from old VHS tapes, and the current, y’know, situation, and this absolutely fcuking totaled me when I found it. The song is by Matthew Ryan, the footage found and edited by Tom Serchio, and it’s honestly heartbreaking (in a good way):

1. This is by Negativland, and it’s called ‘Not Normal’, and, well, it isn’t:

1. One of the most happymaking things I saw this week, remix kings The Hood Internet, featured on here at various points in the past, return with the latest in their attempts to remix ALL the music of a given year into a single 3-minute track. This is 1985 – if you are old, ENJOY THE TIME MACHINE (and if you’re young too, obvs):

1. UK HIPHOP CORNER! This came to me via Joe Muggs’ excellent newsletter; this is by Dreya Mac, it’s called ‘Skippin’ and it’s SO GOOD, seriously:

1. Last up this week, the latest Kinect-y, oddly pointillist representation of East Asian living by Ruben Fro; I featured his video of Vietnam in the same series, and this, of Dong Xuan market in China, is equally gorgeous. I would love to see a longer-form piece in this style, or a music video, or something. Anyway, regardless, THAT IS IT FROM ME I AM DONE BY EVERYONE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY LONG WEEKEND AND THAT YOU ARE ALL ABLE TO ENJOY AT LEAST A SMALL BIT OF SUNSHINE AND THAT YOU ALL STAY SAFE I LOVE YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK I AM OFF TO HAVE A LIE DOWN AS IT TURNS OUT I AM FEELING THE POST-CURIOS BURN A LITTLE THIS WEEK TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU SEE YOU SOON I LOVE YOU BYE!:

Hi everyone! Hi! How are we all?

An uncessary question, obviously, for we are all ecstatic at the news that our Prime Minister has managed to not only cheat death at the hands of the pandemic, but, equally, SPAWN ANOTHER JOHNSON! To the…indeterminate extant ranks of the brood, then, we can welcome whatever the fcuk they end up calling the poor kid! I think I’m going to call it Poor Kid! Hello, Poor kKd! Will you EVER know how many Christmas cards you ought to be sending at Christmas? Where do you think you’ll sit in the will? So many questions for Poor Kid!

Anyway, as you can tell I am HIGH ON LIFE, or the omnipresent scent of Johsonian jizz, carried, wafting, on the summer air throughout London – either/or, really. I hope you are too, and that you are ready for another bumper, jam-packed edition of Web Curios, your ESSENTIAL lockdown companion for the end times that very much feel upon us. Click! Read! Watch! Laugh! Cry! Boggle! Gibber! Whatever you do, though, DON’T WORRY! It’s all going to be ok, we’ve got Poor Kid as our new national mascot! DO IT FOR POOR KID!!!

Ahem. I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, you have possibly stopped reading, we are all still indoors. 

***NEW EDITION OF IMPERICA MAGAZINE KLAXON!!!*** It is HOT off the press, and contains some great essays (the one on atheism and the alt-right is particularly good imho) and you can buy it here for the low, low price of THREE QUID!***

By Bertjan Pot

LET’S KICK OFF THIS WEEK WITH A LOCKDOWN DJ SET BY BIZ MARKIE!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT CHOOSING WHETHER TO LET THE ZOOM PEOPLE OR MARK ‘HONESTLY GUYS, I JUST WANT TO CONNECT THE WORLD!’ ZUCKERBERG HAVE YOUR VIDEOCALL DATA IS A BIT SOPHIE’S CHOICE-Y:

• Facebook Is Copying Zoom: I mean, that’s not quite it and it’s not the whole story, but this is about a week old now and I presume you all know about it, so I reckon I get to take some authorial license here. Basically this is the announcement that Facebook is going BIG on videocalls, allowing for the same sort of functionality that has made Zoom super-popular (the whole ‘anyone can use our videocalling platform, you don’t need an account!’ thing) but on everyone’s favourite familiar digital surveillance panopticon. There’s actually quite a lot in this announcement, including a few tweaks to Insta livestreaming (including the ability to export old streams into Stories), the upgrading of WhatsApp calls to 8 participants from 4, charitable donations direct from Insta Lives, and (coming soon) the introduction of paywalls for livestreams from Pages, which is to my mind the most interesting part of this and, obviously, the bit that’s received less attention than any of the rest of it. I can’t quite work out whether this is because most tech journalists are unimaginative hacks, or because my assessment of what is interesting is simply so skewed by years of being EXTREMELY ONLINE that I’m incapable of empathising with normies and what they might care about anymore; WHICH IS IT?? Don’t, please, tell me.
• Facebook Launches Chatbot (Well, The Code): Facebook’s being doing a lot of fiddling in the chatbot space over the past decade (we all remember the great Year of the Chatbot in approximately 2016, right? When agencies decided that we were all going to be building digital conversational interfaces and rushed to establish teams to deliver those services, only to discover that people enjoyed interacting with bots on Facebook about as much as they enjoyed dealing with those nested phone menus that you find yourself shouting at before being placed on hold for an hour to BT, mainly because they are EXACTLY the same?), and this is the latest expression of it. “Facebook AI has built and open-sourced Blender, the largest-ever open-domain chatbot. It outperforms others in terms of engagement and also feels more human, according to human evaluators…Today [actually, this was yesterday – it’s the magic of time travel!] we’re releasing the complete model, code, and evaluation set-up, so that other AI researchers will be able to reproduce this work and continue to advance conversational AI research.” So there – mainly of interest (in fact, solely of interest) to those of you playing around in the conversational AI space, of which I imagine there are approximately two of you.
• Facebook’s Results: The headline figure that really grabbed me here was the 3bn figure – that is, 3bn people used Facebook products in April 2020. That’s literally half the human population (almost) (so not in fact literally) (damn the linguistic imprecision that cost me that place at Cambridge), and is the sort of number to wave at people who naively think that Facebook’s going anywhere in the next decade or so.
• Twitter’s Latest Numbers: User numbers are up, but they junked all their revenue predictions for the year based on the pandemic, so this is basically just a holding statement before the really significant figures come out in Q2. Still, the user numbers look good, even if the ad revenue would be scaring the hell out of me if I were an investor.
• TikTok Launches Donation Stickers: It’s now simple for users on TikTok to add a ‘donation’ sticker to their, er…’Toks’?’ Which is A Good Thing, and the sort of thing which brands might want to consider grafting onto their sponcon because, well, it’s the right thing to do. If you’re going to lift a TikTok craze for brand kudos, the least you can do is encourage people to donate at the same time whilst you match funding.
• TikTok Numbers: It’s passed 2bn downloads. It’s over, there’s no hope, our collective future is one in which we do nothing but stare slack-jawed at the continual procession of well-off midwestern teens performing sub-Saturday Night Live skits in their terrifyingly-well-appointed kitchens as the world around us crumbles. No, it’s decided, there’s nothing we can do about it.
• YouTube Bringing FactChecking To The US: This is an extension of what’s already in place in Brazil and India; if users search for specific queries around which YouTube believes there to be significant quantities of disinformation on YouTube, the platform will put out ‘fact boxes’ in the search results to point them away from the 5G muslamic rayguns and into the comforting, welcoming arms of some verified third-party sources. “Our fact check information panels provide fresh context in these situations by highlighting relevant, third-party fact-checked articles above search results for relevant queries, so that our viewers can make their own informed decision about claims made in the news.” Per previous comments here in Curios, what’s a GUARANTEED way of making conspiracy nutcases who believe in a lizard-led controlling elite think twice about their nutso theories? Yes, that’s right, getting one of the world’s largest companies to tell them that their beliefs are unfounded and they should just listen to the grown-ups. Bound to work.
• Reddit Launches Chatrooms: This is really interesting (and is also going to result in SO MANY male Redditors having same-sex masturbatory experiences together, often involuntarily); “Start Chatting is a new feature that matches you with other redditors who have similar interests as you and want to chat too. To get started, visit a community you’d like to chat about and select the Start Chatting button.” The idea is that you’ll be matched with upto 7 (I think) other users, selected at random, who’ve also expressed an interest in chatting; users can block others who do or say anything unpleasant, thereby guaranteeing that you won’t see their messages anymore and won’t be matched with them in subsequent chats. Obviously, this being Reddit, it will be a cesspit; equally obviously, this being Reddit, it will also be a fascinating social experiment. For brand-type stuff (sorry, but there is at least a thin professional veneer to this first section of Curios) there’s quite a lot of fun SURPRISE AND DELIGHT stuff you could do, having talent just drop into chats on specific relevant subReddits to entertain fans; worth having a think about how you might use this, particularly if your client’s the sort of brand to have a fandom or interest community on the site.
• You Can Now Turn Videochats Into Podcasts: Basically putting this here solely for the purpose of asking you to please, please not do this.
• Digital In April 2020: Robin Grant’s team of social media dataminers released this last week, slightly too late for Curios, meaning this is less steamingly-fresh than it might otherwise be; still, if you want 140-odd slides featuring ALL THE SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE DATA from around the world, including a bunch of numbers that show the REVELATORY truth that, yes, we’ve all been using s*c**l m*d** quite a lot since we decided outside was BAD. If you want some definitive stats on how the Gabonese have changed their Facebook usage since January then this is going to make you very, very happy (I might be lying about Gabon, fine, but you get the idea).
• Insights From Hollywood: There are lots of words I hate relating to the stuff I do for a living; ‘content’, obviously, ‘deck’, ‘strategy’ (to be honest, ‘job’ is another one that makes me feel really sad, as is ‘s*c**l m*d**’), but currently in pole-position is the word ‘insight’. “Some great INSIGHTS in here!”, say emails linking me to another load of dull statistics! “Why not join our webinar for INSIGHTS from A N Other generic media w4nker?”, promise the invites, asking me to listen to someone JUST LIKE ME lying about things that they have no real authority to talk about. STOP TRYING TO DRESS THINGS UP AS IMPORTANT BY USING THE WORD ‘INSIGHT’ FFS IT JUST MAKES YOU LOOK STUPID. Ahem. Anyway, this is a useful presentation (thanks to Camila Toro for sending it to me), which does a really good job of demonstrating what the term is meant to mean in the context of advermarketingpr by taking a bunch of famous films and demonstrating what the INSIGHT one can take from each of them is. If you’re still struggling with colleagues using the term despite having no practical idea of why they are doing so, and if you need to do a bit of teaching about ‘how you look at something and develop a truth or rule from it which you can then export as some sort of maxim or aphorism which in turn can be used as the starting point for creative work’ (and if you’re a better person than me, who is now at the point where I basically start crying every time I open a work email), then this is rather useful. For the rest of you, there’s maybe a fun reverse quiz in here where you get people to try and guess the films based on the ‘insight’ (must stop typing that word, it’s lost all meaning now).
• Cadbury’s and QR Codes: This did the rounds last weekend to much acclaim for advermarketingpr Twitter; Jerry Daykin, who used to work at Cadbury’s, writes about his experiences wasting an unquantifiable (but, rest assured, vast) amount of time and money getting QR codes printed on the back of chocolate wrappers so people could enjoy joy-related content (insert biscuit for contentzzzzzzzzzz). It’s interesting, and Daykin is admirably honest about why it didn’t work – on the other hand, though, judging by the seal-like clapping that greeted its publication you’d think he’d brought the books of Revelation down from Patmos. Look, if you work in advermarketingpr and you read this and think ‘ooh, he’s right, I’d never thought of that before!’, and the idea that consumers might not be itching to consume MORE branded content that they have to jump through irritating hoops to access is a novel one to you, then you are terrible at your job and you should go and do something else. Now, I wonder how the Creme Egg ‘let’s ditch all our TV ads and try and get people to watch short branded ‘comedy’ films on a microsite instead!’ campaign worked out for them…(obviously this is going to end up having been vastly successful and I will end up looking stupid, but I’m used to that by now).

By Mathery Studio

NEXT, WHY NOT ENJOY THIS ABSOLUTELY KILOMETRIC SPOTIFY PLAYLIST OF SLIGHTLY-OBSCURE COVER VERSIONS?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE EVERYONE WHO WAS TALKING ABOUT SYMONDS BEING PREGGO BACK IN OCTOBER FOR BEING SPOT ON WITH YOUR TIMINGS, PT.1:

• Tons Of Help: Advertising…dammit, there’s no other word, ‘guru’ Trevor Beattie was featured in here last year for his ‘Bank of Mum & Dad’ initiative, offering interest-free loans of upto 1k to people who needed them; this is an offshoot of that, offering smaller, one-off cash handouts of 100 quid to people in dire straits. It’s small, but every little bit really does help; you can either apply for a grant if you’re in need, or if you’re in the fortunate position of having a spare…er…monkey? Pony? I can’t quite work out whether it says better or worse things for me that I don’t know the Lahndahn slang for blocks of currency…anyway, if you can spare £100 you can donate it to the initiative to be passed on to someone more needy than you. A good project which I would encourage you to share widely; it’s not a load of money, fine, but it’s an amount that could make a small, helpful difference to someone in need.
• Layoffs: A website tracking layoffs from startups as a result of COVID, but which rather than being a slightly macabre record of companies shedding staff (which, fine, it also sort-of is) is in fact a way of hopefully helping those staff find new jobs. If you’re looking to hire software / product people who need a gig, this is a decent place to start looking.
• Free Games For The NHS: Literally that – a bunch of games companies are making some of their titles available for free download for NHS staff; all they need to do is register with their staff email address, and they’ll be sent instructions on how to access a free game of their choice on XBOX, PS, PC or Switch. If you know anyone who works for the Health Service, send them this – it’s a small thing, but it’s nice.
• Kindness Amid Coronavirus: I nearly got into a fight with a jogger on Sunday (I told him he was jogging like ‘a fcuking cnut’ – he really was, two abreast on the pavement ; he jogged back 45s later to remonstrate with me in equally-choice Anglo-Saxon. Honestly, thank God he was obviously not going to actually punch me, I’d have been paste); that wasn’t very kind. This website, though, serves ONLY to communicate the nice things – it’s a map tracking all the good news from the pandemic, all the nice things that people are doing for each other worldwide. You can look around the map and click on specific areas to learn more, or submit your own links to stories which you think fit the bill; if you’re after an antidote to the seemingly-neverending cavalcade of misery, incompetence and human suffering coming at you from every single screen in the world, this might be for you.
• The OpenAI Jukebox: OpenAI is the group behind GPT-2, the gold standard of textual AI and the tech behind the Talk To Transformer website which has been used to build text adventures, write academic papers and cobble together scripts and screenplays which people claim are written by AI but really aren’t. This is their latest toy; the OpenAI Jukebok presents a bunch of songs, including lyrics, sort-of made-up by AI (they’re quite open about the fact that the dozen or so ‘polished’ tracks on the homepage are finessed by a human); they’re terrifying, inhabiting a weird, aural uncanny valley that I didn’t know existed til I clicked the link an hour or so ago. What’s more interesting is to click through into the selection of raw samples, which are far less coherent and a lot messier and, aurally, REALLY interesting; the Ed Sheeran ones in particular are terrifyingly nearly there. There’s not currently the option to generate your own tracks, but I imagine that will be included in version 2; there’s no way in hell that we won’t have had a co-credited human/AI number one by 2025 (feel free to make fun of me about this one when it fails to come true; for reference, I am SO BAD at predictions that I once stated with confidence that the USA would win a football World Cup by 2020; bet against me whenever you can, it’s a BANKER).
• Syncers: I picked this up from Jed Hallam’s ‘Love WilL Save The Day’ newsletter (which you really ought to subscribe to – you get one genuinely great new music mix each week, along with some rather good writing, and it’s introduced me to loads of music I would never have heard otherwise) – Syncers is a website that lets whoever visits it listen collaboratively with everyone else on there to whatever’s playing, suggest the next track using Soundcloud links, chat, and generally hang out in a sort of virtual bar (the sort of bar that I reckon is possibly only populated by men, none of whom are talking to each other but instead are drinking intently, nodding rhythmically to the bassline of the obscure minimal techno white label being played by the terrifying, blank-eyed, multi-pierced androdj with the interestingly-accessoried trousers). Far, far better than this admittedly-appalling description made it sound, honest.
• Random Training: Are you all still doing Joe Wickes? Are you all as buff as he is? Do you have new hard places where your soft places used to be? Damn you, in that case, as I am as doughy as I ever was (ha! I am not doughy at all! I am all spiky bones and elbows and borderline anorexia, joke’s on YOU!); perhaps I should try this website out, which sets a 20-minute timer and then spits out a selection of suggested exercises that you should do for 30-odd seconds at a time to make up a full, different-every-time workout, soundtracked by a random link off Soundcloud to offer you a surprise musical accompaniment. Let me stress now, for the avoidance of doubt, THIS IS PROBABLY NOT A VERY GOOD WAY OF WORKING OUT, and may well lead to muscle strains or tears or rends if you’re not careful. Great, now that’s out of the way, click the link and see what health-endangering exercise regimen it encourages YOU to undertake!
• Supernatural: Pretty much on the opposite end of the sophistication spectrum when it comes to exercise is Supernatural, a VR platform that promises to offer you workouts ‘in the most beautiful places on earth’, all without leaving your home. I’ve used VR a bit over the past few years, and whilst it’s undeniably getting loads better I still can’t quite square the experiences I’ve had with the implied promise of the website, which seemingly envisages you doing one-legged Namastes on the top of some sort of exotic peak at sunset; not quite sure how that squares with the inevitable bit when you bump into your couch or get tangled in the headset wire, but perhaps you’re more coordinated than I am (you definitely are). It’s only currently available in the US and Canada for some reason, but I reckon you can probably lie your way around that if you’re desperate for some virtual nature workouts (or, er, just go to the fcuking park and lift a log, you weirdo).
• Mark Watson’s 24h Comedy Marathon: If you’re reading this on Friday, it starts at 9pm, runs til 9pm Saturday (of course it does, probably didn’t need to explain that bit), and will feature a rolling cast of comedians from across the UK (and possibly around the world), all doing sets from their home to raise money for foodbanks, hospices and other good causes. The link above takes you to the fundraising page, but look at Watson’s Twitter from 9pm for streaming links – this is a lovely idea, which Watson’s been doing for a few years now and is always good fun. Also, my friend Vix took part in this last year and has ended up becoming an actual, proper standup as a result, so who KNOWS where it will take you?
• Loomie Live: This doesn’t exist yet, but it will – I am just helping you prepare, mentally, for the inevitable. Are YOU getting face fatigue from all the videocalling (and this week saw the first wave of stories about the boom in plastic surgery consultations taking place in the wake of us all staring at the pixellated hideousness of our own faces for 7 hours a day)? Wouldn’t you like some sort of digital avatar to hide behind? That’s exactly what Loomie is promising with its ‘coming soon’ Loomie Live service, which promises to provide you with a Bitmoji-style cartoon avatar of yourself to represent you on videocalls instead of the real you. I can’t wait until the future in which my poor attitude and frankly risible work ethic is deconstructed by HR while they wear lightly-Pixarified masks of their own faces! This is a horrible future that is coming down the line faster than I want – MAKE IT STOP SOMEONE PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
• An Interactive Twitter Murder Mystery: Choose Your Own Adventure Twitter games aren’t new – the latest, best version prior to this being the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? game version that someone built last month off the back of the Quiz TV show (and which annoyingly I now can’t find to hyperlink) – but I don’t think I’ve ever seen something with this level of polish; there are VIDEOS, ffs! Alasdair Beckett-King presents a wonderful (and very fun, and funny) murder mystery game, played entirely within Twitter, which takes on on a wonderfully-hammy journey through a bunch of classic tropes and cliches on its way to unmasking the murderer. Can you survive? Will you find the culprit? Honestly, if agencies aren’t already throwing money at him to make versions for clients, they are all idiots (I think, by this point, my feelings on agencies and their ‘idiot/non-idiot’ status is mostly clear).
• Block By Blockwest: This was meant to happen last weekend, but the servers fell over so it didn’t. It’s now rescheduled for later this month – so if you want to enjoy SXSW but in Minecraft (for this is exactly what that is). It’s happening on May 19th – the website contains a list of confirmed acts (names I have heard of are thin on the ground, but I’m 40 and this is definitely not aimed at me) but, more helpfully, a tutorial on how to access the Festival; Minecraft is a bit fiddly, I’m told, when you start trying to do stuff on different servers, etc, so it might be worth getting a feel for it in advance of the event to make sure you can get online with minimal trouble. Still, ANOTHER amazing and wonderful bit of innovation, using virtual environments in novel ways; I think this might be my favourite side-effect of the pandemic.
• Airtime: Watch stuff together with your mates on your phone. Literally, that’s it – like a watchparty thing except it works on mobile. It’s a bit limited – you can watch YouTube and ‘selected’ TV shows and movies – but it’s better than nothing, and if you’ve got teen kids this might be something to point them at as a new way of socialising with their friends (HA! JOKE! Obviously your kids are all using stuff way cooler than this that you and I haven’t heard of).
• Unavoidable Disaster: I can’t quite recall where I found this, which means I can’t go back and lift their description of what the fcuk it actually is – which is a shame, as I honestly don’t really know. I think it’s basically one person’s occasional linkdump, but presented as a weird-yet-aesthetically-pleasing collage-type image, with each element being an annotated, clickable url. I really, really like this – there’s something about the fact that everything’s sort-of hidden behind a click that encourages exploration, and the aesthetic is rather lovely, in an oddly-50s-Americana sort of way.
• Got Your Back: Can we all agree that backgrounds to videocalls have been done now? GREAT! Still, if you can still be bothered to think about communicating the uniqueness of your personality via the medium of a specially-chosen backdrop for your work calls, then this selection is probably my favourite so far. Shiny, arty, surreal, occasionally disturbing, these feel to me like they’re channeling the same sort of aesthetic as long-running, WTFish Twitter account Archillect. If nothing else, you can absolutely be THE most Art Basel-esque person on your work drinks this afternoon, and, frankly, what the fcuk else are you going to achieve today?
• Bookcase Credibility: This is what happens when you don’t have a background and instead choose to speak to the world in front of a backdrop of book spines – Twitter accounts like this one spring up and judge you. This is a UK account which does a very gentle line in humorous commentary of the bookshelves of famouses (sample: “David Baddiel. No chances taken here. David surrounds himself with bookcases and the vaguely hexagonal shape suggests they move round us, closing us in with him in a honeycomb of credibility. The sensation is of being welcomed into the hive of a particularly well-read bee.”), but which would be made IMMEASURABLY better if it accepted nominations and started absolutely roasting the bookshelves of members of the public. In fact, can someone turn that into a subReddit? Thanks! Oh, by the way, someone’s doing exactly the same thing but in the US, but it’s less funny
• Lovo: This is really interesting, but also really bad news for voice-over artists online. Lovo is a service which purports to offer a variety of human-quality AI voices for text-to-speech output, offering you a cast of different made-up tones to insert into your podcast, audio dramas, videogames…It’s a paid service, obviously, but even with prices starting at $20 a month it’s clear to see how much cheaper it is than paying actual humans to do it for you; the output wouldn’t, to my mind, fool anyone, but this sort of tech is only going to get better, and if you’re planning on making a career out of v/o stuff in the coming decade then you’d better be good, basically.
• Glanceback: I really, really love this project. Glanceback is a Chrome extension which once a day will take a photo of you when you open a new tab, and ask you to share a thought; these photos are kept to form an archive of your face, captured at random, uncurated and unstyled and unexpected. “Once you type your answer and press enter, the photo and thought will be collectively saved to your history of glances, cumulatively creating an archive of moments you share with your screen. Given that most of the digital photos we generate of ourselves today are highly curated (i.e. wait let me fix my hair and smile and please take at least 10 photos just to make sure there’s a good one!), Glance Back also acts as an antidote to this attitude by providing you with unexpected and often… unflattering… photos of yourself.” It’s important to note that the photos are only stored locally – there’s no danger of your face being used for nefarious purposes (unless there’s something VERY nefarious hidden in the code). Pretty much perfect digital art imho.

By Pawel Bajew

I FIND THE PRACTICE OF REFERRING TO BAND MEMBERS AS THOUGH THEIR SURNAME IS THE NAME OF THE BAND THEY ARE IN TO BE INCREDIBLY FCUKING IRRITATING, BUT WILL MAKE AN EXCEPTION FOR JAMIE XX’S RECENT ESSENTIAL MIX AS IT IS VERY GOOD!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE EVERYONE WHO WAS TALKING ABOUT SYMONDS BEING PREGGO BACK IN OCTOBER FOR BEING SPOT ON WITH YOUR TIMINGS, PT.2:

• Facedoodle: Draw on your face! In AR! Move your face around and watch as the graffiti moves with you, as though it were somehow attached! Except it’s not! This is literally just a browser version of what you’ve been able to do on your phone for ages, but, well, here! You will use this approximately three times; once just to see how it works, once to attempt to do something genuinely artistic or creative, and once to draw a spaffing cock on your forehead (I don’t make the rules).
• Citizen DJ: Oh wow this is a lot of fun and a great use of archive materials. The US Library of Congress is encouraging people to use its sound and video archive to MAKE MUSIC! Yep, they want you to use sound recordings, old snippets of music hall entertainment, old radio broadcasts, ambient recordings, whatever, to compose brand new music of whatever style or genre you fancy. This is SO SO GOOD – not only do they offer you complete access to the library collections, but they’ve even built-in some rudimentary beatjuggling software into the site, so anyone can play around with whatever they like, right there in the browser. I am honestly floored by this – not simply because it’s such a wonderful, fun use of the materials, but because I simply don’t expect this playfulness from a national archival insititution. It’s as though the British Library had basically made its entire collection available as a resource for blackout poetry, or the Tate isolated all the individual elements from its archive of paintings to use in a gigantic online collage game. So, so, so good, and a new gold standard for ‘interesting and fun ways to get people to engage with your archives’.
• Cuddlecall: Remember the farm where you could book a llama to join your work meetings? Remember how fresh and fun and exciting that felt? Well, it’s not fresh and exciting anymore, it’s OLD and has spawned IMITATORS – like this one. “cuddlecall.me connects you with your favorite cute, cuddly animals directly over video chat. Perfect for virtual classes, meetings, birthday parties, or other events! Pick any of our animals that you’d like and during the specified time cuddlecall.me will join your call to wow and amaze your guests. Works with all major video chat clients like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and Go2Meeting.” Except there are no details on who’s behind this, or where the money goes, and the whole thing smells a bit sketchy. Still, if you’d like to book someone who is DEFINITELY NOT a human in a rabbit costume to join your company meeting later, go for it!
• Special Guests For Zoom: Other videocalling apps are of course available. This, though, is a really interesting idea – like the one above, but instead of booking CUTE ANIMALS you can instead book archetypes to join your call and help you achieve your doubtless-dastardly goals. You can book the hypeman, who will always back up whatever you have to say, the timer, who will ensure no one person dominates the chat, the critic, who will tell everyone how stupid they are…you get the idea. This is a really interesting idea, and made me think that that Cameo app really should pivot to letting you book minor famouses for your calls; honestly, if I had access to Dave Benson Philips, say, I would TOTALLY be pimping him out for £200 for a 15m appearance. IMAGINE how good that would be? Or Timmy Mallet! Or someone that younger readers might actually have heard of! Anyway, this is an interesting idea that you can tweak and turn into an ACTUAL, POTENTIALLY QUITE GOOD PR THING (if you can turn it around in about 24h, because I refuse to believe that I am the only person who’s had this thought).
• The Phonetic Reverser: Or, more simply-put, a website which will help you learn how to talk backwards. Now that you’ve accepted that you are not going to finish (or start) the novel, or get really good at the ukelele, or finally get round to reading A La Recherche, or any of the other things you’d half-hoped to achieve, perhaps it’s time to scale back your ambitions to something a little more realistic. Perhaps teaching yourself how to say “I find everything you do risible and I think you’re a joke” backwards, so you can insult those close to you in secret, is within your gift? I like this a lot, not least as it offers you phonetic guidance on how the everliving fcuk to actually say this stuff, as well as the option to hear your own speech reversed for practice purposes.
• Fifteen Monsters All In A Row: This is a really cute little bit of interactive fiction which you can play with your kids if they’re reasonably small. You, the player, have to defeat 15 monsters! How will you do it? Except you don’t have to defeat them, you can make friends with each of them instead, and the whole thing is in-part designed by a kid and so it’s lovely and whimsical and super-cute, and it’s honestly a really nice 15-minute thing to do with a small child and a lovely introduction to IF as a concept.
• Bad Seed TV: Nick Cave’s launched a 24h TV station on YouTube! Combining studio footage, concert footage, videos, interviews, songs and rarities, and quite possibly including a bit of actual, live-right-now-Cave every now and again too, this is very cool indeed and the sort of thing that if you’re a Nick Cave fan will probably end up being on pretty much constantly in your house. There’s a chat channel too, so you can hang out with other Cave fans in the sidebar as you watch lovely Nick and the lovely Bad Seeds make their lovely music. Honestly, this is superb, and the sort of thing you can imagine becoming pretty ubiquitous for bands with a big enough back catalogue of stuff to draw on.
• Get A Small Israeli President In AR: No, really! Look, here’s the blurb from The Next Web: “To celebrate the country’s Independence Day, each year the President of Israel opens his home to people of all walks of life and personally meets them for a brief selfie sesh, accompanied by an uplifting speech. But due to the coronavirus lockdown, the President has decided to address the nation in a responsible manner… by turning himself into an AR hologram…According to a press release, President Reuven Rivlin is set to “visit” each and every home in Israel in his virtual form, as he believes that “now, more than ever, personal contact with Israel’s citizens is of paramount importance.”” Seriously, though, nothing can prepare you for how brilliantly-weird this is; fire it up, and Rivlin appears through your phone screen looking, frankly, a bit dishevelled, wearing a crumpled suit that looks about 3 sizes too big for him, and sort of waves his hands around whilst talking at you in Hebrew. I can totally see Boris Johnson doing a version of this – try it out, you will see what I mean.
• What To Watch: As someone with a Michael Owen-like appreciation of cinema, I’ve not got a massive backlog of CLASSICS that I feel I must watch, or a library of movie favourites to cycle back through; which means that my girlfriend and I have mostly been watching genuinely appalling horror films as part of the lockdown experience (things I have noticed as part of this – I think there must have been a screenwriting trend in the past decade or so where every single person with a mediocre thriller/horror film script was told by someone ‘look, if you don’t quite know how to frame it, start with the endpoint scene of horrific destruction and then cycle back to the beginning to show how we got here; works every time’ because, honestly, they ALL do it); if you’re running out of inspiration for films to pass the time, this site claims to offer recommendations based on ‘stuff that people are talking about right now’, though I’m fcuked if I know where they are pulling this supposed chat from. Regardless of the methodology, though, this contains LOADS of stuff I’ve never, ever heard of – I can’t vouch for quality, but it certainly ticks a lot of obscurity boxes. Note, though, that it won’t stream the films – you’ll have to find them elsewhere.
• Golden Hour: An app for your Mac which will light your face BEAUTIFULLY during your calls, presenting you as a glowing beacon of health rather than the pasty, pustulent lump you’ve doubtless become in the six weeks since you last bothered to look in the mirror.
• Vocal Synthesis: A YouTube channel dedicated to creating fake audio of famouses using machine learning, which came to my attention via this post by Andy Baio, in which he explained how Jay-Z’s Roc Nation attempted to get all legal with it the other day in a classic example of the Streisand Effect (if you don’t visit Andy’s site, Waxy, by the way, you ought; if nothing else you’ll always get about a dozen of my best links each week in advance, and without any of my horrible prose). The channel contains dozens of examples, and the quality here is quite astonishing; there’s no attempt o present these as anything other than well-made fakes, but you can easily see how good this is going to get in the next year or so. Combine this with the OpenAI jukebox up top and it’s not impossible to imagine a future in which Ed Sheeran NEVER STOPS MAKING MUSIC oh god please no.
• The Decameron Project: This is on Patreon, and you can back it if you so choose, but all the entries are ungated so you can equally read to your heart’s content for free (but, er, chuck them a few quid if you can afford it). The Decameron Project takes it’s name from Boccaccio’s plaguetime chronicles from the…er…10th? Gah, no, early-14th, damn my lack of knowledge…anyway, the 14th-century collection of stories from Florence in plaguetime, and is a collection of writers posting a new story each day throughout the pandemic. Styles and themes vary, but the overall quality is high (as it should be, these people are pros) and there’s a LOT in here to get your teeth into if you’re in the market for (at the time of writing) 40ish short stories by a range of writers.
• The British Museum Collection: See, on the one hand this is obviously ACE – the British Museum’s made loads of its collection available in digitised form online for the first time this week – but on the other it’s just not as fun as the Library of Congress project. Still, “under the new agreement the majority of the 1.9 million images are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. Users no longer need to register to use these photographs, and can now download them directly from the British Museum. Under the terms of the Creative Commons license, you are free to share and adapt the images for non-commercial use, but must include a credit to the British Museum.” (that description from the excellent IanVisits, by the way). Expect some PRETTY POINTED remixes of the Elgin Marbles coming soon from the disgruntled Greeks.
• This Is How Mind-Fcukingly Rich Jeff Bezos Is: Absolutely the worst thing about the pandemic (not the worst, OK, but the thing that has personally caused me the most grief) is the amount of money I have ended up giving MechaBezos over the past few weeks, simply because it’s so much easier than not giving him money. This website is a quite staggering visualisation of the scale of Bezos’ wealth; I know you think you know how much money he has and how that compares to how much money is maybe a reasonable amount for one person for feasibly possess, but I promise you that you really don’t have the faintest idea. Seriously, click on the link, scroll, and marvel – and then, hopefully, get angry about the fact that this is the case. Look, should there be any of you reading this who believe strongly in the right of the individual to pursue their own endeavours and benefit from the fruits of their brilliance and their success – yes, I get it, and I agree that people should be able to invent and create and get rich off the back of their invention and creation! I do! I just don’t think that when your wealth exists in no small part because you make margin by fcuking a LOT of other people, and when it is so large that there is NO CONCEIVABLE WAY you could ever, ever use it all, that perhaps you ought to, well, stop. Would the world be a worse, less creative, less amazing, less advanced place if we all agreed to cap personal wealth at, say, $2bn? I posit that it would not, and that things would be better. There we go, ELECT ME TO RUN THE WORLD (please, don’t, I really, really wouldn’t enjoy it.

By Miles Johnston

NEXT, TRY THIS SUPERB HIPHOP MIX WITH A DISTINCTLY-90s FEEL BY DJ WREX!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO CONGRATULATE EVERYONE WHO WAS TALKING ABOUT SYMONDS BEING PREGGO BACK IN OCTOBER FOR BEING SPOT ON WITH YOUR TIMINGS, PT.3:

• Songalong: This is a really cute project. Songalong invites you to compose a new song each week – they give you a theme, and the rest is up to you. It’s started today, so there’s nothing on there at the moment, but the idea is that they’ll collect people’s submitted tracks and collect them on the site, so you’ll eventually end up with a wide-ranging, varied collection of songs created by people across the world, arranged by themes. This week’s prompt is ‘a song about an unlikely friendship’ – I am genuinely excited to see what people create, and I really do hope that this gets shared widely to encourage as many people as possible to give it a go; please do send this to people you know who make music, I think it’s a great project.
• Out of Context Animal Crossing: I think this was sent to me by Alexander Burley – THANKS ALEXANDER BURLEY! – and it is exactly what it suggests; a Twitter account presenting screencaps from Animal Crossing, without context. Occasionally funny, occasionally makes me think that Animal Crossing is a far, far darker game than people have been letting on.
• Daily Effects: I think I am going to respond to every single call for ideas for ‘creative’ video stuff from now on with ‘look, just pay some kid on TikTok, they are better at this than everyone’. I mean, check this person out – the gimmick to this account is that each day the creator adds one additional visual effect to their original video, and if you scroll right to the bottom you can see quite how far it’s evolved. The creativity and the technical skill here is honestly astonishing – THESE KIDS ARE BETTER THAN YOU AT VIDEO (also, better than me, let me be clear; tbh you are almost certainly better at video than me, I am rubbish).
• Akinbeat: Plug in whatever artist or band you like and this site will generate a playlist of ‘similar’ stuff. I have no idea what is powering this under the hood, but it generates the playlists from individual YouTube tracks and it seems to work quite astonishingly well; if you’re after a non-Spotify/Pandora alternative then this isn’t a terrible option for the creation of the odd platylist here or there,
• The Best Travel Webcams: Are we all agreed that none of us are going on a foreign holiday anytime soon? GREAT! Console yourself (it is no consolation, dammit, I was really looking forward to going to Greece in September and I am TOTALLY going to sulk when that inevitably gets cancelled) with this collection of quite wonderful webcams from around the globe, including trips to the mountains, river journeys, city breaks, safaris…honestly, whatever sort of ‘I don’t want to be here, take me somewhere else please magical internet machines’-escapism you’re after, you’ll find it here. Except Agistri, you bastrds.
• Are You Tone Deaf?: Well, are you? Why not find out by taking this test by Harvard University? You’ll not only get an accurate assessment of whether or not you’re really tone deaf or just really, really sh1t at music AND you will be contributing to serious academic research at the same time.
• TRex Gone Wild: Not, to be clear, anything to do with T-Rexs getting sexy; instead, this subReddit shares photos and videos of people out and about wearing those weird foam T-Rex costumes that have become weirdly popular in the past few years. On the one hand, this is very much a one-note gag; on the other, I will never get bored of the floppy-headed gait of a man dressed up as a predatory lizard chasing some cats through a house.
• Brutalist Sandcastles: Calvin Seibert makes architecturally-impressive sandcastles which are sort-of reminiscent of the National Theatre, and they are GREAT, and OH GOD I WANT TO BUILD A SANDCASTLE FFS.
• The Weirdest Kinks: An excellent example of the classic ‘wow, Reddit, you really do contain multitudes’ thread, this. “Sex workers of Reddit, what’s the weirdest kink a customer has asked you to fulfill?”, runs the question, and OH BOY do people answer it. This is joyful, mainly because (mostly) whatever you might be into, sexually, you will be reassured that it’s pretty much normal compared to what some of these people have been exposed to. Some observations, before you dive right in: a) it’s 99% men’s fetishes – why? I refuse to believe that men are significantly more kinky than women, so why is it that there are so few female clients referenced in here? Is there an answer in Krafft-Ebing I should look up? Anyone?; b) people don’t seem quite as weirded out by the “someone paid me to lie really, really still for an hour without talking while they w4nked at me” stories as I feel they ought to be; and c), I think I am going to start referring to people as ‘footslut Georgio’ because it is the single greatest epithet I have heard so far in 2020.
• The Shampoo Challenge: I can’t remember how I found out about this, but I am SO GLAD that I did. I’m not personally into cock, but even so I was oddly charmed by this hashtag, which consists of literally HUNDREDS of men who’ve decided to photograph themselves balancing shampoo bottles on their erect penises (said penises are encased in shorts, though, so it’s not total bongo). LOOK AT THEIR PRIDE!!! Honestly, it’s weirdly-heartwarming and cheered me up no end earlier in the week (and has done so again just now – thanks, anonymous cocks!) – to be clear, though, if you don’t want to see lots of erect penises (albeit silhouetted inside jockey shorts) then probably don’t click the link.
• The Hogwarts Digital Escape Room: Thanks to Julian for sharing this with me – it’s another Escape Room done in Google Docs, but this time it’s Potter-themed, so if you’d like to enjoy some clicky intricacy which draws on the most tediously-ubiquitous children’s literary saga of all time (I like Potter, but, well, can we give it a decade off, please?) then GET IN. It’s simple enough to be enjoyed by kids (I reckon 8-9’s probably the age gate here), so share with yours (or indeed other people’s) if they’re Potterphiles.
• Desktop Meadow: I don’t normally include stuff that requires a download, but this is too lovely not to share. Download the program and start growing a virtual meadow on your desktop, complete with little birds that will come and visit and which, over time, will bring messages from strangers – who are other people elsewhere playing the game. This is SO BEAUTIFUL and just a really lovely piece of digital gameart – honestly, it may sound twee but do give it a go (also, what’s wrong with twee you CNUT???).
• Prince Of Persia: I just discovered that there’s a version of Prince of Persia that you can play in-browser. This is fcuking brilliant, and it’s all I can do not to sack of Curios right now and go and fall into a spiked pit.
• Clicking Bad: Finally this week, this is VERY OLD but it was new to me and it’s kept me vaguely-occupied all week; it’s a classic ‘clicker’ game all about building a meth empire, and in common with all such games it’s very, very soothing, in a sort of ‘do nothing, stuff happens’ kind of way. I recommend opening this and keeping it running in a browser as something to stare at as the latest pointless, tedious Teams call with idiots drones on around you.

By Cynthia Karalla

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS FANTASTIC, GALLIC, LOUNGEY SELECTION BY 2CV!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• German Signs About Coronavirus: Literally just that. These are all in German, should that not have been made clear from the title.
• Blanke Bedenten: More German coronacontent! This time it’s German medical professionals, posing naked in protest at what I presume is their belief that provision of protective equipment has been inadequate. For some of you, the mere promise of naked doctors will be enough, but it’s also interesting to me as a corrective to the ‘everything is fine in Germany compared to here’ chat; no question that the UK’s fcuked it in several key ways and that our government is full of cnuts, but, equally, every single country’s population, aside perhaps from New Zealand, has variously had complaints about their administration’s handling of the pandemic.
• Model Architecture: A Tumblr of architect’s models. Lovely, lovely models of buildings. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.
• How Loopy Is That?: Superb, beautiful, hypnotic looping gifs. Seriously, you may never come back from this link, they really are that mesmerising.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Lend A Hand: Another lovely small, cheering project, Lend A Hand is simply asking people to share photos of their hands along with an accompanying story of kindness experienced during the pandemic; they’ll then post them out through this Insta account. It is, fine, just photos of people’s hands, but they are nice photos of nice hands with nice stories attached to them, so just fcuking enjoy them, ok? OK????
• #Kutimancometogether: Kutiman’s a musician whose work I’ve featured in here before; he’s been doing little videomusicalmashups on his Insta feed under this hashtag, which you can see here collected, and they are ACE. Seriously, check out the Flea/Stevie Wonder one, it’s superb.
• Sasamana1204: This person makes really, really pretty sandwiches. It may not seem like much, but these are SO PRETTY. They are Japanese, inevitably, as everything that is incredibly cute and very precise must by law be.
• Francois Vogel: Vogel is a video artist, I presume a French one, and his Insta feed is a wonderful carousel of slightly-odd video, manipulated with various effects to Dali-esque ends – seriously, his use of scanslit results in some very, very odd-looking cats, amongst other things.
• Barbie Woodshop: I always feel a bit guilty about featuring amazing acts of parent/child creativity, mainly as I worry it will make more, well, standard parents feel a bit inadequate. This, though, is too lovely not to – this bloke and his kid are getting into woodwork, and so is Barbie. Honestly, you may not think you need to see photos of Barbie skillfully-manipulating a bandsaw but, well, you really do.
• The Cooking Bstard: A colombian chef posting cooking guides and recipes; included partly because, well, you probably don’t cook too much Colombian cuisine so why not learn and, more prosaically, because the name of his Insta feed made me laugh more than almost anything else this week (it’s been trying). Thanks, again, to Camila for this one.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Shiny, Happy Quarantine: I don’t use Instagram – I mean, I can use it, I just don’t, it simply doesn’t interest me – or Facebook, aside from a worky group I’m in, which means I’ve not been subjected to much, if any, idealised lifestyle content depicting people’s blissful quarantine experiences. In this essay, Dave Pell presents his dispatch from his perfect quarantine life – if you’re sick of people telling you to BAKE BREAD LEARN A LANGUAGE COOK BETTER MEDITATE MORE WRITE A BOOK FIND YOURSELF then this will probably make you feel significantly better.
• Saving the COVID Chronicles: As ever with modernity, we are chronicling this passage of time at a scale and with a breadth of voice unprecedented in human history; as ever with digital materials, the extent to which these chronicles will maintain over time is…uncertain. This is a look at how various archivists across the web are working to try and preserve the incredible volume of social history being created every second across the web, in the midst of, and about, COVID-19. You know all this, obviously, but it’s worth reading these pieces to be reminded of the wealth of human history and experience that will be lost as a result of the inbuilt ephemerality of Stories, for example, or the fact that A N Other media owner could choose to pull the plug on a platform in a few years’ time, consigning all these meticulously-constructed personal histories to the great binary scrapheap in the sky. I wonder whether there will be a move towards an international consensus on preserving digital materials after this, by a UNESCO or similar?
• How COVID Will Change Retail: Obviously this should in fact be called ‘How COVID might change the face of retail’, but noone ever clicked on speculative headlines like that. This is by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, and is very US-centric insofar as it looks specifically at the previously-mall-led culture dominant over there, but it contains enough interesting and smart observations to make it universally (potentially) applicable. Everything in here is stuff I’ve seen mentioned elsewhere, but it’s one of the more comprehensive pieces I’ve read on how the change in movement habits will impact commerce and how that, in turn, will have significant likely impacts on property, which in turn affects everything else. Obviously all the predictions in here might turn out to be totally wrong, but Thompson’s at least asking the right questions about what the next 24m will look like and what they will mean for the 120 to follow.
• The Media and Lockdown: Sam Leith writes on how the media is in many ways running the narrative when it comes to the pressure to ease the quarantine measures, making a compelling case that the clamour for clarity and ‘a strategy’ is born as much of the need to have something new to put on the front page as it is a desire to hold the Government to account. I particularly like the detail about all the papers having spunked their ‘lockdown baking’ guides too soon; I can only imagine the horror of conference these days as a bunch of nervous faces attempt to come up with a novel angle on ‘we’re still inside and everyone’s really fcuking sick of reading about baking’.
• Domestic Telepresence At Scale: Or, perhaps more appealingly to the average reader, ‘some thoughts about how videocalling might evolve so as to become better and more seamless and less annoying and rubbish now that we’ve all accepted that it’s a thing’. This is really, really interesting – similar in scope to the piece last week about creating digital spaces with similar properties to physical space in the way they facilitate interaction, but focused on imagining a way in which we could have a more seamless, and pleasant, experience of inviting people into our homes via video. I would bet significant cashmoney on the next big Ideal Home-type show featuring an awful lot of full-wall screen setups for full-size telepresence-type stuff.
• COVID Nudes: On the one hand, this feels slightly like it might have been commissioned by a COVID journalism bot which just pairs a random, zeitgeisty word with ‘…in the time of COVID!’; on the other, this is a surprisingly well-written and interesting look about the semiotics of the n00d…’in the time of COVID!’, with a particular focus on its role as in fine art and portraiture.
• Quarcore: I AM SORRY, BUT I DID NOT MAKE THAT WORD UP. Blame GQ, which examines the world of ‘prepper fashion’ – for those of you unaware, ‘preppers’ is the generic term for people who sort-of think that everything’s going to go pretty seriously to tits and as such have stocked up on tinned food, bows and arrows and lots of very expensive Kevlar-reinforced underwear for when things really go South. What’s most interesting about this is the intersection with actual urban fashion – I know at least two people who dress like this in real life (Hi Ed! Hi Jay!), as though they just stepped out of a Gibson novel, and I know how much this stuff costs (lots, basically); there’s a load of quite fascinating cultural semiotics stuff in here if you fancy a bit of a dig around.
• The Insta Cash Giveaways: On the current phenomenon of influencers on Insta doing cash giveaways to a lucky follower, just as long as they go and follow this bunch of other accounts RIGHT NOW; this piece explains how this works, and how the influencer’s make bank off it (basically they give away, say, $10k, but charge out 20 ‘follow this account’ slots at $1k to brands or aspirant-influencers, thereby making a neat 100% (or whatever) profit. Fascinating, not least for the throwaway line in there about some of the biggest current purchasers of these opportunities to gain followers being plastic surgeons, which says several not-entirely-excellent things about where we’re currently at as a species.
• Why Did The Youth Social Action Agenda Fail?: This is quite serious, and quite policy-focused, but if that doesn’t put you off then I would really recommend reading it; it’s by David Reed, and is the first in a three-part series in which he looks at why the UK Government’s multiple-year focus on increasing ‘youth social action’ in the country. It’s quite depressing, but hugely instructive – Reed was himself involved with multiple projects as a third-sector worker, and his account of how these initiatives get dreamed up by spin doctors and senior civil servants and how that then plays out in reality is sobering. You read this and you realise that it’s a fcuking miracle that anything ever gets done in a system where political priorities which determine the fundamental ways in which the country works change every two years when there’s a reshuffle or an election.
• On Fortnite’s Travis Scott Concert: If you’re interested in knowing more about how the Travis Scott/Fortnite thing actually worked, and a bit of intelligent commentary on WHAT IT ALL MEANS FOR THE WORLD AND ENTERTAINMENT AND BRANDS, then this typically-astute essay by Matthew Ball is worth reading. I found the whole thing very, very impressive, fwiw, but I do rather wish there was more clarity on how much it cost, as it would stop people asking me ‘so how much would it cost to do something like that but for a bank?’ and other such FCUKING STUPID questions.
• How TikTok’s Changing Musical Titles: Basically labels and artists are finding that they need to SEO the titles of their singles to take advantage of a 6s clip of part of the hook being used in a viral dance craze. So it goes.
• The Stockbrokers of Magic: The Gathering: Magic: The Gathering (I am not going to type its full name again) is one of those things that you might vaguely remember from your childhood and which you probably don’t realise are still weirdly massive (see also: Runescape). For those who don’t recall, it’s a card game which basically revolves around building out the strongest deck you can from a finite selection of commercially-available cards of varying power and rarity. It’s also one of those things that has an incredibly complex economy attached to it (basically it turns out that there is literally NOTHING on this earth that people won’t make a market out of); this WIRED piece looks at how that economy works, and the very weird world of those who play it for big stakes.
• Animal Crossing and Productivity: You may have read all the Animal Crossing thinkpieces you think you need, but please make time for just this one additional article. In it, Grayson Morley writes about his relationship with the game in the context of his wider life, pre-and post-quarantine, and how he sees it in relation to his own wider relationship with work and leisure. It still doesn’t quite address the confusion I have about ‘intense productivity as leisure pursuit’ that the game seems to embody, but it’s a lovely piece of writing.
• Walking in Japan: This is WONDERFUL, and in may ways perfect for lockdown. Craig Mod walked a lot of Japan; this website collects his notes and thoughts and photos of that walk. Honestly, I can’t tell you how beautiful this is – it’s slow, meditative and spare, and Mod writes simply about both what he’s experiencing as he walks and the wider cultural context within which it sits. “Let me emphasize that this is not a guide, but it’s also not not a guide. It’s a collection of notes, tips, and, I guess, “travelogue” entries about walking the Ise-ji route of the Kumano Kodō. I wrote this because I love the Ise-ji, and want you, also, to think: Damn, that looks like a fine hike. So consider this a persuasion or seduction, a thing to bookmark and return to, for when you decide to give this walk a go. Consider it a playful dare, for when we can all go out and walk again.” Honestly, this is ART.
• Sucking Your Own Knob In The Age Of COVID-19: This is not art – instead, it’s a look at how the ancient art of autofellatio is gaining popularity as men struggle to work out what to do with themselves during lockdown. There’s a lot to love in here, not least the slightly-poignant comments from the guys who think they might never ‘get there’ but are happy willing on those who do. There’s quite a lot to unpack in this practice from a psychological point of view which I don’t personally think gets investigated quite enough – I mean, do these people spit or swallow? And if the former, do they feel some sort of small, personal and weirdly-conflicted sense of rejection in the immediate aftermath – but, mainly, it’s just quite funny.
• Snorkelling Against COVID: A SNEAK PREVIEW OF THE NEW IMPERICA MAGAZINE! This is an essay from Issue 4 – available to buy here! – this is Lucrezia Lozza about how a humble snorkelling mask from Decathlon has been at the heart of Italian efforts to treat victims of the virus.
• The Nine Elms Cold Store: God I love this – not only is it a history of forgotten London, but it’s a history of forgotten London which is right round the corner from my house. The Nine Elms Cold Store was a massive monolith which started its life as a cold storage warehouse and then had a weird, mixed-use life as part of London’s counterculture in the late-70s and 80s. This is SUCH a wonderful essay, not least for the several stellar anecdotes dotted throughout. Gay clubbing in the 80s was SCARY, turns out.
• The Stuntman: Or, “why Richard Branson is a sh1t”. This is a great portrait, based on a new biography of the man, by David Runciman in the LRB, which does an excellent job of demonstrating why Branson’s free-wheeling rebel schtick is just that. A small Branson anecdote; his businesses, I am told, employ a surprising number of blonde women in their 40s and 50s who all have senior roles, often ill-defined, and who are otherwise characterised by the fact that each and every one of them made the unusual career move of going straight from air hostessing to a well-remunerated position in the corporate world. You may wish to speculate as to why this is.
• The Rematch: A GREAT comic which imagines what would happen if the tortoise and the hare had a rematch. This is superb – well-drawn, funny and with some excellent little observations and small gags scattered throughout.
• Get Fat, Don’t Die: I absolutely adored this article, but it made me cry quite a lot so caveat lector (is that right? I don’t speak Latin) and all that. It’s about the ‘zine Diseased Pariah News, which ran for 9 years in the US at the height of the AIDS epidemic, offering funny, frank and unsentimental advice to the country’s thousands of men living with the virus as it cut swathes through their friends and contemporaries. It’s in the main about the fabulously-named Beaowulf Thorne, but it’s equally about the revolving cast of sidekicks and misfits who helped him compile each edition. I fcuking hate the term ‘inspirational’ but, honestly, this really is – oddly I am welling up a bit again as I type this, suggesting it really did make an impression. Please do read this, it’s beautiful.
• Natural Selection: This is ALSO beautiful – it’s a truly superb essay profiling a man called Irv Teibel, who was basically responsible for the birth of ‘natural ambient’ as amusical genre (you know, the sounds of seas, forests, whalesong, etc etc) but who was far, far more than that. Everything about this is a joy – Teibel’s obvious, charming eccentricity, the immense amount of information and knowledge that it imparts without ever obviously trying…honestly, even if you don’t give two fcuks about music or sound or anything, this is still the loveliest thing you will read all week.
• I See The World: Finally in this week’s longreads, a rather short one. This is by Jamiaca Kincaid, and is a sort of stream of consciousness prose-poem about right now, and is very beautiful indeed.

By me

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. This is the first excellent music video I’ve seen since lockdown; it was all shot ages ago I presume, but it’s a lovely, shiny piece of visual storytelling. The song’s quite an odd mix of stuff, but it works with the visuals – this is ‘Bikini’, by Bass Astrax x IGO:

1. This, by contrast, is VERY quarantine-y. It’s called ‘Smile’ and it’s quite unsettling – thanks, Erian Trotland!:

1. This is EXCELLENT, and exactly the sort of thing that a brand could commission 10 influencers to collaborate on for a semi-decent bit of lockdown advertising imho. This is called ‘Exquisite Quarantine’, and it’s exquisite corpse but with film; 17 directors each have 30 seconds of film, each following on from the next. I really enjoyed this, far more than expected:

1. I don’t think I’ve ever featured music from Kyrgystan on here before, but today that PATHETIC EXCLUSIONISM ends! This is Biykech, with her recent single Kyrk Kyz – this is very good, and very different to anything I’ve heard before whilst at the same time being very recognisably a record from 2020:

1. Last up this week, this is just fcuking amazing. SOMEONE RECORDED AN ENTIRE FCUKING TALK SHOW IN ANIMAL CROSSING. Seriously, just look at this, it’s amazing (even if, to be honest, I couldn’t really give a fcuk about the actual content). Why don’t YOU spend the weekend interviewing YOUR friends in a videogame and recording the outputs? Whatever you choose, IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GO BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE SEE YOU NEXT WEEKEND UNLESS I DECIDE TO TAKE THE BANK HOLIDAY OFF IN WHICH CASE IT WILL BE TWO WEEKS WE’LL SEE HOW IT GOES BUT REGARDLESS OF WHEN I RETURN KNOW THAT I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY AND SAFE AND THAT I AM HOPING AGAINST HOPE THAT EVERYTHING IS SORT OF BROADLY OK FOR YOU THANKS AS EVER FOR READING THIS FCUKING THING I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU BYE!!: