On the one hand, no one wants an election (you may think you do, but you really don’t). On the other, THIS COULD BE OUR CHANCE TO ACTUALLY MAKE HIM THE LEAST-SUCCESSFUL PRIME MINISTER IN HISTORY. Of course, so doing would mean finding someone else worth voting for, which at the moment looks a touch problematic to be honest. 

Yes, that’s right, we’re in PRE-ELECTION FEVER! Distinguishable from ACTUAL ELECTION FEVER by the absence of any actual election on the horizon, and the creeping feeling that this is all an elaborate bluff to distract us from the fact that NOTHING IS HAPPENING! Are you excited? I’M EXCITED!

I am not, of course, excited; I haven’t in fact been excited since approximately 2003, frankly. I am bored, tired, and increasingly of the opinion that, honestly, maybe climate catastrophe’s actually not that bad a thing after all. Shall we just call it quits, kids? Shall we just, well, stop?

But then, of course, I think of all the websites out there to scour and catalogue, all the weird and slightly-creepy artworks and kickstarters and fetish sites to share with you, all the words that would go unwritten and, honestly, I realise that it’s my OBLIGATION to keep doing this for as long as I’m capable, if only to keep distracting the rest of you from the slow, ineluctable entropy of everything (yes, that’s right, this is a PUBLIC SERVICE, what of it?). 

So come with me as we once again avert our gazes from the bloody, toothy mess that is meatspace and instead turn our square eyes back towards our magical, promise-filled screens. Out there it’s all meat and gristle and hatred, whereas in here…well, it’s also all meat and gristle and hatred, frankly, but at least it’s the digital twin rather than the real thing.

I am Matt, this is Web Curios and, as ever, you’ll be glad when it’s over.  

By Chris Austin

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS NEW MIX COMPILED BY FRANK OCEAN!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF THE WORST THAT HAPPENS IS A LOT OF GAGS ABOUT HIS DEAD EYES AND CRAP HAIRCUT THEN MARK ZUCKERBERG GOT OFF PRETTY LIGHTLY THIS WEEK TBQHWY:

• Facebook Continues To Preserve Democracy!: No matter that the boss isn’t exactly clear on why a Nazi and a Nazi politician ought to be treated differently on his platform; they are CLEANING UP THE SWAMP! Sorry; it’s just quite hard not to jump on the ‘let’s kick Mark!’ bandwagon, even when it’s your bandwagon and you’ve been riding it for years and frankly you’re starting to get a bit irritated at how crowded it’s getting with all these bloody arrivistes hopping on at any opportunity – most of the stuff in here is perfectly sensible. This post summarises a slew of new initiatives being undertaken by FB (across both it and Insta) to help minimise chicanery around the US elections in 2020; these include greater transparency around who owns or administers Pages, clearer information about political adverts (where they appeared, better breakdown of overall vs regional spend, etc), and more prominent flagging of posts sharing stories that have been debunked by third-party fact-checkers. This is all generally Good Stuff – and, regardless of the fact that it’s sloooooowly being introduced in the US with no details of how long it will take to expand more widely, this is all worth knowing about, as there’s no way this isn’t going to become standard procedure worldwide. The stuff about Page transparency is most interesting, imho; the eventual requirement for all Pages to be linked to a registered business or individual, and for this to be public, would, if I’m understanding it correctly and if it becomes universal, be a hugely significant change.
• Facebook Protect: Announced in tandem with the above slew of electoral safeguards (ha!), Facebook Protect is a programme of measures designed specifically to help politicians and adjacent actors secure their Facebook / Instagram presences against outside interference; this “offers candidates, elected officials, federal and state departments and agencies, and party committees, as well as their staff, a way to further secure their accounts. By enrolling, we’ll help these accounts (1) adopt stronger account security protections, like two-factor authentication, and (2) monitor for potential hacking threats”. Which, again, is smart and sensible, will almost certainly be rolled out more widely in 2020, and hopefully means that the governing classes won’t be able to roll out the tedious, barely-believable ‘I was hacked!’ excuse next time they drunkenly share close-up photography of their various mucous membranes with a stranger.
• Facebook Adds Search Results to Standard Ad Placements: I could explain this but, honestly, you don’t need me to: “All new ad campaigns using Automatic Placements will automatically include the Facebook Search Results placement. You can also manually select the placement when setting up your campaign. Once you opt-in, ads will be eligible to appear on search result pages which includes general search and Marketplace search – and will both respect the audience targeting of the campaign and be contextually relevant to a limited set of English and Spanish search terms.” DO YOU SEE? Good!
• Facebook Testing Ads In The Group Tab Feed: It’s almost advertising to Groups, but not quite! FB is slowly starting to experiment with flooding one of its few as-yet-untouched pieces of real estate with ads, as some advertisers are being offered the opportunity to place their ads in the Groups tab of the FB app. This doesn’t currently afford said advertisers the ability to target based on what Groups people are members of, but, well, give it time.
• Facebook Adds Restrictions To AR Lenses: The Facebook SparkAR studio – the bit where you can make your own filters and lenses for FB, Insta et al – this week announced that it was launching a few restrictions on what users can create on the platform; specifically, filters which are ‘associated with plastic surgery’. Exactly how far this extends is…unclear; whilst this is obviously designed to limit the ability of devs to create those weird apps which filter people to look like they’re being fitted for a facelift or, even more weird, like they’ve just had one (complete with technicolour bruising and post-op swelling, because WHY NOT?!), it’s not immediately apparent as to whether this would kibosh anything that offers exaggerated CG-style facemodding, or even any ‘lip filler preview’-type lenses. Worth being aware of if you’re thinking about creating anything in SparkAR which involves facial deformation, however ostensibly benign.
• Insta Testing Better Account Cleaning Features: This is likely to do not-great things for branded Insta accounts. The platform’s apparently testing the ability for users to group the Insta accounts they follow, along lines like ‘least interacted with’ and ‘most shown in feed’; you’d imagine that many of the ‘least interacted with’ will be corporate Instas BECAUSE NOONE WANTS TO INTERACT WITH A BUS COMPANY’S FCUKING INSTAGRAM FFS, and that this feature might see quite a few of them getting unfollowed as a general hygiene thing.
• It’s Now Even Harder To Instastalk: Users attempting to browse Instagram on desktop will now have to be logged in to access or view anything more than a very minimal selection of a feed’s content, meaning…well, meaning not very much, I don’t think, other than a slightly-annoying additional step to go through when doing desk research and, in all probability, an even worse experience when trying to use any sort of social media analytics software on the fcuking platform.
• Twitter’s Q3 Earnings: It’s not particularly great news! More users (but still, really, not very many) and falling ad revenue, and Nazis (they don’t mention the Nazis, but they’re always there)! Still, as I feel occasionally compelled to point out, until someone invents a better and faster way for people to share news – you may scoff, but whatever you think of Twitter it really is unparalleled for this – then it is unkillable (please note that this is not the same as ‘a great and profitable business’, just that there are a few industries for which it’s basically infrastructural at this point and that’s not a bad position to be in).
• Better Employee Engagement Stuff on LinkedIn: Harass your staff into sharing your company’s THRILLING UPDATES on the world’s worst platform! “With Employee Notifications, Page Admins can now alert employees of important posts, which employees can then engage with or share to their LinkedIn network. This makes it easy for your employees to share your organization’s content and amplify your messages.” So not only do you now have to ignore the email from marketing asking you to PLEASE SHARE the CEO’s doubtless-inspirational essay about how “creativity is at the heart of everything the business believes in” (fancy that!), you have to ignore a nagging notification on LinkedIn too! There’s some other stuff in here about Page Admins now also having the ability to give badges and ‘kudos’ to particularly high-performing wageslaves within the company, too, which I’m sure will make not getting a bonus this year easier to swallow.
• Snap’s Q3 Earnings: It’s surprisingly OK news! More users! More ad revenue! A decent AR platform! Maybe it’s all going to be ok!
• Snap Launches Dynamic Ads Offering: Basically it’s exactly the same as the dynamic inventory ads you can already run on the big platforms: “With Dynamic Ads, advertisers can now automatically create ads in real time based on extensive product catalogs that may contain hundreds of thousands of products. These ads are then served to Snapchat users based on their interests using a variety of templates provided by Snap.” So expect to see the same bullsh1t Wish.com ads you see all over Facebook and Insta on Snap as well, as we continue to explore the cognitive dissonance inherent in ‘really wanting to save the planet’ and simultaneously ‘really wanting to buy whatever pointless crap we’re fed on the internet regardless of the fact it’s all made of plastic, produced under questionable labour conditions and shipped from the other side of the world because look it’s just so FUNNY!!!1111eleventy’.
• Twitch Testing Watch Parties: Amazon’s usually pretty quiet about its link to Twitch – there’s relatively minimal interlinking between the platforms, at least to the casual observer – but this creates a more explicit connection, with the news that streamers will (probably) soon be able to livestream films and TV shows for ‘watch parties’ with their audiences, using Prime Video as the delivery mechanism. This is, I think, very smart indeed, and the sort of thing that you probably ought to be aware of if you work in entertainment marketing or somesuch (HELLO TO ALL THE PEOPLE IN OSTERLEY!).
• The Latest We Are Social Global Statistical Jamboree: It’s that time of year again, when the diligent people at the We Are Social workhouse churn out another of their comprehensive compilations of statistics about global s*c**l m*d** usage. Want a vaguely-plausible-sounding figure for the number of people using Insta in Tuvalu? GREAT! As ever, perfect for constructing whichever straw man argument you fancy as to why your client MUST pay you five figures for a ‘TikTok Strategy’.

By Christian Schmidt

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY SOME SPARSE ELECTRONICA MIXED BY ANDREY ZOTS?

THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.1:

• Stealing Ur Feelings: It feels – perhaps unfairly; SORRY to all the creators of excellent interactive web experiences whose work I am unfairly dismissing here – that there’s been a bit of a dropoff in innovative webwork in the past 18m or so; not that I’ve not seen loads of interesting or beautifully-made work, more that it’s been a while since I’ve seen something which makes me think ‘ooh, I’ve not seen that before’. Which is why this pleased me so much – it’s, I think, something I’ve never seen before. Built in partnership with Mozilla, this is a video all about how facial recognition tech is being used by apps and websites without us necessarily being fully aware of what it’s doing or how it’s working, and does an excellent job of explaining how the tech can be implemented and to what ends; what’s EXCITING about it is the way it dynamically pulls in facial recognition information from your webcam, changing elements within the film based on your reaction to them. I have NO idea how this is compiling it all on the fly, but it’s very, very impressive. Also, MAN I look tired and baggy of face this morning. FFS, WEBCAM!
• Skin On: You will, I am sure, have seen this story somewhere this week – it was even in a NIB in the Metro ffs – but it’s worth clicking on the actual creator’s website to get the full horror. Skin On is a project by technologist/designer Marc Teyssier, which involved him creating an artificial ‘skin’ for his phone, which he was in turn then able to use as a new gestural control interface. Rather than tapping, stroking or swiping the screen, Teyssier found himself instead able to pinch, tickle, tug and prod his newly-epidermised device to control it, in the most Existenz-mimicking thing I’ve ever seen in real life. Honestly, you HAVE to watch the video; there’s something so amazingly, viscerally-unpleasant about the ‘skin’ – I think because it reminds me of how sticky toys look after you’ve lost them under the bed for 6 months and then they emerge all befluffed and unsticky and weirdly old and flabby – but also so incredibly satisfying about the tactility introduced by the fauxflesh. Wonderful, horrible, and the sort of thing that I guarantee at least one person will discover a new and moderately-disturbing fetish as a result of.
• Digital Wellbeing Experiments: It’s not even the sort of thing you can call ‘bleakly ironic’ anymore, really; welcome to the latest suite of tools designed to help us cope with the horrors of technology, designed by…one of the creators of the horrors of technology!! This selection of ‘Experiments’ by Google are small pieces of code which can be downloaded – or fiddled with, as it’s all Open Source – designed to help us manage our digital distractions better. So, for example, there’s one which lets you select a variety of different settings for your device to limit notifications and alerts to selected apps, or something which gently shows you how many times you’ve unlocked your phone in the past 24h, or one which lets a group of people all set a collective lock on their phones to ensure they all STAY IN THE MOMENT TOGETHER… Cynicism aside (ha! ONLY JOKING), these are all very smart pieces of design (as you would expect), and there are some small-but-wonderful germs of ideas in here. I just sort-of wish this wasn’t done by Google.
• Bruno Simon: Right, developers – RAISE YOUR GAMES. This is the new high watermark for ‘ridiculously flashy and overdesigned CV/portfolio websites’ in 2019 and beyond; take a bow, Bruno Simon, because this is just superb. It’s one of those ‘website that’s also an interactive experience’ things, specifically an interactive experience in which you drive a little RC car around an isometric-3d environment complete with RAMPS and JUMPS and STUNTS and, weirdly, BOWLING. Oh, yes, you can see Simon’s work and CV and stuff, should you so desire, but frankly it’s the jumps that will keep you interested. Hire this person, just so you can get them to add a 360-degree loop-the-loop to this.
• The White Tower: If you’ve ever wanted to explore a comprehensive history of the constructivist movement in architecture and design and its specific relevance to the construction of the water tower of Uralmash in Yekaterinburg, Russia, then this will please you no end. If, on the other hand, you’ve never wanted that, trust me when I say that you will find this interesting regardless. There’s a VR version to experience for those of you with access to the kit, but for everyone else this is a genuinely fascinating piece of arthistoricalarchitecturaldesignhistorystorytelling, with some nice webwork and design flourishes thrown in.
• Flipfit: Has anyone ever made the ‘social shopping’ thing work as a business yet? I mean in a platform sense rather than just ‘managing to sell stuff using socials’ sense – I don’t think I can recall anything having any sort of significant breakout success, but perhaps Flipfit will be the exception. This doesn’t feel like its hugely different from ideas I’ve seen before, or indeed like it’s economically sustainable, but, well, I am pretty much the opposite of a businessperson, so. The idea is that users shop through Flipfit, get outfits sent to them, then post photos of the clothes and get their followers to vote on what to keep, with the initial buyer able to return all the stuff they don’t want; users to attract new users to the platform will earn credit within the app, as will users who vote on other users’ looks – obviously designed to get people onboard fast (as is the app’s pretty aggressive influencer engagement programme), but equally obviously the sort of customer acquisition strategy that’s very much not financially sustainable (unless Softbank is backing them, of course). Oh, there’s a social justice element to it to, with users able to use the platform to return old clothes to be donated to charitable causes, which is a nice touch. I may be wrong, though, but I can’t see any way in hell that this can become a sustainable proposition (watch as it becomes Amazon by 2025).
• Quick AI Avatars: To be clear – this is not ‘AI’, and the ‘quick’ bit is, well, questionable. Still, though, if you want to make your own, slightly-shonky, question-and-answerbot, delivered in equally-slightly-shonky 3d humanoid fashion, then lucky you! The deal is that you type in questions and answers into a spreadsheet, along with notes on emotes that you’d like the avatar to express when delivering certain phrases, and VWALLAH! You’re very own 3d answerbot! If you want an example of how widely the term AI is being abused, this is perfect – they are literally peddling a lookup sheet as being somehow ‘intelligent’, which is, well, quite the reach. All that aside, it’s sort-of fun to fiddle with for five minutes if you fancy making a humanoid CG minifig which will give ‘humorous’ answers to childish questions (yes, that is exactly what I did – don’t you dare judge me).
• Did You See This?: A new content format by Buzzfeed in the US which I found quite interesting; it’s a multi-presenter ‘let’s chat about the NEWS’-type magazine show, but delivered via the medium of the Groupchat – so the video content is literally the screenrecording of a groupchat conversation, with the participants narrating in v/o. This sounds terrible but, honestly, works surprisingly well, particularly when they bring in multimedia elements; it reminds me of something that launched a few years back and whose name I forget and which briefly got hyped before, inevitably, dying, whereby users could livestream their messenger conversations to interested parties, but, er, less fundamentally-pointless. There’s definitely some ‘creative inspiration’ *cough* to be taken from this I think.
• Camera Rescue: Do you have an old analogue camera knocking about that you know that you will never get round to getting fixed, despite your 2019 new year’s resolution to ‘get back into analogue’ staring guiltily at you from the frontpage of your diary? No matter, give it to these lads! “Camera Rescue is an organisation from Finland dedicated to preserving cameras for future generations. So far we have rescued just above 46 000 cameras, but we are just getting started. From one to thousands at a time, we rescue cameras from any time period old or new, working or broken. Trade in your old or unwanted camera equipment for cash, and help us with our goal of rescuing 100,000 cameras by 2020.” Embarrasingly I am VERY late to this, but I think it’s a lovely project and deserves support if you fancy donating your Box Brownie or whatever (nice contemporary reference there, well done Matt).
• Magic Spoon: It’s an online recipe scrapbook…ON THE BLOCKCHAIN! No, I have no idea why either, but it’s nice to know that I can secure my personal selection of culinary picks to an immutable decentralised ledger. I…I honestly don’t understand who this is aimed at or why it would be a thing – is this for people who are worried for the imminent collapse of everything and feel that this is the only way that they can ensure that their favourite recipe for one-pot chicken survives the Great Inevitable Mainstream Web Breakdown of 2020? Baffling.
• Creepy Professional Anecdotes: Hell of a question, this, on Reddit: “What is the creepiest thing you don’t talk about in your profession?” Now were I to answer that as a ‘non-specific generic media w4nker stroke advermarketingprdrone’ I’d struggle to come up with anything really unsettling, other than, perhaps, the weird, unspoken thing that in PR agencies people will STILL parade attractive young female staff in front of middle-aged male clients like they’re pieces of fleshy collateral (and if you work in PR and you don’t believe that this still goes on then, well, you’re an idiot). Thankfully, though, the people responding to the question work in more interesting or esoteric jobs and MAN are there some genuinely unsettling things in here. A lot of it – caveats, as ever – is quite upsetting, so be aware that there are references to abuse, death, injury and the like throughout. That’s not, now I come to type it, any sort of appealing description, but I promise you that this is really interesting (if, obviously, bleak).
• The Book Cover Archive: Like books? Like design? WELL LUCKY YOU! This is a wonderful archive, though it’s a US site and, frankly, I don’t think they do book covers as well as we do – although actually, looking more closely, I think they feature examples of design from around the world so SHUT MY FACE. A lovely project.
• Superpatron!: It is a truth universally acknowledged that any and all human beings in possession of 4g or broadband access are CREATORS here in the year of our Lord 2k19. And creators need to EAT. Thanks, then, to Patreon CEO Jack Conte who has created this $50k endowment for ‘creators who are ready to solely focus on making art’. There’s no elaborate form to fill in – you just give your name and details and a short proposal – the only criteria is that your application must be short enough that it can be reviewed in three minutes. So, if you want to jack it all in to MAKE STUFF for the next 12m, and you have an artistic practis/praxis that can be distilled into <180s, GO FOR YOUR LIFE! If this isn’t all hoovered by by kids who want to make TikToks fulltime, though, I will be STUNNED.
• The Evolution of the Scrollbar: The design history you didn’t know you needed. It’s a small touch, but I like the fact that the scrollbars all, well, scroll.
• The 2019 Photomicrography of the Year Award: SMOL THINGS CAPTURED ON CAMERA! This year’s Nikon-sponsored celebration of photos of really, really tiny things rolls round again; once again, these are all astonishing. To my mind the spider’s the standout, but, honestly, this stuff just blows my mind in general.
• Hey Robot!: The creation of games for Amazon Echo isn’t a new one – Sensible Object made ‘When In Rome’ a few years back, and I’ve seen a few other variants on the theme since. This is a new one, funding on Kickstarter and already funded with a month to go, which has a really smart premise; the idea is that each team competes to get the voice assistant to say a specific word, the catch being you can’t use any form of that word in your question. Sounds simple, but you can easily imagine the slightly contortionistic fun you could have as you attempt to work out how to get Alexa to say ‘diarrhoea’.
• Toilet Duck As A Service: There have been a few REALLY dumb ‘as a service’ things in recent weeks, but this one’s a strong contender for dumbest of the lot – and yes it’s 10x funded on Indiegogo with a whole week left and, honestly, what is the MATTER with people? Shine describes itself as ‘automatic cleaning and toilet maintenance’, but is – let’s be very clear about this – simply AN ADDITIONAL FLUSHING MECHANISM YOU ADD TO YOUR TOILET. There is a LOT to love (not in fact love) in here – from the opening sentence of the crowdfunding page which boldly asks “We all start preparing for the day in the bathroom, but how are we expected to prepare ourselves for the world, when the bathroom we use isn’t prepared for us?” (a pretty fcuking fundamental question, I think we’ll all agree), to the accompanying app (OF COURSE) which lets you check into the operational status of your toilet wherever you may be. Oh, and you can tell Alexa to clean your toilet for you, thereby sending a blast of ELECTROLYSED WATER (for that is what Shine uses to keep your porcelain spick and span, you see) to sanitise the bowl. EVERYONE IS MAD. EVERYONE.

By Shannon Tomasik

HOW ABOUT TRYING OUT THIS OH-SO-BEAUTIFUL AND VERY RELAXING MIX OF ECLECTIC BEATS AND SOUNDS BY BREAK MODE?

THE SECTION WHICH, MORE THAN EVER, REALLY, REALLY WANTS A ‘NONE OF THE ABOVE’ OPTION ON ANY EVENTUAL BALLOT PAPER, PT.2:

• Fesshole Ipsum: If you’re not already following Rob’s anonymous confessionbot Fesshole on Twitter, do it now. Fesshole Ipsum is a small, silly toy built on the Fesshole corpus, which will generate Lorem Ipsum-type copy for your website needs from all of the horrible confessions people have added to the back-end. Web devs! Please, please, please use this to populate a slightly-hidden Page in your current least-favourite site build and see if anyone notices; bonus points if anyone can get a site live with some of this copy still on there.
• Programming Hero: It’s increasingly clear to me that I’m going to be almost entirely unemployable within about a decade or so (which is fine, because I’ll probably also be nearly dead) – were it not for the fact that I’d honestly rather eat my own face than procreate, I’d probably be banking on my kids to be able to take care of me in my capitalistically-useless dotage. If you’re more sensible than me, though, and have spawned, consider using this useful-looking app to TEACH YOUR WHELPS TO CODE! I know, I know, we’re all over the idea that simply knowing a bit of HTML will make the blindest bit of difference to one’s actual prospects, but this teaches Python and, apparently, will add more languages in the coming weeks and months. I know that this isn’t a cast-iron guarantee of quality, but the fact that the devs are answering all the reviews and messages on the Play store makes me think this is probably A Good Thing (God I am SO NAIVE).
• The Squirrel Census 2019: Why the FCUK doesn’t this happen in St James’ Park?! There has been a SQUIRREL CENSUS in Central Park in New York! They now know how many squirrels there are, and where they hang out, and you can buy a glorious map displaying this incredibly significant information! I slightly wonder whether this isn’t organised and paid for by the dogs of NYC, but, regardless, I love that it exists. I case you wondered, by the way, there are ‘approximately’ 2,373 grey squirrels living there at the time of going to print.
• Stones/Water/Time/Breath: I am a bit of a sucker for pieces of art / music which are sort-of open source and can be performed / created anywhere, by anyone, and which are determined by the setting in which they exist and as such are always inevitably unique each time – see also John Cage’s 4’33, for example. This is SUCH a wonderful idea and I love it – “Dean Rosenthal’s Stones/Water/Time/Breath is experimental music in which a participant or participants choose any body of water and perform a set of actions designed to create a musical performance. It was born from an impromptu performance by the composer in May 2012 on Martha’s Vineyard that was later written down as a set of performance steps that can be performed by everyone.” You can see videos and hear recordings of various instances of its performance over the years, and get the score so you can perform your own version – if you’re stuck for something to do this weekend, I guarantee there are NO more pretentious options than this.
• The Goodsell Gallery; David Goodsell is an artist specialising in representations of elements from structural biology, microscopy and biophysics; what that means in practice is that his work presents the molecular structure of cells as beautiful, semi-abstract, colourful canvases. You can find a selection of his drawings here available to download under creative commons – these would make SUCH beautiful large-scale prints, to my mind.
• Free For Dev: Not exciting AT ALL – unless you’re a dev, in which case it might be a bit exciting. “Developers and Open Source authors now have a massive amount of services offering free tiers, but it can be hard to find them all in order to make informed decisions. This is a list of software (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, etc.) and other offerings that have free tiers for developers. The scope of this particular list is limited to things infrastructure developers (System Administrator, DevOps Practitioners, etc.) are likely to find useful.” See? TOLD you it wasn’t exciting. Still, there are about three of you who might find it practically helpful, and that’s the sort of incredibly-specific reader service you get with Web Curios – I know none of you care, but I do, dammit.
• Dr Lava’s Lost Pokemon: Whenever I come across Pokemon-related stuff it feels very much the sort of thing I ought to include in here, given it’s such an immense cultural lodestone for a whole generation of people just a tiny bit younger than me; at the same time, though, I’m equally slightly amazed that that kids’ card game has had such an incredible legacy with millennials. WHY?!?! Anyway, this Twitter account is a fascinating look into WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN – whoever Dr Lava is, they have access to all sorts of information about imagined Pokemon which, for whatever reason, never made it into canon; you want to know all about the specific evolutionary trees of the Blastoise family, and how there are SECRET COUSINS you never knew about? Christ alone knows why, but here you go.
• VGMaps: Would you like a website collecting images of videogame maps from throughout the history of the medium? OF COURSE YOU WOULD! The site is…basic, and a bit clunky, but I just travelled back in time 23-odd years and reminded myself of the map of level 6 of Alex Kidd in Miracle World on the Master System and, well, madeleines have NOTHING on this, is all I’m saying.
• Tattoo Votes: Not so much a link to a good website as a link to a GREAT (if a bit mean) idea. Click the link and DO IT.
• One Rothko Per Hour: I mean, what else do you need me to tell you? Put it on a big screen and feel like you’re in the Tate Modern except without all those other irritating fcuks (I once tried to chat someone up in the Rothko room at the Tate Modern. It went SO badly I still feel actual, physical pain at the memory. GOOD TIMES!).
• Open Doodles: A free library of open source doodles and illustrations, for all your ease of use. It’s worth reading the ‘about’ Page, which is a lovely articulation of why the creator has bothered to make all their work freely available like this, and their support for the principles of open design; one of those rare moments when you think ‘aw, isn’t the internet NICE and OPEN and FREE’, before you remember that it’s not, really.
• Mac OS Screensavers: A Github repository of all the old Mac OS screensavers you could possibly ask for, and several more besides.
• The Worst Garfield-related Facebook Group You Will Ever See: I mean, I’m not lying to you. Want to click and find out exactly how awful? YES YOU DO. This is a *bit* NSFW, but I reckon you can probably get away with it if you’re careful (you’re tempted now, aren’t you? I CAN TELL).
• Virtual Mate: The latest in Web Curios’ occasional series of dispatches from the dark frontiers of teledildonics and sextech, say a big, sticky, slightly awkward HELLO to Virtual Mate! What is Virtual Mate, I hear you ask? TAKE A WILD FCUKING GUESS. It is, unsurprisingly, some sort of cocksheath which you can connect to software, OBVS, except the gimmick here is that the accompanying software will REACT TO YOUR ONANISM! Yes, that’s right, it’s FULLY INTERACTIVE DIGITAL W4NKING! Even better, the makers claim that you can add literally ANYONE YOU LIKE to the software – as long as you have their consent! That…that couldn’t possibly be abused, could it? There is SO MUCH horror here – this is obviously a crowdfunded project, and with a week to go it’s raised $120k – the amazing (disturbing) thing, though, is that there are only 700 backers – meaning on average they have each paid 5x the suggested retail price for this BECAUSE THEY WANT IT SO MUCH. Who are the men who want a $1000 dollar luxurywankingmachine, and can afford one, and can we please quarantine them all somewhere. Be aware, btw, that whilst technically sort-of SFW this is a VERY sleazy website indeed.
• ASCIIDent: Finally this week, the most impressive ASCII game you will ever see. Ever. I am not joking, this is INCREDIBLE and one of the most insane labours of love I think I have ever seen. Please, do click, this is honestly quite, quite jaw-dropping.

By Danny Galieote

LET’S FINISH THIS WEEK’S MIXES WITH SOME GOOD OLD DRUM’N’BASS!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Kitchen Ghosts: Foodie cinemagraphs. Cinemagraphs were ACE, weren’t they? Can we make them a thing again please?
• Hidden Architecture: Maps, plans and drawings of historical buildings and monuments, if you’re into those sorts of things.
• Warning: Graphic Content: Not in fact anything gross at all, this is instead a great Tumblr compiling dataviz-type stuff (there’s a newsletter too if you prefer your information delivered that way).
• Wikihow Illustrations: The images on Wikihow are some of the most consistently-baffling things on the web. This Tumblr collects them – please, just marvel at the wonder of some of these; there’s a glorious caption competition game waiting to happen here.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Alpacas of Instagram: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
• Spenser Little: Little makes art out of wire (not only that, but there’s a lot of it); there’s something beautiful about the style here, which reminds me oddly of a certain school of Italian illustration from the 70s.
• Chandler Holding Your Favourite Album: You…you don’t need me to explain this, do you?
• John Waters Divine Trash Page: Like John Waters? Like Divine? Like trash and schlock and pulp? GREAT, you’ll love this feed then.
• Ricardo Oliveira: You may have seen the heartwarming clip doing the rounds this week, of the kid with cerebral palsy skateboarding thanks to a specially-made rig that holds him upright and supports his muscles; Ricardo Oliveira is the skateboarder who made that kit. This is his Insta feed, full of his own rather good ‘boarding exploits.
• Nick Walker: This is my friend Nick. He is, in his own words, gorgeous and hilarious, and he mentioned to me that he felt somewhat slighted by the number of Insta followers he had, so I said I’d chuck him in Curios and see if that helped. Look, I’m not expecting loads to happen here, but if NONE of you follow him I will look really stupid so, er, please? I promise I will never, ever, sully the purity of my blognewsletterthing with this sort of shameless friendplugging EVER AGAIN.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• The Best Thing You Will Read About WeWork: Not ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most in-depth or informative’, but certainly ‘best’ in the sense of ‘most likely to make you snigger at the very real madness at the heart of this whole story’. When you consider the bare facts – that despite utterly fcuking a bunch of people, almost certainly committing some pretty creative acts of fraud and being pretty much the new dictionary definition of delusional, asshole founder, Adam Neumann is still walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars – there’s an argument to suggest that this superb piece of satire-adjacent writing by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine maybe doesn’t go quite far enough.
• How Softbank is Breaking the World: Susbtitute ‘Softbank’ for ‘the very practice of venture capitalism’ and you’re closer to the truth, imho, but the premise still holds. I know I’m by no means alone in this, certainly not some sort of visionary seer, but it’s nice to finally see a little more mainstream consensus forming around the idea that the problem, perhaps, is the funders in these cases as much as the founders. I found this line particularly telling: “Deep-pocketed VCs understand that while continually pumping money into a company can prop up valuations, it’s not enough. You also have to pretend business is something that it’s not. Vision Fund investments need a vision, after all. It doesn’t matter whether Uber or WeWork actually work—or what happens when they fail—but that they have a vision that sounds profitable.” Apply that lens to EVERY SINGLE ‘X as a Service’ business you’ve seen of late – it’s true, isn’t it?
• The Dark Power of Keyword Signalling: Amongst all the rubbish talked this year about the DARK GENIUS OF DOMINIC CUMMINGS (please, can we all acknowledge that the only person who benefits from this narrative is Dominic Fcuking Cummings himself, and that perhaps we ought to maybe give it a rest?), possibly the best/worst was all the stuff about Boris’ speeches being carefully tailored to replace old search results with new, silly ones – see the ‘I like to play with buses’ example. This story is adjacent to that, but more sinister, and explores how right wingers in the US are working to insert specific words and phrases into the public discourse, which if searched for will lead the curious down a rabbithole of fashy conspiracy – genuinely smart, if deepy iffy, tactics, these.
• Jakarta is Sinking: So the XR people have gone dark again, at least for a few weeks, and so we can all forget about the climate emergency for a bit. Except, well, try not to! This piece, all about exactly how fcuked Jakarta is, is one of the most sobering things I’ve read about the actual, imminent impact of environmental catastophe; the prospect of having to imminently find new homes for 30million people is so utterly, mind-flayingly daunting. What’s interesting (read: miserable) about the article is the sense it gives of how systemic the problems are; the very fabric of the city, as it currently exists, is simply not sustainable, and this problem is almost certainly going to be replicated across the developing world multiple times over the next five decades or so.
• Social Credit In Practice: A really interesting look at the differing practical realities of several local Social Credit schemes across China; this does a really good job of explaining how the system is a largely regionalised set of experiments rather than a full-scale national programme, and how different schemes in different reasons differ practically in the function and philosophical approach to the idea. It won’t necessarily make you think that Social Credit is any less creepy as an idea, but it might make you wonder which elements of it could reasonably be incorporated into a less-obviously-creepy setup (can anyone say “slippery slope”?).
• The Obamanauts: A fabulous essay, ostensibly a collected review of the post-White House memoirs of several Obama staffers but in fact more of a review of his Presidency, as well as a series of musings on the nature of legacy and biography. There’s a lot of wonderful writing in here, not least the offhand dismissal of 75% of the books reviewed as little more than protagonistic fanboying; this is a really great piece of criticism and analysis.
• Useful YouTube Tricks: Ok, this is neither an essay or a piece of journalism or indeed good writing – it is, though, REVELATORY (or at least it was to me) on what you can make YouTube do. Honestly, there will be at least one trick in here which you will find properly lifechanging (oh, ok, FINE, that’s shameless hyperbole, but it’s still pretty good, I promise).
• Viewingbots On Instagram: The latest engagement-baiting technique on Insta uses Stories as the hook – there’s a spate of bots and software plugins available which will automatically make your profile ‘view’ thousands of Stories a day, thereby exposing YOUR profile to thousands of potential new followers who might be flattered enough by your interest to offer you a follow and thereby (presumably goes the thinking) make you marginally, incrementally more likely to be able to pass yourself off as an ‘influencer’ than you were before. This is a good overview of how it works, how to spot it, and, if you’re BLACK HAT, exactly what sort of apps can do this for you.
• 20 Years of Blogging: Unless you’ve spent a LONG time online this may not speak to you; to me, though, this was a genuinely lovely, strangely poignant essay, by David Liebowitz, who’s been blogging for two decades; here he looks back at why he started, why he’s kept going, what’s changed and what’s not. It’s an almost-perfect distillation of what was beautiful about blogging and the early internet back in the day; no expectation of audience or reward, just the small joy of carving out a tiny piece of cyberspace (LOL SO RETRO) all of your own, which anyone could stumble across and enjoy. I am obviously getting old, because this made me ever-so-slightly sentimental and misty-eyed.
• Ghost Hands: Sub-headed ‘A history of art and AI’, this article looks at the historical use of technology and automation in the creation of artworks, from the self-playing pianos of the early-20thC; its conclusions aren’t startling, fine, but as an exploration of man/machine creative collaboration and the history of the ‘Centaur’ (see Curios passim), it’s fascinating.
• Machine Reading: More on AI, this time the particular advances being made in machine analysis of texts, and the idea that we might one day be able to ‘teach’ a machine to ‘read’. What’s most interesting here is the breakdown and analysis of how we analyse language as humans (or at least how we understand ourselves to understand language) and how machines currently parse text; even the latest iterations of the very best software, based on code by Google nicknamed BERT, can’t be said to do anything so complex as ‘understand’ language so much as being a wonderful, sophisticated system of pattern recognition. There’s a nagging part of me that wonders whether the really interesting questions here don’t revolve around what we currently mean when we say ‘understand’, and how that meaning might require tweaking as we start to grapple with the mechanics of machine intelligence in a serious way.
• BBC Voice and AI: The BBC this week updated its Alexa Skill for News, with the added functionality of being able to ask for more depth on any given story; using voice commands, users will be able to access additional reporting from the BBC on any news item they here. Regardless of the fact that it’s a very smart idea, the tech and thinking behind it is really interesting; here, the BBC’s Tallulah Berry, involved in the project, explains some of the considerations and thinking – technical and user-focused – involved in its creation. As a primer on how to think about voice tech, this is really good.
• Instagram, Censorship and Art: It’s long been a bone of contention among the art world that Instagram’s ‘don’t offend ANYONE’ prudery effectively limits the platform’s efficacy as a vehicle for art. This is the account of a recent roundtable between a varity of arts practictioners and the powers that be at Facebook/Insta, discussing where lines can and should be drawn and how the platform can and should evolve to become more hospitable to the creators it claims to value so highly. Nothing conclusive emerges, but it’s interesting to see the arguments presented, and the fact that this conversation’s even taking place would suggest that changes are a-coming.
• An Oral History of Clerks at 25: I know it’s not fashionable to say this, but I actually prefer Mallrats. Still, Clerks is a GREAT film, and this look back at it around its 25th anniversary is interesting if you’re a fan, funny in general, and VERY 90s. I love the idea of Jason Mewes getting cast simply because he was quite funny and just sort of around; there’s something so pleasingly shambolic about the whole thing that should give heart to anyone who’s ever wanted to make anything but never quite known how.
• Meet Condé Naste: I had NO IDEA until I read this article that Condé Naste was a real man, but I am now obsessed with the idea of someone I know calling their kid ‘Condé’ (seriously, HOW FABULOUS WOULD THEY BE?? Also, how bullied?). Anyway, this is a profile of the publishing magnate, and the very singular vision thatr powered the creation of the modern empire that is ‘The Nasty’. As a credo, this is on the one hand quite horrid but on the other the clearest articulation of a vision you can hope for: “The publisher, the editor, the advertising manager and the circulation man must conspire not only to get all their readers from one particular class to which the magazine is dedicated, but rigorously to exclude all others.”
• Journalist as Influencer: This Guardian article got a lot of love on the TL this week, mainly from other female writers strongly endorsing its perspective – to whit, that there is something inherently character-driven and performative about modern journalism, particularly for women, whereby it’s not solely about the act of writing but also about the act of being seen to embody and espouse a lifestyle or character that will resonate and be relatable, and that this lifestyle or character is as important in attracting readers and commissions than the content or quality of your prose. As a non-bylined journalist (this is not journalism) I’m in no position to speak – I found elements of the article a little bit self-indulgent and self-pitying (part of me thinks, for example, that the pattern described here simply doesn’t apply to the very best writers regardless of gender), but the overall thrust seems true. What struck me is how much the central theme of performance as a necessary component of professional practice applies almost as much in advermarketingprland, with the endless AWARDS and BLOGS and TWITTER FEEDS and HUSTLES and THINKPIECES and POLEMICS and oh god I am just part of the problem aren’t i?
• How To Write Great Mystery Plots: By Charles Finch, himself a writer of mystery novels, and one of the best things I’ve read in ages about the practice of writing. Smart, funny, self-deprecating, a tiny bit catty, this is just delicious.
• The Case for Checking a Bag: Does Roxanne Gay ever write anything bad? This is a short-ish essay on why it is always a good and sensible thing to pack hold luggage when travelling on an aeroplane, and it has no right to be this good.
• My Broken Bladder: You may not think that the (very) personal tale of the author’s struggle to stop peeing so often would be the funny, uplifting story of (sort-of) triumph against (sort-of) adversity you needed today, and yet here we find ourselves. This is very, very funny (unless you yourself are a bit incontinent, in which case it’s probably a bit close to the bone).
• Welcome To The Land: One of two wonderful pieces of travel writing in here this week, this is Adam Karlin’s trip to the Northernmost point of the United States – Utqiagvik, Alaska (no, no idea how you pronounce it, sorry), “a place that is not just a cardinal direction but so far away from everything that it is defined by its liminality, its edge-ness, like reality had a border where the night is the day and the road is the beach and the bears.”
• Parenting and Panic: I can’t vouch for this beyond the quality of the writing, but if you can get behind the following sentence then you will enjoy this a lot I think: “Parenting has a lie built right into its name: we should’ve called it childing, because that’s who is in charge.”
• Under The Knife: A very honest and rather sad account of the author’s own labioplasty procedure – why she had it, how it felt, and how it made her feel. It’s dispassionate, and well-written, but there’s something so dispiriting about the eventual and unsurprising realisation that perhaps the issues they were trying to fix were perhaps not fixable by a ‘simple’ act of surgery.
• Electronic Dawn in Uzbekhistan: This is SUCH a brilliant essay – as a piece of travel writing, as a piece of music writing, as a general ‘wow, isn’t the world and human culture just fcuking AMAZING’ exclamation of delight…Tom Faber was recently at a techno festival in Uzbekistan, a place it may not surprise you to learn doesn’t host loads of them as a rule. Honestly, if you can read this and not have at least a small flicker of believe at the unifying power of 140BPM sounds and a campfire then, well, what’s wrong with you? Truly superb, even if you would rather perforate your own eardrums with rusty nails than listen to this sort of stuff.
• The Essential Harv: Finally in this week’s selection of longreads, this is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read all year. I have no idea who Harvey Mayes was, nor indeed does that matter. I don’t think he was particularly famous or notable on a global scale, but that doesn’t matter either. This is an essay written earlier this year on what would have been his 75th birthday, by the man for whom Harvey was a first ever boyfriend. In 25 small vignettes he paints a wonderful, vivid, human picture of someone we’ve never known and will never meet and who, by the end, you are genuinely sad never to have hung out with; it’s one of the most intimate essays I can remember reading about anyone, ever, less in the quality of the details and more in the general sense of love that permeates the whole thing (yes, I know that sounds AWFUL, but trust me on this – I am the most repellently cynical person I know, and if I think this is cute then I promise you it really is). Please enjoy.

By Tina Berning

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

This is called ‘Humanoid’, it’s by ‘Fcuk It’, and it reminds me of a sort of souped-up version of the dirty breaks tracks I’d get on Botchit & Scarper compilations around 1996. Excellent digitalartwank video to accompany it, too:

This track’s refrain is basically tailor-made for love and relationships in 2019. It’s by Common Holly and it’s called “Crazy OK”:

This is the most preposterously-woke song you’ll hear all year – honestly, hands-down – and it feels like it was composed specifically to soundtrack an end-of-year compilation of footage of XR protests worldwide, but her voice is quite wonderful (shades of Beth Gibbons, to my mind, along with some soul/country artists I can’t quite place) and the video is, whilst as-discussed preposterously-woke, generally a pretty hopeful montage of kids who, as the title suggests, are having none of it. This is by Frazey Ford, see what you think:

Next, a truly brilliant video for a really excellent song- this is ‘I See You’ by Pumarosa:

Last up this week, this is the new one by Clipping which I have decided are my current favourite US hiphop outfit. Per the rest of their output, this is creepy and quite horrible, but this time there’s more of a spoken word / visual art edge to the whole thing and, honestly, they are SO GOOD. Suitably creepy given we’re coming to Hallowe’en – this is called ‘All In Your Head’ and BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE DON’T FORGET THE CLOCKS GO BACK THIS WEEKEND WHICH MEANS AN EXTRA HOUR IN BED SO WHY NOT TREAT YOURSELF TO THAT EXTRA DRINK ON SATURDAY, WHY NOT GO TO THAT SECOND PARTY, WHY NOT SAY YES TO LIFE, BECAUSE GOD KNOWS IT MIGHT ALL BE OVER SOON AND THERE WHERE WOULD WE BE ACTUALLY DON’T ANSWER THAT DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT INSTEAD FOCUS ON THE WEEKEND AND THE WARM FEELING OF MY ENTIRELY PLATONIC LOVE ENVELOPING YOU SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BUT IN THE MEANTIME TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE!:

 HERE I AM HELLO! I was meant to be in Venice this weekend, but due to Circumstances Beyond My Control I am in fact NOT in Venice! I am in my kitchen! Radio4 is on! I have been typing for approximately 6 straight hours and my fingers hurt! I should be heading towards art and culture but instead here I am in my pants, spaffing out what I would conservatively estimate to be around 8,000 words about ‘things what I saw on the web this week’! GREAT!

You will note, dear readers, that I am not at all annoyed about the cancellation of my trip. That lack of annoyance will doubtless shine through in the measured equanimity of my prose this week – or perhaps I’m just mollified by the prospect of maybe finally doing a Brexit up ourselves (although if any readers would like to enter into a small wager as to the likelihood of this deal getting parliamentary approval then, well, I am ALL EARS. Wagers to be of the hideously and humiliatingly biological variety, for preference). 

Regardless, it’s late, I have written too much and I am DONE. Watch as I fling this poorly-cobbled-together bundle of words and links casually to one side and stroll on into my future; fall onto my leavings like the information-starved foundlings I know you all deep in your hearts to be (ha! information starved! in 2019! chance would be a fine fcuking thing, eh?); read my words, click other people’s links and generally let Web Curios ease you into the weekend the in the same gentle way that a trepanning spike ‘eases’ its way into your skull.

I, as ever, am Matt, this, as ever, is Web Curios, and one way or another this will all be over soon enough. 

By Polly Penrose

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS ABSOLUTELY BANGING SPOTIFY PLAYLIST BY JOE MUGGS WHICH IS BASICALLY THE UR-GUIDE TO UK DANCE MUSIC!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS THAT IF FACEBOOK REALLY WANTS TO TRY AND HUMANISE ZUCKERBERG THEY OUGHT TO DO A BETTER JOB OF WRITING HEADLINES FOR THEIR OWN RELEASES WHICH SOUND LESS LIKE THEY ARE SPOKEN BY A POORLY-CODED ATTEMPT TO PASS THE TURING TEST:

• Mark Zuckerberg Stands For Voice!: No, really, that’s actually the headline – “Mark: He Stands For Voice!”. Good to know that one of the most powerful-yet-famously-inscrutable people on the planet has finally put a line in the sand and told us what they really care about – it’s VOICE! The amorphous concept of vocalisation! It’s what motivates him to get up in the morning! This link is actually to the text of Zuckerberg’s speech yesterday all about his (and by extension Facebook’s) ideas on free speech and free expression (he’s a fan!), and what he thinks of China (not so much of a fan, despite having commercial ties with Chinese businesses which earn Facebook hundreds of millions each year!) and TikTok (it’s not a platform for free expression like Facebook, which is bad! Racist boomer groups = good, memetic dance crazes = bad!). Basically we all just need to stick together, get through this, and keep on using Facebook as it’s probably the best means we have of healing the fundamental divisions which threaten to split our society asunder like an overripe melon. Got that? Great!
• Twitter Clarifies Content Exceptions: The past few weeks’ furore over Facebook’s refusal to block factually incorrect political advertising has led to other platforms seeking to clarify their somewhat-murky policies as to what you can and can’t get away with posting; this week, Twitter has published this reasonably-clear guide to how its ‘public interest’ exception functions – that is, the criteria by which it assesses whether content which would ordinarily be removed from the platform stays up when it’s posted by a public figure. This is actually all reasonably sensible, but there’s a wonderful kicker at the bottom. The types of content that they will never apply the public interest exception to? That featuring “child sexual exploitation, non-consensual nudity, and violent sexual assault”…oh, and anything featuring a copyright claim. Good to know that a President or Prime Minister can literally lie about whatever they like, but heaven forfend they post an uncleared clip of the Champions League.
• Instagram Offers Users Better Data Controls: It’s one of those weeks in which none of the s*c**l m*d** news is actually particularly relevant or useful to brands; what I ought to do at times like this is just keep this section brutally short and get on with the bits I actually enjoy writing, but instead I always get a misplaced sense that if I do that I’m not quite giving yout the full Web Curios experience (yes, you’re having an ‘experience’ – did you not realise? This is all laid out in the Web Curios ‘Mission & Values’ document which I must publish one day) and as such end up padding these entries out with exactly the sort of rambling inconsequentialisms that you’re reading right now. Anyway, this is a very long-winded way of telling you that Insta “is now adding a new feature that allows individuals to “manage all of the third-party services they connect to their Instagram account””. Worth going through your settings and checking exactly who you’re sharing your posting history with, should you still be interested in such outmoded concepts as ‘digital privacy’.
• LinkedIn Events Is Here!: I know! I’m excited too! One of the newsletters I read (sorry, I forget which; I’m upto what feels like about 10 a day at the moment and I confess that it feels like I might be a bit full) described LinkedIn as being ‘Facebook in slow-motion’, which I rather liked; this feature addition rather bears that out, with LinkedIn introducing the ability for users to create Events on the platform, just like you’ve been able to do on Facebook for a decade or so. It’s all pretty limited at present – you can’t promote events, the functionality doesn’t allow for integration with ticketing services or anything like that – but you’d expect over time that it’ll become more sophisticated. Still, if you’re the sort of person who unaccountably wishes to actually meet Oleg, this could well be the best thing you’ll see all week (it really oughtn’t be, though).
• Trump On Twitch: It does make quite a lot of sense for Trump to be on Twitch from a demographics point of view, but it’s also a sort-of perfectly 2019 move; the idea of ‘the most powerful man in the world’ (he’s not, obviously, but he thinks he is) taking to a platform on which blue-haired anime enthusiasts broadcast themselves playing digital card games in their pants to an adoring audience of hundreds-of-thousands of obsessed and addicted children (and yes, I also know this is a hugely-reductive description of Twitch, but still) is in and of itself basically a plotline from a videogame (SMASH!TV, sort-of). SO META! Oh, this isn’t really related but I don’t quite know where else it fits; Twitch’s account of its recent rebrand is a really nice, clear presentation of the thinking behind design and is worth a look if that’s your field / interest.
• The Giphy Arcade: This is potentially quite fun, and certainly a clever move from Giphy, which this week launched Giphy Arcade – a service where anyone can create their own customisable videogame from a series of templates, from Breakout clones to Flappy Bird ripoffs. You select the type of game you want to make, swap out the template sprites for your own choices from the vast Giphy archive, fcuk with the palette and the feel and the pace and a bunch of other variables, give it a name, and then bingo, play and share and LOL to your little heart’s content. Obviously there’s a brand play here – Wendy’s was one of the launch partners, and has created a bunch of small burger-themed games to give an idea of the sort of thing other brand’s could do were they so minded; the games that you make are all mobile-friendly and embeddable and, frankly, if you want to create some light-touch ludic digibollocks you could do worse than have a play around with this.
• LAST CHANCE FOR LAST QUESTION TICKETS: Well, not quite the last chance, but if you want to attend on 28 October and hear such luminaries as Martin Wiegel and Anjali Puri discussing whether marketing has lost its personality then CLICK HERE. NB – Imperica’s getting paid to promo this, which I feel honour-bound to disclose, though let me make clear that I am not personally making any money at all here and so this recommendation is as pure as the driven snow.

By Daniel Dichter

NEXT, WHY NOT TRY LISTENING TO THE VERY SPOOKY SOUNDTRACK TO THE SCANDI FILM ‘THE CIRCLE’ WHICH WAS WRITTEN BY NONE OTHER THAN BENNY FROM ABBA!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY ISN’T AT ALL BITTER ABOUT NOT BEING IN VENICE RIGHT NOW, PT.1:

• The Earth Archive: There’s not a lot to see at this link – FFS MATT SELL THE LINKS, JESUS CHRIST THIS IS WHY NO FCUKER READS THIS BASTARD THING – but the idea behind it is wonderful. The Earth Archive is a project which wants, eventually, to create a 3d map of the entire Earth’s surface, laser-scanned using a technique called LiDAR – “LiDAR, Light Detection & Ranging, involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane towards the ground. It’s a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface & everything on it. Not an actual image, but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points.” In my head, this means basically making a sort of Microsoft-Kinect-style representation of three-dimensional space – which (and this is where it gets scifi and interesting) would in theory give anyone and everyone a topographically-accurate digital twin of the planet’s surface to play around with. Which offers quite incredible opportunities for virtual exploration, virtual travel, games…who cares that the surface of the planet is a boiling mess of death and dust? LET’S PLAY VR SAND SURFING! This is a quite preposterously ambitious project, and given the fact that it doesn’t seem to be backed by any massive corporations and is currently seeking funding (and the website’s an off-the-shelf Squarespace job) I’m not particularly confident in it ever getting off the ground, but, well, just IMAGINE.
• Real Talk About Suicide: This is, I think, actually a year old; I believe it was made for National Suicide Prevention Day in 2018, but for whatever reason it only passed across my field of (internet) vision this week. This is an interactive film in which you’re presented with Jason, who’s struggling with suicidal thoughts; at various points in the narrative you’re offered dialogue options to try and help Jason and get him to seek help, with the site helpfully explaining to you why some options and techniques are more effective than others when dealing with the very depressed. This is really nicely made, the interactivity’s handled well and the performances in the video are better than they tend to be with stuff like this – it’s also quite a hard watch if you’ve any experience of this sort of thing, so caveat emptor and all that jazz.
• The Rotten Library: I occasionally get all misty-eyed about the halcyon days of the earlyish web on here, and one of the sites that gives me a proper hit of nostalgia is Rotten.com – now defunct, but in the 90s one of the urls that every teenage boy had committed to memory (it wasn’t hard to recall tbh) as a place to find weird and, in the main, incredibly gross stuff. Rotten was a weird collision of viscerally-unpleasant photos (often literally visceral), creepy miscellania, odd bongo and everything inbetween, and was generally the sort of place you’d send people who were first starting out on their tentative internet journey of discovery in the hope of scarring them forever. This is a mirror of the Rotten Library, a collection of articles written by…someone, about a very, very broad range of topics including, but not limited to, history, death, art, culture, George Washington’s testicles and optical illusions; the navigation’s horrible and the quality of the content is…variable, but it’s a window into a very different internet. Just FYI, from what I have seen at least, there doesn’t appear to be any horrible photography on the site, so you can browse without fear of suddenly happening upon a flayed human leg or something (probably).
• Give Your Face To A Robot: In fact, sell your face to a robot! How much do you think your likeness is worth? What amount of cash would you require to sign over yourt physical likeness to a corporation for them to use…well, potentially however they see fit? If the answer to that question is “why, Matt, the nice round sum of £100,000!” then this website could be exactly what you’ve been looking for. Without a doubt one of the dodgiest-sounding seemingly-real things I’ve seen in a while, I think that this is probably a bit of link-generation PR by Geomix, a data-driven manufacturing company, but I couldn’t be certain. Look, here’s the blurb: “A few weeks ago we were approached by a robotics company asking if we could help it with the finishing touches of a state-of-the-art humanoid robot it’s been working on. Details of the project are scarce due to a non-disclosure agreement we’ve signed with the designer and his investors, but this is what we do know. The company is searching for a ‘kind and friendly’ face to be the literal face of the robot once it goes into production. This will entail the selected person’s face being reproduced on potentially thousands of versions of the robots worldwide. Obviously, this is not our usual remit of request, which is why we’re making this public appeal to try and find the right person. The designer knows that this is a big deal, and has agreed a fee of £100,000 to license the rights to the right face.” SO MANY QUESTIONS! What are the terms of the license? If I win, am I still allowed to use my own face or do I have to use the 100k to fashion myself a new one? WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS BUYER???? Nah, there is no way this is a real thing – still, worth keeping an eye on to see what the real story is – should any readers feel confident enough in their own physical beauty (and, er, confident in the benevolent intent of the project over all, which strikes me as far bigger reach) to apply, please do let me know how it all goes.
• Click-to-Pray: This did the rounds the other day after it was announced, with coverage driven by the fact this is seemingly fully-endorsed by the Holy See (it’s also available for sale on Amazon, suggesting the Vatican’s more keen on frictionless drop-shipping than it is on the upholding of global labour rights) – it’s the SMART ROSARY that all good Christians have been waiting for! It’s honestly impossible to make fun of this (and not just because I’m a good Catholic and couldn’t possibly mock something which has been endorsed by His Holiness Pope Francis) – it is already utterly beyond parody. CLICK-TO-PRAY FUNCTIONALITY (the parallels with the infamous Call Of Duty interactive funeral (“Press ‘F’ To Pay Your Respects”) are too delicious to ignore – IS GOD JUST PLAYING US LIKE THIS IS ALL SOME SORT OF DIVINE FPS???)! Rudimentary fitness tracking! A pedagogy of prayer delivered through audio classes to better connect with the divine! PEACE IN THE WORLD!!! (it really, honestly, genuinely has that at the bottom of the Page). Please, click through – regardless of your thoughts on Catholicism or Christianity or religion, this is so utterly ridiculous that you will not fail to be slightly cheered by it. The only thing that could make this better would be for me to start noticing an aggressive campaign of parallel social media advertising, a la Caspar Mattresses or those fcuking slippers, to start following me around – if the Vatican has embraced digital marketing then, well, EVERYTHING is up for grabs, kids.
• Microstudio: A free game development environment, currently in alpha, for all your simple game-creation needs, Sprites, maps, editors, all can be accessed within the site simply by creating a free account; it’s technical and requires you to have a vague idea of what you might be doing, but as a free, simple way of beginning to explore some of the concepts of rudimentary game design (and quite possibly more than rudimentary for some) it looks genuinely useful.
• Name The European Cities: There was a smol game in here a few weeks back in which you had to name as many US cities as possible; this is that, except with European cities, and again it ought to be really boring but instead you will find yourself compelled to add more and more and more cities to the map and you will start sweatily attempting to remember how to spell Vladivostock without checking, and at some point in the mid-afternoon you’ll get the other people on your pod involved and then that’s it, you’ll basically have become geography nerds. I’m just warning you – that’s EXACTLY what will happen.
• BBC BASIC Bot: For a certain vintage of nerd, this will be like a hug. The BBC BASIC Bot lives on Twitter and has one simple feature – Tweet @ it with some lines of BASIC (keeping within the single-tweet 280 character limit, obvs) and the bot will reply with what that code will do when it runs; so you can have it fill the screen with “HELLO MATT!” (10 PRINT “HELLO MATT!” / 20 GOTO 10 / RUN – nb if I have somehow contrived to fcuk even that very simple bit of coding up, please do not feel compelled to tell me) or love hearts or whatever you like. I am immoderately in love with this.
• A Thread of Female Protest Art from HK: Literally that – from the opening Tweet: “A Women’s Place is in The Resistance – a #HongKong protest art thread. While HK govt’s depiction of women in the movt has reeked of misogyny – they can only be mothers, sluts or virgins – HK art shows a fuller spectrum of womanhood and what female righteous anger looks like.” There’s no way to say this without sounding quite spectacularly-shallow, but I find the aesthetic of the HK protests particularly fascinating; better cultural historians than me (that is, any actual cultural historians) would I am sure be able to tell me, but has anyone done an analysis of the visual semiotics of the HK movement? As an aside, as I type this it’s 831am and this is the first really pseudy thing I’ve written, which personally I am quite proud of – WELL DONE MATT.
• Sandspiel: A very soothing little falling sand webtoy – sand falls, you change the colour and volume and the like and sculptures will slowly form in the grains. Utterly pointless but very relaxing indeed.
• Spareplace: About 5 or 6 years ago I was very loosely involved with a startup called ‘Proffer’, which wanted to effectively become the last-minute app of choice for London, enabling anyone to see up-to-the-moment availability for theatre tickets, restaurants, bars, etc; I never took any money from them because, well, I’ve worked with startups before and they have an unpleasant tendency to believe that they own your soul as soon as they’ve shelled out a tenner, which turned out to be the right idea as by the time it launched it had become something totally other and it died and ignominious not that long after launch. Which is all by way of long-winded explanation that Spareplace seems to do exactly what Proffer promised but didn’t deliver – to whit, last-minute restaurant inventory. It’s pre-launch, so there’s no indication to how well it will function, but if you’re the sort of person who’s potentially in the market for last-minute cancellation-hijacking, or a venue that wants to minimise its liability for no-shows, this could be worth a look.
• Joymode: Or “Stuff, as a Service!”. Joymode’s the latest iteration of the ‘subscribe to rent tech’ model, except here it’s not just tech, it’s seemingly everything. Pay your $30 a month ($22 if you sub for a year) and you can rent a seemingly-limitless array of things as part of your subscription. From Nintendo Switches to garden furniture, the site offers a range of ‘bundles’ – you can have one ‘bundle’ at a time rented out, but any time you want to swap they’ll deliver a new one and pick up the old. The value of this obviously depends on the extent to which the packages of things that they offer match your own needs, but it’s an interesting model; US-only (obviously), but there’s no reason a similar sort of service couldn’t work over here.
• Stream: A digital artwork by Leander Herzog, which presents a neverending stream of minimalist representations of s*c**l m*d** posts, passing across your screen as a bleak representation of what we spend so much of our lives doing. There’s a small fulscreen button in the top-right of the Page here, which I would recommend clicking for the full, numbing effect – oh, and there’s some slightly-uncomfortable audio too should you desire it. Enjoy!
• YOLOv3BOT: A Facebook Page which posts photographs in which the objects within shot have been identified by the Open Images dataset, except those identifications have been replaced by words picked at random from Urban Dictionary. Which is obviously a slightly-nonsensical description,but I promise you that this is ART. No, really, it absolutely is.
• Boardreader: I know most of you will be people working for BIG AGENCIES and will therefore have access to Sysomos or Brandwatch or somesuch tool and won’t have need of this at all, but for any of you who don’t have the means to pay the five figure subscriptions this might be of use. Boardreader is a search engine for Forums – it looks crap, but there’s a decent ‘Advanced Search’ functionality buried in there if you dig, and the results it throws out are seemingly pretty decent. Worth a look.
• Historical Records: This is an ASTONISHING archive, all maintained by one person (hello Dani Gal in Berlin!), which collects vinyl recordings of political speeches from the 20th Century. “Historical Records is an ongoing project of collecting commercially released vinyl records that document political events of the twentieth century. The collection contains over 700 LP’s of speeches and interviews of those who were in power and others who objected this power, of wars and peace agreements, human rights struggles and other radio broadcasts, of the events that shaped history from the invention of the phonograph to the fall of the Berlin wall. The project examines how recorded political events were commodified and what role sound documentation has in the interplay between personal and collective/national memory.” Any 20thC historians reading this, enjoy.
• The Cherry Picks: A site for film criticism and recommendations whose gimmick is that all reviews and opinions are drawn from women and non-binary people – “Each of our film pages includes an excerpt and hyperlink to the original published film review to introduce readers to a wider range of critical voices. We also created our own CherryCheck system which keeps tabs on the movie industry by highlighting existing programs to respond to the growing demand for representation and equity on-screen and behind the scenes.” If you’re after a place to read film criticism and appreciation from a non-male perspective, this might be a useful site to bookmark.
• No Context Chick Tracts: VERY long-term readers may recall that I had a bit of an obsession with fundamentalist Christian hate-mongering comic book artist Jack Chick back in the very distant past when I wrote this for H+K (speaking of which, why not journey back in time to 2010 and ‘enjoy’ historical versions of Web Curios for yourself – not least to observe how little my writing style has evolved or improved in the intervening decade – FCUK YOU GLADWELL WITH YOUR 10,000 HOURS); this is a Twitter account which exists solely to share out-of-context panels from Chick’s hateful oeuvre (honestly, the comics are SO horrible – you can check them out here if you so desire). The main theme you’ll quickly discern here is that of a God who REALLY likes punishing those who stray from His chosen path, usually via the medium of heavily-signposted-but-always-unexpected-and-often-very-brutal death – bleakly amazing, as long as you don’t think too hard about the fact that there are people out there who genuinely believe that stuff like this is an acceptable way of teaching kids about ‘good’ and ‘evil’.
• Birds of America: ANOTHER Curios appearance for the Audubon Society, North America’s bird enthusiasts’ club, which here presents nearly-500 illustrations of THE BIRDS OF AMERICA for your ornithological pleasure. “John James Audubon’s Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again” – not only this, but you can download each and every one of the images as a hi-res jpg, meaning you can create your very own little avian art collection. See what the angriest-looking bird you can find is; some of these lads look FURIOUS.
• Dracula: The Evidence: Another wondeful literary Kickstarter, this is an experimental-retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which seeks to tell the classic tale via the medium of various artefacts and ephemera presented as a collection of objects in Van Helsing’s briefcase – effectively the sort of prop setup you’d find in a Punchdrunk experience, say. It’s nearly fully-funded with a month to go, so it seems safe to say it’ll make its target; this is a potentially wonderful way of exploring the Dracula mythos in immersive, creative fashion, though its success will rest on the quality of the finished product; still, as a means of storytelling it’s a fascinating idea although the pricetage (£300-odd quid, and that’s the discounted version) is eye-watering.
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2019: You will doubtless have seen the winning image this year, that of the terrified rodent being chased by a fox, but the rest of this year’s winning entries are also very much worth exploring (as they always are). The navigation’s a bit horrid, frankly, and they don’t make these hugely easy to find on-site, but, leaving those (incredibly petty) gripes aside, there are some wonderful pictures here; personally my favourite is Charlie Hamilton’s shot of the CUTE STREETRATS, but please pick your own (no, really, DO IT).

By Christoffer

NOW WHY NOT ENJOY SOME CLASSIC HOUSE STYLINGS COURTESY OF GRAEME PARK?!

THE SECTION WHICH HONESTLY ISN’T AT ALL BITTER ABOUT NOT BEING IN VENICE RIGHT NOW, PT.2:

• Nowhere Stairs: Or, to give this photo series its correct title, L’Architecture D’Entrainement. My title’s better, though – this is a series of photos of buildings with stairs that lead nowhere; I think these are taken mainly in France, but the ur-examples of these always seem to be in Greece as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, this is by French photographer Eric Tabuchi – I think I’ve featured his shots in here before, specifically the ones of off-season nightclubs, but it’s very much worth exploring if you’re not familiar.
• The UK Rail Map: ALL OF THE UK’S RAIL LINES! ON A MAP! ON THE INTERNET! I sort-of imagine that anyone who would really enjoy this site probably knows about it already – I mean, you’d think that any train obsessives worth their salt would have Googled ‘UK rail map online’ at some point in the past decade, but on the offchance that YOU are such a rail enthusiast and you’ve unaccountably never done that then, well, merry Christmas!
• Be Kind Rewind: A relatively-new YouTube channel which provides in-depth-but-accessible analysis of Hollywood past and present; each episode is 20-odd minutes, and to date they’ve covered such topics as ‘The Blind Side’s White Saviour Complex’, Vivien Leigh’s Oscar win, an analysis of the film ‘Judy’…if you’re a cinephile, this might be worth subscribing to.
• No Stress Booking: We all know, yes, that when we’re browsing stuff on a website and a popup appears telling you that you MUST BUY IT NOW THERE ARE 73 OTHER DESPERATE WEBMONGS ABOUT TO STEAL YOUR HOLIDAY BUY IT NOW that it is in fact totally made-up rubbish and there are in fact NO other desperate webmongs attempting to gazzump you? Good. Still, if you find the ceaseless cajoling and hurrying of websites such as Booking et al to be a touch on the enervating side then you might enjoy this Chrome extension which claims to block all that sort of fcukery from your browsing experience.
• Social Justice Kittens 2020: You know that the year’s drawing to a close when the annual Social Justice Kittens calendar rolls around again. This year’s offering features another selection of impossibly-cute, impossibly-woke cats, each accompanied by a real quote culled from the socials and, the calendar’s creators claim, presented entirely in the context it was intended. I think I mentioned before when featuring this that I am 99% certain that this comes from a position of postivity, gently mocking the more…preposterous bits of the social justice movement whilst being broadly invested in it – honestly, I’m as pinko and lefty as the next kitten, but if you can’t see the ridiculous in phrases like “When I’m discussing my pain, your job is to listen” then, well, we’re probably not going to be friends tbh. The link up top is to the purchase page, but if you want to get a closer look at this year’s kittens before you pony up the cash, you can see them here.
• Quotes Uploader: This is odd. A YouTube channel which seemingly does nothing more than publish videos featuring a bunch of fairly generic inspo/motivational/hideously normie quotes over the top of stills from the recent Joker film. It’s basically like a vaguely redpill version of the Minion meme craze, but made slightly sinister by the moderately-incelish tone of some of this, along with the imagery, and the viewcounts which are frankly insane. Who are the 200k+ people who watched a video titled “15 Ultimate Boys Quotes” and whose thumbnail reads “80% of boys have girlfriends; Rest 20% [sic] are having brain”? And, er, who’s treating them?
• Mudita: ANOTHER minimalist phone, another successfully-funded Kickstarter which I am a tiny bit skeptical about (but maybe I’m being unfair). Mudita is a very nice-looking concept, all slick and minimal and with an e-ink display which is a first for me; it’s also going to retail for £300-odd quid, which to me seems like an awful lot of money for a featurephone with no browser (though there is a mindfulness feature, THANK GOD). Still, if you’re in the market for a phone which simultaneously signals your unique aesthetic AND your effortless ability to decouple from the digital treadmill then this may be for you. You dreadful, dreadful poser.
• Wheelhouse: ANOTHER NEWSLETTER! But this one’s specifically for people who make stuff with their hands, and features updates about materials and design and making techniques, and looks like it would be genuinely useful if you’re someone who actually makes things as opposed to the sort of useless cultural parasite who just spaffs out words and opinion and likes to pretend that that’s ‘creativity’ (it’s not creativity).
• Analogue Pocket: I sort-of believe that even at the very tail-end of civilisation, when the seas are boiling and the sun is a gigantic red death-orb filling our field of vision with fiery death, there will be a healthy cottage industry dedicated to keeping old console formats alive; there are, seemingly, certain men for whom the ability to play old Gameboy cartridges is simply the single most-important concern in their lives. Should you form part of that subset of humanity (emphasis here on the ‘sub’) you’ll be thrilled to hear of the Pocket Analogue, due to launch next year, which is a(n admittedly beautifully-designed) new handheld console designed to be compatible with all the Gameboy models you can think of, as well as a few other consoles like the Atari Lynx and Neo Geo Pocket. It’s not going to run emulator software, it will be coded from the ground up, will have a SUPER HI-RES SCREEN (on which to play very lo-res old games, not sure how that’s going to work tbh) and the ability to throw the games to your TV (ditto) – despite my snark, if this is the sort of thing that floats your boat then it does look rather cool; it’ll sell for $200 when it launches next year.
• Very Ugly Plates: The artist’s statement speaks for itself: “I’m an artist serving bad humor on Very Ugly Plates. I’m located in Berlin and all my plates are wall plates.” Honestly, these are fcuking wonderful (presuming you like the nature of the gags here, which are halfway between ‘classic millennial distant affect’ and a particular type of birthday card) and are for sale at around 40 Euros a pop; excellent Christmas present potential here for the right person.
• Your Wild Journey: This is quite incredible – the CHUTZPAH! Wild Journey is a meditation app, offering you a series of ‘journeys’ and ‘meditative experiences’, all presented through the medium of sounds from the natural world overlaid with relaxing words and soothing messages; you can choose what sort of natural landscape you want to experience, and there are suitable accompanying graphics to help get you into the mood…oh, and there’s a £7 MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION FEE! TO HEAR SOME FOREST-TYPE SOUNDS! Honestly, fair play to the creators here as this is some truly astonishing grift.
• Crate Labels: You didn’t, when you woke up all those many hours ago, imagine that you’d be rendered speechless with joy at a collection of old labels from Floridian crates of citrus fruits, did you? And yet here we are.
• Tawktube: Potentially REALLY useful tool, this – plug in any YouTube video you like and get it converted into a podcast (ok, fine, it’s literally just an audio file) for free. You can seemingly do this for an entire YT channel, though I’ve not tried it, which, if it automatically splits videos into individual audio files, is an incredible service.
• The Maths Genealogy Project: I sent this to my friend Ed this week, who’s the most mathematical person I know – his response was “that’s an odd website” which basically is what I live for when I send people stuff. This seeks to maintain an active archive of the pupil/tutor relationships in the mathematical world, presumably to attempt to make some sort of record of the spread of concepts / ideas within the academic world. It’s obviously of no interest whatsoever to anyone who doesn’t have a burning need to know exactly how many students Paul Erdos tutored in the 1950s, but if you do have that burning need then, well, YOU’RE WELCOME!
• Giant Military Cats: Cats, photoshopped into photos of military ordnance. Oddly reminiscent of Coldwar Steve, but with less McFadden and more kittens.
• Robn: This looks QUITE ridiculous, but if you’re a runner then perhaps it’s a hugely useful idea that you’ve been clamouring for for years. Robn is a…harness, I suppose you’d call it, designed to be worn like a packless backpack and which basically lets runners (or indeed anyone) carry their phone, keys, etc, in a non-pocketed way whilst at the same time doing away with the need for headphones thanks to inbuilt speakers. It’s quite hard to describe, but click the link and take a look – it looks a bit like the sort of thing that might be bought by the type of man who likes to share details of their ‘carry’ on Reddit and who never leaves the house without a Leatherman and at least one concealed blade, but if you’re the sort of runner who finds headphones unaccountably infuriating and who wants to keep their keys somewhere that isn’t a bumbag then perhaps you’ll be into this.
• Ologies: Tedious caveat about me not listening to podcasts aside, this looks like it could be really interesting – Ologies is a simple premise for a podcast, with its host Alie Ward exploring a different science each week (the titular ‘Ologies’). Recent episodes have covered the science of spider webs (spidroinology) and bleach (disinfectiology, apparently, though I think that’s not a real word) – I think this sounds fascinating and quite a lot of gentle, comic, Robin Ince-ish fun.
• Wheel Decide: Can’t decide? SPIN A WHEEL AND LET IT DECIDE FOR YOU! This was quite a weird discovery; I thought it was a slightly thin single-gag website, but digging around links it to a weird little subReddit dedicated to people making seemingly infinite variations on the decision wheel. Want a wheel to help you decide which blocks to lay in Minecraft? How to propose to your girlfriend? NO PROBLEM! Very strange.
• Singsong Dingdong: A lovely little 8-bit-style platform game – small, simple and perfectly-formed, this is a great way to waste half an hour while you’re meant to be working.
• Lewdlist: Two important caveats here: 1) THIS LINK IS QUITE NSFW; 2) I promise you, as ever, that I don’t look for this stuff, IT FINDS ME. With those caveats out of the way, let me present to you the Lewdlist, a website collating every single ‘sexy’ videogame concept you could possibly imagine, and then about 3million more which you couldn’t imagine at the outset but which now, by Christ, you certainly can (even if you wish you couldn’t). Let me state quite clearly I AM NOT INTO THIS STUFF AND HAVE NOT PLAYED ANY OF THESE GAMES; that said, I confess with only minimal shame to having spent an increasingly-boggle-eyed (anyone who knows me will be aware of quite what a statement that is) twenty minutes clicking around and reading about some of these. You ever wanted proof that rule34 is very much a thing? Here it is! Be aware that there is quite a lot of very odd sex stuff in here, so bear that in mind before you go gambolling through the sticky pages with abandon. There’s still nothing that’s stayed with me quite so much as the image on the landing page for ‘Breeders of the Nephelyn’, mind.
• JS13K2019: This year’s collection of games made as part of the JS13K project, where programmers vie to make the best game they can, playable in-browser, with a total filesize of no more than 13kb. As ever, the inventiveness on display here is wonderful, and there are several legitimately good games in here – the winning title, a puzzler involving shadow selves and buttons and door unlocking, is a VERY clever little headscratcher, and it’s only one of several here which are worth your time.
• The MS-DOS Game Archive (Redux): Last up in this week’s miscellaneous links, the Internet Archive this week uploaded another 2500 old PC games, all playable in-browser. You want the Monkey Island games? You want Cannon Fodder? You want Sensible World of Soccer? You want OLD VERSIONS OF CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER?!?!?!? This is SUCH an incredible resource and SUCH a good way to get sacked – who the fcuk cares, though? Your job’s sh1t and largely pointless and capitalism’s dragging us all to hell in a handcart; let’s all give up and play Ivan Ironman Stuart’s Offroad Racer until death comes to claim us!

By Jason Brueck

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS DESCRIBES ITSELF AS ‘CHILL DREAM HOUSE’ AND WHO AM I TO ARGUE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• 9-Eyes: Only one Tumblr this week and it’s an old one whichcame back to life last week – 9-Eyes launched around the advent of Google Maps and was dedicated to collecting some of the more WFTish elements captured by the panopticoncars; it had been offline for 5 years now, so it’s lovely to see it return. Again, this is ART.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Long Furby Fam: An Insta account dedicated to posting images of modified, often deeply disturbing, Furbies.
• They Didn’t Die: Obituary euphemisms for ‘died’ – passed away, departed, or, beautifully, ‘crossed the rainbow bridge’.
• The Lynx Project: The Insta feed of a project studying the Lynx in Canada, which presents a pleasing selection of photos of these large, pointy-eared bois. O MAOW!
• Our Type: “Our Type documents the disappearing shopfronts, signage and typography of Ireland’s towns and villages.” Pleasing.
• Felipe Nunes: Felipe Nunes is a skateboarder; he also happens to not have the full complement of limbs. Watching Nunes skate is quite, quite incredible, and will make you rethink (again) what people with disabilities are capable of.
• Annette Labedzki: According to her bio, Ms Labedzki ‘loves paint and colours’. She also loves making a delightful, beautiful, VERY SATISFYING (in a vaguely kinetic sand-adjacent way) mess. If you’re a bit ASMRish then you will enjoy this a LOT imho.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 100 Days of Hong Kong: Or, more accurately, 100 days of the Hong Kong protests. This is an excellent interactive put together by the South China Morning Post and presenting a chronology of the protest movement over the past three months, its evolution, the shifting tactics of the state in response and how the demonstrations have ebbed and flowed across the territory as the protest has evolved. A briliamt piece of digital journalism, presenting an awful lot of information clearly and with a strong sense of narrative, this is really very good indeed.
• Is Amazon Unstoppable?: The first of two MASSIVE pieces on Amazong this week, this from the New Yorker and is an excellent overview of the company, its business its culture and its almost-unique place in the pantheon of American capitalism. It won’t, if you’re a keen student of Bezos and his works, tell you anything you don’t probably already know, but as is common with these pieces it ends up being more than the sum of its parts by dint of the cumulative effect of all the parts giving quite a complex, slightly terrifying, vision of the whole.
• What Bezos Wants: The second MASSIVE piece on Amazon is, to my mind, the better of the two; by Franklin Foer in the Atlantic; this is better on Bezos (and thus Amazon’s) overriding ambitions – to whit, total global domination – and the uneasy fact that every single company currently selling anything to anyone is simultaneously dependent on, and competing with, Amazon; which, whichever way you look at it, is a pretty sweet position for MechaBezos to be in.
• Weather Reports from Xinjiang: “In 2018, I began to travel to Kazakhstan to interview the family members of Xinjiang’s imprisoned and disappeared. I also interviewed former detainees who described their own experiences. Most had crossed from China into Kazakhstan in the weeks, months, and years before our meeting, either by applying for residency and citizenship or by escaping across the border. The result is an oral history of life in contemporary Xinjiang. To my knowledge, it is the first document of its kind.” There is a LOT in here, but my word are there some incredible stories. This is worth bookmarking and returning to, as it’s an absolute trove of wonderful (and not-infrequently-harrowing) writing.
• India’s Facial Recogniton System: Which of our favourite in-no-way-iffy global superpower regimes is experimenting with the terrifying potential of facial recognition tech to augment its existing social control mechanisms? Why that’s right, it’s ‘cuddly’ Narendra Modi’s India! This article is about as uplifting as you’d expect it to be, and while it acknowledges that there’s no explicit link between this mooted facial recognition system and the already-controversial universal ID system Aahhaar, it’s also not hard to imagine exactly how an already-authoritarian regime might go about making that exact link.
• Goodbye To The Millennial Lifestyle: A smart piece of reporting which is the first to suggest that the less-than-stellar IPO performances of Peloton, Blue Apron and a host of other millennial(sorry)-friendly businesses is a precursor to a shift in economics which will see a lot of the ‘as a service’ offerings seen as so compelling to younger consumers and as such heavily-backed by VCs start to have to hike their prices to survive. Which, in turn, means that consumers might start looking back at this period of relatively cheap cabs, delivery food, exercise and mattresses as a brief blip in the matrix; turns out that keeping this stuff cheap to consumers causes the businesses to haemmorgage money! WHO KNEW???
• Mariana Mazzucato: A slightly-dizzying profile of one of the few current top-of-their-game economists to have anything like a public profile, this is a quite incredible article. Do you ever read things about successful or brilliant people and feel very real sense of your own inadequacy and insignificance? Well with this you DEFINITELY will; honestly SO interesting, regardless of your practical understanding of economics. The sheer number of world-changing projects that she is involved with is astonishing, as is the breadth of topics to which she’s seemingly able to turn her mind; if you ever have some tedious w4nker in a cravat and those square-legged artist’s trousers attempt to tell you what creativity is, show them this and point out that there is literally nothing more creative than using numbers to solve the world’s problems.
• Nowthis News and Social Video: Interesting look at Nowthis Video, a company which has cornered the market (this week at least) in political video content in the US, creating content which reaches hundreds of millions across the political spectrum each week. Regardless of how much you care about content around US politics, the business model here is interesting to read about and, again, a stark reminder of how much of this is a numbers game; the quantity of stuff they produce each week is INSANE, as is the size of the production team. Next time your clients whinge at you about your numbers, ask them when they’ll be willing to shell out for a team of 100+ writers, editors, camerapeople, producers…
• Celebrity Phone Numbers: On the very recent phenomenon of famouses in the US asking you to text them; this is a company which is offering the opportunity for mass SMS-based star-to-fan interactions, effectively a mailing list reduced to the most oldschool means possible. Will be interesting to see if this takes off – what I am always most interested in, though, with stuff like this, is how these apps manage to persuade all the famouses to use them – do they use some of the VC cash to literally pay them to play? Do all these people share the same agent and does said agent have a stake in this app? It’s CONFUSING.
• Did dril Sell Out?: You may or may not be aware that KING OF WEIRD Twitter dril this week announced he was going to make an actual TV show with Adult Swim, attempting to translate his particular brand of despair-surrealism from 280 characters to 20m of video. Whether or not the show will work or not is moot; the story here is the fairly-typical way in which a host of people on the internet got very upset that the person who had kept them entertained for free for a decade with pithy witticisms has decided to get paid for a change. The answer to the question is ‘no, of course not ffs’, but the interesting part of the piece is the discussion around the extent to which being on Twitter can or should be considered ‘work’ or whether it’s what you do to get work, and how those boundaries blur. I tend to find, fwiw, that I very much get jobs despite my Twitter presence.
• The Pinterest Algo: You have to be quite into s*c**l m*d** to get the most out of this, fine, but for those of you who work in or around algoland this is a really interesting read, on the unique way in which Pinterest has given users the opportunity to tweak its algorithm and what that’s meant for the way in which the platform has evolved.
• Hyperpersonalised Medicines: It is entirely possible to create medical treatments for illnesses designed to treat a very specific genetic profile – so specific that they might work for one intended recipient alone. Should we, though? This is a fascinating essay looking at the very, very specific branch of medicine investigating ultraspecific treatments; the questions as to the rights and wrongs are largely left to the reader, but it’s not hard to imagine a situation whereby the ultra-rich are able to create and make use of highly-tailored treatments which the less-plutocratic couldn’t even dream of. Nice thought, eh? What? Oh.
• Time on TikTok: The seemingly-neverending cavalcade of thinkpieces explaining TikTok to a confused adult world continues, though this, in the NYT, is really rather good. A selection of the paper’s critics spent a week with the platform and shared their impressions of it; there are some lovely observations here, and each of them comes away from it feeling, broadly, like it’s not A Bad Thing. There’s a line in here that stuck with me, though, about how it very specifically feeds young people’s ‘desire to be seen’ – it made me think, as a teenager (and, frankly, even now) I honestly had no desire to be seen AT ALL; is this even a thing anymore? Can young people conceive of not wanting to be seen – not just irl, but even online? Is there anyone currently alive and smartphone-enabled between the ages of 10-16 who wouldn’t give their left kidney and a few significant layers of epidermis in exchange for a stint on the ‘trending’ page? Genuine question, I am curious. BONUS TIKTOK! This piece about the weird way in which serial killers are fetishised on the platform is…odd.
• Closet Accounts: The latest Instatrend is teens obsessively researching their idols’ outfits and racing to post links to Insta ‘Closet Accounts’ detailing where other similar stans can purchase the clothes the famous is wearing (or close approximations thereof). There’s DEFINITELY some sort of bullsh1t insight you can squeeze out of this to justify some sort of awful hashtag campaign, in case you’re unfortunate enough to have to use words like that in cold blood.
• On Fortnite’s Black Hole: Typically great writing on Fortnite by Keth Stuart at the Guardian, who as ever does a great job of explaining what happened this week (the black hole! Chapter 2! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN FFS????) to a normie audience whilst also gently outlining how incredibly smart Epic has been at turning what is effectively a software update into a global news story. BONUS FORTNITE FEATURE! This piece looks at how the game map has evolved over each of its various changes in the past Chapter, and how that’s slowly created narrative and UX tweaks simply by changing the playfield. SO much interesting design here.
• Meet Fox E: Fox E reviews restaurants on Yelp. He often includes photos oh himself in those reviews, which are also occasionally left as poems or raps. His girlfrie…oh, look, you just have to read this. What a remarkable man, and what an odd story this is.
• Living In Cursed Times: The proliferation of the term ‘cursed’ has been a feature of the past three or so years online; what does it mean though? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? If you’re in the market for a slightly-overserious explainer about the deeply layered significance of the word in its EXTREMELY ONLINE context, or an attempt at a precise definition of what exactly constitutes ‘cursed energy’, then you will very much enjoy this (also, please, can we move on from the use of the term ‘energy’ please? It makes everyone sound like the sort of person who’s really into crystals, which perhaps on reflection is in fact what everyone is in 2019).
• The Cheetos Market: You know those stories that occasionally do the rounds online, in which someone in the midwest finds an X shaped like a Y (a cheeseburger shaped like Jesus; a rifle shaped like regret; that sort of thing) and then puts it on eBay and it attracts a bid of $100,000 within minutes and the world shakes its collective head and moves on? Well, have you ever actually seen proof that any of these things ever sold for those sums? And have you ever wondered if anyone really DOES collect funny-shaped crisps? And have you ever thought “hm, I’d really like to learn more about the types of people who attempt to extort 6-figures from gullible strangers for a corn snack shaped a little bit like a person, if you squint”? EXCELLENT, in which case read this article.
• Models of Models: This is about mathematical models – what they are, what they are used for, and how to think about them – it is also one of the best, clearest pieces of writing about information categorisation and taxonomy (at a theoretical level) I’ve read in a while, and I promise you is REALLY REALLY INTERESTING, whether or not you are a maths moron (I am a maths moron; there is no need to be ashamed (not true, there are a lot of reasons, but let’s gloss over them for now).
• The Manhood of Achewood: This is part of a long series of essays analysing seminal (in the ‘it was the start of something’ sense rather than in the ‘a load of w4nk’ sense) comic Achewood (if you don’t know what that is then, well, READ THIS PIECE AND EDUCATE YOURSELF FFS) through a variety of different lenses/prisms; this one looks specifically at its treatments of masculinity, and it’s a smart reading of a comic I feel I probably haven’t read enough criticism of.
• Maradona: A quite wonderful portrait of the second-greatest footballer I have ever seen (sorry Diego, but Leo is better), written by an American and all the better for not quite having the same familiarity with the subject matter presumed when a European or South American writes about Maradona.
• In Defence of Fiction: Zadie Smith on typically fantastic form, on writing fiction, what one has the ‘right’ to write about, the role of the imagined in exploring the self and the other, and all sorts besides. She’s so DISGUSTINGLY clever it makes me quite upset.
• The End of Oz: Finally in the longreads this week, on the ‘Oz’ series of books, except it’s not really about that at all – it’s a truly superb essay on childhood and family and memory and the past as a concept and a foreign country and change and, honestly, it’s really quite brilliant and deserves the cup of tea and biscuit you’ll need to accompany it.

By Simone Hutsch

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. There are nearly 400million guns in the US. This video shows you 2,328 of them. This is creepy as you like, but also quite a brilliant piece of film:

1. This is the new one from Slaves. It’s called ‘One More Day Won’t Hurt’, but I’m not convinced that they really mean that:

1. Would you like some unpleasantly-abrasive NOISE from Bridgitte Bardon’t? YES YOU WOULD! I will give anyone who puts this on the office stereo and sends me proof an actual prize; it’s called “I Wonder”:

1. Next, this is a rather beautiful antidote to that last horror – this is Konradsen, with the gentle, beautiful, pleasingly-Feist-adjacent ‘Baby Hallelujah’:

1. Last up this week, this is Lady Shocker’s recent SBTV Wake Up session – love the flow and the way she emotes the fcuk out this; you can tell she’s also an actress. Anyway, regardless, this is ace and you should check it out and OH LOOK THAT’S ALL WE HAVE TIME FOR AND FRANKLY I’M ALREADY A BIT LATE SO I’M GOING TO HAVE TO KEEP THE GOODBYES SHORT THIS WEEK BUT PLEASE REMEMBER I LOVE YOU AND I CARE ABOUT YOU AND ALL THESE LINKS ARE BASICALLY JUST MY WAY OF SHOWING YOU I CARE SO PLEASE TRY AND HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND DON’T LET THE BASTARDS, WHOEVER THEY MAY BE IN YOUR PARTICULAR CASE, GRIND YOU DOWN, TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND TAKE CARE AND I LOVE YOU AND BYE!:

HELLO EVERYONE! What’s happening? Does anyone have any idea? No? GREAT!

For once, though, I genuinely don’t care. I am about to embark upon a disgustingly lavish weekend of eating and drinking with my girlfriend, and, frankly, everything other than food, booze and the happy functioning of my gastrointestinal tract can get royally fcuked until Monday (apart from you, dear reader). There’s a reasonable chance that I might contract gout between now and next Friday, so apologies in advance if next week’s Curios gets delayed by painful crystalline deposits of uric acid around my finger joints – until then, though, let ME feed YOU like some sort of shabbily-plumed miserybird (a glum-beaked stork, perhaps, or a slightly sh1t heron). Open wide and let the anticipation build – WHICH of this week’s multitude of partially-digested, meaty little nuggets of webspaff will I deposit down your pinkly-throbbing epiglottis first? LET’S SEE SHALL WE???

I, as ever, am Matt; this, as ever, is Web Curios; everything, as ever, is a mess and broken beyond all probable repair. ENJOY! 

By Craig Keenan

LET’S KICK OFF THIS SECTION WITH THE NEW FOUR-TRACK EP FROM PIXEL AND JACK NIMBLE WHICH IS A CRACKING LITTLE SLICE OF UNDERGROUND UK HIPHOP!

THE SECTION WHICH SUGGESTS, IF YOU’RE A CLIENT AND FEELING SADISTIC, THAT YOU EMAIL YOUR AGENCY ASKING FOR A WHITE PAPER OUTLINING IN DETAIL WHAT THEY THINK YOUR ‘THREADS’ STRATEGY SHOULD BE:

• Instagram Launches Threads: A NEW SOCIAL MEDIA! A NEW SOCIAL MEDIA! Remember the good old days, before everyone just threw up their hands in resignation at the realisation that Facebook had won, when a new social platform sprang up seemingly every couple of months? Peach? Ello? Yo? Well HUZZAH, then, for Threads, Insta’s new spinoff app (trailed a few months ago and mentioned in here on 30 August, when I said that it ‘couldn’t be less important’, an opinion I’m struggling to revise at 652am this morning)! Threads is effectively to Instagram what Messenger is to Facebook; it’s a messaging app, pure and simple, with the sole gimmick that it’s limited to using with whoever you’ve designated as your ‘close friends’ on Insta; the idea being to streamline the experience for those users who conduct their entire lives through the app. It also includes the to-me-baffling autostatus thing, to whit: “We’ve heard that you want an easier way to keep up with your friends throughout the day – especially when you don’t have the time to send a photo or have a conversation. That’s why we created status. You can choose from a suggested status (? Studying), create your own (? Procrastinating) or turn on Auto Status (? On the move), which automatically shares little bits of context on where you are without giving away your coordinates. Only your close friends will see your status, and it’s completely opt-in” (those are Instagram’s own emoji, btw, in case you thought my long-standing aversion to the sodding things had passed; it really hasn’t). WHO? WHO WAS ASKING FOR THE ABILITY FOR THEIR PHONE TO SEND AUTOMATIC MESSAGES ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING TO A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE? No fcuker, that’s who. Anyway, this is rather a lot of words for something with little-to-no immediate brand implications, though there is definitely some sort of ‘surprise and delight’ (sorry) mechanic certain popular brands could maybe do with granting fans the ‘joy’ of being one of their close friends for a week, offering them exclusive content and offers and a bit of BIG BRAND LOVE (before then cruelly withdrawing the attention and moving on to the next idiot in the queue). I don’t know, you’re the social media people, you come up with something (and if you’re not the social media people, why the fcuk are you reading this section? It’s awful! Skip to the good bits!).
• Insta Tests Reminders For Product Launches: Yep, if you’re the sort of brand whose fans (brand fans – a concept so alien and hideous that it makes me feel a tiny bit less human each and every time I type it) eagerly await your new products with fevered anticipation then this potentially-forthcoming new feature from Insta might be of use; “The product launch sticker in Instagram Stories and product launch tag in feed lets people set reminders for the launch date, preview product details and buy as soon as a product is available without leaving Instagram.” Being tested with a limited number of large brands in the US, but I feel reasonably confident in predicting that this will become available to all in due course.
• AR Shopping Launches On Insta: For a small range of partners (in the US), at least – still, this is another feature that will be available more widely within 6m or so – it’s a standard (ha! ‘standard’! How quickly the magic fades!) feature that will let brands with wearable products allow users to ‘wear’ them in AR, before swiping to buy directly through the app if users like what they see. Why not start pestering your Facebook rep about this each and every day til it finally rolls out in the UK? They live for those sorts of interactions, I promise you.
• Instagram Creators: A slightly-baffling Insta account, from Instagram itself, which is seemingly designed to offer tips and inspiration to ‘Creators’ (fine, I’m not going to wang on again about how much I hate that term; know, though, that I really, really do) for making better, more engaging stuff on the platform. It’s fair to say that, 12 posts in, it’s not really offering much in the way of value, but maybe it will improve and say or do something useful one day. Beautifully, the comments to most of its posts are along the lines of “want to help creators, Insta? Well stop throttling our fcuking content, then, we don’t want to buy any fcuking ads”, though if any of those people think that particular genie’s going back in the bottle they may well be disappointed.
• Twitter Launches Anti-Hate DM Filters: Or at least it’s testing them, and I can’t see this not becoming a universal part of the product. Don’t want to click the link? Here, look, this is the ‘interesting’ bit: “Instead of lumping all your messages into a single view, the Message Requests section will include the messages from people you don’t follow, and below that, you’ll find a way to access these newly filtered messages.Users would have to click on the “Show” button to even read these, which protects them from having to face the stream of unwanted content that can pour in at times when the inbox is left open. And even upon viewing this list of filtered messages, all the content itself isn’t immediately visible. In the case that Twitter identifies content that’s potentially offensive, the message preview will say the message is hidden because it may contain offensive content. That way, users can decide if they want to open the message itself or just click the delete button to trash it.” A Good Thing.
• Smarter YouTube Ads: Turns out I’m really not in the market for paraphrasing a bunch of relatively-tedious social media platform updates this week. Fancy another load of C&P from the link? Tough! “Rather than managing separate campaigns for 6-second bumper ads, skippable in-stream ads, and non-skippable in-stream ads, now you can upload multiple video creatives into a single campaign. From there, Google’s machine learning will automatically serve the most efficient combination of these formats to help you reach your audience at scale.” It’s a glorious time to be alive.
• Snapchat Enables Three-Minute Ads: It’s uncertain whether anyone ever actually needs to see a three-minute advert for anything, but, more interestingly, you can now promote (short) music videos on the platform, longer film trailers and the like; in terms of advertising media to children, this is probably quite useful. Additionally, Snapchat “is also giving advertisers the ability to add swipe actions to their commercial campaigns, just like users can do with non-commercial content. In the new format, any commercial campaign can now enable users to swipe to a web view, long-form video or camera attachment.” Genuinely potentially useful, this, though the obvious caveats around ‘is Snap really a good use of our ad budget though? Is it really?’ apply.
• Reddit Offers More Video Ad Size Options: There are a couple of other small updates here as well, including mobile landing pages and referral URLs; I’m personally of the opinion that Reddit (or at least certain bits of it) is just about normie enough that advertising on it shouldn’t be quite as scary as it used to be, though don’t quote me on that (the idea that anyone goes around quoting some webmong’s opinion on Reddit advertising!).
• Better Privacy Controls for Google Products: There is literally NO brand implication for this at all, but it’s good to know about and the sort of thing you might want to read and inform your friends and family about, should any of them be the sort of odd throwback who cares about privacy and not having their every move tracked by a somewhat-sinister advertising behemoth. This includes an incognito mode for Maps, letting you use the app without automatically flagging each and every step you take to Google, along with improved password security and a couple of other bits and pieces. Not fun, but worth knowing.
• Google Launches Action Blocks: Sinister Google may be, but it does also make some very, very smart things. Action Blocks is a great idea to improve smartphone accessibility; “Action Blocks are essentially a sequence of commands for the Google Assistant, so everything the Assistant can do can be scripted using this new tool, no matter whether that’s starting a call or playing a TV show. Once the Action Block is set up, you can create a shortcut with a custom image on your phone’s home screen.” So, for example, a user could set up an automated chain of actions which would allow them to order an Uber back to their house with a single tap of an easily-recognisable icon from the homescreen; for users with learning difficulties, or dementia sufferers, touches like this can radically increase the usability of a smartphone. SUCH a good idea – currently only in beta, but worth keeping an eye out for this if you know people who might benefit.
• Google Shopping Gets Revamped: The really interesting bit of this update is the tweak to Google Lens, which (as the piece points out) brings it much closer to Pinterest in terms of the ability to take photos of stuff and then buy things that look like whatever’s in that photo. There are a few other updates here too, but at present it’s US-only and, well, I’m bored of this stuff now so am going to leave you to click the link and find out what the fcuk they might be.
• BoostApps: Whilst I appreciate many of you are snugly-ensconced in the ivory towers of BigAgencyLand and as such have access to ready, willing teams of CRACK DESIGNERS and CUTTING-EDGE VISUAL CREATIVES (lol jk I bet it’s a constant battle to get anyone to even crop an image for you, right? And they never answer their emails? FCUKING ART DIRECTORS, EH???), I know that others of you don’t always have the resource and have to cobble together your content in other ways. BoostApps is a set of three apps which are designed to let you make quick, fancy-looking content for the socials, with one designed for Story creation, another for better video editing and the last for the creation of animated ‘posters’. As with all these things, the outputs won’t look quite like the stuff Nike does – still, better than messing around in Paint like I tend to.
• Feast of Legends: In a week in which I saw that the FT has launched a financial literacy boardgame to sell to schools, Wendy’s (the US burger chain whose inexplicable USP is…er…square patties) has done what might be my favourite pointless advermarketingprthing of the year and created a whole Dungeons & Dragon’s-style tabletop roleplaying game which you can download as a PDF and play RIGHT NOW! I just took a look at the game manual and, fair play, it’s nearly 100-pages and is seemingly a pretty well-fleshed-out standalone campaign, although I imagine the near-ceaseless shilling of assorted fast-food products throughout might get a bit wearing after a while. Still, I am officially declaring the creation of branded tabletop gaming products a PROPER TREND FOR 2020 (is this the first trend prediction of the year? Am I a PIONEER?!?!) – you read it hear first, kids!

By Ian Francis

NEXT UP, ENJOY THIS GREAT PLAYLIST OF SONGS INSPIRED BY SCIFI, COMPILED BY FRED DEAKIN!

THE SECTION WHICH IS THIS WEEKEND MORE THAN MOST IS VERY MUCH AWARE OF ITS OWN MORTALITY, PT.1:

• The UK Deprivation Map: Taking publicly available data about relative deprivation across the UK, by postcode, this is an excellent piece of dataviz which quickly and easily allows you to see how different areas of the UK rate on a scale of more-deprived to less-deprived. This is new data, published with relatively little fanfare last week, and it doesn’t paint a great picture of equality and wealth distribution around the country. What’s most striking, to me at least, about this is how it neatly and starkly points out quite how much wealth and privilege is concentrated in certain areas of London; not, I’m sure, news to any of you who aren’t members of the Capital’s liberal elite, fine, but it’s particularly evident here, as is the (again, unsurprising) rise in deprivation in urban areas as soon as you go North of Cambridge.
• Civility in Politics: FULL DISCLOSURE – this is a project by my friend Alison Goldsworthy, but it’s a good project and I would be including it anyway, and it’s my newsletterblogthing so, well, there. Civility in Politics is an award seeking to celebrate the seemingly-lost art of, well, politicians not being complete cnuts to each other; nominations are open in a selection of categories including politician of the year and campaigner of the year, and winners will get a £3k donation to the charity of their choice. Should you know of someone in politics at a local or national level (in the UK) who deserves recognition, nominate them – apparently they’ve had a surprisingly high number of suggestions already, which is pleasing-if-a-touch-surprising given, well, 2019.
• The Depression and WWII In Colour: A fabulous archive of colourised photos of the 30s and 40s in the US from the US Library of Congress on Flickr; there are hundreds of pictures here (1600, to be precise), and if you listen to a combined soundtrack of Count Basie and South Pacific while browsing them you’ll basically be transported back in time.
• The Mr Global 2019 Photos: These have done the rounds a bit this week, but if you’ve not seen them then OH BOY are you in for a massive, beefcake-based treat. Mr Global, I learned this week, is the male equivalent of Miss Universe; much like in that particular bastion of good taste, Mr Global contestants are also required to model costumes based on their traditional national garb, and this photo set presents the JOYFUL press shots for each of the several-dozen square-jawed, brooding-browed hunks dressed up in all their local finery. It’s almost impossible to pick a favourite, but a few observations: 1) WHY DOES THE UK NOT SUBMIT AN ENTRY? Also, what would our national dress look like?; 2) I think I just got pregnant as a result of Mr Nigeria’s lusty gaze; 3) Mr Taiwan is corpsing very hard in his second shot; 4) Absolute respect to Mr Cuba not only for absolutely owning his (very, very silly) outfit, but also for having what appears to be a truly gigantic penis, albeit one which exists at a fixed 90-degree angle to the rest of his body at all times; and 5), WHAT THE FCUK USA THAT IS NOT YOUR NATIONAL COSTUME ALSO PUT SOME EFFORT IN. Honestly, I could stare at these for HOURS.
• Mammalz: Actually, having complained *up there* about the fact that noone launches new social networks anymore, here’s another new one – Mammalz is ‘A new way to experience nature’ – that is, seemingly by tapping away on your phone. The idea is that Mammalz is a (standard-seeming) social platform, designed specifically for people working in, or interested in, nature and conservation, for sharing photos and information and news about, I don’t know, Gnu mating season. This is obviously never going to become anything other than, at best, a niche product (fast forward to 2050 when Mammalz buys out TikTok for $73bn), but it’s entirely possible that the nature community is CRYING OUT for a Facebook analogue; can someone check back in on it in a year and let me know how it’s going? Thanks.
• Flags Mashup Bot: I’m late with this one, mainly as I was convinced I’d featured it MONTHS ago (but I hadn’t. God, it must be thrilling to read about the day-to-day mechanics of running a long-running-but-still-very-much-not-very-popular-newsletterblogtypething!); Flags Mashup Bot is a Twitter bot (SHURELY NOT!) which, er, combines different flags to make new ones. That’s it – except as a result ofthe fact it’s entirely random, it quite regularly throws up…problematic examples which occasionally seem like exhortations to all-out war between certain nations. Can’t imagine too many people on either side being happy with its Sino-Japanese combination, for example, not to mention the Yorkshire/Lancashire abomination. Follow not only for the flags but for the surprisingly-excellent vexillological chat that you get in the replies.
• Peter Lindbergh: I didn’t know this, but Peter Lindbergh was a renowned fashion photographer who died this year after decades of work at the very top of the industry; this site is an online obituary to him and a celebration of his life and work, featuring his biography and portfolio, presented in lovely sober, beautifully-designed fashion. This is in part just a really nice piece of memorial webwork, as well as being a wonderful record of trends in fashion (and fashion photography) since the 60s; it also made me briefly contemplate the sort of esteem one must be held in to get a tribute website in death. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, can someone please create a CurioBot which will churn out GPT2-Generated Curios for the rest of time? Hubris? ME????
• Mylee: I went to dinner at the house of some friends last night who’ve recently had a baby, and we were talking about breastfeeding (it’s a highbrow laugh riot being in middle-age, kids, you just wait!) and what a weirdly political and fraught topic it is. Well, if you want to make it more fraught and give yourself an additional level of worry and anxiety as a parent, Mylee could be the product for YOU! Yes, that’s right ladies, QUANTIFIED TITS!!! You can use Mylee to undertake CHEMICAL ANALYSIS of your breast milk, getting near-instantaneous judgement as to the perceived quality of your body’s output, as well as using it to measure the quantity of your lactation to (and this is the good bit) ‘motivate you to reach your breastfeeding goals!’. Now as a cishet man my experience of either having breasts or lactation is…minimal, but I don’t think this sounds like a particularly good idea, especially not at a time which can often be fraught and nervous and stressful anyway. Would YOU like an app cajoling you about your fluctuating milk protein levels? Do YOU want another reason to be terrified you’re somehow failing the precious, fragile output of your union? I can’t imagine you do, but, well, here it is anyway! Also, and this is a beautiful closing kicker, it costs $250! AND THAT’S A DISCOUNTED PRICE! Madness.
• Natalist: Not content with exploiting nervous parents immediately post-partum, the mad world of startups is also attempting to exploit people’s fear of sterility for profit! Natalist is one of the most shameless grifts I have seen in years – it’s fertility as a service! The site offers visitors the opportunity to buy either one-off ‘Get Pregnant’ bundles, containing a few pregnancy tests, some ovulation tests, some vitamins and a book called ‘Conception 101’, or (and this is the REALLY horrid bit) subscribe to a monthly delivery of this tat for the princely sum of $75 a month. WHAT?!?!? I checked this out yesterday when I found this and the retail price of the goods included isn’t more than £40-odd quid, max, making this a quite staggering amount to pay for a bunch of stuff which, with the best will in the world, are unlikely to make a significant material difference to one’s likelihood of getting knocked up; not only that, but WHO NEEDS THREE PREGNANCY TESTS A MONTH?!?! This is madness, and quite unpleasantly exploitative madness at that.
• What’s Your Grief: A website offering resources for people coping with loss, this contains a wide range of resources, articles, links and advice on how to try to cope with the death of a loved one. It’s not hugely cheery as a casual browse, as you might expect, but it’s the sort of thing I would have found hugely helpful at various points over the past 10 years and which might be worth bookmarking or keeping somewhere because, well, it’s a universal problem.
• Oollee: Preposterous subscription service of the week part two! Oollee does, I will concede, have an oddly-compelling and pleasingly over-engineered website, featuring a strangely-threatening humanoid figure made out of water and a persistent (and, as I am finding as I type this with the tab open, bladder-troubling) watery soundtrack. That’s my goodwill runs out, though – Oollee is selling a subscription to a water filtration system, and specifically to the filters, which you need to replace at the cost of $29 a month. Now there are a few things wrong with this – for a start, US tap water is entirely potable, making this pointless from the outset, not to mention the fact that most commercially-available domestic filtration systems require you to spend around £40 a year on replacement filters rather than the £360 you’d be spending to enjoy the ‘convenience’ of a new one being mailed to you each month. The WORST thing about it, though, is the ability to ‘check the quality of your water whenever you like through the app’ – WHY? WHO THE EVERLIVING FCUK IS GOING TO THINK “OOH, YOU KNOW WHAT, LET ME CHECK THE MAGNESIUM LEVELS IN MY FILTERED WATER TANK WHILE I’M AT WORK, I DON’T WANT THEM DROPPING BELOW OPTIMAL LEVELS!” Literally NO FCUKER, that’s who. The cherry on the cake of this godawful company is that it’s based out of Menlo Park. Of course it is.
• Plotify: I love this – such a clever idea, and I’m slightly annoyed I didn’t think of it. Plotify lets you plug in any film title you like, and will generate you a Spotify playlist based on its plot; the song selection is a touch loose, fine, but the technique is quite smart; as far as I can tell, it pulls a plot summary of whatever you type in from…somewhere, and then using that copy as a series of keyword searches to populate the playlist. If you want an excellent way of throwing together some VERY random (but loosely thematic) playlists this is almost unparalleled.
• Surveillance Cinema: This is a really clever art project; artist Rachel Fleit reimagines iconic scenes from cinema, stitching them together from surveillance camera footage. The resulting short films are sinister and alien despite being very, very familiar – I would love to see a short horror film shot entirely using Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras, maybe one set in a suburban cul-de-sac; sadly Ring’s current privacy travails mean that the likelihood of them commissioning one is pretty low.
• Pret Etranger: The existential musings of Albert Camus, applied to Pret A Manger. You may not think that this sounds funny, but you are wrong.
• Impeachment FYI: Your one-stop-shop for the latest impeachment news and updates. Sadly this pertains to the impeachment happening on the other side of the Atlantic rather than a newly-announced attempt to dethrone That Fcuking Man, but US readers might find it useful and those of us in the UK can just sort of wistfully hope.
• Canoo: This is interesting – a much-predicted business model in the wild for the first time (for me at least). One of the things futurists have been predicting for a few years now is the advent of ‘vehicle as a service’ provision; Canoo does exactly that, offering residents of…some cities in the US (it’s not launched yet, you see) the ability to pay a monthly fee to gain use of one of their specially-designed electric vehicles, which look rather nice and are all spacious and city friendly and stuff. It will be interesting to see what takeup of this is – if they can make it work in the States where people are big into car ownership they can potentially make it work anywhere.
• Drama Online: No, sadly not that sort of drama – instead it’s a wonderful trove of theatrical resources, including playtexts and analysis and theory and all sorts of other gubbins; if you or anyone you know is a bit thespy then this is a glorious resource (although you need to me associated with an academic institution to get access).
• Real Fantasy: I don’t mean to make too many assumptions about my readership, but I feel quite strongly that there may be more than a few of you who might be interested in this. Let’s see: “Real Fantasy is a magazine about interpersonal connections formed in virtual worlds. We are asking for story submissions from people who have played, or currently play, a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game. The only requirement is that the story is about a strong memory you made in-game and carry with you today.” Did you fall in love in Azeroth? Have you developed a secret and burning hatred for someone on your Minecraft server? TELL THE STORY.
• A Kids’ Book About…: On the one hand, this is probably a really good idea – this site presents a selection of books designed to help adults have conversations with children about difficult topics, like sexism or depression or death (and more positive things, like creativity or belonging), all with friendly-looking designs and written by proper kids’ authors, and I can imagine that these aren’t a bad way of beginning to have Serious Chats about stuff. On the other hand, I did laugh a LOT at the sheer miserable horror of the ‘buy’ page, where you’re presented with a litany of titles like ‘A kids’ book about racism’ and, most perfectly of all, ‘A Kids’ Book About Failure’, which at least one of my godchildren is now getting for Christmas and which their parents had better find funny.
• Fat Bear Week: IT’S FAT BEAR WEEK! Thanks to Curios reader Hannah for reminding me of this, and of the fact that you can (as soon as the sun comes up over there, at least) watch a livestream of some VERY CHONKY BEARS catching salmon in the Katmai National Park; there’s currently voting going on to determine which of the bears so-far captured on camera is in fact the thiccest boi, so you may want to get involved.
• Whatsappr: An easy way of adding a ‘share this on WhatsApp’ link / button to anything you want. Which is useful. LOOK, NOT EVERYTHING IN CURIOS HAS TO BE FUNNY OR WEIRD OK, SOME THINGS ARE JUST USEFUL AND THAT IS FINE. Jesus.
• Echo Chamber Club: “The Echo Chamber Club is a philosophical research institute dedicated to understanding how information environments can be healthy and democratic in a digital age.” Part of Ed Saperia’s Newspeak House project, exploring digital democracy and its development, this is worth keeping an eye on if you’re interested in this sort of thing.
• This To That: A website celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and an absolute CLASSIC of the genre, serving one very specific purpose – that purpose is to help you work out how best to stick one sort of physical material to another. You ever wanted to know exactly the best means of sticking rubber to wood? YES MATE IT’S CHRISTMAS COME EARLY.
• Studio Binder: Even in weeks when the internet is an absolute horrorshow of bad, there will be occasional nuggets like this that momentarily convince me that it wasn’t a terrible invention after all; this is a YouTube channel which offers an incredible selection of video production tutorial and theory content, covering everything from scriptwriting to captioning to direction masterclasses…fine, it’s produced by a software company as marketing for its editing tools, but who cares – this is genuinely useful if you’re a budding filmmaker.
• Tilt Five: This is a really interesting Kickstarter, looking like it’s going to do over a million by the time it’s through and offering you the opportunity to get hold of an AR boardgames kit; it will ship with a board, sets of glasses and a variety of different games you can play with the kit. The idea is that the AR will basically turn everything into some sort of amazing Battlechess-style experience, with animations and SFX and all sorts of other digital gubbins which will make your tabletop gaming more immersive than ever before. Which is great in theory, though obviously the value of this will be determined by how good the games are and how many more get made for this specific platform; it does rather feel like it’ll end up being a bit Betamax-ish once Oculus and the rest become mainstream, but til then it could be worth a look if you fancy an augmented boardgame fix (and, er, if you’re ok with Kickstarter’s increasingly unpleasant labour practices).
• The Highway Wiki: You want a Wiki all about traffic signals and associated information? You want to get lost in an exhaustive list of every single manufacturer of traffic signals in the world? No, I can’t imagine you do for a second, and yet I know that at least one of you will click this link and THIS IS THE POWER I WIELD!!!
• Parliament Buildings of the World: A sublime Twitter thread offering photos and, even better, short critical appraisals of the Parliaments of the world. It’s amazing quite how many of them look quite a lot like not-very-good-motels.

By Serge Gay Jr.

NEXT, HAVE A RATHER GOOD TECH-HOUSE MIX BY FRANCESCO MONTI!

THE SECTION WHICH IS THIS WEEKEND MORE THAN MOST IS VERY MUCH AWARE OF ITS OWN MORTALITY, PT.2:

• Leo Aerospace: I can’t imagine there are many of you who are likely to find this particularly useful, but I wanted to include it purely to share my amazement at the fact that you can apparently fire rockets into space FROM A BALLOON, but also because the little illustration of the balloon with said rocket attached to it is SO incredibly shonky that I’m not totally convinced this whole thing isn’t a joke (it isn’t a joke, it’s real, let’s shoot something into space from a balloon!).
• Can You Microwave?: There are certain categories of question that are so important that they need a standalone website (see also: that one up there about how to stick things to each other). This is onesuch site, offering all the information anyone could possibly need or want on the likely outcome of microwaving a bunch of different objects and materials. Even if you don’t click, I feel it’s important to share this particular entry from the homepage: “Can you microwave lube? No.” I’m basically a public servant.
• Knowable: “Knowable is a first-of-its-kind audio learning platform and library of original, expert-led audio courses. We create immersive, screen-free learning experiences that help people get inspired, learn new things, and accomplish their personal and professional goals.” It’s a paid-for service, obviously, but they have some pretty big names involved, including the likes of Alexis Ohanian on their ‘how to be an entrepreneur’ course (I personally think that the likelihood of any of you learning anything from Alexis Ohanian burbling into your ear about entrepreneurship is approximately zero, but feel free to come and laugh at me when you’re riding around on a platinum BMX or whatever it is you choose to buy with the millions). Could be worth a look, maybe, but equally caveat emptor and all that.
• The Brimley Line: A joyous piece of internet silliness, the Brimley Line is…oh, look, here: “When ‘Cocoon’ reached theaters on June 21, 1985, Wilford Brimley was 18,530 days old. This account makes note of people who have reached that age.” Yes, that’s right, a Twitter account that arbitrarily celebrates celebrities’ 18,530th day of life, sporadically Tweeting out things like “Born Jan. 2, 1969, supermodel and maternal health activist Christy Turlington is 18,530 days old today, making her the same age as Wilford Brimley on the day ‘Cocoon’ was released. Congrats @CTurlington — you’ve reached the Brimley/Cocoon Line.” You may not think it will make you happy, but I promise you it really does.
• The SWPA Award Entries: A selection of photos submitted to this year’s Sony World Photography Awards, collected by the Atlantic and featuring some absolute gems; the last one on the page is a particular favourite of mine.
• Cheatman: Would you like to play a game of hangman against the computer? One in which the computer cheats incessantly? One which is impossible to win? You wouldn’t automatically think that this would be anything other than a deeply frustrating and futile experience, and in the main you’d be absolutely right, but there’s something sort-of bitterly amusing about the machine opponent’s ceaseless cnutery which means I enjoyed it quite a lot more than I expected to. Still, you really CANNOT win.
• Haywire: Photographs of the incredibly tangled telephone wires of Nepal, which, again, shouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting as pleasing as they in fact turn out to be.
• Smartcan: I can’t work out if this is the best product innovation I’ve seen all year or absolutely the worst. You decide. There are certain parts of the world in which residents are expected to move their bins to a specific collection point to facilitate the binmen’s job; I can only imagine the intense pain and discomfort these people feel each week when they have to move a wheeled plastic container a dozen or so feet and then back again. Well THANK GOD for Smartcan, then, which eliminates that onerous chore by, er, fitting the bins with wheels and a motor and letting you programme them so they’ll wheel themselves out each week. YOU CAN TRACK THE BIN USING AN APP! “What are you doing, Brad?” “Oh, nothing Steve – just checking my motorised Smart Bin is manoeuvring itself into place with sufficient accurac-oh for fcuksake, it’s gotten stuck on the SUV”. No, I have decided, this is a terrible, terrible idea.
• SeatyGo: An appalling name – honestly, can we ban tweeness for a few years? I thought we’d got all that ‘boaty mcboatface’ and twee nonswears out of our systems a few years ago, but I worry it’s creeping back – for what otherwise looks like quite a sensible thing, a detachable bike seat currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. It’s about halfway there with three weeks to go, so there’s a reasonable chance it’ll make its target – cyclists bored of having their seats nicked could do worse than check this out (previous comments about Kickstarter’s anti-union fcukery notwithstanding).
• The Trade Journal Cooperative: I am MISERABLE that this doesn’t deliver to the UK, but am including it in case anyone fancies setting up something parallel (if it already exists over here, please do let me know) – this is a subscription service which, for an annual fee, will send you a different obscure trade publication each month. It may not sound great, fine, but how much would YOU like to wake up one morning to find an unexpected copy of ‘Pizzaiolo Monthly’ or ‘Sprocket World’ on your mat? LOTS is the obvious answer. Quite annoyed I can’t subscribe.
• Tonic: Sorry, I’ve just realised there’s rather more US-only stuff in here than usual; I’ll be more careful in future. Still, Tonic is a really interesting idea – an app to surface new and interesting content from the web, which uses a combination of automated scraping of sources allied with a human editorial team to triage and maintain quality control. It’s focused on reading rather than audio or video, and is currently US-only for the entirely reasonable reason that most of the content that they are currently surfacing is from / about the US and they want to expand their range before going international. I’ll be watching this with interest – in a sense it could work like a less-overwhelming Curios, which sounds, to my mind, POINTLESS, but then again I would say that.
• AngelFace: A facial recognition app for VCs, cobbled together as a sort-of joke but actually functioning as a reasonably sobering warning about how easy it is to make this stuff now from off-the-shelf bits of code and whatever database of photos you happen to have lying around. It’s not awfully difficult to imagine this sort of thing being used for less-than-lovely purposes – although maybe that’s only if you’re a relentless Cassandra-type miserabilist like I am.
• Fitzframes: Now this seems like a smart business idea – bespoke, to measure, 3d-printed glasses, designed for kids, which come in a range of colours, are claimed to fit perfectly, and which as a result of the manufacturing process are cheap, apparently sturdy and easy to replace. Obviously I can’t speak to the quality as – again – this is a US-only product, but this feels very much like the sort of thing you could probably absolutely rip off and do in another territory if you work fast enough (but, er, don’t! Sorry, people behind this website, I don’t mean to suggest that people just steal your ideas (although that is in fact exactly what I just did)).
• UX Frameworks: A whole host of resources and frameworks for designing UX. Not hugely interesting if this isn’t your field but potentially hugely valuable on the offchance that it is.
• 50 Digital Wood Joints: No, I have literally no clue whatsoever as to why you might want to download a PDF of 50 different ways of making joints in wood, but I’m sure you can come up with a reason.
• Epidermis: A really powerful photo project presenting a range of women, posing in ways familiar from beauty advertising, each of whom have a skin condition which they’re not attempting to conceal with makeup. Sophie Harris-Taylor’s images are rather beautiful; here’s the artist’s statement on the project, which is even nicer due to not having been coopted by fcuking Dove. “Normality is defined by the images we see all around us, we are led to believe all women have idealised, flawless skin – they don’t. Whether unshown or simply disguised, many women have conditions such as acne, rosacea and eczema and many of these women feel a pressure to hide behind a mask of makeup, covering up what actually makes them unique. Here these beautiful women stand unashamed of baring their skin.”
• K-Stans: More photos, this time a gorgeous selection taken in the ‘Stans (Kazakh, Kyrgi, and possibly one or two others) and which are full of impossibly blue skies and yurts and people who grew up on a diet of yak milk. Included in part for my friend Jay, should they be reading this (HI JAY!).
• Troll Factory: A small game by Finnish public service media company Yle (which I think is a bit like their equivalent of the BBC) which is designed to help kids understand issues around disinformation, fake news and social media. It’s short and simple and not aimed at the likes of YOU, but your kids might find it interesting or educative.
• Name The US Cities: This is SO HARD but at the same time SO COMPELLING and I am SO BAD AT IT.
• The Interactive Fiction Contest 2019: Last up in this week’s selection of webephemera, this year’s entries into the annual Interactive Fiction competition features a wonderful, diverse selection of different types of IF, spanning an incredible range of plots, themes, mechanics and styles, from genre fiction to serious, emotionally hefty explorations of some pretty adult themes. My personal favourite from this year’s lineup is this, a (very dark) little story called “The Mysterious Stories of Caroline”, but do take some time to read through see if there’s something that piques your fancy; there are honestly some truly wonderful pieces of writing here, and I think IF is very much slept on as a mainstream content mechanic.

By Naudline Pierre

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, THIS IS A TRULY SUPERB AND ECLECTIC MIX OF ROCK AND SOUL AND ALL SORTS OF OTHER THINGS THAT I GUARANTEE YOU WILL LOVE OR YOUR MONEY BACK!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Fcuk Yeah Jaques Chirac: So long, Jacques. Enjoy a bunch of photos of him looking incredibly fcuking gallic.
• Horny Jar Jar Binks: I make no apologies. IT FINDS ME, OK?? This is broadly SFW insofar as I haven’t seen any obviously deviant images, but the text of the site is very much not the sort of thing you want to be caught reading in the office; the obsession with fellating Metallica is very, very odd.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Vanessa McKeown: McKeown is a (UK-based?) photographer and designer, whose Insta feed presents her gently surreal manipulated images. The style’s familiar, but there are a lot of very good little visual gags in here.
• Samuele Recchia: An Italian artist with a pleasingly scratchy and slightly sinister style – I came across this via an excellent newsletter by someone called Pietro Minto, which comes out every Saturday and always contains at least five links I’ve never seen before. It’s all in Italian, but that will make it all the more exciting to find out what the fcuk it is you’ve clicked on; worth a sub imho.
• Dirk Koy: Short examples of creative videography, with a very distinct style.
• Domenic’s Can Collection: There’s an article down there about the weird hobby of collecting cans of Monster Energy Drink, through which I discovered this EXCELLENT feed in which Dom shows off the many, many different flavours of Monster they’ve managed to accumulate. What’s particularly nice about this feed – there are MANY others like it, turns out – is that Dom takes the trouble to try and compose the shots in gently pleasing ways; I particularly like the use of flowers and fresh fruits as a contrast to the luridly artificial energypiss.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• How Does Trump Win: A Twitter thread by Rob Blackie analysing how and why Trump – and similar politics elsewhere – is so successful; you may think that you’ve read all this stuff before, but I promise you Blackie’s analysis is cogent and he pulls together lots of different elements to make his case. Contains lots of pointers for all your PR people too, should you wish to take lessons from the Bad People.
• Inside Aspen: The Aspen Institute is, if you take it at face value, basically like a paid-for Davos for liberals; a $10,000+ retreat where rich ‘leaders’ (occasionally real, occasionally self-defined) convene to explore ideas of liberalism, statecraft, democracy and the like, whilst communing with like-minded individuals as they learn how to become the best version of their incredibly successful and undeniably-hubristic selves. This is a very, very good read in the Economist’s 1843 magazine, and, especially if you’re a left-leaning person like me, will make you feel a bit uncomfortable (though not as much as it will make you fcuking despise the concept of the Aspen Institute).
• Among Arms Dealers: One of two superb LRB pieces in this week’s longreads, this first is a relatively brief series of vignettes and observations gleaned from the recent DSEI arms fair which took place in London. So, so much to love (read: hate) about this, from the wonderful details (the Italian booth babe in a camo cocktail dress), to the discomfort of the interviewees when they realise they’re talking to a reporter – absolute special shout out, though, to whichever agency it was which came up with ‘Strike With Creativity’ as a brand position / strapline for death-merchants Raytheon; I hope you feel incredibly proud of yourselves, you dreadful cnuts.
• The Surveillance of the Suburbs: A very good article on the growing ubiquity of Amazon’s Ring doorbells, which as I’m sure you’ll recall have come under a bit of scrutiny this year as a result of some rather interesting marketing tactics whereby the company cosies up to police forces to get them to act as de facto salespeople for the tech. The piece shows quite how attitudes in tech reporting have changed over the past few years, and not before time – a few years back, the potential social consequences of surveilled neighbourhoods are unlikely to have been subjected to quite the degree of scrutiny we’re seeing here.
• I Worked At Capital One: An honest account of what it’s like working for a company whose entire business model was predicated on selling people debt that that they were going to have to keep paying off for decades; the interesting bits in this piece are less about the day-to-day mechanics of working for an awful business, so much as the questions that exist in the margins about whether said awful business absolutely had to be as awful as it was to make money; turns out, it probably didn’t! “An ethical corporation could be tempted by compelling evidence about the suffering it caused to relinquish some of its massive revenue. But over the long run, a publicly traded company wasn’t going to sacrifice a meaningful amount of income to avoid destroying lives—unless the law required it.” Well, quite.
• Entertainment is Getting Shorter (And Longer): Hugely interesting essay, particularly if you’re in the content business (AND WHO ISN’T???), about the growing polarisation of content types across different media – on the one hand, ‘snackable’ content designed to be consumed constantly, voraciously, without even thinking; this is your 3-10s bucket, the majority of the stuff we scroll through on the feed and enjoy on the TL; on the other, looooong content, from the hour-long visual albums dropped by Beyonce and others to the proliferation of longform writing all over the web. The piece asks what this means for the more traditional 20-30m content format, the 1500 word essay and the other formats stuck in what the author terms the purgatorial middle-ground; I find the theorising about the relationship between the two forms genuinely interesting, though I appreciate I might be a niche case here.
• Being Famous on TikTok: Another week, another essay about TikTok to try and explain it to the old; this time Vox looks at what it’s like to achieve a modicum of fame on the platform, but frankly it’s less about TikTok as a platform than it is about the increasingly common dream amongst global youth (to quote this excellent line from the article) “wherein performing your life online becomes a paying job.” Performing for who, though? And for what?
• Facebook Dating: The first proper writeup I’ve seen of what Facebook Dating is actually like as a product – the author, an obviously media-literate Manhattanite, is obviously not target audience for it, but her observations ring true nonetheless; that Facebook dating will work most successfully for heavy FB users, which means in turn that it’s likely going to be most popular amongst older demographics and in the developing world. I share the author’s skepticism as to whether it’s going to be enough to entice people back to the platform and make them start using it regularly again, though admittedly one oughtn’t underestimate the powerful motivator of ‘I might get laid’, especially among men.
• Trepanation: I remember always having a weird fascination with trepanation, ever since I was a kid (I remember slightly freaking out my English teacher when I was 15/16 by knowing that word; she was also incredibly disturbed by the fact I was reading American Psycho, suggesting, on reflection, that she was possibly drawing some unfortunate inferences). Anyway, this is an honestly fascinating history of the practice, from its use in Neolithic times to the weird, niche communities who do it to themselves in 2019. Imagine for a second drilling a small hole into your own skull. JUST IMAGINE IT. Maybe it would let the voices out, though.
• Remember Balloon Boy?: Oh wow, those were great and innocent times! Nearly 10 whole years on from that glorious Summer in which a small kid was flown away by a balloon and his terrified parents were briefly famous until it turned out that it may in fact have all been staged as a means of getting famous! HALCYON DAYS! This is a wonderful story – the reporter treats it with admirable respect and restraint, even when portraying a family best described as eccentric, and even when it all gets very odd towards the end. Even if you don’t recall the original incident this is worth a read.
• JD Salinger’s Spiderman: It’s a single joke, fine, but it’s executed perfectly. What if Holden Caulfield was Peter Parker?
• On Escapism, Twitchcon and the Fortnite Habit: I enjoyed this lots more than I expected to based on the writing style (a touch on the overblown style) – I suppose it’s the honesty of the author’s account of his own obsession with the game, and how he felt about it after having seen thousands of obsessive kids hopped-up on primary coloured fizzy drinks and Fortnite fever at this year’s TwitchCon. It sounds awful.
• The Red Bull Experiment: I had totally forgotten that Red Bull tried to find an American F1 driver a few years back; this absolutely fascinating piece tells the story of that process, and what happened to all the people who didn’t make it (as well as the ones who did). The central question here is an interesting one which applies to a range of disciplines, not just sporting; is the search for an exemplary talent ever worth fcuking up the lives of a selection of less-exemplary talents for? Randian theorists need not respond to that rhetorical question.
• Building the Starbucks of Weed: On the race to work out what the perfect environment for people to consume all this newly-legal weed is. The author speaks to a variety of people trying to find the perfect formula for smoking venues; upsettingly, all of them seem pretty much wedded to the idea of some sort of ‘Museum of Icecream’-type Insta-friendly photo playground, which strikes me as HORRIBLE; look mate, when I am very stoned I very much do NOT want to be surrounded by people taking photos of stuff, posing and being all performative. I want, in the main, to be in my house, suggesting on reflection that I am probably not the target market for these places. Still, if you’re interested in the future of weed or indeed retail in general, this is worth reading.
• How Kerrygold Conquered America: If you’re me, Kerrygold is what you buy from the corner shop when you realise that the butter in your fridge has been there approximately seven months and it’s probably not supposed to taste like that. If you’re American, though, it’s apparently THE chic dairy product of choice, endorsed by famouses and redolent of the thick, verdant grass of DE AUOLD CONNTRY (that’s my phonetic Irish – good, isn’t it?); find out why in this article (it doesn’t actually tell you why, but it’s a nice read on the business of food which I am always fascinated by).
• It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfcukers!: YES IT FCUKING IS.
• Cut From The Same Cloth: I absolutely love this essay, in which Myfanwy Tristram writes about her attitudes to her teenage daughter’s fashion choices, and draws links between her past as a goth and the evolution of teen style into the 21 Century. I imagine that if you’re the parent of t(w)een girls this is wonderful – even if you’re not, though, it’s a genuinely beautiful piece about memory and growing up and letting go, and with a healthy dollop of late-20thC fashion history and cultural tribalism. So good.
• Darkness on the Edge of Cougartown: Some of the downsides of dating a younger man, by the older woman in the relationship. Genuinely very funny indeed.
• Consider The Butt: In which the author, Heather Radke, writes for the Paris Review about visiting Butt-Con, an event designed to promote “Tushy, a hefty plastic gizmo that attaches to a toilet in order to turn it into a bidet. The founder of Tushy, Miki Agrawal, says that she likes to work in the “taboo space.” Before getting into butts, Agrawal was busy rebranding menstruation as the CEO of Thinx, a company that makes underwear for people on their periods. Butt-Con was a showcase for her new product, as well as for her own personal brand of transgression: Agrawal doesn’t just want to talk about the body parts we keep hidden, but about what those body parts do. She makes products for periods and pooping, and then she works to make those products seem hip.” This is BRILLIANT; funny and smart and far better than an essay about visiting the launch of a bidet product ought to be.
• Was It Worth It?: A selection of essays by women who in one way or another participate din the Me Too movement, whether by outing an abuser or blowing the whistle on unacceptable behaviour in their industry; each one looks at what happened afterwards, and how their lives have changed. It’s fair to say that it’s not exactly a hugely uplifting series of accounts, but it’s an important one; not only is there some powerful writing in here, but it’s also a useful reminder of the sort of structural power imbalances that still exist to perpetuate the problems that the movement hoped to address.
• Topping From The Bottom: Sex and pain and ageing and illness and drugs and self-hatred and look, I know this doesn’t sound like fun but I promise that it is a beautiful piece of writing by Susannah Breslin.
• Reviewing Updike: Last up in this week’s longreads, possibly the best thing I have read all year, let alone all week. Patricia Lockwood reviews early-period John Updike – you don’t have to have read his work to enjoy this, and please don’t ignore it just because you know nothing about the author whose work it analyses. The piece gives you all the information you need to enjoy it, and the writing is…actually, it’s not even worth trying to describe it, it’s just perfect, to the point where I again got that slightly saddening feeling whereby you read something and you realise that, yes, this is what being really good reads like. Honestly, I kept stopping to enjoy particular sentences or turns of phrase – if you only read one thing from this section, please make it this one.

By Hiroshi Watanabe

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1) First up, a superb mashup of 50 songs from the year of my birth by the ever-excellent The Hood Internet:

2) Next up, this is a BEAUTIFUL piece of animation and on a cold autumnal afternoon it’s just the bleak little tonic I’m sure you all need. It’s called ‘The Full Story’:

3) This is a few months old, but it’s gorgeous – Girl Ray with ‘Tell Me More’:

4) HIPHOP CORNER! This is the latest from Curios favourites Clipping, and it’s as fuzzily, brilliantly anxious as ever. This is ‘Blood of the Fang’:

5) Finally this week in the musical selections, the aptly-titled “Soon There Will Be No Summer” by Fauness – this is gorgeous and cold and crisp and reminds me of frosty mornings, and OH LOOK THAT’S THE LAST VIDEO OF THE WEEK AND I REALLY NEED TO GET MOVING AS I HAVE SOME SERIOUSLY LAVISH EATING TO START PREPARING FOR I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU I HOPE YOU GET TO EAT NICE THINGS TOO THIS WEEKEND AND THAT YOU DO SO WITH MODERATION AND DON’T GET FOOD POISONING AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I CARE ABOUT YOU VERY MUCH AND REALLY HOPE THAT I CAN BE HERE AGAIN NEXT WEEK TAKE CARE BYE BYE TAKE CARE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HELLO I AM BACK MY GOD I HAVE MISSED YOU! I went to Spain! I saw some sun! I met an Australian millionaire who was responsible for coating one of Perth’s major roads with 1000 litres of concentrated sulphuric acid a few years back! I saw young women who’d had such aggressive lip-fillers that they literally had to move their mouths with their fingers to be able to drink from a bottle! I had a time. 

In my absence, it appears that noone’s seen fit to sort the world out at all – what the fcuk have you been doing with yourselves? Anyway, with little further ado, let’s crack right on with the links and the words and stuff – I imagine that your past two Fridays have been miserable and work-filled and without the usual slightly queasy LOLs afforded you by my sparkling prose – strip down, grease up, and prepare to squeeze yourself into the tight-fitting cloaca that is this week’s infodump. I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you have no idea how good it is to be back.

By Mark Tansey

FIRST UP, A LOVELY NEO-SOUL-ISH END-OF-SUMMER EP BY HALIA JACK!

THE SECTION WHICH, BASED ON THE PAST WEEK’S NEWS, FEELS BROADLY POSITIVE ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF ESCAPING INTO ZUCKERBERG’S VIRTUAL BIG BLUE MISERY FACTORY:

• Facebook’s VR Future: This stuff is all hugely speculative, fine, but it’s fascinating to read; whether or not any of the tech outlined in here becomes mainstream or whether it’s all superseded before it comes to market is unknowable, but (if you’re me, at least) it’s impossible not to feel a small frisson of futureexcitement at the developments listed in this FB announcement on its VR tech. Photorealistic 3d avatars! Holopresence! The creation of a 3d map of the entire world, enabling the lightning-fast 3d experiences in a digital analogue of meatspace! Fine, the last one is perhaps a touch on the sinister side – I’m not 100% certain that I want any single commercial entity ‘owning’ a digital representation of the physical world, though I can’t fully articulate why – but overall the work listed in this piece is genuinely thrilling from a tech point of view, and offers a momentary peek into a scifi future that I will doubtless be too scared, confused, old or dead to enjoy properly.
• Facebook Horizon: About 10 years ago, I remember getting very excited indeed about the prospect of Playstation Home – anyone remember that? No? It was Sony’s attempt at a mass-market virtual world, where anyone with a PS account could have an avatar and use it to navigate a persistent, multiplayer virtual space in which they could talk to people, watch films, play games and generally amuse themselves in manners befitting tiny digital humans. Obviously it didn’t catch on at all – turns out noone in the mid-00s had either the bandwidth or the general desire to hang out in a digital apartment playing Frogger – but I can’t help but be reminded of the ambition when I read this announcement about Facebook’s forthcoming (in 2020) VR world ‘Horizon’, which basically sounds like the same sort of thing (except first-person and VR-enabled). This is all very much theoretical at present, but the idea is that anyone will be able to create their own spaces, experiences, etc, and share them with other users to enjoy collaboratively, with the ability to watch multimedia, play games and generally hang out with whoever you like in digispace. The likelihood is that this will, at first at least, be a shonky, uninhabited mess, but it’s equally likely that this is the first step towards a proper, mass-market VR world and as such it’s worth keeping an eye on. Oh, and if you think that FB isn’t going to be tracking everyone’s movements and actions in VR and using that data to sell more ads to the world then, well, you’re a naive idiot.
• FB Expands ‘Playable’ Ads: Facebook’s interactive ad units – which let you create games as an ad format, or AR face filters as promos – are now being rolled out to everyone! That’s right! I’m excited too! My pathetic ennui aside, these are quite interesting opportunities (if expensive ones).
• FB Announces New Features for Public Figures: If you’re a famous, then Facebook has a whole new suite of toys just for YOU! The ability to contribute collaboratively to Stories, better discovery for famouses on the platform, a ‘fan reply’ sticker option to encourage photo or video responses from your audience, additional ways of screwing your idiot fans for cash through the ‘Facebook Stars’ tipping mechanic, and a few other things too. SO EXCITING (not exciting at all).
• Facebook Adds New Video Publishing Tools: This is mostly stuff about Lives – you will now be able to ‘rehearse’ a live on Facebook (why is this necessary?), trim the footage to eliminate the top and bottom of the broadcast for post-Live replay, and – and this is the really exciting bit – broadcast for a full 8 hours rather than the limiting, inadequate 4 hours that you were previously allowed. I am thrilled to discover the exciting, innovative content formats that ‘creators’ are going to invent with this newfound freedom – 8 hours of slow, miserable edging? A webcam feed of your office hours? Truly, the possibilities are almost endless and we should all be thankful that we live in what can only be described as the golden age of creativity.
• Twitter Launches ‘Hide Replies’ Feature in US & Japan: If you’re in either of these countries, you can now opt to hide replies to your Tweets – so you can now say whatever awful crap you want without having to see the reactions! Obviously this is designed to minimise the impact of trolling, but it will also act as a convenient way of muting dissent and reinforcing one’s own opinionbubble – Twitter here, as ever, taking a broadly sensible idea and fcuking it right up through poor implementation. Anyone would think its leaders don’t really have the first clue as to how to manage their platform and its impact on the world!
• Twitter Launches List Update: This isn’t very new news – the feature’s been tested for a few months now – but you can now swipe left within the Twitter app to navigate to your Lists, making them significantly more useful as a tool for normie users. For certain brands, this might make creating and pimping lists for your followers becomes worthwhile – maybe, a bit. It’s only iOS at present, but is coming to Android ‘soon’ – if you were yearning for something to look forward to for the remainder of the year, this is surely it.
• Snapchat Launches 3d Selfies: I…I don’t care. Sorry. Look, if you’ve got a recent-model iPhone you will now be able to make vaguely 3dish images using Snap, much like you’ve been able to do on Facebook for a while. Is that exciting? Should I be interested? Do you feel better for knowing this information? Shall we move on? Let’s.
• TikTok Introduces Video Search: Or at least it does in China. Leaving aside this week’s news about TikTok’s censorship of stuff the Chinese government’s not keen on, this is legitimately amazing (let’s not think too hard about how this video search might be used by the in-no-way-terrifying Chinese state apparatus); TikTok’s rolling out the ability to search within the app by face – so you can easily find videos featuring the same people – or products and clothing, to facilitate in-app shopping. This is SO FUTURE, and basically how all video is going to work within a decade.
• All The TikTok Ad Formats: Thanks to Contagious for this genuinely useful guide to the different ad options that you can buy on the platform; it’s accurate as of today, but will almost certainly be hideously out-of-date by the middle of next week, by which point TikTok will doubtless have launched the ability to target people based on sperm count of follicle count or something equally invasive. Still, ‘til then this is worth bookmarking should you or your clients be in the business of flogging stuff to children.
• Pinterest Updates Its Lens Visual Search Tool: Oh, look, here, I can’t be fcuked to paraphrase this very tedious news: “Pinterest made some changes to its Lens visual search tool to aid Pinners in their searches for ideas and inspirations. Pinners can now take photos or upload images from their camera rolls and use them to search via Lens.” Isn’t ‘Pinners’ a horrible term? Isn’t that an appallingly-written article? Don’t you wish you had skipped this section and gone straight to the links? ME TOO.
• All Of The Amazon Announcements: I know that this is hardware rather than software (in the main), but it’s advermarketingpr-adjacent and so I feel justified in including it. Amazon this week announced a bunch of new things – mainly Alexa-enabled products, with new devices and the exciting development of ALEXA WEARABLES, so you can order toilet paper on the move via your magical surveillance ring (no pun intended). Glasses with Alexa! A ring with Alexa! An oven with Alexa! All ‘coming soon’ (the wearables will be released in limited numbers as a beta test in 2020, apparently), and prepping us for the inevitable future in which Amazon has basically won the voice assistant game and knows everything about our wants and desires, thereby achieving an unassailable commercial advantage and basically becoming the overall winner of the great game of ‘Capitalism’ come 2100 or so. I jest, but only slightly – also, I am now totally convinced that MechaBezos is secretly planning to live forever via the medium of uploading his consciousness into the Alexa ecosystem on death (I am going to start referring to this as the Jeffularity, and you can too if you like).
• 24 Hour Ace: I make no apology whatsoever for including yet ANOTHER Gucci website in Curios; this is a site promoting the brand’s 24 Hour Ace project, where a bunch of designers mess with their Ace trainer to create bespoke, limited edition designs. This is WONDERFUL – all retro aesthetic, but simultaneously packed with lovely content – and, much as it pains me to say so, I quite like the shoes (but not enough to shell out the fat end of 500 quid on them, to be clear).
• The Trino Quest for Comfort: This is a promo for socks, but that really doesn’t matter – ignore the slightly baffling brand association, and instead glory in this wonderfully-playable little browser game, which plays a bit like a more forgiving version of Flappy Bird in which you play as a hanggliding sheep. Honestly, this is really, really fun – works best on mobile, but playable in-browser as well, and I just lost 10 minutes playing it which either suggests that I am right and it’s an excellent game, or that I’m not really in the mood for writing another 6,000-odd words about stuff on the internet this morning and would rather get back into bed for a few hours (guess which!).

By Guim Tio Zarraluki

NEXT UP, MORE MODERN SOUL FROM OLIVIA LOUISE AND HER NEW EP ‘NO PHUX’!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER HOPES THIS TREND FOR IMPEACHMENT CATCHES ON OVER HERE, PT.1:

• Imagenet Roulette: You’ve almost certainly all seen this and played with it already, what with it having come out in my absence, but I’m including it anyway because a) THE INTERNET IS NOT A RACE FFS; b) I like it a lot; c) it’s being taken down at some point today, and so I feel honour-bound to pimp it while it’s still available. Imagenet Roulette is a site which lets you upload any photo you like, from the web, your camera roll or your webcam, and which then uses the Imagenet library held by Stanford university to ‘classify’ whatever you upload; effectively the software matches the image you upload to ones in the extant library, and applies category classifications to it based on what it ‘sees’ – the idea being to highlight the problematic nature of many of these classifications, and draw attention to the inherent bias which exists within these sorts of AI systems. I just webcammed myself and got “convict, con, inmate, yard bird, yardbird” which, well, is indicative of the sort of rock-hard, threatening man I am. Anyway, this will disappear from the web imminently, but if you’d like to check it out it’s installed at the Barbican and at the Fondazione Prada in Milan – it’s ART, guys.
• Generated Photos: 100,000 made-up faces! You want a huge repository of faces of people that have never existed and which have in fact been ‘imagined’ by an AI? GREAT! “We have built an original machine learning dataset, and used StyleGAN (an amazing resource by NVIDIA) to construct a realistic set of 100,000 faces. Our dataset has been built by taking 29,000+ photos of 69 different models over the last 2 years in our studio. We took these photos in a controlled environment (similar lighting and post-processing) to make sure that each face had consistent high output quality.” Honestly, these are amazing – not only because of how convincing they are at first glance, but also because of all the instances where the faces are slightly wrong – honestly, do take the time to take a look at the GDrive of the images and have a browse, as there are some genuinely unsettling little anomalies in there, from the odd overly-crinkled ear to people who seemingly have nostrils in their foreheads (I kid you not). There’s something interesting about the fact that all the generated faces are so generally-pleasing; I would love to see a similar project undertaken using a training set of normal (oh, ok, ugly) people rather than models; in fact, there’s a really interesting project in the idea of using sets of people divided by nationality and seeing what emerges. Fascinating.
• Who Posted What?: “whopostedwhat.com is a non public Facebook keyword search for people who work in the public interest. It allows you to search keywords on specific dates. When you want to search on a specific date, you can search only for the year, only the month from a specific year or for a specific date. It is also possible to use two or more keywords like terror attack paris. You can also search in posts who got posted in between two specific dates. It is possible to search in between two years, in between months of different years and in between two specific dates.” Not hugely interesting, fine, but REALLY useful as a means of surfacing legacy content from Pages or Groups – journalists and general muckrakers could get a lot of use out of this imho.
• Am I Cancelled?: I’m genuinely annoyed about this – way back in November last year, as you will doubtless-recall, I told you all about an idea my friends and I had called Milkshakeduck.me which would tell you how likely you were to be cancelled; now someone’s gone and made a tool which basically does that, except in a really crap way; plug in your (or anyone else’s) username and it will tell you whether or not you’ve been cancelled based on your past Twitter output. It doesn’t even tell you why, FFS! Everyone apart from me (and you, dear reader, and you) is a useless, know-nothing bozo.
• Witches: The University of Edinburgh presents a map of all the places in Scotland where women accused of being witches lived – over 3,000 of them, which is a quite astonishing number and one worth bearing in mind when you hear Trump describing his impeachment proceedings as ‘the greatest witchhunt in history’. You can click on the individual entries to find additional details about the person in question, which occasionally throw up some wonderful little story fragments – “She was a servant to the father of Margaret Murdoch, the tormented girl who denounced a lot of the 1699 accused witches”. WHO WAS MARGARET MURDOCH? WHY WAS SHE TORMENTED? So many writing prompts in here if you’re in the market for them.
• The Syllabus: I always feel a bit wrong recommending other newsletters in here, like I’m asking you to cheat on me or something (I know, obviously, that you all know no other newsletter Gods but me); this one’s a relatively new offering from anti-tech-solutionist and general genius pessimist Evgeny Morozov; the idea behind The Syllabus is that it’s a weekly digest of interesting writings and thinking and podcasts and videos and stuff, which you the reader can customise to a reasonable extent; there are a variety of off-the-shelf selections you can subscribe to, covering media, tech, etc, but the really interesting feature is the ability for individual users to select the areas they’re most interested in, and receive a lightly-personalised selection of curated content each week based on their choices. I got my first one this week – it’s VERY academic, and if I’m honest I’d prefer a little more in terms of commentary and colour on the selected bits, but I can definitely see the potential. Were I a better, more organised and frankly more altruistic newslettermong I might try and implement something similar for Curios but, well, life’s too short.
• Butter Churn: You want a fun, Flash-esque music visualiser? YOU GOT IT! This is really nicely done, and the various options are visually excellent – another thing which it would be sort-of cool to throw up on a big screen and just let it react to whatever soundtrack you choose to play. Pleasingly you can sync it with either music from your device or from any track/playlist from Soundcloud, so try it out with whatever sounds you’re feeling RIGHT NOW (NB it produces some very odd stuff when you plug in Cannibal Corpse).
• Spot: It seems that we’ve been gawping at Boston Dynamics’ terrifying robot creations for years, making it all the weirder that this is the first time that they’ve been commercially available. Still, welcome to the FUTURE, in which anyone who fancies it can get their hands on a creepy, quadrupedal dogrobotthing, to, I don’t know, test the safety features in an industrial environment, or dance gamely through a minefield, or race through the desert, or whatever you want (actually that last one’s a GREAT idea – I would watch robot dog desert racing in a heartbeat, although my enthusiasm may be as a direct result of having been back at work for a week and as a result being almost catatonic with boredom). The video here is a pretty standard promo, featuring very little you haven’t seen before, but it’s still astonishing to see actual, proper robotics on practically-mass-market-sale; I think there will be a smol domestic version of this tech available within the decade. Oh, and if you want to see the REALLY mental robot stuff, here’s a different video showing one of their humanoid robots doing gymnastics which, well, CRIKEY.
• Megabot: The other mental robot-related link in this week’s Curios, this is a live eBay sale which, if you have a spare 100k (at the time of writing) will let you purchase Eagle Prime, the “15-Ton 2-Story Tall Gasoline Powered Car-Smashing Piloted Giant Battle Robot From the world famous USA vs Japan Giant Robot Duel” – if you don’t remember that event with forensic clarity you can see it again here. What would YOU do with a two-story tall mechanical fighting robot? Depressingly, I imagine the answer for lots of the sort of people who would be willing to bid on this would be something along the lines of ‘take it to Parliament Square and TAKE BACK CONTROL’, but perhaps I’m being unfair. Regardless, if you’re a very rich person, why not take a punt on this? Even better, if you’re a business owner with a few hundred k burning a hole in your balance sheet then why not buy this as an interesting landmark/talking point to erect outside the office? COME ON, LIVE A LITTLE FFS.
• SD Notes: Another ephemeral website creator – log on, add whatever characters you like after the / at the end of the url, and HEY PRESTO, your very own site! You can only add text to it, but it’s permanent (as long as you update it every The Geocities Archive: I have definitely featured Geocities lookup repositories on here before, but this is the most comprehensive I’ve yet come across; if you want the ability to search through the internet back in those innocent, halcyon days before we realised everyone was basically a Nazi with a keyboard then this is for YOU. This is a complete goldmine of odd – a couple of cursory clicks just now landed me on this archived scan of a comic strip from Beezer magazine called ‘True Brit’, which features a Roger The Dodger lookalike called Tommy who, when he gets angry, turns into a TRUE BRIT (I am, I promise, not making this up) and acquires superpowers. Honestly, you could lose yourself in this stuff for years – SO MUCH WHIMSICAL ODDITY!
• Adblock Radio: A tool to block ads from podcasts and livestreamed audio. I’ve not tried it, so no idea if it actually works, but the idea’s potentially useful – Web Curios accepts no liability whatsoever if this ends up being some sort of appalling malware.
• The Cool Worlds Lab: If everything’s just a bit bleakly terrifying right now, perhaps this YouTube channel will help. This is produced by the Columbia University Astronomy Department, and is “a team of astronomers seeking to discover and understand alien worlds, particularly those where temperatures are cool enough for life, led by Professor David Kipping.” You want to learn about exoplanets and artificial gravity and whether or not we are likely to be alone and unloved in a godless and uncaring universe (we are, get over it)? You will LOVE this, in that case.
• Fix Radio: This is AMAZING! Fix Radio is an online radio station aimed at tradespeople – it’s literally created especially for people with paint-spattered radios who hang out in your kitchen drinking endless cups of oversugared tea and telling you that ‘no, mate, it’s going to take another 6 days and I need to order the parts and we’re looking at the fat end of a grand to be honest and do you have any digestives?’. I can’t tell whether this is a branded endeavour, but, honestly, I now want to create bespoke radio stations for ALL professions – I am totally pitching this to someone next week as the vanguard of new content solutions, practicality be damned.

By Mark Tennant

NEXT, TRY THE RATHER EXCELLENT CHIPTUNE-Y SOUNDTRACK TO THE VIDEOGAME ‘SAYONARA WILD HEARTS’!

THE SECTION WHICH RATHER HOPES THIS TREND FOR IMPEACHMENT CATCHES ON OVER HERE, PT.2:

• Plastic: A very powerful graphical visualisation by Reuters, which shows you the amount of plastic bottles which have been sold since you open the page (I’ve had it open for the time it’s taken me to write this sentence, and we’re at *checks* 120,000, which is frankly insane. As an aside, I think this week was the first when I felt the proper ‘wow, we really are totally fcuked, aren’t we?’ species-level horror about the environment; whilst I obviously applaud all efforts to be better at renewable energy and recycling and lessening plastic use, it’s becoming eminently clear to me that the problem isn’t necessarily one of specific materials or actions so much as one of a species-wide addiction to consumption, which is so desperately, deeply ingrained that we’ll still be buying cheap sunglasses and assorted crap off Wish when the seas are boiling around us. If you’re worried about single-use plastics and coffee cups whilst still buying stuff on Amazon Prime and shopping in Primark you’re still part of the fcuking problem, sweetheart.
• WeWalk: This is SUCH a good idea – WeWalk is a ‘smart’ cane, designed to offer additional information about one’s surroundings and ambient environment to the visually-impaired. I remember watching my brother using his cane when he was alive, and thinking that it was a massively inefficient tool – this is exactly the sort of thing which would have made his life easier (although it’s probably a bit fragile for smacking bullies with, which was very much his favourite use for it).
• Kapwing: This is a really interesting tool – if you are in the invidious position of having to make CONTENT for a living (I know, I know, we are ALL creators in 2019, we are ALL visionaries, we are ALL geniuses whose output needs to be seen and heard and worshipped) then this might be useful; Kapwing is ‘a collaborative platform for creating images, videos and gifs’, which presents a really simple UI to pull together text, image and video collages collaboratively, which you can then export on the social platform of your choosing. There are free and paid-for tiers, but the difference seems minimal outside of the ability to watermark stuff, so if you need a slightly less-awful way of creating flashy texty gif-type-things then you could do worse than check this out.
• Cancelled Bot: The first of two bots by Rob Manuel to be featured in Curios this week (he doesn’t even PAY me for these plugs, the fcuker), Cancelled Bot does exactly what you’d imagine and CANCELS anything that’s currently trending on Twitter. You can follow it and @message it if you want to be cancelled too – it’s oddly cathartic.
• Tone Detector:Grammarly’s been around for an age, letting you get a digital eye cast over your prose to tell you exactly how badly you’re mangling the language and syntax; it’s just launched another tool which analyses your copy and lets you know if you’re coming across as, well, a bit of a cnut (I’m paraphrasing; sadly the assessments don’t have quite that degree of clear-eyed honesty). On the one hand, this is sort-of useful; on the other, if you really can’t tell if your emails are rude or enervating or downright aggressive without the help of a digital assistant then you’ve probably got problems beyond the reach of software. Interestingly, it ranked the edition of Curios I tried it out on as ‘disheartening’, which is probably about right tbh.
• Guard: This is a really interesting service, which seeks to use machine learning to assess the privacy policies of websites, and offer users an at-a-glance overview of exactly how appalling the terms of service of many major web services are. It’s a work in progress, and at the time of writing it’s only got 20-odd sites on it, but over time, and with enough training, you can imagine this being a genuinely useful service – anyone can assist in training the software, so if you’re feeling bored and like you might want to contribute to the effort, you can spend 10 minutes assessing the privacy-friendliness of a bunch of legalese (it’s not, it’s fair to say, hugely exciting as a pastime, but then again neither is your actual job).
• Fesshole: Rob Manuel’s other new bot, Fesshole has gotten quite a bit of attention over the past week or so – the idea is that anyone can contribute an anonymous confession via a GDoc which will eventually be tweeted out by the bot; there are some genuinely GREAT (and appalling) ones in here, and you can see the full list of confessions to date by clicking here should you so desire. I have submitted one myself – I hereby offer an actual, proper readers’ PRIZE to whoever can accurately guess which is mine (seriously, email Imperica with your guesses and I will send someone an actual gift if they guess right) of the current 1100 entries. Special shout out to the deviant who confessed this gem (please never share the output): “I’m creating a deepfake of Nigella Lawson and Lucy Worsley going at it with each other, purely for my own amusement.”
• Old Wood Toys: Do you want a pleasingly-retro website collecting all the information you or anyone else could ever desire about the manufacture and maintenance of old wooden toys? No, of course you don’t, it’s 2019 ffs, and yet I present it to you nonetheless. If nothing else, this is worth checking out to learn about the genuinely terrifying Scary Anne dolls of the 1920s, which will be haunting my nightmares tonight (and probably yours too).
• Satellites: A website which uses your location to tell you when you might be able to next see a satellite passing above you. Largely pointless, unless you’ve a real burning desire to know exactly what that fast-moving dot of light hurtling across the sky is, but a really nice example of how you can stitch together a bunch of different open data sources to interesting effect.
• Heart of Neon: I’m making quite a big assumption here, but I’d imagine that quite a few of you know who Jeff Minter is. In case you don’t, though, let me briefly explain – Minter is one of the great eccentrics of the UK videogames industry, a man who created some of the greatest, oddest little digital toys of the 80s and 90s and whose baffling obsession with camelids led to him naming his studio Llamasoft and one of his games Llamatron (Llamatron is, honestly, AMAZING – watch this video of it and then go and download a copy). This is a Kickstarter project seeking funds to make a documentary about his career, which if you’re in any way interested in the history of indie games is a worthwhile cause to punt a fiver at. The target is…ambitious, and it doesn’t look like they’ll make it with a fortnight to go, but it’s something I’d love to see made so, you know, PAY UP.
• Zero Degrees: A photo project which photographs flowers encased in blocks of ice. Weirdly lovely, and the sort of thing which feels like it could be an ad campaign for…something, though I have no idea what. Maybe one of you creative geniuses can come up with something.
• The ESPN Body Issue: It’s that time of year again, when ESPN presents a selection of photos of elite athletes in the buff so that we can all feel moderately inadequate when we compare our pasty, lumpy-in-the-wrong-places reflections to the visions of muscular perfection here arrayed. Every time I see this stuff I am left slightly in awe at the insane examples of humanity displayed, and genuinely amazed at the buttocks in particular – I mean, just look at the callipygian nature of the subjects! You could bounce pound coins off them! They’re like bowling balls in tights! My personal favourite in this year’s edition is Katrin Davidsdottir, but they are all quite disgustingly wonderful-looking examples of humanity.
• Knolling: Knolling is apparently the practice of arranging objects in pleasingly regular grids and then taking photos of them; this is all the photos with that tag on Flickr, and I promise you it’s a LOT more satisfying that you might initially imagine.
• Malmal: Malmal is a collaborative infinite canvas, on which anyone can draw anything they like – wonderfully, there doesn’t appear to be ANY hate or Nazis or racism or anything on here, meaning you can instead just scroll around and enjoy the wonderful selection of surprisingly really good art on display, ranging from cartoon-style, anime-ish figures to more serious-looking character sketches. Genuinely wholesome and lovely (at least at the time of writing – apologies if by the time you get to it it’s been overtaken by channers).
• Seasons: A beautiful short ‘game’ in which you listen to a piece of music and pick lyrics to fit it, creating your very own song as you go. This is absolutely gorgeous, and I would play the fcuk out of something that took this concept and built on it.
• American Election: Finally this week, a game which takes you through modern American politics in a series of creepingly-awful chapters which slowly and meticulously explore and unpack the vile, violent and angry nature of modern political discourse in the US. This is, honestly, masterful – a wonderful use of a lightly-interactive medium to tell all sorts of stories about the world we live in. It describes itself as “A dark political nightmare game about Abigail Thoreau, a campaign assistant working to elect her candidate”, but, honestly, that doesn’t give you any idea of quite how dark and brilliantly written this is. Play it – it’s vastly more interesting than anything else you’re likely to do in the office today.

By Camille Soulat

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, HAVE AN HOUR-LONG CUT OF THE MYSTERIOUSLY-NAMED BUT RATHER LOVELY ‘SOVIETWAVE’!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!

• Nice Sausages: Beautiful, cut-out-style animations by Kajetan Obarksi. These are WONDERFUL, often taking old illustrations and paintings and creating humorous moving vignettes from them – Obarski’s got a wonderful eye.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Pixeldanc3r: Pixelart by David from Argentina. David is brilliant, whoever they are.
• Brutalist Empire: I know that in internet terms a fascination with brutalism basically marks you down as an aesthetic VSCO girl, but I don’t care. This feed collects loads of good brutalist design and architecture – glorious photos.
• Foka Wolf: Street artist from (I think) Birmingham, with a nice line in urban subversion and reworked signage.
• Dr Leon Advogato: Possibly my favourite story of the week, this – “Leon was just like any other stray cat – roaming the streets, looking for scraps. One day, he walked into the Order of Attorneys of Brazil building, and his life changed. After people started to complain about the cat hanging around the reception area, the OAB took action to curb the moaning: they hired Leon as a lawyer.” IT IS ADVOGATO, THE LAWYER CAT! O MAOW!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Carol Cadwalladr: The headline of this Atlantic profile is ‘Britain’s most polarising journalist’ – what really got Carol’s back up this week was the assertion contained within the piece that she’s as much an activist as a journalist. I can see her point – whatever you might think of her investigations in Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the like, you can’t argue with the quality of her hackery. Still, the article’s interesting insofar as it details the slightly obsessive nature of her quest, and the slightly blurred lines that occur when one starts to crowdfund one’s investigations in the manner in which Cadwalladr has done – not to suggest that there’s anything wrong with her seeking funds for her work, more that as soon as you start to take money from people with a vested interest in a certain outcome, you could be argued to be compromising your reporting to an extent. Regardless, this is a really interesting read (even if it did make me think of Louise Mensch, oddly enough).
• The Cameron Book: We’re all sick of hearing Dave wax unrepentant, aren’t we? FCUK OFF DAVE THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT HOW DARE YOU SUGGEST THAT A REFERENDUM WAS INEVITABLE YOU APPALLING CNUT. Still, regardless, this review of his memoirs by Stephen Bush in the New Statesman is more interesting than most of the comment I’ve read on the subject; I had completely forgotten Dave’s steadfast efforts to de-posh himself in the late-00s, but it’s fascinating to look back at his early reign and his brief, ill-fated attempt to de-toxify the Tory party before the Euromadness took hold.
• Inside the Pee Tape: Do you remember those innocent times three years ago when we all thought that Trump might be brought down by a videotape of him involved in some light urolagnia with some hookers? GREAT DAYS! This is a very odd, very detailed article which looks into the possible veracity of a video which has been doing the rounds for a year or so, seemingly THAT video, which shows Donald sitting in what looks very much like the hotel room in question while two women apparently engage in a little gentle pissplay – it’s almost certainly not real but, well, who made it? Why? This is honestly really interesting – my money’s on Alison Jackson having done this as a laugh, but I’d welcome your theories. Oh, and you can see the video in question here if you really want to.
• One Summer In America: If you want to get a sense of the battering, cumulative effect of all of this news, all of this horror, all of this STUFF, then this piece in the LRB is essential reading. It’s a simple (if beautifully-written) list of all the things that have happened over the course of the past three months in the US, drawn from news reports – everything in this article has happened or at least been alleged, on record. THREE MONTHS. Honestly, reading this is a little like being beaten repeatedly over the head with something blunt (but, er, it’s very good!).
• The Cancel Culture Con: The best thing I’ve yet read on the pernicious idiocy of people complaining about ‘cancel culture’. It’s worth reading the whole piece, but the conclusion neatly summarises the thrusty of the author’s argument: “The power to cancel is nothing compared to the power to establish what is and is not a cultural crisis. And that power remains with opinion leaders who are, at this point, skilled hands at distending their own cultural anxieties into panics that—time and time and time again—smother history, fact, and common sense into irrelevance. Cancel culture is only their latest phantom. And it’s a joke.”
• How TikTok Holds Our Attention: ANOTHER explainer on what TikTok is and how it works, this time from the New Yorker, but worth reading to get a bit more of a handle on how the company operates (chaotically) and the platform’s appeal. There’s something interesting (to me at least) about the rise of a service so dedicated to frivolity in an era characterised by everything being VERY SERIOUS all the time.
• Tinder Swipe Night: You may or may not have seen that Tinder’s moving into the content game, producing an interactive CYOA-style experience called Swipe Night, which will not only present users with a narrative experience but which will also use the choices they make through the game to inform a suite of matches they’ll receive on completion. Whether or not the narrative is any good remains to be seen, but the idea of using these sorts of signals as a means of pairing people is an interesting one – would you want to date someone based on their choices in a game?
• High School Roleplay on Facebook: The phenomenon of Facebook as a space for roleplaying is fascinating to me – from the people pretending to be Boomers, to this phenomenon, where millennials invest and effort in Facebook groups in which they roleplay being at school. WHY?!? I imagine this is a generational thing; this makes no sense to me, being of an age where the internet didn’t exist til I was in my mid teens, but if you grew up with afterschool MSN chats and the like then perhaps it’s more comprehensible. Regardless, I think there’s a genuinely interesting cultural thing here which is ripe for some sort of gentle exploitation – fast forward three months and watch as every fast food Twitter feed pivots to 90s roleplay and ruins EVERYTHING for EVERYONE.
• Photos of Blackboards: Jessica Wynne is a photographer and professor who for the past year or so has been taking photographs of the blackboards of maths teachers; this article describes the work, and, more interestingly, presents a selection of images from the collection. I know it doesn’t sound interesting, but, if you’re a mathematical incompetent like me then the scrawls and equations basically look like magical runes. Also, there will be LOADS of inspiration here if, like me, you like playing the ‘let’s leave a lot of random scrawls on the whiteboard to confuse the next person to use this meeting room’ game.
• Storming Area 51: I’ve mentioned the planned party at Area 51 several times in Curios this year, and on each occasion have made some sort of snarky prediction about how it was all going to go horribly wrong and be a terrible disaster – well IN YOUR FACE MATT MUIR FROM THE PAST, because, once again, I have been proven totally wrong, as this rather lovely writeup of the whole thing suggests. Instead of being a clusterfcuk of horror it appears to have been a genuinely nice, pleasant (if surreal) gathering, and the spin-off party in Vegas also sounds like a generally good time. The only downside, to my mind, is the non-appearance of former Blink-182 frontman and alien botherer Mark Hoppis, who would have been the cherry on the extraterrestrial cake. Oh, in case you were wondering, noone found any aliens.
• The Slime Bash: Memes move with such speed that it’s often hard to remember them once they’ve passed – so it is with the slime craze of a few years back, which I’d totally forgotten about until I read this piece, about this year’s massive slime fan convention in Illinois. Fans? Of slime? How can you be a fan of a substance? HOW DOES CULTURE EVEN WORK ANY MORE? This is less about the convention and slime than it is about the unique ability of online subcultures to create community around shared passions; when reading stuff like this, it’s hard not to think back to being a child and wondering how my personal obsessions would have translated into an online world.
• Japanese Pizza: As a half-Italian I am typically, tediously absolutist about Italian food. Pineapple on pizza is an aberration, if you put cream in carbonara you’re basically a nonce, that sort of thing. Still, I adored this article about the search for pizza perfection by artisan pizzaiolos in Japan; there’s something about the peculiarly Japanese pursuit of excellence in a single discipline which lends itself perfectly to the very prescribed basic idea of Neapolitan pizza, and something oddly romantic about the image of these lonely obsessives making pizza after pizza in search of the ultimate crust. This will make you very, very hungry, fyi.
• The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet: An excellent online mystery, which part of me hopes will never be solved. “Twelve years ago, a catchy New Wave anthem appeared on the internet with no information about who wrote or recorded it. Amateur detectives have spent thousands of hours since trying to figure out where it came from — with little luck.” What is the song? Who recorded it? WHERE DID IT COME FROM? We will, hopefully, never find out, but it’s a lovely curiosity to read about.
• Alec Guinness Hated Star Wars: This is a BEAUTIFUL story – the author once met Alec Guinness, who then mentioned their meeting in his memoirs; this is the author’s own story of that meeting, his recollection of Guinness, and how and why the actor manipulated the anecdote slightly to fit a particular narrative. Honestly, this is so, so lovely.
• Who Would I Be Without Instagram?: One of the best pieces of writing about growing up with, and through, Instagram, written by Tavi Gevinson. Gevinson’s perspective is naturally singular – after all, most of us are not catapulted to international fame in our early teens, and most of us don’t launch publishing imprints before they’re 20 – but her reflections on the manner in which her internal and external identities were shaped, nurtured, stunted and stultified by online existence feel immensely universal. She’s a wonderful writer, and this article is full of beautiful observations about the feeling of being ‘seen’ but not seen online, and the peculiarly, incessantly performative nature of modern – but also, simply human – existence.
• Where Am I?: What must it be like to live with a condition whereby you have no sense of place or direction, where you can’t quite place yourself within the world or necessarily recognise or see the elements that make it up? Genuinely terrifying, I’d say, though this essay by Heather Sellers, who suffers from face blindness and a general lack of ability to ‘do’ space and geography and directions and stuff, is pleasingly uncomplainy – it made me think quite hard about the extent to which I take certain things for granted.
• Football in Greenland: Greenland’s football championship takes place over the course of one week, featuring evocatively-named teams such as the legendary B-67 and very much at the mercy of weather conditions that can include blanket fog and freezing rain; this is a wonderful piece of journalism, sharing snapshots and stories from the week-long tournament and giving a sense of just how small a place Greenland is. I would ABSOLUTELY go to this next year if anyone fancies it btw.
• Kings of Croquet: “On a sunny September Sunday in 1982, Mark Burchfield, a 20-year-old tobacco farmer from rural Kentucky, stood in Manhattan’s Central Park, getting ready to take the most important croquet shot of his life.Mark and his father Archie were one of 32 teams competing in the doubles tournament at the sixth annual U.S. Croquet Association National Championship. Archie already had seven state croquet titles under his belt, but this was Mark’s first tournament. He hadn’t even seen croquet played on grass until the month before; his father’s first time was in March.” You may not think that a story about croquet would be an exciting tale of underdogs and prejudice and class and overcoming the odds but, well, you’d be wrong. This is great.
• Stories About My Brother: Prachi Gupta’s brother was a brilliant engineer with a potentially glittering career ahead of him; he had made money on Bitcoin; he was also someone who’d been turned onto the MRA (Men’s Rights Activist) lifestyle towards the end of his life, and who died after complications ensuing from surgery he’d had to lengthen his legs in an attempt to correct what he saw as the height deficiency that was stopping him having romantic success. This is very sad, but beautifully-written – the gentle radicalisation of young men online is, honestly, slightly terrifying to me.
• The Bread Thread: Superb piece of writing, about female sexuality and shame and gender and bullying, and how women are judged, and how owning one’s past isn’t always enough to make one safe. Really, really good, this.
• Going To The Restaurant: Finally this week, a short-but-perfectly-formed essay, describing going to a restaurant. This is SUPERB, with not one word wasted, and it’s an excellent way to spend two minutes of your day.

By Shohei Otomo

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!

1. Let’s kick off with this wonderful song by Vagabon – the vocal is wonderful, I love the slightly shiny minimalist vibe of the track overall, and the dancing in the vid is mesmerising; the song’s called ‘Water Me Down’:

2. Awesome video, this, and the song’s not bad either. This is Anyway Gang, with ‘Big Night’; the song’s an excellent indie disco banger, but the 16-bit game in the video’s the real star here:

3. Belle & Sebastian’s latest. I fcuking love Belle & Sebastian. This is called ‘This Letter’:

4. This is called ‘Tape’, by a band called Canigou. I could watch this video forever – honestly, it’s like animation done by a neural net or something, it’s mesmerising:

5. UK HIPHOP CORNER! I got goosebumps listening to this – SBTV Warm Up Session by Deyah – there’s something really pleasingly understated about her delivery here, but the words are fire, as I believe the kids say, and her flow is amazing when she ramps it after the first 90s:

6. MORE HIPHOP CORNER! This is the latest track from Tyler and it is SUPERB. This is A Boy Is A Gun:

7. Last up, an excellent video which seems apt given this week’s news. This is called Natural Born Killers, and it’s by James Massiah AND THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK IT’S SO GOOD TO BE BACK I’VE MISSED YOU AND I HOPE YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEKEND AND THAT YOU GET TO RELAX AND MAYBE FORGET ABOUT ALL THE SCARY THINGS FOR A BIT AND INSTEAD JUST DO STUFF THAT YOU LIKE AND ENJOY AND MAYBE HANG OUT WITH FRIENDS AND JUST GENERALLY ENJOY YOURSELF BECAUSE I ONLY WANT THE BEST FOR YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE!:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I wasn’t expecting this, I have to say, but as I prepare to take two weeks off (yes, that’s right, I’m AWAY! You don’t have to feel guilty about deleting this email without even taking a cursory looking at its contents for a whole FORTNIGHT!) I am in a weirdly cheery mood. He’s fcuking it all up! Maybe it’s all going to be ok! Between this and Italian politics’ surprise decision not to let the fascists win (yet), it’s been a far less bad week than I was anticipating, and in a few short hours I get to go somewhere (hopefully) sunny and (hopefully) pleasant (this is a somewhat underresearched trip, it’s fair to say).

I need to pack, I need to shop, I need to MOVE. So, with no further ado, I bequeath you this latest edition of Web Curios, freshly-birthed and still covered in that lovely mucal sheen; hold on a second while I whizz up the infoplacenta and then huff it ALL down in one go – TAKE THIS, ALL OF YOU AND DRINK IT, FOR THESE ARE MY LINKS (they’re not mine, they’re all other people’s hard work, I just hoover them up and to be honest they deserve the credit, not me), FORAGED JUST FOR YOU!

I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and what are you going to do with yourselves on a Friday afternoon for the next few weeks? Work?

By Quentin Shih

FIRST UP, THE NEW ALBUM BY HIPSTERHIPHOP GREATS ‘WHY?’!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS GETTING RID OF ‘LIKES’ IS A START BUT WHICH WOULD QUITE LIKE THIS TO NOW EXPAND AND INCLUDE POSTS, THE FEED, THE CONCEPT OF ‘FRIENDS’ AND, WELL, THE WHOLE FCUKING THING TBH:

• FB To Test ‘Like’-Count Removal: Muchlike Insta did earlier this year, so Facebook is apparently considering removing the oh-so-meaningful metric of appreciation from public view. Whether as a sop to the ‘s*c**l m*d** is bad for you’ crowd, or as a way of making people feel less self-conscious when noone gives a fcuk about the minutiae of their lives and by so doing encouraging people to post more freely, this is unlikely to become A Universal Thing anytime soon and, beyond that, won’t make any practical difference to anything. So, er, NEWS!
• Facebook Launches Business Tools for Messenger: These look interesting, particularly the lead generation and CRM-integration stuff (as ever in this initial section, the word ‘interesting’ is doing quite a lot of work here); there are also updates relating to appointment booking and conversion tracking through the platform. On the flipside, though, Messenger stuff will no longer appear in Facebook’s ‘discover’ tab – Mark giveth, and, more often than not, he taketh away.
• The Facebook Data Portability & Privacy White Paper: Be aware that, unless you have a specific and detailed interest in the future of the ad tech industry and data brokerage in general, this is likely to mean very, very little to you (another way of explaining this is that it meant very, very little to me and therefore I’m sort of hoping that that means it’s a bit niche and obscure rather than something to do with me being thick). This is Facebook’s White Paper setting out its position on data portability and privacy, and all the thorny questions over rights to data and what controls and regulation should be enacted to attempt to de-Wild-West the whole online advertising business – it’s light on actual concrete positions, but from what I’ve read it’s very heavy on thinly-veiled and somewhat-repetitious criticisms of ‘regulators’ from ‘stakeholders’ for not deciding what the laws on all this sort of stuff should be and thereby traducing not only the poor consumers but also the POOR POOR PLATFORMS alike. DEFINITELY nothing to do with the platforms not having given anything resembling a fcuk about any of this ‘til about 18m ago, oh no no.
• Facebook Dating Launches in the US: Readers in the US, you can now entrust your future romantic journey to the Big Blue Misery Factory! Imagine a cherub with Zuckerberg’s face, flying around, pinging amorous shafts (ahem) off left, right and centre whilst simultaneously attempting to hamfistedly shoehorn product placements into every new couple’s first set of romantic photos – yes, THAT is what Facebook Dating will be like. In my head, at least – for a more realistic description of the platform, click the link and read the blurb. There’s obviously LOADS of ad potential here – at the very least, the ability to advertise at people who’ve just matched with someone on FB dating seems like an obvious one – but what really interests me about this is whether Facebook ends up actually being quite good at the matchmaking thing; after all, it has such an incredible wealth of datapoints about so many of us. Or maybe data is a fcuking terrible way of looking at such an amorphous concept as romantic attraction. Maybe.
• You Can Now Share Tracks From Spotify on Facebook Stories: If you happen to work in one of the territories where people actually use Stories on FB, congratulations! You can now add music from Spotify to them! I probably didn’t need to write any explanation here, on reflection!
• Twitter Launches Audience Expansion Options: When you buy ads on Twitter you’ll now also get the opportunity to allow Twitter to automatically expand the audience into lookalike categories. Which is nice. I particularly like the idea that there’s a sliding scale to determine the ‘fuzziness’ of your targeting, from ‘pretty much as specified’ to ‘we’ll decide to show your ads to, thankyou very much’. No clue as to when this will arrive with everyone, but expect it to be reasonably soon.
• LinkedIn Introduces Insights & Research Hub: It’s writing sentences like that that have caused my soul to with and atrophy to the extent that I can actually hear it rattling around in my thoracic cavity as I drag myself around the city (jk! I sold my soul to the devil when I was 16 in exchange for good exam results!). Anyway, if you’re the sort of person who’d like a quick and easy way to get research and data from LinkedIn about how best to reach specific industries, divided by vertical, or different people within an organisation, then this might be useful – be warned, though, that this seems puddle-deep in terms of what you can get out of it, so I wouldn’t expect it to suddenly solve your ‘insights for the C-Suite’ crisis (another absolutely rock-bottom sentence to close with, there).
• Insights and Comedy: The top section of Curios doesn’t, as a rule, link out to 200+page academic dissertations, but I will make an exception for this one. Justin Lines is a researcher and strategist who is also doing research with Edinburgh University into the relationship between the insights that comedians bring to bear when constructing jokes and routines, and those that us advermarketingpr scum use when attempting to persuade a client that our idea’s really clever and makes loads of sense, honest, LOOK I’VE TOLD YOU A FCUKING STORY CAN YOU PLEASE JUST BUY THE CAMPAIGN SO I CAN HIT MY NUMBERS THIS YEAR WE ALL KNOW THAT IT’S ALL BULLSH1T ANYWAY SO CAN WE DROP THE PRETENCE AND CAN I STOP PERFORMING NOW PLEASE? Ahem. Sorry. Anyway, as I alluded to, this is VERY LONG, but also contains some really clear, smart and useful thinking around the whole horrible ‘what is an insight and how do I find one and what are they for?’ stuff which, in the main, I am very bored of, but which equally I am mostly very bad at. Readable, interesting and unexpected (at least what I have read of it so far), this is very much worth your time. Anyone who’s ever seen me present anything, ever, can attest to the fact my style veers somewhat towards ‘angry, frustrated, borderline-aggressive bottom-of-the-bill drunk on an open mic night’, so perhaps that’s influencing my opinion here, but still.
• Create and Strike: The next global climate strike is happening between 20-27 September. A few creative agencies have launched this initiative, encouraging people in advermarketingpr to join the movement on 20 September; this is the accompanying site, explaining what it’s all about, offering information as to where your nearest strike action will be happening, and naming the agencies that have signed-up in support. There are loads of pretty big names on there, and whilst I’m basically of the belief that taking a day off to protest climate change whilst working for an industry whose primary ethos is to get people to consume more is pretty fcuking risible, it’s also better than nothing – so why not send this to your CEO and ask if they’ll join you in standing around doing nitrous all day in the middle of Piccadilly in a fortnight’s time?

By Giulia Andreani

NEXT, HOW ABOUT THIS PLAYLIST OF OBSCURE INDIE ELECTRONICA WHICH IS ALL REALLY RATHER GOOD?

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS PRE-HIATUS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU ALL, AS EVER, FOR READING THIS BASTARD THING, PT.1:

• The Enigma Machine: Absolutely sublime little webtoy which lets you play around with an interactive version of the Enigma machine, specifically one which is laid out so as to show you the insane complexity of the codes it generates and how it goes about generating them based on any given input you choose. Type in whatever phrase you like, and watch as you’re shown the encryption process in beautiful, soothing animation; this does a superb job of demonstrating the basic principles behind this sort of system, and the way in which it works to encode information. So, so lovely.
• Datehackr: ‘The apps’, as I believe people on the dating scene call them, aren’t really working for anyone, are they? Does anyone seem to actually enjoy dating any more, or is it just a chore that people go through inbetween sitting nervously at home biting their fingernails, taking CBD medication and watching infinite repeats of soothing television they recall from Better, Simpler Times? Perhaps one of the reasons why they’re not working any more (other than the aforementioned possibility that treating people as swappable, tradable commodities is perhaps not a fantastic route towards self-actualisation) is because of stuff like this. Listen to the blurb: “If you’re not getting matches on dating apps, it’s because your profile isn’t being displayed. We create multiple dating profiles with your images to increase your match rate instantly. By creating multiple profiles, you will be displayed more often and get many more matches!” First off, lads, THAT IS NOT THE REASON YOU ARE NOT GETTING MATCHES. Second, WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH ALL THESE PEOPLE YOU MATCH WITH? I am not 100% convinced that the likely users of this service are going to have the immediate rapport and sparkling repartee to necessarily forge any sort of personal connection here. The most-depressing thing about this, though, is that part of me has a sneaking suspicion that there’s no tech behind this at all, and in fact all of the ‘automatic swiping’ here is being done in one of those now-legendary engagement farms somewhere in the far East – or, even worse, is just being Fiverr-ed out by some poor kid in the Philippines for 10p an hour, creating yet another layer of invisible servitute sitting just below the taut, shiny skin of the beautiful future we all inhabit.
• Hong Kong Protest Livestreams: A collection of streams from whatever is going on in Hong Kong right now, this page automatically updates with new feeds whenever any of the currently-streaming ones gets shut down by the Government, and is another example of the incredible, odd, oh-so-future nature of the HK protests.
• Leon Sans: This is ‘just’ a font, fine, but it’s one of the most beautiful web experiences I’ve seen all year; the site cycles through a variety of different styles and applications of the Leon Sans font (so named after its designer, Leon Kim), all presented through a series of beautifully-designed, beautifully-animated transitions. Seriously, this is mesmerising and I quite want to commission Kim to make a 3m film of this sort of thing using words and phrases of my choosing that I can have as a looping artwork at home (to note here: I neither have the sort of home where this would look anything other than ridiculous, or anything to display it on other than a crap 20-odd inch non-smart TV, lest you think I’m getting too fat off all the sweet, sweet Curios dollar).
• Zao: I couldn’t not include a link to this week’s momentarily-viral-and-then-REALLY-SCARY Chinese face-fiddling app Zao – so here it is! You all, I’m sure, heard about this this week; huge spike in popularity based on the (genuinely impressive) faceswapping tech, which enables anyone to plant their fizzog into scenes from popular films, animes, etc, with a hugely-impressive degree of seamlessness, subsequently-followed by MASSIVE PRIVACY PANIC when everyone a) remembered it was a Chinese app and we are all convinced that China wants to capture ALL OUR FACES and b) read the Ts&Cs. Did we all forget the Faceapp thing from a few months ago already? We did? Oh, right, ok. Couple of things to note about this, from my point of view; firstly, that the app’s a very clever toy but not much more – the impressive nature of the results is down to good tech, true, but also due to the fact that it only does a relatively limited set of things (you can only insert yourself into stuff that the app has pre-loaded, meaning that a lot of the heavy-lifting is done in advance when it comes to the graphics, computation and stuff); and secondly, that the person who properly wrote up this up first in a Twitter thread (Allan Xia) had much of what they wrote lifted wholesale by many of the publications writing it up, which seemed a bit sh1tty to me. Anyway, put your face in an anime and train the Chinese AI army! Or something like that, maybe.
• Faceswap: Seeing as we’re doing face stuff, Faceswap purports to be ‘the leading free and multipurpose open source Deepfakes platform’. If you’re seriously interested in messing around with this stuff, I’d start here – though be warned, you need some pretty decent processing power at your disposal and a rudimentary (at least) understanding of coding and, probably, a bit of maths. Don’t expect to be churning out anything Will Smith/Matrix-like, basically.
• Commerce Cream: A really horrible name for a website, but the idea’s nice – Commerce Cream collects examples of really pretty sites built on Shopify, along with occasional interviews with the designers who made them. If you’re after a repository of design inspiration – albeit design inspiration with a VERY particular sort of aesthetic, because Shopify really does cleave quite closely to a very particular sort of interiors magazine aesthetic.
• Commute: We all know about the pollution we experience on the average London commute – the clogged breathing, dulled-grey skin and particulate-encumbered hair we find ourselves with upon arriving at the workprison each morning testifies to this. We don’t, perhaps, consider the question of the aural pollution we’re subjected to – helpfully, this site exists to remind you that that’s a problem too. This is a ‘visualisation and sonification of the noise pollution in our daily commutes’, taking data from routes along the Paris Metro and letting you visualise and listen to an aural representation of it through a couple of separate views, wave and spiral. For something which is meant to represent the grinding, noisy horror of traipsing from your sock of an apartment in the unfashionable end of the 19th to your office across town in the 7th, this is surprisingly easy on the eye and ear; I would LOVE to see (hear) this done for London, with different audio styles for each line; I think the Northern would be grindcore and the District some sort of distressing Gilbert & Sullivan-style medley.
• This Erotica Does Not Exist: The rather sparse, sober description on the ‘About’ Page reads, simply, “This website contains samples of text generated from GPT-2, fine-tuned on text from Literotica.” It doesn’t quite do justice to the beautiful, mad filth that’s contained within it, though – this is technically NSFW, but it’s also all-text, so unless someone’s actually bothering to read over your shoulder then you should be fine (also, HELLO OVER-THE-SHOULDER-READER YOU SHOULD GET YOUR OWN SUBSCRIPTION TO CURIOS YOU FREELOADING FCUK!). You can pick from either randomly generated filth, or stuff that’s been prompted with seed text from classic works, like Hobbes’ Leviathan (surprisingly sexy), Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations (so much thirstier than I would have expected), or Agatha Christie (I do NOT remember Poirot doing that). Genuinely funny, though does also quickly lead one to conclude that erotica writing must be a deeply tedious pursuit; how many new euphemisms for genitals can one come up with? And how do you remember where everyone’s got their hands?
• The Bartender’s Library: Oh wow – if you’re into booze (but in a socially-acceptable, ‘interested-in-mixology’ sense rather than my rather more specific ‘has a problem with the Casillero’ sense) and cocktails and stuff, this is a treasure trove. This site collects old texts on cocktails and bartending, digitised and held in the Internet Archive, in one place – you want to find actual, proper old recipes from the 20s and 30s? You want to know how to mix a gimlet in the manner in which Bertie Wooster would definitely have approved? GREAT. Definitely worth keeping in mind next time you’re having a party and want to appear sophisticated for at least 10 minutes before someone breaks out the ket and it all goes downhill and then the crying starts.
• The Future: I don’t EVER feature single memey-type stuff on here, but I’ll make an exception for this – seen on Insta, it’s a wonderful grid of potential options for the future of humanity, based on where on the ‘hyperhuman/unhuman’ and ‘deceleration/acceleration’ axes we end up heading. Click and pick which one YOU like the look of most; personally-speaking, I’m pinning my hopes on ‘Fully-Automated Space Gay Luxury Communism’, but, as they say, TAG YOURSELF!
• Reigns: Reigns, if you’ve not played it, is an excellent mobile game in which the premise is that you’re the ruler of a fictional kingdom and need to stay alive as long as possible through making a series of binary decisions, through which you swipe, Tinder-like, til you’re inevitably skewered by a resentful courtier or eat a bad goat or something. This is a Kickstarter seeking funds to make a physical, card-based version, which I imagine would work wonderfully and which is worth a look if you’re a player of games.
• GPX Jewellery: I’ve featured people on here before who make slightly-abstract map-based jewellery, but I think this is the first place I’ve found that takes data from things like Strava and uses that as the basis for a design. Upload the GPX data from the route-tracking device of your choice and turn it into rather beautiful, geometric-ish pendants. Currently they only ship to the US, but the site indicates that they will consider international shipping if you ask nicely; if you have a friend or partner who’s unaccountably attached to a particular cycle route, say, this might make a lovely and unique present.

By Chelsea Gustafsson

NEXT, HOW ABOUT A PLAYLIST OF ALL THE MUSIC FROM THE TONY HAWKS GAMES?!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO TAKE THIS PRE-HIATUS OPPORTUNITY TO THANK YOU ALL, AS EVER, FOR READING THIS BASTARD THING, PT.2:

• The Institute of Urban Arts: “The IOUA is a social enterprise that was founded in 2019 to document and expose pioneering work from the urban avant-garde through projects, publications, film, and exhibitions.” It doesn’t yet have a physical location, and details are sketchy (you can read a little more elsewhere on Imperica), but it’s worth keeping an eye on and signing up to if you’re interested in the idea of attempting to preserve, support and showcase urban art.
• Email Love: Who doesn’t love email? Well, most people, it seems, seeing as we’re always talking about how we want to KILL IT and replace it with stuff like Trello or Slack or Messenger or Workplace. Well fcuk that noise, I like email; I like receiving them (although, fine, not at work) and I like reading them and I like writing them, so THERE. Anyway, for any others amongst you who feel the same way, Email Love might be a useful site to browse through; it’s a collection of resources and information for people who work in or around email including examples of great templates, good newsletters (the omission of Curios can only be a temporary oversight), interesting email design, a blog… It’s a one-person labour-of-(email)-love, and its creator, Rob Hope, plans to add more tutorial and how-to content over time; if you’re a newslettermong like me, it’s an interest place to have a dig around.
• Himalaya: Have we solved the podcast discovery conundrum yet? I know they’re now googleable, but that doesn’t necessarily help with the ‘I like podcasts like x, where can I find more?’ issue which I presume plagues those of you who listen to the bastard things. Himalaya attempts to solve this issue by sorting them across 29 categories, each with their own subcategories for you to browse. There’s limited information beyond the title of each show, which is potentially a pain, and someone really ought to come up with a specific category for ‘people talking far too self-indulgently about stuff that not even their mates would bother listening to for 45 minutes and dear fcuking christ did you have to record this on your fcuking headphone mic?’, but I can imagine this being at least a bit useful to a few of you.
• Free To Use Sounds: Well this is quite something. The ‘free’ bit here doesn’t feel entirely accurate – the site attempts to get you to part with cash suspicously-regularly for something that touts itself as free, but given that it appears to be entirely created and maintained by a (very enthusiastic) German bloke named Marcus and his partner Libby you can’t really begrudge them wanting to make a few quid. They’re seemingly travelling the world, recording sounds and adding them to their burgeoning online library of ambient noises and FX; you want Vietnames pigs? You got it! You want nearly 100 different toilet flush sounds? LUCKY YOU! Charmingly, lots of the sound libraries have little blogs attached talking about how they recorded the audio, what equipment they used, and the occasional whimsical anecdote; leaving aside the slightly-aggressively-grifty UX, this is kind-of charming.
• Medieval Lions: I have, for many years, had something of a thing about poorly-drawn or poorly-sculpted animals in classical art – this Twitter thread basically had me in tears for a good few minutes when I found it earlier this week. LOOK AT THEIR FACES!
• The Phonetic Reverser: Or, more prosaically, a website that lets you type in anything you want in English and which will in return spit out a phonetic pronunciation guide so you can say the phrase backwards, phonetically. Try it out, it will make marginally more sense once you’ve seen how it works; now, keep it loaded on your screen and refuse to speak to the person across the computer from you unless it’s via the medium of backwardstalk. They will, I guarantee, find it HILARIOUS. This is also useful in case you want to do one of those ‘record it backwards so that when you play it in reverse it looks like it’s going forward’ music videos and need to learn what shapes to make as you lipsync, which I am sure is how at least three of you were planning to spend your weekends.
• Find Lectures: I don’t know about you, but every September I’m filled with a very real sense of regret that I’m not embarking on an exciting new journey of academic discovery and will instead continue to sit slumped in front of a computer, willing the minutes to pass so I can go home and drink myself into a state of calmness whereby I can finally sleep. If YOU feel a bit like that too, why don’t you spend this month IMPROVING YOURSELF by watching one or more of this incredible collection on English-language lectures from around the world? “FindLectures.com allows you to discover interesting topics that you might not think to look for, including collections of approachable academic lectures, conference talks, interviews, documentaries, and historically significant speeches. Generally, transcript talks and the speaker’s bio are searchable, so that you can find presenters who have a unique angle on their content. Video and audio content is scored for a variety of quality measures, including length, audio quality, presentation style, speaker authority, and more.” HUGE collection of stuff, with a bias towards North America but loads of stuff from the UK too, this is a combination of video and audio and has content on almost every topic you can imagine if you feel like indulging your back to school memories for a while.
• Online Courses: I think I featured this a few years ago, but it’s updated for 2019 – this is Open Culture’s motherlode list of open, free online courses which are open for registration in September – there are nearly 4000 of the things, from academic institutions across the world. Want to enroll in a Harvard course on Shakespeare’s life and work? Fancy exploring the History of Rock & Roll through the University of Florida? GREAT! I know I always say how everything is awful and it’s all the web’s fault, but things like this make me momentarily think that perhaps it’s not all terrible (even though deep down I know it mostly is).
• Visualising Bon Iver: A beautiful promo site for Bon Iver’s latest, made in conjunction with Spotify, which pulls data on the number of streams the album’s received and lets you scan back through how that’s changed since early-August; all the while, the site plays tracks from the record, and a mesmerising series of ASCII-type animations, all made of the character ‘i’ (because the album’s called ‘i, i’, DO YOU SEE?). Very nicely done.
• Touchy-Feely Tech: Have you ever thought “I quite like DIY and tinkering with things, and I also quite like sex toys; why don’t I combine those two passions into a single hobby?!”? No? Shame, because if you had then this site would basically be perfect for you. “Touchy-Feely Tech is a creative technology studio working at the intersection of electronic hardware, art and education”, and they are currently working on developing their first project, a build-it-yourself vibe kit designed to teach the rudiments of making, electronics, programming and sex positivity, all-in-one! The idea is that eventually it will develop into workshops and talks and a movement of sex-makers, but at the moment it’s just a website and pre-order list; still, this sounds like a great project; certainly as good a way as any to get a horny teen to get busy with a soldering iron.
• Drilldo: Of course, you might not want to bother with all the faff of crafting your own sex toy; you might, instead, just want to jam a dildo onto the end of a power tool and be done with it. BUT DON’T DO THAT IT IS ALMOST CERTAINLY VERY DANGEROUS! Instead, get Drilldo – the safe attachment that lets you attach your rubber dong to the end of an actual, proper Black & Decker. I am honestly incapable of imagining what this might be like as an experience – and god knows, whether I like it or not, my brain has been trying to make me ever since I found this link – but if anyone wants to do a product review I am ALL EARS (I am not all ears, please never, ever contact me with this information). This is a BIT NSFW, but it’s worth the risk to see the frankly terrifying product range on display (there’s no nudity, but an awful lot of massive latex wang).
• 15 Wishes: Last up this week, and VERY different from the last link, is a lovely, gentle little block-breaking game (think Breakout, for the older people among you), all about the feeling of missing someone. Gorgeous piano soundtrack and some genuinely heartstring-tugging copy means you might shed a smol tear as you play.

By Tony Toscani

FINALLY THIS WEEK, LET’S CLOSE THE MIXES WITH TYCHO’S SUNRISE SET AT THIS YEAR’S BURNING MAN!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• GifMK7: Satisfyingly-chunky and oddly-squeezable 3d animated CG gifs. Occasionally featuring statuary, for no discernible reason.
• Stationery Compositions: Satisfyingly-composed images consisting of artfully-arranged stationery, and the second week in a row I get to call out design & office supplies emporium Present & Correct for being great (and as an aside, if you want an example of an excellent retail Twitter feed, this is it – SO good, perfectly on-brand, fulfils a great function (interest/design utility), consistent and well-curated…honestly, you can learn a lot from it if you’re the sort of poor bastard who has to do things like write Twitter ‘strategies’ for a living).
• Earthglance: Aerial shots of the earth. Actually I think I nicked this from Present & Correct too. FFS.
• Lvl374: An odd-but-wonderful Tumblr, collection a series of short animations, all evidently set in the same imagined world, each looking as though they are taken from the cut-scenes of a long-forgotten 90s Japanese shooter. The aesthetic is PERFECT, though I would love to know if there’s some sort of hidden narrative behind it all. Regardless, beautiful work.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Richard Parry: Richard Parry’s feed (at least of late) presents a series of beautiful images showing exploded electronics – you know, those views of stuff where it’s all pulled apart so you can see all the internal components? YES YOU DO FFS CLICK THE LINK – he sells prints too, should you like the designs.
• Donald Topp: A very Supreme-y vibe to these drawings by Donald Topp, where pop culture figures meet tattoo culture. Not violently original, fine, but really nicely done.
• Dan Kitchener: The Insta feed of street artist Dan Kitchener, whose work is in a variety of places around London and which was drawn to my attention by Josh (THANKS JOSH) because there’s a piece opposite his office. The ‘city-by-night’ effect on a lot of this stuff is magnificent.
• Precious Mutator: “Canadian upcycling art”, reads the description. YOU HAVE NO IDEA. There are some very creepy things on here (NB – I see that since I found this it’s been picked up by MailOnline – I know I never talk about where I get stuff from, but it WASN’T THERE).

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Angus The Troll: Apologies for linking to a Twitter thread – but, well, you can unroll it if you need to – but this is EXCELLENT; Marc Owen Jones tells the story of befriending a Twitter troll called Angus…and then watching as Angus cycled through a variety of different identities and political positions over the course of their relationship, seemingly unaware of the fact that Jones could see behind the curtain. This is, aside from being very funny in parts, a really interesting look at the practical realities of how these sorts of sockpuppet/bot accounts work.
• The Cost of Next Day Delivery: This is an excellent-if-very-long piece, looking at exactly how Amazon is meeting its next-day-delivery commitments in the US, and the costs that these commitments are exerting on the workforce undertaking said deliveries. What’s especially interesting about this is the stuff about how Amazon’s effectively established an entirely new delivery industry around itself, created from the bottom up and designed specifically and explicitly both to fulfil its next-day promise and to circumnavigate the sort of legislation that would have made that fulfilment utterly impossible to do. It’s quite incredible – honestly, the detail about the smaller trucks being used as it brought them below some health-and-safety thresholds is, if you leave the ethics aside, sort-of brilliant – and yet another example of how Amazon is literally reshaping the world around it to attain and cement market position.
• Musk & Solar City: Solar City is the forgotten bit of the Tesla empire – the solar panels business which was meant to revolutionise energy collection and storage through its invention of solar energy collecting roof tiles and similarly scifi creations. Except it doesn’t seem to be quite working out like that. This is a bit businesswonky, fine, and it helps if you’ve a vague interest in the ‘is Tesla a fcuked company or not?’ question, but even if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s enough in here about Musk and his…idiosyncratic approach to fiduciary duty and, you know, truth to make it worth a read.
• Call The Robot ‘It’: On the importance of creating emotional distance between children and the current generation of ‘robots’ – voice assistants or programmable toys or whatever. I hadn’t heard of Generation Alpha as a concept before reading this – apparently that’s the first generation to grown up with robots and voice assistants and the like as a standard part of their surroundings – but the article suggests that maintaining a degree of ‘us’ and ‘them’ distance between the machine and the kid is important for ensuring a healthy understanding of the ‘programmer’ vs ‘programmed’ nature of the human/machine dynamic. At least until that dynamic flips, obvs.
• Killer Robots: A really quite unsettling look at the current state of robot warfare and autonomous systems of mass death delivery – smart missiles, bombs, tanks, drones, all of which can go, identify a target it, reduce it to pate and come home with nary a human command. Except that’s not the case yet, and the article’s at pains to point out that the idea of giving full autonomy to robot killing machines isn’t anyone’s idea of sensible right now. I don’t know about you, but the ‘right now’ there isn’t filling me with loads of confidence. This is yet another piece about scary future tech in which I kept to see, I don’t know, a military or technological ethicist crop up as being involved in the development of all this stuff but, well, NOPE!
• The Instagram Papers: I love stuff like this – platforms being bent into the shape the users want, regardless of their intended use. This is a great and oddly-heartening piece about how growing numbers of young people are setting up their own newsfeeds on Instagram, curating and packaging the day’s events for their peers in a manner that works for them. Details like this are great: “Within Instagram, there are different ways of reaching audiences and starting conversations. Kanda engages followers via polls on Instagram stories and records videos, like the one she recently posted explaining the scandal surrounding financier and accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “People also tend to reply back to stories with questions or actually wanting to start an open discussion,” she says. “I’ve gotten some really thoughtful insights from people replying to stories.” I know the idea of an ‘insta newspaper’ isn’t new, but let’s forget about that woman from the Standard’s preposterous vanity project and look at the genuinely interesting stuff instead.
• Five Millennials Changing The World: I know that making fun of millennials is a) not funny; and b) a joke from about 5 years ago, but this piece made me laugh a LOT. Profiling the 5 millennials around the world who really can be said to be making a difference, this is glorious (for about 5 minutes, and then maybe just a bit sadmaking).
• The Post-Truth World of Influencer Romances: I’m including this in part because it’s interesting to look at the odd world of manufactured romances in general – nothing has changed since Hollywood in the 20s, honestly – but also because it’s yet another footnote for my ‘twenty years of kayfabe’ theory that I am going to keep on wanging on about til Alex gets round to writing that piece.
• Using AI to Write a Novel: In which the author, Sigal Samuel, explores how working with the GPT-2 AI is helping him write his next novel, and how by using a combination of his own work as a prompt, what that causes the AI to generate, and his own edits of that eventual output, he can find himself creating more creative, vivid and imaginative scenes where he might previously have struggled. This is truly fascinating stuff – less so, to my mind, in terms of the output, but more in terms of this as an emergent discipline; I’ve written here before, loads, about the idea of human/machine ‘centaurs’ being the likely optimal application of AI til it gets REALLY good, and it’s something I know Shardcore is interested in exploring with his art. The really, really interesting things with AI at the moment happen when you start to see how it can work alongside human thinking as the mental / creative equivalent of the motor on an electric bike.
• Hipster Cereals: On the growing trend for super-healthy, subscription-service, keto-diet-suitable breakfast cereals in the US. This sounds ridiculous – especially that people might pay something like £2 a bowl for stuff that tastes like Cap’n Crunch but which is less likely to give you type-2 diabetes – but, well, here we are. This feels like the sort of thing there might be a market for in the UK (and tbh I reckon if you could make Crunchy Nut Cornflakes with extra protein and less sugar you could probably retire within 12 months).
• The Counterfeit Airpod Market: Ostensibly a sort-of review of a bunch of ripoff Apple airpods ordered off the internet, this is a far more interesting article which asks some interesting questions about the knock-on effects on the planet of wildly-successful consumer products, particularly something as famously environmentally-problematic as the Airpod. “These fake AirPods will probably work for a couple of months with regular use. Then, they’ll probably start holding less of a charge, and eventually stop working entirely. Just like regular AirPods, they’ll make pretty, symmetric fossils. Fake AirPods will never biodegrade, and they’ll never decompose. These knock-off AirPods are the unavoidable outcome of Apple making culturally important products that are out of most people’s price range. The same capitalist forces that make AirPods possible also make fake AirPods possible.” Feel good?
• How Waze has Ruined LA: Another week, another ‘hey, look what happens when you build ‘disruptive’ technology but don’t spend enough time thinking about what the consequences of ‘disruption’ might in fact be!’-type article, this time looking at how Waze, the driving / shortcuts app, has basically turned LA into an (even more) undrivable sh1thole. This is an object-lesson in how less-than-thoughtful product development and design, when layered onto the real world, can have pretty remarkable and not exactly unpredictable consequences. You know that whole ‘we live inside a simulation’ idea that gets a new wave of attention every now and again? Well maybe we’re inside the simulation that a bunch of super-intelligent beings are using to test out all their exciting, disruptive new ideas before deploying them in real life. Would explain quite a lot tbh.
• Mapping the Artists of the Whitney: A lovely interactive project, mapping where the artists featured in every single Whitney Biennale since 1932. Mainly of interest to art fans, but it offers a really interesting journey through trends in North American contemporary art.
• The Art Gallery in Fallout76: If you ‘do’ videogames, you may know that the latest game in the post-apocalyptic Fallout series was less-than well-received. Still, it hasn’t stopped players doing some fun things in the gameworld, and this account of one player’s creation of an in-game art gallery, in which people can have their own area in which to create an exhibit from the games objects and props, based on whatever themes they choose, is a wonderful example of users stretching systems to the limit of their intended use. Also, the ‘exhibits’ are occasionally GREAT.
• Weezer’s Blue Album: God I loved Weezer’s Blue Album. It, along with Ash’s first EP (when they were still literally 15 and living in Ireland and before they got famous with Kung Fu), marked me down as having DANGEROUSLY ALTERNATIVE tastes amongst my classmates (Swindon, man, Swindon), and meant I spent an awful lot of time listening to it on a Walkman and dreaming of escaping to a place where SOMEONE would UNDERSTAND me (so, so emo). Anyway, this is a great piece looking at the band’s genesis and painting a not-hugely-flattering picture of any of the people involved, but in a believable rather than monstrous way (though Cuomo does sound like a bit of a prick).
• The History of the Fleshlight: You all know what a Fleshlight is, don’t you? Yes? Good, well we can continue then. VICE looks back at the device’s history – its genesis as an aid for a man whose wife had been told she couldn’t safely have sex during her pregnancy and so who decided to design himself a solution (we all have a practical friend, don’t we?), its subsequent status as a piece of internet legend and a pop-culture phenomenon (noone knows anyone who owns one, everyone knows what one is), and, latterly, its status as something of a precursor to the world of more gender-fluid and less anatomically-focused sextoys we’re moving towards. Totally SWF, though, well, there are some pictures of the devices in question. Still, could be anything, right?
• Courtney Love at 55: An article celebrating the Hole singer at 55, and looking back at her (the piece contends) somewhat overlooked status in the pantheon of rock. Reading this, it’s startling to remember quite how much outright hatred and misogyny Love has faced throughout her career; I remember reading music magazines in the mid-90s which even then effectively painted her as a serial groupie and hanger-on rather than an artist and performer in her own right. That said, Love’s never made any secret of her desire for fame and status, which comes through loud and clear here – what also comes through, though, is the extent to which she was a pioneer of strong female voices in modern rock music. Really interesting, and made me want to listen to Live Through This for the first time in YEARS.
• Eton and Power: I know Sam Leith, the author of this piece, a little bit – he’s lovely, and joins the collection of people I know who went to Eton who I want to hate but can’t. Sam looks back at the very peculiar nature of the Eton experience for this article, and tries to examine what it is about it that produces people with such an odd relationship to power; this is fascinating, and quite horrible at the same time.
• The Book of Prince: Imagine being asked to write Prince’s book with him. JUST IMAGINE. No, don’t imagine, read this piece instead. This is a lovely, intimate piece of writing – Dan Piepenbring is obviously a huge fan, and it comes across in every sentence; as does the fact that Prince was evidently a very intelligent, very interesting, very singular man who would have been an absolute intimidating terror to work with – go on, read this and then try and imagine bringing notes to Prince: “Yes, er, I mean, I’m just not sure that that metaphor wor…”. No, it’s too awful to contemplate. This is a SUPERB essay.
• Two Days in the Spa: Do we have 24h Korean spas in London? It feels like a very US thing, somehow. Anyway, in this article the author attempts to spend two days and nights consecutively in LA’s Wi Spa, in which you can pamper yourself, sweat, eat, sleep and just generally hang out. Will our hero attain a state of Nirvana? Will he transcend? Will he get found and kicked out before the 48h time has been reached? This is genuinely funny, a touch like a slightly-less-neurotic early-period David Sedaris, and you will feel ever-so-slightly-cleansed after reading it.
• Magic Eraser Juice: Beautifully-written account of what it’s like going round saving opioid addicts from overdose in an unnamed part of America. Really, really superb prose, but about as uplifting as you’d expect.
• Lemons In Winter: Finally this week in the longreads, Mika Taylor writes about her divorce and its aftermath, and going to visit some seals. Gorgeous and sad: “It’s January and I am visiting California’s Central Coast because my husband is leaving me. Has left me. I have never been this sad before. I am forty years old and my marriage is, was, the center of my life. My husband and I have been together almost twelve years, married eight, and separated less than six months. I am not over it. I am not OK. And I do not really see a path through, though therapists and friends assure me that time will help. I know this type of loss is common enough, but I am in no way prepared. At least in California there will be sun, I’d thought. But right now, it’s raining.”

By Sandro Giordano

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. First up, this is a lovely, spare and sad song, about the end of a relationship or friendship and that feeling of not knowing quite what you’ve done wrong. It’s called ‘What Have I Done?’, it’s by Zoe Boekbinder and it’s for each and every one of you who’ve ever considered unsubscribing:

2. I really, really like this, and it reminds me very strongly of something from around 2009/10, but I am fcuked if I know what. Anyway, it’s by Melt Yourself Down and it’s called ‘Boot and Spleen’, and it’s sort of shouty, spiky, art-rocky, with horns!   

3.  

4. This is called ‘Bones’, it’s by Free Love, and it’s got a wonderful buildup and sort ofg gently old school rave-ish sensibility which I very much enjo

6. Next, a lovely, slight, skeletal, skittery, insectile piece piece of electronice by Floating Points, called ‘Last Boom’

8. I love the vocal on this so, so much (anyone else find it a bit Bjorkish in parts?). It’s called ‘Trying’ and it’s by Aunty Social:

10. Last up, this is ‘Thrasher’ by Sassy009 and it’s EXCELLENT, not least the way it sort-of switches halfwaythrough – AND THAT’S IT I AM ON HOLIDAY OH MY DAYS A BREAK AT LAST BYE BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND DON’T FORGET ABOUT ME I WILL BE BACK THANKS FOR READING EVEN IF IT’S ONLY EVERY NOW AND AGAIN EVERY LITTLE HELPS AND I APPRECIATE EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE SEE YOU IN THREE WEEKS BYE BYE BYE!!!!

Amidst all the triumphalism in the Tory press this morning, did anyone happen to notice Macron’s body language during their joint presser yesterday? There was a point when our glorious leader was lying through his teeth about the meaning of Merkel’s ’30 days’ line and Manu’s index finger was spasming so hard against the lectern that it looked like his digit was ineffectually cosplaying Woody Woodpecker. 

I was doing quite a lot of professional spasming this week too, not least because of the realisation that next Thursday I have to deliver a two-hour presentation to 100-odd people at one of the agencies I work at. I am therefore obviously going to spend the majority of the weekend catatonic with poisons so as to engender the MAXIMUM degree of slightly wonky fear which will hopefully propel me over the finish line as I start writing the bloody thing on Tuesday – WISH ME LUCK, WEBMONGS!

Anyway, enough talk of WORK – it’s a three-day weekend! It’s carnival! It’s going to be nice weather! DON’T THINK ABOUT THE BURNING RAINFORESTS AND BOLSONARO AND TRUMP AND JOHNSON AND FARAGE AND ORBAN AND BEZOS AND ZUCKERBERG AND DORSEY OR ANY OF THE OTHER BAD THINGS! Instead, take a deep breath, bend over and place your head into the hole I’ve helpfully dug for you, and then enjoy the gentle, tickling sensation as I fill it up around your ears with infosand – see, it’s better this way. It’s safe inside the web (it’s not safe). I am Matt, today is Friday, this, as ever, is Web Curios, and YOU deserve every inch of it. 

By Daehyuk Im

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THE LATEST AND GREATEST SUPERMIX BY INTERNET ODDITY SADEAGLE WHICH IS, AS EVER, TRULY SUPERB!

THE SECTION WHICH IS ONCE AGAIN SADLY SCEPTICAL ABOUT THE MASSIVE ADVERTISING COMPANIES’ CLAIMS THAT THEY’RE GOING TO MAKE THE AD TRACKING LESS CREEPY AND INTRUSIVE:

• Off-Facebook Activity: It is, it’s fair to say, becoming quite hard to keep up with the various initiatives being announced by Facebook et al to reassure us that no, honestly, we’re the ones in control of our data and who can advertise at us – you’d obviously have to be a terrible cynic and possibly a communist of some sort to believe that this was in any way an intentional side effect of the massively obfuscatory language continually used to talk about all this, and the continued lack of any sort of easily-accessible/digestible guide to what all these different tweaks are and how they interrelate to each other. This latest news is about how Facebook is slowly beginning to roll out its long-promised ‘clear history’ function, promised by Zuckerberg over a year ago – users in Ireland, South Korea and Spain will now be able to get more detailed information about the information other apps and websites have sent Facebook about them, de-link that information from their profile, and prevent this sort of data-sharing happening in future. Note, by the way, that the word ‘delete’ is at no point mentioned; the data is in fact not deleted, it continues to sit on Facebook’s server farms, which is slightly different to what was promised. Note also this news from the other week, about how Facebook has developed systems which will allow ad targeting of users without the use of their personal data and instead based on learned personas, etc, which does rather suggest that the creepy ad stuff isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
• Twitter Bans Ads From State-Controlled Media: A response to the past few weeks’ apparent propagandist ad buys by Chinese media, in which promoted Tweets spread across Twitter decrying Hong Kong protestors’ violent ways in a in-no-way-state-orchestrated campaign. It feels like a superficially Good Thing, though there are some obvious grey areas – Twitter’s definition of ‘state controlled media’ is “news media entities that are either financially or editorially controlled by the state”, which leaves a few interesting questions about organisations such as RAI in Italy, where channel controllers and senior editorial staff are political appointees and very much get their direction from whichever hopeless criminal is in charge that week.
• YouTube Killing Messages: You used to be able to use YouTube as a messaging app – WHO KNEW? Anyway, you can’t any more. This feels very much like an opportunity to build some sort of a plugin replacing this functionality, though when I say ‘opportunity’ I can’t in fact imagine what benefit you’d get from doing it other than a warm sense of slightly-futile satisfaction.
• Some Google Chrome Privacy Thing: On the one hand, even by my low standards for this section that is a terrible, lazy ‘headline’. On the other, I challenge you to work out exactly what this announcement is saying – “we are announcing a new initiative to develop a set of open standards to fundamentally enhance privacy on the web. We’re calling this a Privacy Sandbox.” Ok, so they’re announcing an initiative! About privacy on the web! Except, marvellously, the blog makes references to the fact that ‘today’ they will release more details about what this might entail…but doesn’t reveal them! You have to click through to another blog to learn that…well, actually nothing at all, just that Google’s thinking about some stuff around limiting fingerprinting (that is, the ability for developers to match users across websites and therefore track their behaviour and target them with specificity). I wonder why it is that we find it so hard to trust these companies?
• Livestreaming Comes to Reddit: Or at least they’re testing it, with users across the world having the chance this week to launch livestreams which can be voted up and down in classic Reddit fashion; the trial ran from Monday and closes today, and there’s no guarantee that it will be rolled out permanently, but, well, if LinkedIn can do livestreaming, why not Reddit? The announcement is VERY CLEAR about the ‘no bongo’ rule, but, well, I can’t imagine it’ll be too hard to find.
• Shelter on TikTok: The first UK charity I’ve seen to start using the platform; it’ll be interesting to see whether or not this sticks, and whether they find the effort involved in making TikToks (is that what we have to call them? Dear God) is worth it; honestly, decent vertical video is SO HARD imho.
• The Bacardi Beat Machine: An absolute classic of the ‘the agency will have creamed themselves over this but I would bet actual cashmoney that noone who doesn’t work in advermarketingpr will ever see this, ever’ genre, this. Bacardi have made a MIXING DESK out of YouTube – except it’s not a mixing desk, it’s a single YT video which is designed so that, by skipping back and forth through the track using the number keys on your laptop, you can ‘mix’ ‘songs’. It’s admittedly a clever use of inbuilt functionality, but, well the track sounds crap, the ‘mixing’ is shonky as you like, and you can’t record or export your output, meaning there’s limited shareability. Still, doubtless this’ll be on an awful lot of self-satisfied awards lists, so THAT’S WHAT MATTERS!
• 60 Years of the Clios: 60 years of the advertising awards that aren’t Lions! This is a rather nice website if you’re in the market for some adland nostalgia; the site presents a painting in which are hidden (not really hidden’ a bunch of classic US/UK ads from THE PAST; click on the figures, read a little bit of blurb, watch the clip. It feels like this all skews a bit recent, but it’s nice to see the SMASH robots lurking about in there (the fcuking Budweiser knight can fcuk off, though).
• Deepfakes on Demand: You want a deepfake making for your ad, your SOCIAL CONTENT or just to fcuk with someone? FRIEND OF WEB CURIOS SHARDCORE IS NOW AT YOUR SERVICE. He’s launched a commercial service, offering quotes and production on whatever deepfake you want making (except bongo. He’s not doing bongo). There’s a good 6-12m window when you can get quite a lot of attention doing this stuff as a brand, I reckon, so if you have an idea drop him a line.

By Gherdai Hassell

NEXT, ENJOY THIS 8-BIT REWORKING OF MILES DAVIS’ ‘A KIND OF BLUE’ BY FRIEND OF CURIOS ANDY BAIO!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE EXCELLENT ANNUAL FOOTAGE OF UNIFORMED POLICEMEN DAGGERING, PT.1:

• Streaming Consciousness: I wanted to include this last week, but the site was temporarily banjaxed (and WHY DO I THINK YOU CARE?! This sort of pointless digression is why Curios is so appallingly lo-Christ, I’m doing it again, sorry); it’s working again now, though, so ENJOY! This is a lovely project (thanks Kev for sending it to me), stemming from 47 young people sharing their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, dreams, etc, in an anonymous private Slack group; those thoughts (etc etc) are now collated on this website, grouped by theme, in a sort of semi-infinite mess of emotion; there’s something very personal about the way in which these are presented, and it feels not unlike being inside a collective teenage consciousness which I guess is sort of the point. The gently undulating colourcycle in the background is a touch distracting, fine, but in general this is a beautiful, meditative piece of webart which is oddly reminiscent of perennial Web Curios favourite The Listening Post.
• Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: This is a throwback – I remember the old version of this site from a decade or so ago, and now here it is all de-flashed and HTML-happy. Ishkur’s is a sort of taxonomic guide to electronic dance musical genres, offering a navigable encyclopedia of styles which shows how they interrelate with each other. You can hear short clips of each genre to help make sense of the slightly overwhelming range of stuff in here, and read (often funny) descriptions of each – fair play to Ishkur for bothering to write about the minute differences in style between fidget house and microhouse because, really, HOW DO YOU TELL? Dance music enthusiasts will get lost in this for days, but for the more casual webmong it’s still a fun way to pass 10 minutes; see what the most terrifying style you can find is (clue: it is ALWAYS Gabba)!
• Colournames: Yes I’ve anglicised the spelling, WHAT OF IT? Anyway, this is ACE and the sort of thing that if you’re in the right mood could potentially take over your afternoon rather. This is a madly-optimistic project to create “an open, free and consistent source of color names”; go to the site, click ‘random’ and it will spit out an-as-yet-unnamed shade for you to ascribe an identity to. You’ll be unsurprised to learn that there are restrictions on the words you can use, but naming a particularly virulent shade of yellow ‘fcuk mustard’ wouldn’t be particularly big or clever anyway; this feels like the sort of thing that an entire design team could happily while away the rest of the day messing around with.
• Headbanger: I can’t say I particularly miss the brief trend from a few years back of websites that were controlled by motion-tracking your movements via webcam; still, this is a nice throwback and surprisingly fun (if you don’t mind looking a bit silly). This is a site to accompany a new album by NY metal band Dracaris, whose latest record apparently “is connected thematically by a series of schizophrenic episodes. A tangled web of thoughts, ideas, hallucinations, all from a distorted mind” (course it is lads), and which is obviously best represented through a game of Breakout which you control by moving your head from side-to-side, opening your mouth and headbanging. Try it, it’s oddly fun and there are 13 separate levels to play through – or, even better, get the person opposite you to play it and then try and throw stuff into their gob while they’re open-mouthed and nodding.
• Liminal Earth: SO SO GOOD! This is an evolution of a project I featured on here last year called Liminal Seattle, which I described thusly: “Liminal Seattle is a crowdsourced map, collecting the supernatural stories of the city’s residents mapped to where they took place. If you want to browse around people’s sightings and reports of the supernatural, and enjoy obviously totally sane entries such as “There’s a man in a house who’s trapped in the 3rd dimension. he died in the home and now he sits on the porch. he protects and cares for the folx who live there now, but we think he wants to officially cross over.” (of course there is mate) then this is an EXCELLENT browse.” Except now it’s been expanded to cover THE WHOLE WORLD – anyone can submit the strange stuff they see or experience, tagged to a specific location, so we can get an overall picture of where all the weird is worldwide. Sadly there are currently only two entries for the UK at present; one for a ‘train time slip’, where an otherwise-ordinary regional train in the midlands stopped at the same station twice(!), and another in Wales which I need to reproduce in full: “A door in a tree, didn’t try and open it or knock, the resident probably gets enough humans bothering them. It could also be a portal.” Reader, I scoffed, but then I noticed that there was a photo and OH MY GOD. Honestly, this site is just superb and I can’t encourage you to explore it enough.
• The Custom Movement: I imagine at least a few of you will be into trainers (sneakers? Kicks? Creps? Honestly, no idea), in which case this site may well be something of a goldmine (or route into rapid bankruptcy). The Custom Movement sells custom trainers, redesigned and ‘remixed’ by various artists and designers; some of these are wonderful, some are hideous, and all are guaranteed to make people think ‘man, that person really wants people to look at their shoes’. Wallflowers and the fashion-backward need not apply, but if you’re the sort of person who goes to Selfridges and buys those trainers with the massive velour wings attached to them (you know the ones I mean) then this could be your heaven.
• The Symphony Project: Do we all know what the Blockchain is now? Yes? No? Does it matter? For the purposes of this website, not at all! All you need to know that the Blockchain here is presented as an excitingly-navigable 3d landscape, which lets you not only visualise but also hear the Blockchain in your browser. The developers “used a technique called additive synthesis to generate sound on the fly, and utilized the parallel nature of graphics cards to synthesize a sound for each of the thousands of transactions that can make up a block. The unique sound signature that plays when you visit a block consists of each transaction producing eight sine waves (a fundamental pitch and seven harmonics). The fundamental pitch is determined by the transaction value, and the amount of randomness added to the harmonics partials is controlled by the fee-to-value ratio of the transaction…The volume of the harmonic partials, meanwhile, is determined by the spent-to-unspent output ratio. This creates a range of sound that communicates the health of the block: a virtual heartbeat that codifies the volume of transactions and the number of transactions unspent.” Look, I’ll be honest, I don’t understand much of what I just typed, but as a fancy bit of dataviz and exploration it’s rather wonderful. Sounds awful, though.
• Pago: This is a really interesting piece of design, collaboratively conceived of by Google and Panasonic; Pago is a sort-of combined torch and Google-machine and machine-vision device (yes, I know, but trust me, this is harder than you’d expect), designed to help kids access the power of the web for learning purposes without being tethered to a screen. The appealingly chunky Pago looks like a sort of trumpet; the idea is that kids can point it at whatever they are interested in, press a button, and the device will recognise the object, tell the kid what it is, allow them to learn more about it, and store it in the device’s memory for later transfer to other devices for online scrapbooking, etc. It’s only a proof-of-concept, I think, but it’s a really nice combination of digital and physical.
• Weather: Electronic musician Tycho’s got previous for making interesting little webtoys to accompany their releases; their latest, Weather, is no exception, and the accompanying site is a delight. The gimmick is very simple – allow the site access to your location and it will pull weather data from…some data source; it’ll then use that to craft a 25-song playlist for you, drawn from Tycho’s back catalogue but also including a host of other artists too. Track selection will be determined by factors such as temperature, wind speed, etc, and having tried it a couple of times there appear to be enough tracks linked to it to make it reasonably reusable. Special mention to the site design, which is really very nice indeed – super-simple and all the better for it.
• Moodfeed: A little Buzzfeed archive experiment, where you select what mood you’re in from a list of 6 options (hungry, joyful, nostalgic, bored, curious and stressed, since you ask) and the site will spit out a selection of supposedly emotion-appropriate articles from the Buzzfeed back catalogue. It’s an interesting way of getting people to engage with historical material, though I’m not sure exactly how much of Buzzfeed’s intensely zeitgeisty stuff is really worth going back through at a distance of 12+months. I just tried telling it I was stressed (I am not – I am a Buddha floating on a lilypad, as per) and it suggested I look at a post entitled ‘55 Memes About Anxiety That Will Make You Say ‘Me’!’ which I’m not sure would have the intended de-stressing effect tbqhwy.
• The San Francisco Disco Preservation Society: Like Disco? Well OH MY DAYS is this the motherlode you have been searching for! “The mission of the San Francisco Disco Preservation Society is to collect, restore, digitize, preserve, and present historic audio and video recordings pertaining to DJ and nightclub history in San Francisco and internationally, as well as educate, inform, and entertain the public and future generations through its archives, public events, screenings, and online access to its resources.” There are classic disco mixtapes, and then selections from the 80s, 90s and 00s; honestly, the Summer 1975 one in particular is a DELIGHT.
• Book Covers: I missed this last month – shame on me – but this is a typically nicely-done piece of infowrangling by The Pudding, looking at the visual similarity between book covers; not a topic you’d ordinarily think worthy of poring over, but this visualisation, created by machine learning, shows in beautiful fashion the less-than-original choices made by publishers. Once you start exploring, it’s quite addictive to see exactly how often books quite shamelessly cleave to genre tropes when it comes to covers – and quite how bad so much of US book design is.
• Input Delay: You know that incredibly annoying keyboard lag that you occasionally get when your computer’s struggling under the weight of 100 open tabs (or is that just me?)? This site lets you simulate that exact experience to differing degrees of severity, which is perfect if you wanted to send yourself spiralling into a throb-veined funk just for the hell of it.
• Critics Company: These kids got a load of media attention this week, and rightly so – Critics Company is a collective of young filmmakers working out of Nigeria, who are making some madly inventive scifi/horror-type shorts on their phone; obviously this isn’t quite Hollywood, but the passion they have for it is infectious and I hope that their recent semi-fame gets them access to some better kit.
• Stoic: I think I’ve spoken on here before about the weird adoption of the stoics as the alt-right-adjacent’s philosophers of choice – stoicism is trendy in 2019, or at least the particular variant of it currently being espoused by Jordan Petersen and other such horrorshows of the modern age. Anyway, that probably explains in part the name choice for this new app, a MINDFUL JOURNALING EXPERIENCE (dear God save me), which each day will ask you how you’re feeling and track your moods and ask you to record your musings and serve you content to address your emotional deficiencies and OH GOD CAN WE STOP EXAMINING OURSELVES FOR ONE FCUKING SECOND PLEASE? No? Ok then.
• Fail Online: Via last week’s B3ta newsletter (THANKS ROB!), this is a simple Daily Mail headline/article generator, which churns out frighteningly-plausible pieces at the press of a button. I just got “Huntswoman, 54, who was at centre of storm for whipping bleeding heart liberals and calling them ‘uneducated peasants’ was crushed to death by young muslim men at hunt”, which is uncanny.
• 3d Cholera: I’ve featured John Snow’s infamous map of cholera outbreaks in London before on here, but this new, whizzy version allows you to explore it in 3d, which is a really nice example of clever digitisation of old materials and a lovely piece of dataviz to boot. Click ‘Switch to 3d’ in the left-hand nav to enjoy looking a disease-related deaths across the city in the 1850s! So cheery!
• The Map of Video Walks: This is quite wonderful – a Google Map which collects links to YouTube videos of walks, with each pin taking you to a first-person stroll around…somewhere. Fcuk that Buzzfeed thing up there – if you’re feeling stressed, I very much recommend that you have a stroll around Sorrento instead (virtually).
• Trails of Wind: I’m not particularly proud of this, but I confess to sniggering like a child every time I see this site name. Still, if you can get beyond the schoolboy humour (mine, to be clear, not the developers) then there’s something weirdly interesting about this map of all of the world’s airport runways, showing which direction they run in. You can explore the map yourself, or let you take it on a tour of the world’s runways which, I promise, is significantly more interesting than I just made it sound; the project’s more art than engineering in some senses, given its attempts to visualise the constraints placed on man-made construction by elemental factors outwith our control.
• Typeloop: An app that lets you apply a range of rather cool animated text effects over your photos and videos, and, as is now de rigeur, then export those to use in your Stories in an attempt to leverage the novelty of a NEW TRICK to snare a few more views of the uninteresting, poorly-shot-and-narrated soap opera you are trying to make of your life.

By Frank Moth

NEXT, TRY THE GLITCHY, WONKPOP STYLINGS OF DAVID SHANE SMITH!

THE SECTION WHICH CAN’T WAIT TO SEE THE EXCELLENT ANNUAL FOOTAGE OF UNIFORMED POLICEMEN DAGGERING, PT.2:

• The UK Government Website Archive: This is wonderful, but also a reminder of how little decent preservation of the old web exists and how much is being lost via attrition. Jonty Wareing has pulled the earliest entries from the Internet Archive for each of the official list of .gov.uk domains, meaning here collected on this page is a collection of what each site looked like when it was first created. It’s astonishing quite how early some of these were – who was accessing Bradford Council Services online in 1996?! Who were these built for? So much excellent retrodesign goodness, should you be in the market for such a thing.
• The Travelling Youth Circus: The Boston Globe’s Big Picture series presents a wonderful set of photos of the only travelling youth circus in the US; these are all wonderful, but particularly the shot of the kid looking intensely, perfectly, teenagedly bored and p1ssed off whilst in full slap and costume which will be a familiar expression to anyone who’s ever interacted with a teenager ever.
• The Digital Ludeme Project: This is slightly academic, but very interesting nonetheless. “The Digital Ludeme Project is a five year ERC-funded research project hosted by Maastricht University. This project is a computational study of the world’s traditional strategy games throughout recorded human history. It aims to improve our understanding of traditional games using modern AI techniques, to chart their historical development and explore their role in the development of human culture and the spread of mathematical ideas”. There’s no playable output as yet, but the idea of training an AI on the rulesets of all the ancient games ever and then seeing what it comes up with is a fascinating one, and I think this is a really interesting avenue of enquiry when it comes to the automation of systems design and the like (which, I know, sounds incredibly dull when I write it down, but I promise it isn’t really).
• Gone: I can’t work out if this is just a genuinely terrible idea or whether I am missing something brilliantly obvious. Gone is a listmaking/task-planning service whose gimmick is that any list you make will disappear within 24h, thereby, so I presume the theory is that this will pressure or incentivise you to do the things before they vanish and you forget…or, alternatively, you’ll just procrastinate as usual and then all your tasks will vanish and you’ll simply never, ever do them. “Did you remember to pick up the teabags?” “No, I wrote the shopping list yesterday and so it vanished into the digital oubliette and so I had nothing to remind me what we needed and now we’ve got a fridge full of pepperami and special brew” is basically how I imagine this working out.
• The Shoal Tent: A concept so biblically stupid that when I saw a video iof it doing the rounds I had to go on a solid 10-minute Google to assure myself it’s not in fact a host – it’s not a hoax. The Shoal Tent is, as its name would suggest, a tent, which has one singular gimmick – IT FLOATS! Yep, that’s right, the Shoal Tent is also an INFLATABLE, meaning that you can sleep in a tent which is bobbing up and down on whatever body of water you choose to place it on. WHAT IF IT DEVELOPS A LEAK WHILE YOU ARE ASLEEP? WHAT IF A CROCODILE COMES? I don’t think these people have thought this through AT ALL. Although at the time of writing it appears to be sold-out, so once again it appears that I am the know-nothing bozo here and everyone in fact literally does want to sleep with the fishes.
• Student Recipes: Some of you will have kids who are in the throes of preparing to go and saddle themselves with £60k’s worth of debt solely to be able to ‘enjoy’ a soul-crushing existence in front of a screen for the 50 years post-graduation; CHEERS! If your offspring are about to fly the nest, this website’s not the worst thing in the world to point at them, comprising as it does about 5000-odd recipes which, for a change, aren’t American and so don’t refer to ‘cups’ (the worst unit of measurement in the world, hands-down). Lots of the recipes, fine, are for smoothies and variants on ‘banana pancakes’, but they will still be better than the ‘chilli soup’ which my mate Dave made at university and which caused the walls of our hovel to be coated in a thin film of sweat and we all ate it in silent suffering.
• Matteo In Tour: This is all in Italian, but it translates reasonably easily and even if you don’t speak the language you can get the gist; this is a datavisualisation and analysis project tracking Matteo Salvini’s perigrinations around Italy and indeed the world; this Summer alone, the man who hopes to become Italy’s next leader (pray God no) has been rocking up at beaches and resorts across the peninsula, pressing flesh and dancing with upsetting erotic abandon and generally getting his fash on. It would be sort-of wonderful to have this level of detail on the movements of all politicians, although I accept probably not for them.
• 2020 Madness: This is a really interesting idea; using a sort of fantasy stock market approach to raise money for whoever the eventual anti-Trump candidate vomited up by the Democratic party is. Users buy into the game with real money to earn tokens which they can then use to buy, sell or short any of the Democratic candidates, with said candidates’ ‘value’ being determined by polling, debate performance, media coverage, etc etc; players compete against each other for fun and bragging rights, and there’s no prize; instead, the funds raised will be donated to the campaign of whoever’s finally selected. No idea how much it will make – they’re aiming for $1m, which good luck – but it’s quite a smart premise.
• RSS Mailer: Get your RSS feeds in your inbox. That’s, er, literally it, but if you’re in the market for something which collects updates from sites you like and mails them to you once a day then, well, here you are!
• Music Pro: Slightly confused as to who this is for, but I guess if you don’t want to shell out for Spotify then you might use YouTube as your music playing service of choice; in which case this app, which lets you stream music via YouTube on your phone continuously, without ad interruptions and with the ability to turn off the video and just leaving it alone without it turning itself off. As far as I recall those are all premium YT features, which makes me think that this is a hacky workaround which might not exist that much longer, but while it lasts it might be worth a look.
• Nuts AbouT Squirrels: Steve Barclay is NUTS ABOUT SQUIRRELS! This is his YouTube channel, which has been going for a few years but which has recently been re-upped, with a new trailer and renewed focus and, basically, if you don’t love Steve a little bit then you and I are not going to get on. This is what I can best describe as a series of Ninja Warrior-type assault courses, for squirrels, with commentary and some truly appalling puns, with no seeming trace of irony – just a deep and abiding love for the tree rats. Honestly, this is the purest thing you will see all day.
• Sunrise Search: Also nicked from B3ta (THANKS ROB!), this is regular contributor Monkeon’s very clever little hack, which presents a list of webcams from around the world which are imminently going to show you a sunrise or a sunset. At the time of writing (10:05am fwiw), Barbados is next up; this is quite a pleasing thing to bookmark, as I promise there are few things more soothing than being able to watch the sun rising somewhere in the world (almost) whenever you want.
• Arise & Shine: Or, alternatively, “The Official Website of David Berkowitz former Son of Sam”. I like the fact that you can be a ‘former’ serial killer; you could argue that it’s not really a thing that one can leave behind, but Dave is very much trying to do that, with his love of Christ and his repentance and his wonderfully web 1.0 website and his slightly-terrifing 9-part ‘In My Own Words’ series of autobiographical videos. Quite, quite mad, and a tiny bit chilling (ok, quite a lot chilling).
• Waves: What would make dating apps better? The ability to get right down to it and match with people based on your kinks, fetishes and the like? The ability to search for people who are into domination, whipping and, er, sleeping (no, really, that’s a category)? Who knows, but I suppose there’s an almost admirable degree of honesty inherent in all this; the list of kinks is a touch on the vanilla side, though. If you were going to do this properly you’d lean in hard and include the furries, the fatties and the fisters, no? The p1sspigs and the scat-daddies and th- oh, ok, fine, I’ll stop.
• Satoshi’s Games: Finally this week, a free 8-bit-style arcade featuring a variety of delightful little games with slight Bitcoin themes in tribute to that Satoshi. The micro-version of No Man’s Sky in particular is a joy.

By Kiknavelidze

LAST UP IN THE MIXES, ENJOY DJ NATE’S CARNIVAL MIX 2019 AND HAVE A FUN CARNIVAL IF YOU’RE GOING!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Stray Cat J: J is a Japanese cat. He is very cute. MAOW WHAT A LOVELY NECKERCHIEF!
• Ken Albala: Not in fact a Tumblr! Still, this blog is a rather wonderful find. Ken Albala is a culinary historian who experiments with old recipes, often from the 70s – you know, the ones where everything is in aspic and salads come with mayonnaise florets – along with photos and tasting notes; this is joyous.
• Relatable Pics of Roger Waters: So many relatable pictures of Roger Waters!
• Fifteen People: Also not actually a Tumblr, but this is a great project (or it will be as it progresses) where the site’s author is going to go through every record in Momus’ back catalogue and review/ assess them; I appreciate 99.9% (recurring) of you will have no idea who that is, but, I promise you, he’s absolutely one of the smartest musicians of the past 30-40 years and you will relish discovering him.
• Sh1tpost Sampler: Crosstitch patterns of VERY Tumblr posts. You ever want a pattern for a needlework picture reading “Just because I am in the shape of a person does not mean I am one”? Course you do!
• Sh1tty Movie Details: Slightly bro-ish but still reasonably funny gags about stuff that you might have missed in popular cinema.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Bob Bicknell-Knight: I featured one of Bob’s paintings in last week’s Curios – Zuckerberg with felled antelope – and it’s worth you checking out his Insta feed as it’s rather wonderful.
• Dolen Carag: You want a hand-carved human skull, turned into a lovely, bespoke piece of post-mortem art? You want some pictures of such skulls? YES YOU DO!

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• 1619: This is a wonderful interactive from the New York Times, looking back on the 400 years since the arrival of the first slave on American soil, and presenting a history of the African American experience in the context of slavery. This is just brilliant journalism and digital work, and I recommend it unreservedly.
• Mark Zuckerberg is a Slum Landlord: We’ve not been short of metaphors for the way big tech uses and abuses us, but this one was new to me – I rather like it. Bryan Menegus uses the concept of property and space as a vehicle to, as you might expect, explain why the Big Blue Misery factory is so, well, miserable: “let’s plainly define what Facebook is: an entity which extracts monetizable data in exchange for a place to store and grow our digital lives. At its most basic, the relationship resembles that of a tenant to a landlord. So what kind of accommodation does our personal information afford? More populous than any single country, and six of the seven continents, the 2.4 billion people crammed within Facebook’s blue and grey walls are spending their data to rent a digital equivalent of a tenement, constructed to maximize profit at the expense of safety and quality of life.”
• A Walk In Hong Kong: Part travelogue, part political musing, in which the author describes their experience of being caught up in the Hong Kong protests. I’ve not been able to quite work out who they are, but as a Polish immigrant into the US who’s currently in HK, their perspective is really interesting; there’s a sort of double-outsider feel to the whole piece, and I slightly adored his observation at the top that the US is a ‘less developed’ nation vs HK (for by most indicators it almost certainly is).
• Trump 2020: I know, I know, THAT MAN AGAIN; ordinarily I wouldn’t bother with A N Other piece talking about how he’s awful but might win again, but this, but Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone is always a good read and this is a happily ranty piece, seething with understandable anger and pointing fingers everywhere. It’s nice to remember occasionally that it’s not just us who’s fcuked, it’s everyone!
• The TikTok Hate Speech Problem: Ok, there has to be a law for this, right? That any network of individuals will become hateful beyond a certain size or number of connections? You know that classic image you’ve all seen on too many powerpoint presentations, with all the phones in a circle, demonstrating how network effects multiply? At what point in the size of the network does one of the phones go mental and start communicating only in racial epithets? Anyway, that’s a long-winded and largely nonsensical way of teeing up this piece about TikTok’s issues managing abuse, specifically caste-led abuse, amongst users of the platform in India; the general conclusion to draw is that the problem is, as ever, people, and that TiKTok is yet another app which has been driven to scale violently without adequately bothering to think of the consequences of said scaling on a human / social level. HAVEN’T WE BEEN HERE BEFORE FFS?!
• Silicon Valley’s Crisis of Conscience: Segueing smoothly from the last piece, this is a wonderful, terrible, horrible read, all about the guilt plaguing Silicon Valley about what it has wrought on the world, and what the big players are doing to assuage that guilt – in the main, it seems, talking a lot of spiritualist w4nk and doing kundalini. This really ought to make you angry – if nothing else it’s the sheer arrogance demonstrated here, with these people thinking that they are so smart and so special that they can somehow just talk all these problems out of existence, and that all it’ll take to put the genie back in the bottle is some hot stone therapy and a really good colonic.
• Depop: Had you heard of Depop? I had not, and yet apparently 1 in 3 UK teens has it on their phone (this seems…untrue, I must say, at least based on visible download numbers); it’s basically like a mobile-first ebay for 90s fashion, and this piece is a nice introduction into how it works and the social craze around i – it sounds a bit like Wavey Garms used to be bitd, except, well, it’s an appt. Honestly, if only I’d known this stuff would come back I’d have kept all my old tshirts (what do you mean ‘you still wear them you pathetic throwback’?).
• The End of Bronycon: This year saw the final Bronycon – the convention aimed at adult fans of the very much not-for-adults cartoon series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which became inexplicably wildly popular with a certain type of young man about a decade ago. This isn’t a particularly great piece of writing, but it’s interesting to me that we’re now at a position when these slightly odd internet moments in time can come and pass and be left behind as perfectly-preserved relics in our collective memory; “do you remember when Bronies were a thing?”, we’ll ask, and the children will wonder what we’re talking about and we’ll smile ruefully from behind the protective masks and suck down a long huff of Huel and we’ll go back to talking about what real food tasted like before The Event.
• Why Can’t We Just Quit Twitter?: This piece puzzled me a bit. Sarah Manavis in the New Statesman writes about the odd compulsion that Twitter exerts on its users, many of whom believe it’s actively doing them harm but still can’t quite seem to shake the compulsion. I totally buy the addictive bit, no question, but…harmful? Look, everyone, YOU CAN TAILOR THE EXPERIENCE! IT IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT! FOLLOW DIFFERENT PEOPLE! USE LISTS! It doesn’t have to be miserable, does it?
• The Failed Social Networks: Another article in Gizmodo’s week-long series of pieces about an ‘Alternate Internet’, this is a laundry list of failed social networks – not exhaustive, fine, but it covers off most of the big ones. It’s fascinating mainly for some of the small details; how quickly some of these went under after having been at the top of the pile, for a start, and the absolutely OBSCENE amount of money that AOL paid for Bebo back in the day – honestly, go and look at that figure, you will do a proper involuntary gasp.
• Parliament of Owls: It’s really not a good time for those of us who really don’t want to believe that there is a shadowy cabal of super-rich deviants running the world; here’s another piece which might make you feel a bit weird: “Once a year, the enigmatic redwood forests of Monte Rio in Northern California host some of the most powerful people in the world, who meet for reasons nobody knows for sure. The secrecy surrounding this bizarre frat party has sparked the public’s imagination for over a century, igniting a flurry of conspiracy theories that Bristol-based photographer Jack Latham elegantly explores in his latest book Parliament of Owls.” Latham does say quite explicitly that “I’m certain they aren’t an affront to the occult and certainly do not sacrifice children”, so that’s probably ok.
• Confessions of a Professional White A$$hole: Entertaining story of an actor who made a living for a while getting repeatedly cast as ‘racist white guy’ in sketch shows and comedies; I do love these stories of people on the fringes of glamorous industries, or doing the crap jobs amongst the glamour, and this one’s very well-told.
• Crotchball Card: This is WONDERFUL, and a brilliant story about minor workplace disobedience. Keith Comstock was a professional baseball player who was never immensely successful, but did achieve the unique distinction of having the best baseball card portrait ever; this is the story of how that came about. Honestly, if you have ever collaborated with colleagues to do something entirely stupid, a bit disruptive and entirely benign in the office then this will resonate with you massively.
• All The Facts: No Such Thing As A Fish is the QI Elves’ (the people who research the quiz show) podcast, where they talk about AMAZING AND OBSCURE bits of knowledge; this website lists every single episode along with the facts discussed; it is a BRILLIANT repository of odd, interesting information – I mean, look: “The seventh time park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning coincided with the 22nd time he fought off a bear with a stick”. You can’t tell me you’re life’s not marginally better for knowing that – the whole site’s like this, it’s a goldmine.
• Thirst Trap: On Bukowski’s drinking and writing, and the odd fetisation of the former that accompanies admiration of the latter. With the exception of a very short list of books (Bad News by Edward St Aubyn, Speed by William Burroughs Jr, maybe a couple of others) I find books about booze and drugs very boring indeed, and I’ve always found it slightly odd that the incredibly self-indulgent and often-vile Bukowski gets quite so much literary love when it seemed that the drink was an impediment to his talent rather than a catalyst for it. Regardless, a really good dispassionate essay about the myth of the great, drunk man of letters.
• A Review of Airmail: I mentioned Airmail, a new online magazine with a monthly subscription fee and a high-end aesthetic, a few weeks ago; this is a wonderfully waspish review of the project, which starts with a brutal headline (describing Airmail as a ‘magazine for the rich and boring’) and then really gets into its stride. On the one hand, I never like to read a kicking of someone’s creative endeavour; on the other, I always like to read a gleeful hatchet job, and this is a wonderful example. Also contains this line, which, well, YES: “There’s too much content on the Internet, and it remains difficult to separate high quality from low. The newsletter’s static quality, its weekly promise of comprehensiveness, is appealing despite its impossibility. We need human editors and curators more than ever so we don’t fall prey to purely algorithmic selection, and we need to pay subscription fees so independent media continues to exist.”
• Wayne’s World: An Oral History: Looking back, I think Wayne’s World might be the perfect film. Dumb/Smart, consistently hilarious, fourth-wall-breaking, pop cultural in a way that feels weirdly post-internet…I want to watch it RIGHT NOW. This is a great look at how the film got made with all sorts of nice little anecdotes about the filming process and creative differences that made the movie so great. Wonderful.
• Super Sad True Chef Story: A rumination on the death of the classical French kitchen system as characterised by Escoffier, with the rigidly hierarchical staffing structure, the rigidly-policed recipes, all supported by the rolling mass of stageistes, the people at the bottom of the pile who do the back-and-arm-and-neck-breaking work of prepping everything for the actual cooks. The piece’s author goes to try his hand at a stage in a Michelin-starred restaurant – it’s not a spoiler to say the experience breaks him. I love cookery, I love the practice of cooking, but it’s when I read things like this that I am usefully reminded of exactly how much more lazy I am than I would need to be to do it for a living.
• The Dorothy Byrne McTaggart Lecture: Byrne is Channel 4’s Head of News; this is her lecture to the assembled grandees at the Edinburgh TV festival currently taking place. Covering sexism in the industry, the Murdoch press, the BBC, being a woman in media and SO much more, this is a truly barnstorming speech that I wish I had written; it should be required reading for anyone doing any public speaking ever, and I wish more people had the balls to write and speak like this in the workplace.
• Day Trip: A mother takes a child to visit its father in prison. This is a beautiful, very sad piece of writing. If you’ve never visited a prison, know that seeing kids in the visiting area is one of the most heartbreaking things in the whole entire world.
• Elliott Spencer: Finally this week, this short story by George Saunders in the New Yorker. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, other than to say that, as per with Saunders, it’s linguistically inventive, very funny and quite deeply disturbing. It might take you a few minutes to get into the style, but it’s very much worth it – I can’t think of a short story writer whose work I enjoy more.

By the seemingly-unGoogleable ‘Dennis S’, more of whose photos you can see in this VERY NSFW collection

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1. This is FASCINATING – this short film shows how they make the sound effects for the new Mortal Kombat game. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to effectively and convincingly simulate the sound of someone’s lungs being pulled out through their splintered ribcage then this is for YOU!

2) This is called ‘Take Control’ and it’s by the Mysterines and it’s just a great, hooky rock song – honestly, you’ll be humming this fcuker all afternoon:

3) What’s really going on in world politics? Shardcore and the computers explain:

4) Excellent indiepop now, by Kitten – the track’s called ‘Memphis’:

5) BRAND NEW MISSY ELLIOT! Still excellent, and this is a corking video – the teeth freak me out rather, though:

6) I heard this yesterday and thought ‘Hm, this sounds almost exactly like I would imagine having a panic attack on the underground would sound if panic attacks made sound’. See what you think! It’s by Uniform and the Body and it’s called ‘Day of Atonement’:

7) This is by Shi Online, whoever they are – it reminds me weirdly of Die Antwoord, if Yolande was the only one fronting them up. It’s…odd, but weirdly catchy and poppy despite being very much not really pop at all. This is ‘Где ты’:

8) There’s a sort of odd Sleaford Mods / Iggy Pop-type vibe to this, by Tropical Fcuk Storm; see what you think, but I rather like it:

9) Finally this week, this is PURE INTERNET. Cashmere Cat, with ‘Emotions’. No, I am not sorry, I promise you that by the end of the track it will make a sort of weird sense, in a sort of ‘oh, so this is the 21c equivalent of Alvin & The Chipmunks, I get it’ way. Oh, and THAT’S IT FOR THIS WEEK THANKS FOR READING I HOPE YOU HAVE A LOVELY BANK HOLIDAY IN PROSPECT AND THE WEATHER STAYS NICE AND YOU HAVE AT LEAST ONE CONVERSATION WITH SOMEONE WHICH MAKES YOU FEEL HOPEFUL AND THAT THE NEXT WEEK IS AS GENTLE YOU NEED IT TO BE AND THAT YOU TAKE CARE AND THAT YOU KNOW THAT I LOVE EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU BYE I LOVE YOU BYE TAKE CARE BYE!:

HI EVERYONE! I MADE IT! Yes, despite having only had three days in which to scarf down all of the week’s internet, I have somehow managed to curl out an almost-fully-formed Curios this week! Yes, OK, fine, it might be a little light on the miscellaneous links and videos this week, but I’ve made up for it with WORDS (which are the bit that noone wants)! Special thanks to the people who paid me for my time on Wednesday and Thursday and who have basically paid for this this week (pretty sure none of them read this). 

Anyway, I went to Rome for my Grandmother’s 100th and it was, honestly, lovely, and made me feel almost warm and positive about life (although that may just have been the heat – it hit 48 in the centre of the city on Monday, which is frankly not ok hun). That mood has sort-of continued through to the weekend – I’m off to the seaside for a few days, to eat fine food, drink less fine wine (as a man who drinks more Casillero del Diablo than water, I’m in no position to be snobbish about a vintage) and, hopefully, win a selection of keyrings thanks to the magic of TICKETS. 

Whatever YOU are doing with your 48h of freedom from the stupid, pointless waste of time that is your dayjob (NB – it’s probably worth me pointing out here that when I talk about work being a pointless waste of time, I am obviously only talking to the advermarketingpr folk among you; in the unlikely event that anyone reading this does a real job then know that I am not talking about you at all), start the weekend off RIGHT by immersing yourself to the very hairline in this week’s linky miasma, a warm, vaguely glutinous slop which will osmotically imbue you with all of my knowledge as you scroll. HOW WILL YOU FIT IT ALL IN?! I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and you can’t keep me waiting any longer. 

My centenarian grandmother, taken by the bloke who does her hair and who looks uncannily like me after a go on one of those face-ageing apps

LET’S KICK OFF WITH A TRIP BACK TO THE OLD SCHOOL COURTESY OF AN LTJ BUKEM MIX FROM 1992!

THE SECTION WHICH THINKS IT MAY NOT BE A COINCIDENCE THAT VERIZON TOOK THAT MASSIVE HAIRCUT ON TUMBLR JUST AFTER SHINGY ANNOUNCED HE WAS LEAVING (AND WHICH APPRECIATES THAT THIS SENTENCE WILL BE LARGELY INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO THE MAJORITY OF YOU):

• Facebook Makes Some Utterly Cosmetic Changes To Groups!: There will be NO MORE secret Groups on Facebook! I mean, there will be – they just won’t be called ‘secret’ any more. This seems like basic housekeeping from Facebook – it’s simply not a good look for the platform to have Groups that can self-describe as ‘secret’, what with all the hate and white supremacy and illegality and other unsavoury things happening in the private nooks and crannies of the platform; ‘private’ is a far less politico/tabloid-riling designation. This change will make NO DIFFERENCE to almost everyone – look: “By default, a group that was formerly “secret” will now be “private” and “hidden.” A group that was formerly “closed” will now be “private” and “visible.” Groups that are “public” will remain “public” and “visible.”” See? Nothing to worry about.
• New FB Ad Units for Films: New ad-types! Specifically to get people to go to the cinema! Ad units which will let users set reminders to alert them when a film shown to them in an ad appears in cinemas nearby! Ad units which will let users immediately see film times at nearby venues! These are genuinely useful, and you’d imagine that this sort of functionality will be rolled out beyond just films in the not-too-distant future. Or at least I would – that’s the way my imagination works, you see, wild and free and unfettered by tedious shackles of convention.
• Facebook Stories Now Let You Add Slideshows: Once again I defer to Matt Navarra, a man so dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about s*c**l m*d** that he barely even exists in corporeal form any more, instead manifesting as a buzzing swarm of 1s and 0s. He’s learned that you will be able to add image slideshows to your Facebook Stories, and now, via me, you know that too, and isn’t your life better for the fact? Humour me.
• You Can Now Schedule Instagram Posts Through Creator Studio: I imagine for some of you this will be as a soothing, cooling balm on a hot summer’s day; no longer will you have to log into the ‘gram to post that desultory ‘Who’s having BOTTOMLESS BRUNCH?!?! We love bubbles!!’ twelve-liker to the corporate account on a miserable, comedowny Saturday morning; instead now you’ll be able to schedule that post and keep keying the ket long into the afternoon with nary a thought of work! Sadly this doesn’t currently allow for the scheduling of Stories, though, so don’t get too excited.
• Instagram AR For All: Spark AR, Facebook’s AR kit for Instagram, is now open to all in Beta – so if you fancy messing around with creating Snap-style effects for the ‘gram, this is your chance. This is all very much experimental at the moment, but the tools are actually really user-friendly and there’s quite a lot of quite cool stuff you can do if you put the time in. The sort of thing that could work as a competition for the right sort of brand, or just somewhere to make some fun, throwaway digital tat – get the tone right and there’s at least one WACKY CORPORATE FUNSTERS viral thingy in this, I reckon.
• Instagram To Launch Revised Boomerang Formats: Jane Manchun Wong, the world’s other indefatigable social media sleuth and tipster, has discovered that Insta is apparently going to roll out half-a-dozen slightly tweaked Boomerang formats which will let users make ever-so-slightly-different back/forward-looping video clips! There’s no timeline attached to this, but just so’s you can start thinking of all the EXCITING NEW CONTENT you can create. There’s some other ‘coming soon’-type stuff in here too, including a bunch of new image-grid formats for Insta stories which do actually look quite useful.
• Insta To Allow Flagging of False Information: Literally just this. A good thing, though one perhaps might argue (not for the first time) that this is another instance where the platforms are, metaphorically-speaking, carefully-locking up the farm and applying the deadlock whilst the sounds of happy whinnying drift across the evening sky from several fields away.
• New Snapchat Specs Let Users Film First-Person 3d: Well, sort-of 3d – the specs will have two cameras, though, which will provide a degree of depth to footage shot with them, meaning you’ll be able to apply more interesting digital after effects to your videos; the examples shown here include a rather natty little pink bird flying around elements in a user’s film. These are available for pre-order in the UK at the moment, turns out, and if you’re a CONTENT CREATOR (sorry) and have a spare few hundred quid, these could be quite a worthwhile investment.
• Spotify for Podcasters: Or, specifically, how podcasters can get better analytics through Spotify. Attach your podcast account and you’ll be able to get detailed information on listener numbers, which seems like a Useful And Good Thing.
• Plus-Sized Stock Photos: I’m including this solely because I think that’s now literally every conceivable application of the ‘stock photos but this time for this otherwise ordinarily underrepresented group of people’; you can’t, sadly, really rip this idea off any more. Don’t look at me like that, it’s been a whole bloody year I’ve been pointing these out to you and telling you to jump on that bandwagon, it’s not my fault you don’t listen.
• AXA #KnowYouCan: I’ve been having to work on quite a lot of employee engagement stuff at the moment, but sadly none of it has been blessed with quite the same sort of evidently insane budgets as AXA had at its disposal when planning this particular activation. JUST LOOK AT THE VIDEO! “AXA launched #knowyoucan, its new brand slogan about self belief -” NO HANG ON HANG ON WHAT?!?! Its ‘new brand slogan about self belief’? WHAT THE ACTUAL FCUK? YOU ARE A FRENCH INSURANCE COMPANY WHY DO YOU NEED ONE OF THOSE? Take a moment to deal with that idiocy and then carry on watching, and marvel at the fact that they have seemingly built a giant interactive wall of video screens displaying negative phrases which employees could…er…hit tennis balls at, to banish said negativity in in-no-way-clunky metaphorical fashion. WHY TENNIS? Also, hang on, IS THAT SERENA WILLIAMS?!?! Honestly, watch this, try and work out, roughly, what the budget was for all this, and then spend some time thinking about better ways to spend that money. It won’t be hard. Do you ever think that everything we do is totally fcuking pointless waste of time, money and energy and we would all be better served by, well, just stopping with all this pointless rubbish? Do you? You fcuking well should you know.

By Jason Anderson

NEXT, ENJOY THIS INTENSELY ECLECTIC SELECTION FROM JON AVERILL!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO WISH SAZ A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOR TOMORROW, PT.1:

• Living Ferguson: A digital memorial to Michael Brown Jr., the black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, 5 years ago. It’s interesting – and by interesting I mean ‘depressing’ – the extent to which that incident seems oddly like a precursor or catalyst to declining US race relations since; the website is a beautifully-put-together collection of interviews with local residents, sharing their memories of the day, their experiences with police, and their reflections on how the community and its relationship with law enforcement has changed since. “Reporters at St. Louis Public Radio interviewed more than 20 people for this project. Some spoke to us alone, others alongside friends and family. All were directly touched by the inequalities that #Ferguson’s eruption showcased to the world. Several themes emerged during the interviews. Those themes became the chapters of this project.” Not only an interesting piece of documentary website-making, but a really nice example of how to land this sort of project sensitively and effectively.
• Relativity: Another week, another link for which I have to say thanks to Josh– this is a lovely site which seeks to show how the behaviour of light goes some way towards providing a proof for Einstein’s theory of relativity. I won’t pretend that I understand any of the physics here – honestly, I really don’t; there’s a point with physics at which my brain simply stops attempting to understand or engage with the topic and instead just sort of slides over and around the surface of it, not unlike a fried egg on a well-greased non-stick surface (no, no idea why that’s the analogy my head’s decided to fixate upon here, but there we are, nothing I can do about it) – but the visualisation and interactivity are both really nicely-done.
• The Google Question Hub: This isn’t live for the UK at the moment – it’s currently in beta for users in Nigeria, Indonesia and India – but it’s SUCH an interesting idea, with a load of potentially-interesting use cases for CONTENT PROVIDERS. The Google Question Hub lets users see what questions people are asking Google in their area that don’t currently have high-quality answers to them, so that they can then create content which answers said questions; the idea being that users get the information they need, whilst website owners who provide GOOD QUALITY STUFF will get the SEO and traffic boost their helpful behaviour deserves.Worth keeping an eye on this to see when it expands to other territories as it almost certainly will.
• The Al Safar Project: This is a…slightly frustrating website. The Al Safar Project is…well, part of the problem is that the site doesn’t make it hugely easy to tell, what with the somewhat buried nav and the fact that it’s all in this fcuking horrible cursive font. I think that the Al Safar Project is a not-for-profit association promoting projects that advocate international understanding and cooperation, and that this website collects some of those projects, and the stories and people behind them. It’s SUCH a shame that the site’s such a mess, as I get the feeling there’s actually lots of really interesting stuff in here, from promoting a female rally-driving team in Palestine, to supporting the work of a French photographer who’s retracing the cross-country pilgrimage of a 14th-Century Islamic scholar; there are some lovely pictures, but reading this is HORRID. Can someone please CHANGE THE SODDING FONT PLEASE? Thanks.
• Pegleg: We’re all comfortable with the fact we’re all cyborgs now, right? Even those of us who haven’t gone full implant can happily acknowledge our advanced state of human/machine symbiosis and our status as centaurs in pretty much all aspects of our lives? Good! Now we’ve got that cleared up, let’s swap ourselves down with medicinal alcohol and prepare to insert what looks like a cigarette-packet sized circuitboard under our skin! “PegLeg is a distro of the PirateBox platform, designed to be meshable, and run on hardware small enough to implant in the human body.Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movement, PirateBox is a self-contained mobile collaboration and file sharing device. PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless file sharing networks where users can anonymously share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content”. Click the link and just look at that – would you want that inside you? It looks unpleasantly glisten-y and Cronenbergian, for a start. Beautifully, the disclaimer at the end reads: “please seek out someone with the skillset to put this in a human body instead of blindy [sic] cutting yourself open. If you do not feel entirely confident in this procedure, please consider turning this device into a wearable.” STERLING ADVICE.
• Coinlocker: This is all in Japanese, but if you click the button on the landing page you’ll see an option to change it to English – doing so will reveal that Coinlocker is a service designed to help you break your digital addiction. So far, so meh, but the truly dastardly thing about this service is that it really doesn’t fcuk around; you give it your passwords to the accounts you want to be deprived of access to, and Coinlocker will change them without telling you what to. You’ll then be locked out of the platform til the specified time period has elapsed, at which point you’ll be emailed the new password so you can get back in and scratch the itch again. This is SO clever – I think that technically it breaks a lot of various platforms’ Ts&Cs, though, meaning there’s a small chance that it’ll get shuttered at any moment and leave you unable to ever get back into your Twitter account, which is another really fantastic reason to use it if you ask me.
• Method Of Denim: I don’t normally feature clothes in here, but I’ll make an exception for this, mainly as this company sells denim stuff which you can customise to a quite frightening degree on the website; I can’t vouch for the quality of the output, but which of us can resist the opportunity to order a stonewash denim jacket with ‘WEBMONG’ written across the shoulderblades in that sort of weird, spiky, almoost chitinous script so beloved of death metal bands? NO FCUKER, THAT’S WHO! Honestly, you can make some truly preposterous garments on here – the interface is really nice, reminiscent of quite a few of the old ‘design your own tshirt’ sites from a decade or so ago, and it’s really rather fun to spend 20 minutes designing your own entirely customised edgelord rock god denim getup.
• The Version Museum: “Version Museum showcases the visual history of popular websites, operating systems, applications, and games that have shaped our lives. Much like walking through a real-life museum, this site focuses on the design changes of historic versions of technology, rather than just the written history behind it.” If you’ve grown up on the web, this is a quite uncanny time machine – the collection of screenshots of Facebook alone is a strange and rather unsettling trip back to a more innocent era in which we poked each other and threw tacos; there are also historical images of old Office versions, operating systems and a few game series as well, and the whole thing is a fascinating look at quite how much webdesign has evolved in a relatively short period of time.
• Cutie Pi: This is an interesting prototype project, seeking to produce a tablet based on the Raspberry Pi, being developed by a team in Taiwan. It’s a really impressive piece of design and build, and while the team are looking to manufacture it themselves (with an aim to sell it around £200 or so) they have also done the decent thing and make the whole project open source too. If you’re a codery, hackery, tinker-y type, this is worth a look.
• Reals: Do we really need another social platform? Do we need one, in particular, that exists specifically for people to share their REAL selves and their REAL feelings and REAL thoughts about REAL things? Do we really want something else that encourages that most tedious of communications-types of the 21st Century, the ‘rant delivered into phone camera held in outstretched arm’? No, no we do not, and yet here Reals comes, all POSITIVE and puppylike, with its standard spiel about how it wants users to find an ocean of sincerity and ‘realness’ in the crowded sea of digital fakery. Look, people behind Reals, I am sure that you mean well, but the one thing we have far too fcuking much of in 2019 is people unaccountably feeling that they should have some sort of a fcuking medal for SPEEKING THEIR FCUKING BRANES at the internet. Being ‘real’ isn’t always good, you know, as anyone who’s ever met the sort of person who has ‘if you don’t love me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best’ in their profile.
• Bovine Obstruction: The weekly moment in Web Curios when I start wheeling out the links I nicked from last week’s B3ta (HI ROB!) – this is a very silly site, but a very pleasing silly site. Try typing something. GO ON, TRY IT.
• No Bias: This feels like a great idea that sadly won’t have the impact it might due to limited adoption; I know, obviously, all the reasons why it would never happen, but wouldn’t it be nice if something like this was installed into Chrome as a default? Oh, hang on, I haven’t actually explained what it is, have I? Ahem. This is a browser extension, available for Chrome and Firefox, which does one thing – once installed, it allows users to get information about news sources – their likely political leanings and credibility – directly from Google Search or Facebook. It’s a really nice interface – the extension just applies a little paw graphic next to the link, which on hover-over displays some info about the site that the article appears on, and a rough visual guide to its political leanings on a left/right scale. The whole project is really interesting, with an impressive team behind it – I really want this to do well, so please do share it far and wide.
• Digital Security and Privacy for Domestic Violence: Sorry, there’s literally nothing ‘fun’ about this one at all, but it is a really good collection of resources to help people either suffering from, or at risk of, domestic violence maintain their digital security and safety; as they put it, “to help IPV [Intimate Partner Violence] survivors, advocates, and technologists discover and mitigate tech-based risks and vulnerabilities”. I hope none of you have reasons beyond the professional to click this link.
• US Flags: I know that there’s at least one flag enthusiast (what a characterisation!) amongst my readership, so, er, this one’s for YOU! US Flags is a site which, er, collects all the US Stae flags and analyses the principles behind their design, which, fine, might not sound interesting, but I promise you that if you’re in the market for designing your own flag for your own fledgling micronation you will find no little inspiration in here. Also, American State flags are on occasion REALLY silly – what were you thinking, Wyoming?!
• 8 Bit Workshop: Do YOU like 8-bit games and the general sort of nostagia for a bygone era that they evoke? Would YOU like to learn to code your own, with a web-based interface that lets you do EXACTLY that in a variety of 8bit languages? GREAT! This site is a wonderful collection of resources and information all about making 8-bit games; a bit technical, fine, but if you’re interested in tinkering with this sort of thing it’s a good starting point.
• Google Maps Shenanigans: I hate the word ‘shananigans’ – it speaks to me of a particular sort of aggressively-unfunny and unfun North American, which is perhaps unfair of me but there we go (this is MY blognewsletterthing and MY irrational prejudices are part and parcel of the ‘fun’) – but I will let it slide for this excellent subReddit collecting a wide range of Google Maps fcukups, oddities and, er, penile lakes and landmasses. Often quite childish, but, well, childish is funny and I will brook no argument on this. Also, this kid deserves to be famous.

By Bob Bicknell-Knight

NOW LET’S GET CONCEPTUAL WITH THIS MIX BY BRITISH MUSICIAN AND SOUND ARTIST RICHARD SKELTON!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE TO WISH SAZ A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY FOR TOMORROW, PT.2:

• The Library Land Project: This is the project website for…hang on, I’ll let them explain it: “We are Adam Zand and Greg Peverill-Conti, the principals of SharpOrange and the guys behind Library Land. Since late 2017, we’ve visited more than 200 libraries across Massachusetts – a strong start to our goal of visiting every library in the state. We have also visited libraries in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, DC. When we visit a library, we rate it on 11 criteria: parking/transportation, WiFi, meeting rooms, condition, completeness, community, friendliness, restrooms, noise, comfort level and the all-important “Good place to work?”” Yes, this is a website that rates libraries – the perfect combination of weirdly obsessive, deeply tedious and ultimately pointless that regular readers will know forms the sweet, sweet heart of the Web Curios experience. A question, though. The ‘Sharp Orange’ they refer to is their PR company, which they founded a few years ago and which doesn’t have an office because they just work out of libraries instead – erm, is that ok? That does seem rather like a massive pisstake, insofar as they are rinsing free wifi, heating, desk space, etc – are any of you librarians? Can you offer an ethical perspective on this? Or are we all idiots for bothering with offices and should we instead run our business empires from the small seating area in the kids’ books section of Clapham Library? I am now very confused.
• Globe Living: This feels like a Bad Thing, though I can’t quite put my finger on exactly why. Globe is a service that can best be summarised as ‘Airbnb, but for an hour or so’; users sign up and can get paid, short-term access to domestic properties in a range of cities, the idea being that you can nip into someone’s house to do some work, take a shower, have a nap, etc, while they are at work; they, on the flipside, get to monetise the vacant space of their apartment while they’re staring dead-eyed at a monitor all day. Part of my irritation with this, I have just realised, is that it’s basically the idea I had five years ago – except mine was better, as it was going to be marketed exclusively at philanderers and was going to be called (lawyers be damned!) ‘Affairbnb’ (I know, it’s a GREAT name, right?). DAMN THEM! Anyway, if you don’t mind the idea of some stranger nipping into your house, rinsing your WiFi and DEFINITELY defecating mightily into your bathroom then sign yourself up!
• Eunoia: Or, ‘Words That Don’t Translate’. A database of those wonderful words which existing languages from all over the world which simply don’t have a simple, single-word English translation. These are always a joy, and I just lost 5 minutes to scrolling through a randomly-sourced selection of the 500+ words on there. Honestly, there is nothing you will learn today which will give you greater joy than the fact that there is an Indonesian word, Desus, which means, quite precisely, “The quiet, smooth sound of somebody farting, although not very loudly”. This is basically perfect.
• The Kosmaj Project: Thanks to editor Paul for finding and sending this to me – The Kosmaj Project collects drone photos and videos from a bunch of kids from Russia, who travel around looking for cool things to capture, and they are awesome. There are a few particularly nice shots of isolated figures in blasted landscapes which are particularly affecting, but everything on here is really rather wonderful.
• Urban Nudges: A site that collects examples of nudge-type initiatives in cities, specifically those that are designed to improve road safety. I think this site is part of a student’s graduation project – regardless, it’s a useful collection of interesting, creative approaches to a specific problem which might prove useful in terms of inspiration, or just some cool ideas on how to make people do what you want them to do.
• US Government Comics: It’s of course no surprise that Governments used comic books as propaganda materials through much of the 20th Century, but this collection contains some absolute gems – from the ones aimed at Native communities, which just feel quite incredibly sad for some reason, to the frankly glorious SPROCKET MAN (no, really), created by the Consumer Product Safety Commission to teach children about bike maintenance and road safety. Honestly, if there are any graphic designers out there who fancy making an easy few quid, I reckon there’s absolutely a profitable clothing range to be gotten out of retro-hipster SPROCKET MAN designs. Anyway, there’s loads of interesting stuff in here, both in terms of funny retro communications and some rather excellent oldschool art styles.
• Serial Reader: This is a nice idea. Taking all those out-of-copyright classic books of yesteryear that are all over the web, Serial Reader packages them as bite-sized daily episodes, offering you a new one each day for consumption through the app. If you feel like you’ve lost the ability to read anything other than Twitter and the sidebar of shame (and Curios – PLEASE GOD DON’T STOP READING CURIOS) this might be a useful way of training those particular muscles again; equally, if you’ve got kids who struggle with it, this could be a way of attempting to get them over that particular hill (presuming of course they’re those unlikely kids who REALLY want to read Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde).
• Balmain Boats: This is pretty much the ultimate in rich person’s indulgences for their kids, but is also quite cool in an ‘idyllic childhood Swallows & Amazons’-type way. Balmain Boats is an Australian company, whose entire sales pitch seems to be ‘buy something that will make your kids think you’re a lot cooler than you are’; in this case, a VERY SMOL rowing or sailboat for you all to go pottering about in. These are, obviously, all lovely and wooden and sustainable, and are flat-packed so as far as I can tell they’ll ship anywhere; you then get to put together the boat LIKE A FAMILY (that’s the idea, obviously – what will actually happen is that there will be a brief moment when your kids are halfway interested, and then one parent will be left to swearily hammer together an unconscionable number of bits of timber into a shape almost but not quite exactly unlike the one advertised which will start to take in water within 30s of being launched). These start out at around 1500 quid, which, honestly, made me applaud the chutzpah of these people quite a lot.
• Alienstock: Remember a few weeks ago when I linked you to the plan to raid Area51 and FREE THE ALIENS? Well that’s pivoted now to become ALIENSTOCK! A festival near Area51! With bands that they can’t announce yet for security reasons! Where the nearest town has literally 100 people and no petrol station or shop! This is going to be an absolutely legendary disaster if it ever goes ahead – it almost certainly won’t, but we can live in hope.
• BBBreaking News: Another B3ta link (THANKS ROB!), this one’s a really clever project which simply looks for Tweets from journalists asking people if they can use their pictures or videos in their news reports, and then pulls that media onto this website. This is in part a GREAT place to just scroll mindlessly through some moderately-interesting media, but also a decent way of tracking breaking news stories; at the moment, it’s all simply stuff from overnight in the US of people going mental on planes and the occasional bout of mad weather, but this is one that’s very much worth bookmarking and going back to on and off throughout the day.
• Flixier: This is basically an in-browser version of Final Cut, and looks INCREDIBLY useful. It’s a paid product at heart, but there are some features available for free, and it’s definitely worth a look if you want a lightweight-but-powerful editing and collaboration…er…thingy.
• Adversarial Fashion: Clothing designed very specifically to throw off automatic surveillance technology. In a week in which everyone in London was pleasantly reminded of the fact that it’s not our city, it’s money’s city and we’re just living in it and money can do whatever the fcuk it pleases including secretly tracking our faces because it fcuking well can, ok, stop asking questions, this seems oddly timely. The current range is designed to mess with Automatic License Plate Readers in the US, but I would love to see a UK riff on this to mess with the King’s Cross panopticon. Can someone make it please? Thanks.
• Import Doc: “Put a Google Doc in any web page. Updates instantly. Setup takes a minute.” So says this website. I have no idea why you might need this, but as you should know by now, Web Curios neither questions or judges.
• Generated Space: This is SUCH a lovely art project, producing computer-generated art of surprisingly broad stylistic scope. “Generated Space is the result of a year-long endeavour to make computers do unexpected things. It presents a wide range of different generative algorithms; from organic flow fields and particle systems to rigid fractals and grammar-based shapes. Some more serious than others. All the code is open source and available on GitHub, so feel free to change and improve upon any sketches that interests you.” It’s worth taking your time and clicking through a few of the projects to get a feel for the broad range of styles the site encompasses; these are SO LOVELY.
• The Amazon Interview Airbnb: On the one hand, there’s nothing at all weird about preparing assiduously for a job you really want; on the other, there is something very weird, to my mind at least, about this setup, whereby you can use Airbnb to book yourself a 5-hour simulated Amazon interview in downtown Seattle. Presumably this is designed for people who will be interviewing for a place in MechaBezos’ glorious, fully-automated future, but I like to think that there is a dedicated core audience of Amazon-heads who would do this as an actual holiday just for the kicks. Anyway, for the fee you get access to ex-senior Amazon people who will coach you, pretend-grill you, and then, best (not in fact best) of all, let you sit in on their deliberation and scoring process as they rip you and your professional deficiencies apart in the post-interview debrief. The best part? The cost. For this glorious experience – an experience which, you will recall, lasts 5 hours – you will shell out an eye-watering $5k. HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO MEET MECHABEZOS? I really don’t like the future of work, you know (I don’t much care for the present either, if I’m honest).
• Chesses: Last up in this week’s miscellania, another selection of small, fiendish, wrong games from Pippin Barr – this time another set of riffs on Chess, whereby in each of the games the rules are given one or two small but very significant tweaks. These are all designed as two-player experiences, but you can mess around with them to get the jokes – I LOVE Barr’s work so much, and this is as clever as you’d expect from them.

By Tom Hegen

LAST UP IN THE MIXES THIS WEEK, SOME ABSOLUTELY UNAPOLOGETIC PSYTRANCE WITH A SUPERB HOUR-LONG MIX BY CHACRUNA!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Hyperart Thomasson: Unintentional art, created by the city. Contains images of the sorts of mad architecture that makes urban spaces worth living in sometimes; strange staircase follies in the middle of car parks, odd pipes attached to nothing, walkways leading into space…the odd, the surreal and the vaguely-menacing in the urban jungle.
• Dr Phil Imagines: “I’m Phillis. I’m a 34 year old white woman who adores Dr. Phil. Welcome to my hospital. May post imagines sometimes, though lately I have not had much time for that. Apologies.” I really, really hope that this is a joke, otherwise this person is…unwell. PLEASE click the link and have the sound up – this is VERY important.
• Thiccer Waifus: Ah, it’s been a while since we’ve had a good, seamy-underbelly-of-the-weird-sex-web-type-Tumblr on here – WELCOME BACK! Thiccer Waifus is, for those of you unfamiliar with the lexicon, a Tumblr featuring girls from anime and manga (the ‘waifu’ in question) whose already often-preposterous proportions have been jacked up to frankly terrifying scale by fans with photoshop. This is really not very SFW – there’s no actual nudity, fine, but there are lots of cartoon women with planetary-sized busts (I am really not exaggerating). HOW DO YOU DISCOVER THAT THIS IS WHAT GETS YOU OFF?!?!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Gallagher Tools: Sean Gallagher photographs the tools owned by his family and tells the stories behind them. Lovely, in a very soothing sort of way.
• The Rio Cinema Archive: I featured a collection of photos of Dalston in the 80s on here a while back; this, I think, is an Insta feed featuring similar pictures, focusing specifically on the area around the Rio Cinema up by Kingsland, but also taking in the wider Hackney area. Superb.
• Odnoboko: I have no idea at all why this Russian person photoshops massive cats into all their photos, but, well, MAOW!
• Micah Adams: Micah Adams carves coins. These are quite, quite astonishing.
• Birdfreaks: The best avian photos I’ve seen on Instagram – there are some beatiful shots on here. Also, thanks to this video I just learned what sound an eagle makes and now feel you should too as I don’t want to suffer alone.

LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!

• The Tumblr Venn Diagram That Predicted The Future: This is obviously, on the one hand, a very silly article which goes in far too deep in a piece of popculture faux-profundity churned out years ago for the lols. It’s also – and this is the weird Schrodingerian (not a word, I know, but it ought to be) nature of the now – simultaneously a very smart look at how mid-10s web culture effectively foretold a lot of where we are now, in terms of online factions and attitudes shifting and melding and overlapping. This is THE most online thing I read all week, and contains the following quote which ought to win someone somewhere an award: “as a media archaeologist, I can tell you that this is an amazing artifact of an observant Tumblr user in the still-strong normie meme era of the web.” I mean, REALLY.
• Remember Gamergate?: The NYT goes deep on Gamergate 5 years on, and does a reasonable job of drawing the lines between the mass-mobilisation of gamers through 4Chan and Reddit and how the movement was cleverly, covertly coopted by a whole host of unsavoury people with unsavoury ideas in order to sow the seeds of the online far-right cesspit that occupies certain corners of the web in 2019. This is a genuinely good read, and something that’s worth sharing with people as a ‘this is how we got here’-type primer; there are parallels with the ideas raised in this viral Twitter thread from earlier in the week, about how boys are turning hard-right via meme culture, though fortunately the tone of the article is less tooth-grindingly smug than the thread was.
• The Other Article About #FBPE: The Guardian piece on the mental side of the Remain campaign got all the clicks this week, but I personally though this piece on Medium, by a Remain campaigner exasperated by the fcuking idiocy of so much of the wider mob, was a better read; this tells a more interesting story about why the campaign hasn’t had any actual proper public traction at all, despite its visibility (I mean, really, it hasn’t, and I say that as someone who thinks that Brexit is obviously an idiocy and who wishes it wouldn’t happen), how and why the left has once again fragmented, and what lessons campaigners can and should learn from it. Regardless of your politics or perspective, the responses to both this and the Guardian piece on Twitter illustrate both their points perfectly.
• Do We Create Shoplifters: This is a really fascinating piece about the unintended-consequences of automation, and the unseen value that human engagement in a process can bring, whether it be on a supermarket checkout or driving a car. Interesting, and made me think differently about automation and its value.
• Three Years of Misery at Google: Misery’s perhaps a strong word, but this article, all about Google’s travails as it attempts to manage its staff and its status as the de facto gatekeeper of information to the majority of the species, is a hell of a read. I wrote this somewhere else earlier this week, but I’ll reuse it here as, well, I’m lazy: “There is SO MUCH in this piece – Google as a microcosm of the increasingly-polarised post-2016 world, the impossibility of impartiality when you’re a company staffed by humans and whose existence is effectively predicated on managing/gatekeeping human knowledge, the way in which it’s been gamed by the right… I have a mate who used to work for Google bitd (he launched Gmail) and he once told me about being in a hot tub in Mountain View with Sergei or Larry, circa 2004. They were all *quite* fucked-up, and S or L whispered to him at a certain point “You know what, Scott? I have NO IDEA what I am doing”. Which sort of acts as a nice wrapper for much of what’s led us here tbqhwy”
• What Happened To Aung Sang Suu Kyi?: This is a really interesting piece, but also one which made me feel quite sad after reading it; it’s a reasonably sympathetic portrait of Suu Kyi, insofar as that’s possible, but very much paints a picture of a person whose saintliness increased in direct proportion to their time in isolation, and who perhaps was never the woman who the West believed and wanted her to be. More than anything, she emerges from this very much as a person who you would not fcuk with (which is a hugely banal assessment of a world leader, fine, but it’s also true).
• The Arrogance of the Anthropocene: All about how referring to the current age as ‘the anthropocene’ is maybe a case of humanity backing itself a bit too hard – the piece notes that previous ‘cenes’ have been geological era lasting millennia, and so to ascribe that suffix to a period so far lasting 400-odd years is a) a bit of a reach; and b) making some pretty strong assumptions about the length of time we as a species are likely to be hanging around for, which recent events might suggest are…punchy.
• Plastic Davos on a Boat: I mean, that’s not the actual title of the piece, but it’ll do. Soulbuffalo is a company that takes executives from major corporations on cruises to show them the realities of plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean, and then gets them together with envirionmentalists to talk about it and thrash out solutions. On the one hand, this sort-of sounds like a good idea, at least in terms of getting the individuals at the head of these companies to directly confront and engage with the issue; on the other, there’s an unpleasant whiff of corporate solutionism to all of this – there’s a line in here about how ‘Governments can’t fix this’ which really gets on my tits (MAYBE IF YOU ALL STARTED PAYING TAXES THEY PERHAPS COULD, EH?!?), and the idea that some bloke who runs EXXON is suddenly going to have a Damascene moment when confronted by a plastic-choked Minki strikes me as a touch on the fanciful side. More power to everyone trying to do stuff about all this, obvs, but I am not 100% convinced that this particular initiative is going to find the answer.
• The Thotshot Economy: Is…is this a thing? I mean, a real thing – I don’t doubt that there are some people who sell nudes to strangers to get a bit of extra cash, but is this actually a trend? Say it ain’t so. Or at least that’s my initial reaction – am I meant to think that this is somehow empowered rather than sad? I can’t help but be of the impression that flogging a snap of your tits for a stranger to dustily ejaculate over isn’t quite the glorious future of independent womanhood that the sisterhood envisaged, but I appreciate I am a middle-aged man and so my opinion is probably not one that counts here.
• Where’s The Toothpaste?: A truly VITAL enquiry into one of the great mysteries of the modern world – why do hotels NEVER offer complimentary toothpaste to guests? You can have all the soaps and the shampoos and the shower gels you like, but you try getting even a TINY comped tube of Crest in your Premier Inn or Malmaison. NEVER. This may sound like a staggeringly-dully premise for an article, but I promise that, as with nearly all investigations into large-scale logistics-type questions, this is actually really interesting and will make you want to break into the basement of the next big hotel you stay in to check out the gigantic shampoo filling stations.
• How Britain Killed the Aperol Spritz: Aperol Spritz is one of the marketing success stories on the past decade; the way the Italians have persuaded half the world that a bright orange drink which tastes mildly of earwax is the signifier of a BANGING SUMMER is nothing short of masterful (by contrast, their ad copy is fcuking horrendous and if any of you were responsible you should be ashamed. ‘Together We Joy’? Death’s too good for you). This piece looks at how the popularity of the (ersatz) export version has had unexpected negative consequences in Italy, and is a great example of how consumer capitalism has regular and actually quite predictable impact on the social/physical world.
• The UX Of Bongo: On why the Tube sites are designed and arranged as they are. It’s not exactly a spoiler to say that the answer is ‘to keep you alternately clicking and wnking’, but despite the fact that you already know the answer it’s an interesting read nonetheless.
• The Taco Bell Hotel: This is neither a particularly long or well-written article, but it is pretty much the perfect encapsulation of the weird state of fetishisation we’ve reached with certain brands. Honestly, SO much of this reads like everyone has been hypnotised into loving Taco Bell. I mean, look, read this and try and simultaneously hold on to the belief that no, actually everything is fine and this is all normal: “House music thrummed as guests lounged by the pool on hot sauce towels. Some were dressed in bathing suits with the word “fire” across the front; one piece of the Taco Bell merch available in the lobby gift shop along with sunglasses, shirts, shorts, pins, towels and pillows. Lauren Godwin, 19, from Los Angeles, said she cut a trip to Cancún, Mexico short to be at the hotel. “I had like a 10-hour drive to get here,” she said. “It’s [Taco Bell] definitely like a weekly basis almost daily basis kind of thing.” In the salon adjacent to the pool, hotel guests can get a Taco Bell manicure or a fade with the words “Taco Bell” or “Live Mas” or the outline of a fire lick shaved into the side of their heads.” You see? It’s not possible, is it? Everything is mad.
• My Wild Weekend at Fairycon: A classic of the ‘I went to a convention with a bunch of weirdos’ genre, this feels a bit like it’s punching down on occasion (although I feel for the author as it must be incredibly hard not to make at least gentle fun of a bunch of grown adults who sincerely believe that they commune with the faerie folk), but it’s also quite interesting on the why of all of this, and the extent to which people are turning to this sort of crazy nonsense (sorry, Faerie Folk, but, well, no) as a sort of buffer against the very sharp edges that reality appears to have right now.
• Baseball Mud: This is WONDERFUL. I had literally NO IDEA that every single Major League baseball game uses mud to take the shine off new balls – and that the mud all comes from one secret place, sourced by one bloke. This is so, so lovely and very silly indeed.Simone Biles: If you’ve not read it, this Twitter thread, breaking down exactly why Simone Biles’ latest jaw-dropping feats of athletic excellence are, well, jaw-dropping and excellent, is excellent – it does a great job of explaining what Biles is actually doing when she performs a triple-double, and showing you how the move evolved from early days of gymnastics, and making you appreciate that this woman is basically a tiny alien as there’s almost no way in hell that someone that small should be able to jump that high.
• Sealand: “Sealand was founded as a sovereign Principality in 1967 in international waters, seven miles off the eastern shores of Britain”, trumpets the Sealand Website. This is a great piece of writing, in which the author takes a trip to the Principality and chats to the man who lives there, alone, guarding it. This is so perfectly mad and British and feels lovely and quaint and odd until you remember where in time we are and you realise that this is just the one person’s ultimate Brexit. Still, a great read.
• Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors: Celebrated chef and author Michael Twitty writes about his experiences of working in kitchens at old plantations, as part of the ‘reenactments’ put on for tourist visitors, and how relates and reacts to the (mainly white) tourists who pass through, and what the very notion of historical reenactment of slavery means to a black person in the US. Such good writing.
• The Enduring Appeal of Trance: Back in those long-forgotten days when I was YOUNG and used to go clubbing all the time (it was the mid-90s, we did that sort of thing then because there was hope) and my music of choice was psy-trance; it wasn’t cool then, and it certainly isn’t cool now, but there was something about the speed (and, er, the speed) and the wibbly bits that really did it for me (the dogs on strings and the white people with dreads less so, but one learns to cope). Then trance got co-opted by the mainstream and became all happy and shiny and didn’t feel anywhere near as fun any more, so I sort of lost interest a bit. Still, I was heartened to read this retrospective of it and find that it’s still a thing – Jesus, I am listening to some as I type and I now REALLY want to get off my tits for 8 hours.
• The Basketballing Nun: This is a truly wonderful story, I promise you. Please read it, even if you think you have no interest at all in the story of a woman who gave up a career as a professional basketball player to join a convent; honestly, I nearly wept, this is SO SO NICE (and I mean that in the best possible way).
• Goats: This is an extract from a novel by Kevn Barrett, but the highest compliment I can pay it is that reading it – an excerpt conducting entirely in dialogue between two unnamed interlocutors – reminded me very, very strongly of certain conversations in DFW novels in which protagonists talk seriously and with increasing urgency about a scenario that is slowly revealing itself to be very, very odd indeed. This is, honestly, superb – don’t let the slightly odd formatting put you off, it’s a proper treat.

By Jemma Arts

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) Shardcore’s been messing around with the deepfakes again. Look what he’s done to Jacob Rees-Mogg:

2) Thanks Dan for pointing this out to me – I’m going to use his description because, well, because I’m lazy and I can: “New(ish) band, first album out next week and with a sort of pleasing video about a big red ball. Described by some as

‘Sounds of early Aphex Twin intertwined with Liquid Liquid repetitive groove climaxing in electronic Grumbling Fur folk’. Featuring none other than snooker legend Steve Davis. Not sure if that explains the red ball.” This is ace, though no idea at all about the Steve Davis thing:

3) This is by Lauren O’Connell, it’s called ‘Shimmering Silver’ and it is heartbreaking – honestly, this makes me cry each time I hear it and I’m deliberately not playing it while I type this as it will just set me off again. So, so beautiful:

4) HIPHOP CORNER! This is by Clipping – it ought to be a Hallowe’en song, as it’s PROPERLY sinister, but have it in August anyway. This is called ‘Nothing Is Safe’:

5) Finally in this week’s slightly-truncated selection of videos, this is a short animation called ‘The Box’. It’s 12m long, and it’s worth each and every second of that time – please do watch it, it’s SO good. And, er, THAT’S IT BYE I LOVE YOU BYE THANKS FOR READING AND SORRY THIS WEEK’S WAS A BIT ON THE LIGHTWEIGHT SIDE BUT I WILL MAKE IT UP TO YOU I LOVE YOU HAVE FUN AND TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES AND DON’T WORRY I AM SURE SUMMER WILL COME BACK AND I WILL SEE YOU NEXT WEEK AND TIL THEN WHY NOT SPEND YOUR TIME DOING THINGS YOU ACTUALLY ENJOY INSTEAD OF THINKING ABOUT ALL THE HARD BITS OF LIFE IF YOU CAN ANYWAY TAKE CARE I’M OFF I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE SEE YOU SOON BYE!:

HAPPY FRIDAY EVERYONE! What’s that? It’s not a happy Friday? You feel strangely anxious about the state of, well, everything, and it feels ever-so-slightly like things might be becoming, well, perhaps a tiny bit much?

WELCOME TO THE MODERNITY CLUB! In which every week you’re entitled to a surprise FREE GIFT of HORRORNEWS, which occasionally, as in weeks like the one just past, we get delivered in bulk! Membership is free – at least materially; the emotional cost is, well, incalculable! – but the only way of dissociating yourself from the organisation is through the discovery of time travel or death. Have a time!

Also, enjoy this week’s Web Curios – a fine selection of links which in the main will serve as some sort of soothing balm on the flayed skin of your psyche, and almost certainly won’t act in the same way as lemonjuice on papercuts, oh no siree! Just to warn you, by the way, there’s a small chance that there won’t be a Curios next week as on Sunday I am taking a WHIRLWIND trip to Rome for 48h to wish my Grandmother a happy 100th birthday; sadly, it being Italy, there’s no letter from the Queen; on the plus side, though, Nonna Angela can bask in the strange symmetry of Italy being a largely fascist nation as she reaches her centenary, much as it was (almost) when she was born! Anyway, as a result of that I might not have time to give the internet sufficient attention – rest assured, though, that normal service will be resumed in a fortnite at the latest. 

In the meantime, though, vafammocc a chi t’e mort’ to anyone who voted for That Man in the recent Tory leadership elections – no, please, DO translate it, I mean every fcuking word you utter fcuking cnuts.

This, is ever, is Web Curios – you asked for this, don’t forget. 

[OOH ALMOST FORGOT TWO PIECES OF IMPERICA STUFF FROM EDITOR PAUL:

• Please fill in the reader survey if you’ve not done so already he will be very appreciative (and if you all tell me to stop doing this, maybe you can all get your Friday afternoons back!)
• Imperica continues to seek PAID contributions to its next print magazine – DETAILS HERE!

Right, now on with the webspaff!

By Matthew Grabelsky

FIRST UP, WHY NOT EXPERIENCE THE GENUINELY ODD BUT QUITE BRILLIANT FULL ALBUM BY 100 GEKS WHOSE SINGLE I FEATURED IN THE VIDEOS LAST WEEK!

THE SECTION WHICH WOULD LIKE YOU ALL TO PROMISE THAT YOU WILL NEVER, EVER BUY SUBSCRIPTION TELLY THROUGH FACEBOOK:

• Yes, That’s Right, Telly Through Facebook!: Well, some telly. In America. But it’s still pretty big news; users in the US will be able to buy access to certain shows, from places like Tastemade and College Humor, through Facebook, with the platform taking a cut. Obviously makes all sorts of sense from a commercial point of view, but I’m pretty dead set against anything that a) gives the Big Blue Misery Factory more money; or b) keeps people locked within its ecosystem, and so for that reason I’m…er…going to rail ineffectually against it to no discernible end whatsoever!
• Instagram Rolling Out Easy ‘Instant Video’ Promo Creation: Indefatigable s*c**l m*d** sleuth Matt Navarra, a man so plugged into the networks that I am starting to wonder whether he’s cloned himself and has several of said clones installed under the floorboards in Menlo Park, spotted this new feature the other day; it’s not, seemingly, a universally-available thing, but following the Snapchat ‘we’ll make it as easy as possible to make half-decent ads because we know that for some reason most people still don’t quite ‘get’ the concept of vertical video in promos yet’-feature last week, it seems sensible that Insta would do something similar (plus ca fcuking change, eh?).
• Twitter’s Billboard Ad Campaign: This isn’t interesting or important – SO WHY ARE YOU FEATURING IT THEN? FFS Matt, this sort of attitude is why you’re not Ben Thompson, rolling around lasciviously on a bed of crisp fifties, dictating this newsletterblogthing whilst being fed peeled grapes by acolytes. It is, though, emblematic of how lazy all this stuff is; Twitter’s latest real-life ad campaign is all about the difference between people behave on Insta (all polished and fake) and how they behave on Twitter (all GOOFY AND FUN), using real-life Tweets to illustrate the example. This is annoying for two reasons: 1) anyone who has used Twitter at all over the course of the past three years or so can attest to the fact that ‘goofy and fun’ is not necessarily the overriding vibe of the platform these days; and 2) this is basically exactly the same creative as Snapchat’s recent anti-Insta campaign, all about how ‘real friends’ are on Snap, not Insta. GET SOME NEW FCUKING IDEAS FFS. Also, I thought Insta was all about authenticity and stuff in 2019? I don’t understand anything any more.
• TikTok Adds Giphy Integration: It is now “possible to import Giphy GIFs, specifically its animated Stickers, into TikTok posts, and at the same time, to be able to create new GIFs for Giphy based on what you are doing in TikTok”. I can’t be bothered to explain the exact mechanics of how this will work – look, trust me, read the original explanation and you’ll understand, it’s not exactly interesting – but it’s worth being aware of this as another reason to potentially get involved with Giphy as a platform, if you’re a brand or organisation which lends itself to gifs.
• Live AR Directions Now(ish) on Google Maps: I am SO excited to try this out, but this particular update is yet to reach me; we will all soon be able to get AR directions in Google Maps, thereby (in theory at least) ensuring we will never again be in situations like I was yesterday afternoon when I got very, very lost trying to find Barnet train station after a pitch. The idea with this is that you can hold your phone up and see AR overlays pointing you in the direction of your destination; the reason I’m including it in here is to get you thinking about all of the inevitable ways in which you’ll eventually be able to buy ads in this space – because you will, obviously.
• Pinterest Adds a Couple of New Features: You can tell I’m sort-of phoning this section in this morning, can’t you? Sorry, I promise I’ll muster up more enthusiasm once we’re done with the worky-type stuff. Anyway, this is news that Pinterest is getting an updated product recommendation service, as well as offering retailers a…oh, here: “Pinterest is adding an updated shopping section below Pins from certain businesses, which will showcase expanded brand catalogs based on the items you’ve shown an interest in.” There. Happy? Of course you’re not.
• Voyant Tools: One of several things in here sent to me by Josh this week, for which THANKS, Voyant Tools is an interesting site which lets you conduct corpus analysis on any website or set of website you care to feed it, giving you snapshot views of main words used, frequency and the like. It’s *quite* wonky, but it could be useful for doing toplevel analysis of specific clusters of sites around certain topics.
• Cities Talk Back: Lyft is still trying to compete with Uber, and has obviously decided that ‘we’re a lot less awful than they are and we care about stuff’ is the strategic route to go down; hence this site, putting it squarely in the anti-Trump camp by celebrating the many, many immigrants that make up its driverbase, and telling their stories through this nicely-made, if *slightly* cheesy, site (scroll out on landing – OH LOOK IT’S THE IMMIGRANTS ALL MAKING UP THE AMERICAN FLAG DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY’VE DONE THERE?!?). The company’s also donating to immigrant friendly organisations, and is inviting riders to round up the cost of their fares to do the same, which is generally A Good Thing.
• The Love Island Job: Look, I am not going to judge you – I know that for one of you this is the absolute DREAM gig. Would you like to be ‘Head of Client Partnerships’ for Love Island at ITV? Would you like to be the person negotiating the deals with Boohoo and…er…whatever other brands want some of that sweet Love Island action (I am so far outside the target demographic for this that I can’t even conceive of what they would be. Clairol? Kleenex? A variety of regional lip filler clinics?)? Would you like to be within touching distance of the next set of pituitary meatheads to be held up as the Platonic idea of love (as imagined by Mattel)? YES YOU WOULD! The application process closes on Monday 12 August (if you’re reading this via the Curiobot on Twitter then you are sadly too late), so if you have ‘Experience of working in a Senior Account Management/Account Director role either Advertising Agency/Creative agency or media owner’, and a ‘Passion and interest for Love Island as a format’ then FILL YOUR BOOTS.

By Hans Vandekerckhove

NEXT UP, HAVE SOME EXCELLENT UK HIPHOP FROM NOTTINGHAM MC JUGA-NAUT

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY TERRIFIED THAT A NOVEMBER ELECTION WOULD SECURE ANOTHER FIVE YEARS OF TORY GOVERNMENT AND, REALLY, CAN WE JUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN PLEASE, PT.1:

• Hey From The Future: This is an interesting idea that feels like it could have been a project for a charity or campaign, but is seemingly simply a hobby project which makes me like it more. The concept is simple – anyone can log onto the site, pick an age, and (presuming you’ve registered an account) leave a message for anyone else, giving advice to people of that age that you wish you’d known at that point in your life (not quite sure who the methuselan (it may not be a word, but it should be) people are living life tips for 81 year olds, but you GO you hoary old scholars of existence!). You don’t have to write anything – you can just browse the advice left by others, which range from the irritatingly trite to the genuinely moving, and overall the whole project is gently, quietly, almost sadly lovely. It’s a genuine shame that I can’t imagine any actual teenagers ever stumbling across this site, as there’s some solid advice in there for the 365 Stories: What a wonderful project this is. Matt Zurbo is an author who is also a new father, and who in the first flush of love and excitement at his new daughter decided that he would, selflessly, embark on a mission to write 365 short children’s stories and place them online for free for anyone else to find and read. These are perfectly ready to read as they are, but Zurbo has also included art direction alongside the stories, to allow either for parents with an artistic bent to potentially create illustrated versions for their kids, or for kids themselves to get a bit of a framework should they want to do it themselves. SO CUTE, and the sort of thing you could perhaps co-opt if you were the right sort of kid-facing brand (or, alternatively, we could accept the lovely selflessness of Zurbo’s vision and maybe stop trying to turn everytyhing good into advermarketingpr, thereby ruining it forever. Maybe that’s better).
• Squad: A NEW TEEN SENSATION IN APP-LAND! Well, maybe – I can’t vouch for the veracity of this claim, what with not in fact being a teenager or being in regular contact with any, but I’ve seen it mentioned a few times this week as being the HOT THING, especially for girls, and so feel honour-bound to mention it to you. Squad’s gimmick is that it allows for live screensharing with your mates, the idea being that you can collaboratively watch stuff, shop, etc, in social fashion with your SQUAD. Or, and maybe I’m just being cynical about kids and what they are like, engage in some really spectacularly cruel bullying by collaboratively working on the best ways to torture people in DM conversations and the like. No obvious commercial use for this for brands, at least not that I can conceive of right now, but interesting as a potential trend.
• The ONS GeoDataViz Gallery: Another one from Josh (THANKS JOSH), this is a quite wonderful and slightly silly VR/FPS-style gallery website put together by the Office of National Statistics, presenting a virtual space in which you can wonder round and check out a variety of cartographic works that have been commissioned by their Dataviz team. I have literally no idea why this was created, or indeed why the developers saw fit to include a very weird and slightly shonky ‘footsteps’ sound effect to accompany your passage through this non-existent museum of cartographical wonder, but I am very glad it’s a thing. Why is there a digital bin in there? WHY???
• Favejet: This is a really interesting idea, and potentially useful for journalists looking to snoop on famouses PROBLEMATIC FAVES (is that still a thing that we care about? Possibly, in celebrityland at least). “When you follow someone on FaveJet you follow their faves: tweets they’re faving, starring or liking (it’s all the same). And in turn, they can follow yours. There’s no recommendation algorithm telling you what you’ll like — just a stream of interesting tweets, made easy to follow.” Useful for picking diamonds from the stream of effluvia that is the TL, or indeed for keeping a gentle eye on who’s attempting to gently chirpse who.
• Some Words For Me: Have you ever thought “Ooh, I ought to keep a diary, that’ll be something interesting to read back in a few years and maybe I can track my moods and be all mindful about stuff” and then realised that bothering to keep a diary is in fact really hard and requires a not-insignificant degree of commitment and dedication and, frankly, life’s too short? Well NO MORE! This is a really clever service; you simply tell it to email or text you at a specific time each day; you then reply to that message with whatever you want to say, and it will magically be compiled into a journal for you, which you can access at any time. Regardless of the fact that I think that this is being touted as some sort of appalling WELLNESS thing (I hate wellness and embrace sickness, fundamentally, like some sort of really rubbish goth who didn’t quite get the wardrobe memo), it’s a very neat, simple idea and worth a look if you either fancy keeping a diary or want something to send you a daily, nudge-y reminder to JUST FCUKING WRITE SOMETHING.
• Earbuds: This feels like it could potentially be huge if the sports people get on board. The gimmick behind Earbuds is a really simple one – wouldn’t it be awesome if you could hear all the playlists that your favourite famouses were listening to? NOW YOU CAN IT’S SO EXCITING. It’s been set up by a former NFL player amongst others, meaning that there are a few US sporting famouses on board already, sharing their pre- and post-game/workout/concussion mixes with their adoring fans – the idea of being effectively stream your playlist live is the smart bit here, with the obvious gimmick of allowing fans to experience the same pre-game buildup as their heroes (transpose ‘pre-game’ for ‘pre-gig’, ‘pre-premiere’, ‘pre-awards’, ‘pre-lipo’, etc etc). Will be interested to see if it takes off.
• Certified Artificial: Do any of you notice the RUNNING GAGS that pepper Curios each week? Do any of you care that there are several that I have been doing for LITERALLY A DECADE? No, you don’t, do you. FFS. Anyway, those few of you who do pay close attention to the tortured prose every week may have noticed that I have taken to annotating mentions of AI with the regular bracketed caveat ‘NOT IN FACT AI’, to convey my…skepticism about much of what is being passed off as THE MAGICAL POWER OF THE MACHINE MINDS. This is a joke website which makes a semi-serious point – to whit, that there’s absolutely no accepted definition of what ‘AI’ is in a variety of contexts, and as such it means any old charlatan can claim to be using it for snake-oil gain. The gimmick is that Certified Artificial will independently verify the artificial nature of the intelligence behind your company and give you an actual proper badge to display online – all for a mere $1500! Genuinely do hope they get a few sincere enquiries.
• Alulu: Kickstarter baffles me. This is absolutely the sort of project I expected to be 10x funded, and yet here it is with under a week to go, staring down the barrel of failure (fine, their $300k goal was perhaps a bit punchy, but DREAM BIG KIDS!). Anyway, me linking this here is likely pointless as a result of the not-insignificant shortfall in funds they’re currently facing, but the idea is wonderful. Alulu is a camera which prints in black and white on thermal paper (the sort that receipts are printed on), creating a lo-fi effect reminiscent of the late, lamented Berg’s Little Printer project from a decade or so back (which I have, in searching for it, just discovered has been sort-of resurrected! Huzzah!) – I LOVE this, and am genuinely sad that it will probably never exist.
• Frankenbook: This is a project from last year, but which exists online in perpetuity for anyone to try out – Frankenbook was a collaborative reading project launched by Arizona State University, and which lives on as a website collecting the full text, along with the notes and annotations of other readers, which you can explore and add to as you wish. The interface is simple but really, really clean, letting you toggle people’s annotations on and off at will so you can read the text uncluttered if you will; I love this, and sort-of like the idea of there being a future in which we could in theory read all books like this, with access to the marginalia of every past reader, kept forever.
• Amazon Can Now Mimic Human Speech In Newsreader Style: “At AWS re:Invent 2016, we announced Polly, a managed service that turns text into lifelike speech, allowing customers to create applications that talk, and build entirely new categories of speech-enabled products. Zero machine learning expertise required: just call an API and get the job done! Since then, the team has regularly added new voices, for a current total of 29 languages and 59 voices. Today, we’re happy to announce two major new features for Polly: Neural Text-To-Speech, and a groundbreaking newscaster style.” This is quite incredible; the way it nails the cadence of newsreader speech – the slightly exaggerated inflection and emphasis – is uncanny. It still sounds fake but…only just.
• ADIFO: Or, as it really ought to be called (Christ’s sakes, lads, LISTEN TO THE PR HERE) “THE FLYING SAUCER YOU ALWAYS DREAMED OF!” ADIFO is a Romanian (I think) project which has created an actual, honest-to-goodness working, miniatture flying saucer, controlled by remote control. This is a video of it flying and OH MY GOD it is so cool. Fcuk drones, basically, is my takeaway from this (that and ‘can someone please source me one of these?’) – just IMAGINE the fun you could have doing twilight flybys with one of these.
• Ownersman: I don’t know why you’d need a website which collects complete scans of owners manuals from a variety of different cars, but, just in case you do, this is that very website. If nothing else, you could probably use this to train a neural net to write a car manual for you, though why on earth you’d want to is beyond me.
• Eiko Ojala: Eiko Ojala is designer working between New Zealand and Estonia, and whose work has a wonderful, distinctive style, using layers and cut-outs to give weight and depth to his creations. Honestly, this stuff is wonderful and I would commission stuff by them in a heartbeat.
• The Banana Hill Avatar Design Contest: Banana Hill was a very odd, semi-internet-famous cartoon from a few years back, which mined that very particular Adult Swim/Cartoon Network style of surrealism to reasonable effect (it’s not really my sort of thing, but your mileage may vary). Its creator is planning on making a sequel – here’s the synopsis: “Banana Hill 2 is an adult sequel/pilot episode I plan on releasing by midnight 12/31. We follow 3 friends as they surf the deep cryptic depths of a virtual internet explorer known as WoobWorldz in search for an ancient relic.” As part of the ‘virtual internet explorer’ vibe, they are asking people to create avatars for such a virtual world, which will be included in the final animation to create the sort of early-00s vibe required. If you’re an artist or designer this might be a nice, fun side-project – if nothing else, the Twitter thread linked to at the top of this entry showcases some pretty odd submissions from others which are worth scrolling through.
• Vole: STEPHEN! Ahem. Vole (or, to give it its full name, Vole.wtf) is a site by Matt Round which collects a bunch of silly internet projects in one place – a text generator for websites that uses song lyrics from old kids’ tv shows, a silly little ‘Knight’s Move’ game featuring David Hasselhoff…basically it’s just a bunch of 30s internet amusements, which is EXACTLY what the web was invented for (don’t @ me, Tim).
• Decent: Another Kickstarter, but this one’s met its goal with 9 days to go. Decent is a really interesting idea, and I’m fascinated to see what it ends up looking like – it’s a men’s magazine, created by women, which aims to present a different, more nuanced idea of masculinity than that normally showcased by the more traditional mens’ press. Thank Christ – if I see one more fcuking magazine telling me how Steve McQueen is a style icon, which whiskies I ought to be into as a REAL MAN, what gadgets I must have (because I am a MAN and I love technology and STUFF), and what the one massively overcomplicated dish is that I should master to demonstrate my culinary skills in order to get laid, it will be TOO SOON. Their manifesto sounds genuinely appealing – take a look “We promise you won’t find luxury watches, expensive cars, or protein ball recipes. Just a coffee-table magazine (for the lack of a better buzzword) packed with inspirational people, candid conversation and interesting, fresh perspectives.” About time tbh.
• Subway Nut: Have YOU always hankered after “a website that is dedicated to rail based transit systems and trains in the United States and Canada, and whose goal is to have a photo essay of every station on every system”? ME TOO!

By Katherine Le Hardy

WHY NOT TRY THIS SUPREMELY ECLECTIC MIX BY STEFANO SKOUL? IT’S VERY GOOD, HONEST!

THE SECTION WHICH IS SLIGHTLY TERRIFIED THAT A NOVEMBER ELECTION WOULD SECURE ANOTHER FIVE YEARS OF TORY GOVERNMENT AND, REALLY, CAN WE JUST NOT LET THAT HAPPEN PLEASE, PT.2:

• The Brick Experiment Channel: I got a message from a friend of mine the other day, who’s on holiday with his wife and kid and extended family, saying something along the lines of “if I have to hear that fcuking YouTuber’s fcuking voice one more fcuking time I swear to god my sister’s kid’s are going to die by my bare hands” (I’m paraphrasing, but only slightly). If you too are staring down the barrel of summer holidays dominated by the endless jingle of whatever YT horrorshow your sticky little darlings are currently obsessed by, why not consider showing them the Brick Experiment Channel, which does all sorts of incredibly cool LEGO builds and which are BLISSFULLY free of any annoying voice-over work whatsoever. Practically zen-like, this stuff.
• A Visit to Mount Fanjing: A wonderful collection of images of the UNESCO World Heritage site at Mount Fanjing, which encompasses several temples and some jaw-dropping views. No, really, I promise you this is utterly incredible.
• Mark E Books: A Twitter bot which uses a GPT-2 network trained on some Mark E Smith lyrics and which churns out some pretty wonderful approximations of The Fall every hour or so. You may think this is nonsense, but if you’ve ever spent any time listening to The Fall you’ll get quite how wonderful this is – “It is a new rite of spring… / And I am…. / I am…lympic gold medallist” could well be off Hex Enduction Hour, for example.
• The Hathi Trust Library: Another raft of books from the past century recently entered into the public domain through one of those occasional quirks of copyright law; as part of my reading around that this week, I stumbled across the Hathi Trust Library, which is slowly amassing an incredible collection of out-of-copyright texts, here collected in full. There is SO MUCH in here – literally thousands of texts, full novels to textbooks to cookbooks – and if you’re a bibliophile I urge caution because you could easily get lost in here and never emerge. The Hethi Library will continue to be updated over time; this one’s very much worth bookmarking and returning to periodically to see what new gems they’ve uploaded.
• Typography Resources: You want typography resources? YOU GOT TYPOGRAPHY RESOURCES! Lots of useful stuff here for designers in a helpfully-curated series of lists.
• The Big Face Project: This is all in Japanese, and, whilst you could use the magic of Google to render it comprehensible, I personally think it benefits from being seen entirely bereft of context. WHY IS THE PERSON BEHIND IT OBSESSED WITH CREATING THINGS THAT MAKE THEIR FACE BIGGER? Regardless, if you’ve ever wanted instructions on how to make an oddly-geometric giant papercraft mask of your own face, or a FACE ENLARGING HELMET-BOX (and which of us hasn’t?!), this is very much the website for you.
• Misskin: You probably don’t need or want to know this about me, but I am pretty much littered with moles, including one particularly-fetching example slap-bang in the middle of my ‘damp toilet paper draped over a toastrack’ chest, giving the impression of a third nipple, or an excellent target for the epi-pen should I ever overdose. If you too are a VERY MOLEY PERSON, this app might be useful; if helps you track your blemishes, letting you monitor their size and track changes in their appearance to guard against the skin cance. Sadly doesn’t feature the ability to map all your moles and then play a game of virtual ‘join the dots’ on your own body, but perhaps that’s version 1.72.
• By The People: I love crowdsourced projects like this – the LIbrary of Congress in the US is seeking help transcribing all its old documents in order to be able to better digitise and preserve its archive; this website links out to all the different individual projects currently going on as part of this initiative, and lets you leap in to reading and transcribing documents from the US Civil War, the woman’s suffrage movement and a whole host of other moments in history. It’s interesting, as an aside, that despite the huge advances in automation that have been made in terms of digitising large corpuses of work, things like this that deal with handwritten materials are still slightly beyond current ML capabilities.
• Tiny Animals on Fingers: Your new favourite subReddit. So many VERY SMOL animals! SUCH TINY LIZARDS!
• Octopus Holdings: I really, really don’t get what this is or why it exists – I presume it’s a clever coding thing, but, really, I don’t care; I am just enamoured of the fact that I can now create images of an emoji octopus triumphantly holding up whatever I tell it to. Navigate to the url – now add /XXX to the end of it, where ‘XXX’ is…whatever you like! If there’s an emoji of it, the octopus will now be holding said emoji! Magic! Beautifully, this stacks – try multiple /XXXX/XXXX variants and see what emerges. I have no idea what you might do with this, but if nothing else you can amuse yourself by emailing your colleagues a massive stack of emoji cake or something.
• The Warfield Autograph Room: According the the blurb on the site, the Warfield is a music venue in San Francisco which opened in 1922 and since then has played host to pretty much every musical act of note over the past century. One of the venue’s gimmicks is its ‘autograph room’, which over the years has become plastered with the scrawled leavings of musicians from all over the world, some famous, some infamous, most of whom you will never have heard of – the theatre offers a wonderful high-def 360 view of said room, and it is very easy to lose yourself panning and zooming and trying to find your favourite’s signatures – no idea who it’s by, but my personal favourite is the one happily announcing that you now find yourself in ‘Buttface County’, but do pick your own.
• The Ghost in the MP3: I can’t possibly explain this better than the person who made it, so I shan’t try: “”moDernisT” was created by salvaging the sounds lost to mp3 compression from the song “Tom’s Diner”, famously used as one of the main controls in the listening tests to develop the MP3 encoding algorithm. Here we find the form of the song intact, but the details are just remnants of the original. Similarly, the video contains only material which was left behind during mp4 compression.” This is such an odd, wonderful idea; it creates something that is almost entirely, but not quite exactly unlike the original song, and yet in which you can sort of catch the echoes of Suzanne Vega. Wonderful, eerie, strange, and very much not the sort of thing that anyone will thank you for putting on the office Sonos.
• The Club: This is very, very odd, and you won’t understand what’s going on. It’s a sort-of surreal MMO-type shared in-browser web experience…thing, which also is a sort of musical project which lets anyone download a sample pack and use said pack to create music which you can upload and which will then be played as part of The Club’s soundtrack…it’s aesthetically not a million miles away from that VR social network playground thing whose name I forget (you know, the one with all the weirdly-racist echidna avatars – WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT MEANS NOTHING TO YOU?!? FFS), and whilst this is a total mess and quite jarringly weird, it’s also sort-of perfect for those exact reasons.
• Enby: Enby is the first sex toy I’ve seen that’s designed semi-explicitly for bodies in transition or who consider themselves gender-fluid, and whose shape makes it able to be used in a variety of different configurations depending on what works best for you or your partner. It’s also the first sex toy I’ve seen that looks like a cross between a cute stingray and a bicycle seat, but that’s by-the-by.
• Rollhill: Fun, timewasting game of the week #1! This is Rollhill, a game in which you play a tire, rolling down a variety of hills, as quickly as you can. Strangely addictive.
• AI Dungeon: Fun, timewasting game of the week #2! AI Dungeon is a…oh, here you go: “AI Dungeon is an AI generated text adventure that uses deep learning to create each adventure. It uses OpenAI’s new GPT-2 model, which has 117 million parameters, to generate each story block and possible action. The first couple sentences of AIDungeon and the action verbs are handcrafted, but everything else is not. For each choice that is made, the initial prompt, the last story block, and the last action are fed into the neural network. The resulting story and action options are then output by the model.” This is in the main nonsensical, but just coherent enough to make it fun to play around in; some of the scenarios or options it throws up are quite wonderfully obtuse.
• A Small World Cup: Fun, timewasting game of the week #3! Last of the miscellaneous links this week, and it’s a cracker – Small World Cup pits you against the computer or another player – the goal is to score…er…goals, by hurling your miniature footballman at the ball while your opponent does the same, and you both attempt to flail the sphere into the onion bag. This is VERY silly, but practically-perfect as a way of filling in the hour before you can reasonably slope off to the pub.

By Mark Powell

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THE FABULOUS ONE PUT TOGETHER FOR LAST WEEK’S EDITION OF THE ‘LOVE WILL SAVE THE DAY’ NEWSLETTER, WHICH, HONESTLY, REALLY IS WORTH SUBSCRIBING TO; THIS IS ACE!

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Talking Heads: You want a Tumblr dedicated solely to content about Talking Heads? What? You have no idea who Talking Heads are? FFS, children!
• Album Cover Cover: This is a lovely project, by art director Bruno Ribeiro, in which he sets himself the task of knocking up a new album cover for a certain album, in the time it takes him to listen to said album from start to finish. I’ve got a real thing for artistic projects undertaken within specific constraints like this, and the pleasingly symmetrical nature of this is very satisfying.
• Aircon 1000: Photographs of massive aircon units from Japan. Why? If you have to ask you will never understand.
• Classical Art Memes: The sort of gentle memery which feels oddly out of place in 2019.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Homesick Dot Com: I’m sure that many of you will feel there’s a strong whiff of ‘never happened’ about this Insta feed, collecting letters sent home from Summer camp by (often but not always) homesick kids, but I don’t care – lots of these made me laugh like a drain, and many more of them made me think that perhaps I ought to rebook that vasectomy.
• Gandyworks: James Nolan Gandy describes himself as a ‘drawing machinist’, which as far as I can tell means that he makes intricate pen-and-ink drawings created with Spirograph-style machines he builds himself. I would buy these in a heartbeat (there’s a link to his site on the profile if anyone fancies getting me a present).
• Wblut: The feed of Frederik Vanhoutte, who I can across as a result of his spectacular geometric animations, where he shows three-dimensional shapes being sliced and spun across various axes to create wonderful, abstract black and neon designs. Honestly, these are SO GOOD.
• Emperor Wee: Kenze Wee is a game designer and pixel artist; their feed is full of gorgeous little pixel illustrations, created with unusual artistry.
• Alberto Russo: Russo is a Swiss (I think – or Swiss-based, at least) artist, whose feed is a selection of his works; his style is weirdly familiar, perhaps as it’s reminiscent of several of the people who drew Dylan Dog in the 80s. If that means nothing to you, think strong lines, etched shading and a vaguely 70s Euro aesthetic to the whole thing.
• Gurme Antepli: Baklava. Lots of baklava.
• Ipnot: The most incredible embroidery work you will ever see, which may sound like hyperbole but I promise you really isn’t.
• Hungry: The description here is ‘distorted drag’, which is pretty-much perfectly right if you ask me. Such an amazing aesthetic here, and not a million miles away from the ‘Oligarchs’ CGI video which I featured last week and which you OBVIOUSLY all watched.
• Jedy Vales: To the ranks of Lil Miquela and the other CG influencers/models so in vogue with the fashion world at the moment we can now add Jedy Vales, the world’s first CG bongo star on Instagram! Created by Pr0nhub (who else? Really, some of the best marketing IN THE WORLD right now – so much so that I am now using it completely straight-facedely as my go-to example when people ask me ‘who’s doing good digital stuff these days, Matt?’, mainly as they tend to get quite embarrassed and then leave me alone). This is…odd, though as Shardcore pointed out over Slack, this is obviously just a precursor to the character appearing in actual bongo on the site. I don’t understand the future any more, and nor indeed do I really want to.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG (AND WHICH AS A SPECIAL BONUS WOULD LIKE TO OFFER YOU THIS PIECE LINKING TO 10 CLASSIC SHORT STORIES ONLINE, ALL OF WHICH ARE GENUINELY GREAT EXAMPLES OF THE GENRE)!:

• Bellingcat and El Paso: It’s impossible not to start this week’s longreads without some reflections on last weekend’s shootings in the US; this first piece did the rounds in the immediate aftermath of the El Paso shooting, and is Bellingcat’s typically thorough and reasoned analysis of how it links in to the recent pattern of incidents born of 8chan and other extremist communities online, and what clues or learnings one can take from the way in which said communities foster, encourage and lionise actors such as these. It’s…bleak.
• Pandering: Or, to give the piece it’s actual title, “Where listening to the concerns of racists has got us”. An excellent piece of writing about exactly why every time we make accommodations for the arguments of racists, we go one small step towards legitimising the points of view that they hold, and why as a result it is an important and necessary act to demonstrate wherever possible that ‘being a racist’ is not a valid position worthy of debate or consideration.
• The Savant: Ordinarily I would have put this further down the list – it’s very much on the less-newsy end of the spectrum, more storytelling than journalism – but it fits rather nicely amongst the pieces about last weekend’s Bad Things. US Cosmopolitan tells the…frankly not 100% believable, if I’m honest, tale of a mysterious, anonymous woman living in a nondescript part of semi-suburban America who is some sort of one-woman anti-misogynistic-hatecrime taskforce. The article’s subject spends her time immersed in anti-female communities, monitoring the conversations and keeping a running list of those men she considers most likely to go full assault weapon; apparently she’s been responsible for foiling ‘several’ incidents by dint of her extraordinary nose for these things. This is a very, very strange piece indeed – the tone sort of breathlessly fangirly and hagiographic – but certainly an interesting one.
• Rituals of Childhood: The last piece this week to explicitly address the shootings, this is a devastating essay by Kieran Healy, about how one of the oddest things about US attitudes to their problem with death-by-firearm is the odd accommodation they have made with ‘kids potentially getting murdered whilst at school’, and how the normalisation and ritualisation of the teaching process around shootings is quite, quite horrific when you stop and think about it for more than approximately 3 seconds.
• Tulsi Gabbard: I confess to having largely stopped giving much of a fcuk about the US Democratic nomination because a) it already appears to have been going on for several decades; and b) it’s increasingly clear to me that That Man is very likely to win again (I am very much hoping here by skill at predicting the future in 2019 is as on-point as it was back in 2015); and c) there’s quite a lot going on over here as well, frankly. Still, this profile of Tulsi Gabbard briefly reignited my interest – Gabbard’s a candidate whose anti-interventionist rhetoric has attracted a lot of support from a range of sources, but most prominently a bunch of alt-right adjacent Silicon Valley types (that’s basically what we’re calling Dorsey now, right?). As with all profiles of US politicians, the main takeaway from here is quite how far away from being anyone’s idea of a normal person Gabbard seems.
• How We Got Social Credit Wrong: Tonally-confusing piece from WIRED, this, which on the one hand tells us that everyone in the West has totally overblown the scary, creepy Orwellian nature of China’s social credit system, that in fact there are massive gaps in the panopticon, and that it’s more a load of local administrations messing around with systems to see what works than a whole national-level surveillance-and-control system, whilst on the other making it very clear that all this stuff is very much leading up to something that sounds exactly like the sort of sinister system we all thought it was when we first read about it 2 years ago. I don’t think that the piece is quite the reassuring pat on the arm the author thinks it is, fundamentally.
• Jeffrey Epstein: Andrew O’Hagan in the LRB, writing a short piece about the Epstein case which touches upon the thing I found most troubling about it; the recent Carl Beech story, and Pizzagate, and the other mad-seeming conspiracies about CELEBRITY PAEDO RINGS IN HOLLYWOOD and the rest, all start to sound a little less mad when you consider that that is apparently exactly what Epstein was doing, in plain sight. It seems pretty much certain now that he really was running some sort of international abuse ring, which suddenly makes a lot of the other stuff seem…well, still quite mad, obviously, but you can imagine the hay being made with this amongst the faction of people who’ll quite happily discuss the Clinton’s vampiric tendencies. Troubling.
• How Rising Sea Levels Will Affect Asian Cities: Thanks again, Josh, for pointing me at this rather wonderful (and, if you’re an city-dweller in Asia, not a little worrying) longread/dataviz looking at what’s likely to happen to large urban centres in Asia should predicted climate change occur.
• The Cartographers of North Korea: Another lovely longread/dataviz piece, this time looking at the people who secretly help mapping services get a picture of the murderously-secretive DPRK.
• Quibi: This was totally new to me, I confess – apparently entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenburg is set to launch a new shortform video service called Quibi next year, which he sees as presenting high-quality commissioned episodic content designed to be viewed in bitesize chunks on mobile. This isn’t launching til April 2020, but it sounds…serious: “With $1 billion in the bank and a goal of releasing some 7,000 pieces of content during Quibi’s first year, Katzenberg has been on a buying spree for the mobile-only platform. In June and July alone, Quibi has revealed no fewer than 20 new projects from partners that include Tyra Banks, Darren Criss, Rashida Jones and Veena Sud. They join previously announced efforts from Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Jason Blum, Jennifer Lopez and Anna Kendrick.”
• Not-Alt Meat: An overview of the non-meat industry, specifically Impossible and Beyond Meat, which posits that we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the market for faked animal proteins. The main point here – which I confess I had never thought of before, but which struck me as blindingly obvious as soon as I read it – is that the quality of actual meat currently used in mass-catering (burger joints, hotdogs, Taco fcuking Bell, etc) is so low that these substitutes are already an upgrade in terms of user experience (taste, mouthfeel, etc), and as they become cheaper there is literally no reason why huge swathes of the fast food industry wouldn’t switch them them instead of dead cows or pigs. Might invest (I won’t invest).
• Obscure Plug-In Consoles: Not an essay, this, or at least not in the traditional sense – instead it’s a VERY LONG Twitter thread about the weird trend for those ‘plug it into your TV and play a range of shonky videogames’-type controller things that were popular in the 90s/00s; fine, it’s a *bit* niche, but if you’re interested in games and their history, this is a fascinating footnote.
• The Birth of the Semi-Colon: I love the semi-colon, some (regular readers, my employers, anyone who has to correspond with me for any length of time) would say too much. Regardless, this short piece explains its genesis, and confirms, should any have you been in any doubt, exactly when to use it: “It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon” SEE? PERFECTLY CLEAR.
• Samuel L Jackson and Deep Blue Sea: My girlfriend is obsessed with sharks, to the point that she would quite like to be eaten to death by one (she assures me this isn’t a sex thing, but, well, readers, I have my concerns), and therefore she probably knew all about the iconic ‘Sam Jackson gets eaten’ death scene from the film Deep Blue Sea. I didn’t, though, and had no idea it was some sort of cult thing; this piece is a really enjoyable oral history about how and why it turned out the way it did. Most interesting for me is the light it shines on the sausagemaking process; I had no idea that stuff like this happened when making films, with entire movies being recut to create a completely new, tonally different end-product. Fascinating. Still no interest in seeing Deep Blue Sea, though, sorry Saz.
• The Egg is Bigger Than Before: Partly about a very odd egg ‘hack’ that did the rounds of the web last week, but more about the very, very strange world of 5-Minute Crafts, the YouTube channel that seemingly churns out hundreds of utterly bizarre yet totally compelling ‘hack’-type videos, featuring ‘tips’ that are best useless and at worst genuinely unsettling. What’s interesting about stuff like this – to me, at least – is the extent to which YouTube is ferreting out quite a lot of mass-humanity psychological quirks; who could possibly have known before the advent of this sort of thing that millions of people would really, really enjoy being shown 27 totally pointless things you can make with Coca Cola?
• Endlings: As a result of this article I this week learned that the name for the final living example of a species is an ‘endling’. An endling! How INCREDIBLY poignant! Do you remember the film ‘The Flight of the Navigator’? OF COURSE YOU DO! Remember the impossibly-cute big-eyed worm creature thingy that the kid befriends about the ship? Now think of it as an endling (which it was) – doesn’t that make you want to weep a bit? Anyway, this is about the scientists seeking to preserve some of the last examples of particular species of snails and, well, I might have done a bit of a well-up at this one.
• Lake Duck Pond: A lovely, wholesome example of online creativity, this piece is all about a subReddit about the totally fictitious town and community of Lake Duck Pond, which doesn’t exist and never has done, but has a committed and lively bunch of residents who assiduously roleplay the town’s existence as some sort of weird collaborative online community theatre project. This is wonderful, and the sort of thing that might make you think that the internet is sort-of ok, at least for a few hours.
• Ivanka Aeternum: One of two quite remarkable personal profiles this week, this one focuses on Ivanka Trump and seeks to scry the woman behind the hair/smile. It’s a pretty brutal piece, full of unnamed sources queueing up to paint Ivanka as a strange, contradictory rich kid desperate for her father’s love and who could end up doing quite literally anything in the world once he leaves office, including, perhaps, running herself. Quite jaw-droppingly strange in places, in the manner only profiles of the very, very rich manage to be.
• Imran Khan – Sport, Power, Women: It’s a very silly title, but it’s also apt given the tripartite obsession of this profile of the Pakistani Prime Minister – it’s a wonderful series of anecdotes and observations, and paints a wonderful portrait of Khan as a sort of playboy-swordsman-mystic-savant, but MAN does it lay it on thick about the ladies; you can almost hear the author salivating slightly as he enumerates the Khan conquests. Fun, but an odd sort of stylistic throwback too.
• Coney Island: I’ve never visited Coney Island when in New York, and have no particular connection to the place outside of its mythologised appearances in many of my favourite novels, but this essay about the magic of the place is one of the best pieces of writing in terms of pure style that I’ve read in months.
• London Swings! Again!: Thanks SO MUCH to Charlotte for sending me this – it is Vanity Fair’s 1997 cover story about SWINGING LONDON, penned in the pre-Blair period when everything seemed exciting and pregnant with promise, and it is EVERTHING. It seems so far away, for a start, and whilst I appreciate the breathless style is an authorial affectation meant to evoke the 60s that the piece is making parallels with it’s also a weirdly effective reminder of just how exciting everything seemed then. Fine, that might have been because I was 17, but it did also feel like everything was just sort-of getting better; fast-forward 22 years and, well, not so much. This is just PACKED full of wonder and joy – and, in the case of the author’s weird fetishisation of the normalisation of cocaine use amongst the non-banking classes in the 90s, a strange precursor of why things maybe wenta bit darker 7-8 years hence. Special shout out to the section towards the end featuring Loaded’s James Brown, where he is basically EXACTLY the same person as Jonatton Yea? from Nathan Barley.
• On OCD: Finally this week, this is an exceptional personal essay by James McMahon about his struggles with OCD; it’s a very, very good piece of writing, and I recommend it to you unreservedly.

By Mi Ki Kim

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) First up, this sounds like the Pixies which is good enough for me. This is ‘Hertz’ by Black Dresses:

2) I was pretty much convinced to feature this when I saw the band name, to be honest, but it turns out that this 9-minute slice of psychedelic stoner psych-rock is actually pretty good, as is the accompanying short film. This is The Spaceships of Ezekiel, by Mammoth Weed Wizard B*stards (no, really):

3) Would you describe Battles’ music as Math Rock? You might if you were a bit of a pseud from 2013. Still, the beautifully-geometric video for their latest, called ‘Titanium 2-Step’ fits that description too, and this is a wonderfully angular bleepy mess. Enjoy!:

4) Slightly odd mix of styles, this, but it works perfectly (if by ‘works perfectly’ you mean, as I do, ‘sounds like a weird 2019 version of Bodycount except for at the beginning where it momentarily sounds like sort of shoegazey track from about 1993’). It’s by Black Futures and is called ‘Body and Soul’:

5) Last up this week, Lina Tullgren with ‘Saiddone’, a genuinely beautiful little song which I hope you enjoy and which I hope you take with you into the weekend as, well, BYE I AM OUT OF TIME AND LINKS BYE AND I HAVE TO NIP TO THE SHOPS TO BUY INGREDIENTS FOR SAUSAGE ROLLS AS I AM HAVING SOME FRIENDS ROUND THIS AFTERNOON BUT REST ASSURED THAT IF IT WERE POSSIBLE I WOULD MAKE SAUSAGE ROLLS FOR EACH AND EVERYONE OF YOU TOO BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND CARE ABOUT YOU AND WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY I HOPE YOU HAVE WONDERFUL WEEKENDS AND GET TO EAT SOME SAUSAGE ROLLS YOURSELVES WHETHER VEGAN OR STANDARD BYE TAKE CARE HAVE FUN HOPEFULLY SEE YOU NEXT WEEK BUT IF NOT IN A FORTNIGHT I LOVE YOU BYE!

A majority of one! It could all fall apart within weeks! PLEASE GOD LET IT ALL FALL APART!

It almost certainly won’t, of course, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t all pray fervently just in case there is a God – if there is, they’re definitely not a Tory. 

Anyway, I usually use this preamble to complain about how everything is terrible and then to make some sort of laboured and unpleasantly-biological metaphor likening this blognewsletterthing to some sort of suppurating, Cronenbergian nightmare, but I’m going to briefly change tack this week – if you can’t be bothered to read this, normal service is resumed below. 

Someone on Twitter this week noticed that Imperica’s been posting linkbuilding articles – paid pieces of content designed to improve third-party sites search rankings by featuring keyword links from other domains. It’s not exactly high-quality journalism, was the implication, what are you doing? What Imperica is doing is attempting to earn some fcuking money so as to be able to pay the hosting costs, and the fees for the other writers who write the proper stuff – this is how fcuked small-scale publishing is on Twitter, and what low-traffic, niche-interest sites have to do if they want to do things like, I don’t know, pay contributors or put out a magazine. 

As I said (also on Twitter) in response to this, Imperica isn’t my site, I don’t run it, and I don’t get paid to write on it (others do, but I don’t – I’m not a journalist and I don’t need the additional money, and I would do this for free whatever), but it’s worth pointing out the following. No money = taking linkbuilding cash to keep the lights on. Pay for stuff you think is good on the internet otherwise in a couple of years it will all be fcuked. 

And no, this isn’t me begging you to cough up for Curios – as I said, this will always be free, whether here or elsewhere – this is simply a statement of fact; this stuff costs, whether it be time or money, and not everyone’s in the same fortunate position that I am, of being able to spend 6 hours on a Friday morning writing self-indulgent webspaff just for the fun of it. 

Anway, this is a long-winded way of asking you to take 5 minutes (morelike 2) to fill in this year’s Imperica reader survey – it will help Paul, who runs the site, get more info on who you are and what he might do to persuade of you to give a fcuk. Go on, make him happy. 

God, that was dull, wasn’t it? Fcuk that sincerity for a game of soldiers, never doing that again. Here, look, take the links and FCUK OFF OUT OF IT. This is Web Curios, and you’re very, very welcome.

By Todd Antony

LET’S KICK OFF WITH THIS ULTRACURRENT GRIME MIX BY GRANDMIXXER!

THE SECTION WHICH IS UNSURPRISED BY REPORTS EMERGING THIS WEEK THAT SUGGEST THAT FACEBOOK’S AD TRANSPARENCY TOOLS ARE, INCREDIBLY, INADEQUATE IN THEIR TRANSPARENCY:

• The Facebook Numbers: Another earnings report and – guess what?! – the Big Blue Misery Factory made more money than ever before, and had more users than ever before (boosted in the main by growth in India, the Philippines and Indonesia), and despite having to pay out literally BILLIONS in fines continues rake in the advertising dollars like nothing else on earth. FACEBOOK IS DEAD!
• Edit ‘Live’ Videos In FB: Facebook’s ‘Trim’ feature, which allows for in-app editing of previously ‘Live’ video streams when posted to a Page as archive footage, is being made more widely available. You need never again watch back that awkward bit at the beginning of the live when you were wondering whether the stream was in fact working! That’s, er, it!
• Insta Testing Greenscreen-style Photo Background Feature: This is exactly the sort of feature which you look at and think ‘oh, that sounds fun, I bet that will allow for all sorts of momentarily frivolous creative applications and will usher in a whole new era of memery and online lols!’ and which in reality will end up being used to do the same tedious visual gag over and over again by every single fcuking person you know until you wish we could go back to the analogue age forever. Insta is apparently testing the ability for users to use their own existing camera roll photos as background to new photos – thereby allowing for all sorts of infinitely-recursive fun. Brands, you will have ONE SHOT at doing something exciting with this, so start planning NOW (don’t start planning now – it’s pointless and stupid and doesn’t matter, and you’d be better advised fixing the fundamental problems with your business than messing around with this pointless rubbish which makes not one iota of difference to your bottom line and which, frankly, is contributing to making the world a worse and more stupid place).
• Instagram Donation Stickers Launch to UK Charities: This, though, is GOOD NEWS! Charitable organisations in the UK should now be able to benefit from Donation Stickers in Insta Stories, which will allow them (and other users) to append a ‘Donate Now’-type button to their content. You need to be registered as a charity to benefit from this – obviously – but this is unarguably positive so WELL DONE EVERYONE.
• Twitter’s Numbers: I know I say this every time, but LOOK AT THE CONTRAST WITH FACEBOOK HERE. Comparing the two platforms was always a bit silly (they do different things, for different audiences), but seems even moreso now that Twitter continues to limp along with a paltry 140million Daily Monetisable Users compareed to the literal billions using FB. Still, ad revenues are up, so trebles all round!
• Snap Launches ‘Instant Create’ for Easier Ad Creation: This is really useful – a super-simple ad creation tool for Snap, which automates vast swathes of the process to create native, vertical ad units for you with minimal fuss. The amount of automation here is really impressive, even down to the way the tools scrape a destination url for suitable images and crops them for 9:16 with nary a thought (though I guarantee that the results won’t look as good as you hope they will); if you’re a brand or business who wants to attract THE YOUTH then this might make worth Snap considering as part of your ad inventory.
• LinkedIn Lets Businesses and Individuals Ad Services: You can now highlight EXACTLY what it is that you offer on your LinkedIn profile, with the ability to specify the services you provide – information which will now be searchable, making it theoretically simple for users to find accountants or plumbers or urinolagnia-happy dominatrices or whatever. I just popped over to LinkedIn to check whether this had rolled out to me yet – sadly it hasn’t, but know that as soon as it does I am listing ‘BUSINESS’ as my sole service and waiting for the multi-million pound offers to roll in.
• Pinterest Launches Mobile Ad Tools: You can now set up and run ad campaigns on Pinterest from your phone! Yes! I am so excited I may never be able to stop using exclamation marks!
• Stop Using Like Buttons On Your Websites: There are several reasons for this, not least the fact that it’s no longer 2013 and they are totally pointless and they slow down your site and noone likes or uses them anyway, but the main new one is that according to EU law you may well be liable under GDPR as a DIRTY DATA-SCRAPER should you be making use of them. This is technical and legal and, frankly, almost certainly going to be subject to a long-winded series of legal appeals and reversals and rereversals, but the upshot is that it’s probably not worth the hassle to bother with this sort of plugin any more.
• Ofcom UK News Consumption Data: Lovely, exciting, UK news consumption data! Turns out TV news is still by far and away the best way of reaching most people – whodathunkit?! – but that social media is growing as a means of consumption. Although it’s frustratingly fuzzy on some of the exact meaning of this – results are based on survey data, conducted online and face-to-face, and I have literally no idea what people mean when they say they ‘consume news via Whatsapp’. They open links sent to them by friends? They subscribe to Whatsapp-based news services? THESE ARE QUALITATIVELY DIFFERENT THINGS FFS. Anyway, you want some numbers to prove whatever it is that you want them to? Great, here, take these.
• Approved/Not Approved: I like this. A project designed to highlight some of the slightly odd any hypocritical decisions made when it comes to approving or rejecting adverts for sexual content, specifically those ads designed to flog sex-positive things like sex toys and lube. This is put together – unsurprisingly – by manufacturers of said devices, but despite the obvious vested interest the point stands; ads for pharmaceuticals seem to get through far more often than ads for sex education and the like, which doesn’t quite feel right.
• Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: It’s been a while since I’ve seen a really good film or TV promo site, but this one, for Tarantino’s latest, is WONDERFUL – presented in the style of a print magazine from the era in which the film’s set, the design here is just perfect; you can almost smell the paper through the screen, the visual design is perfect, the articles draw you into the fictional Hollywood and the wider Tarantino metaverse, with ads for the ever-present Red Apple cigarettes and other familiar brands from Pulp Fiction and other movies…The whole site is excellent and a genuine pleasure to spend a few minutes browsing, and even make me almost want to go to the cinema for the first time in approximately six years (but only for about 10 seconds).
• Gucci Marmont: I think this is the third of these Gucci websites I’ve featured on here, but I am NOT ASHAMED – it’s another of their hand-painted, ultra-confident, super-luxe and VERY SILLY series of microsites which present an entire range in the style of beautiful, opulent still lifes. As per usual, there’s minimal annotation – it’s expected that you just know what these bags are and that they speak for themselves, and it’s perfect. Note the way that the light sources on each painted bag seem to change slightly as you move the cursor around them; now THAT is luxury web design. Also, as my friend Jay pointed out, “Superlux website and then an approachable pricing strategy: getting designer handbags back to £800 / $1000 (a price point they’d all exceeded for a few years) to hit those Millennial & teen wallets. Not stupid.”

By Echo Morgan

NEXT UP, WHY NOT TRY THE NEW ALBUM OF CHOPPY BEATS BY LA PRODUCER BLARF?!

THE SECTION WHICH PRESUMES THAT NOW THAT SAUDI IS LETTING WOMEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY UNACCOMPANIED WE’RE GOING TO JUST FORGET ABOUT KHASHOGGI AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF, PT.1:

• 100 Every Day: 100 people die in the US every day as a result of gun violence, a number so mad and so large that it’s quite hard to countenance. 100 Every Day is a project asking designers to contribute a piece of design – a poster, specifically – highlighting the statistic however they see fit to raise awareness and remind people that this is, in fact, a daily reality. “We are not calling for restric­tions to our Con­sti­tu­tion­al Rights, but just common sense legislation that will help save lives. We’re not an institution. We’re just a group of creative people who think that 100people shouldn’t die every day.” Exactly. There are some lovely designs here, aside from anything else.
• 99 Music: A lovely site by The Ringer, which lets you explore their selection of either the 40 best albums or the 40 best singles of 1999, complete with all the Spotify integration you could hope for so that you can ‘enjoy’ the two-decade old stylings of, say, Lou Bega (yep, he’s in there, and you KNOW that he has every right to be). Each entry includes a bit of trivia, occasional throwback interviews, assessments of whether the track would still be a hit in 2019, and is generally a lovely little nostalgia timecapsule (if you’re me) or a journey in time to a strangely optimistic past where people still naively believed that things could one day get better (if you’re a child).
• Facebook Ad Watch: Despite the reported inadequacy of Facebook’s ad transparency tools, a couple of researchers in Germany (I think) have used it to scrape the dataset and present this slightly-less-shonky searchable database of Facebook ad spend around the world, searchable by topic and with some simple dataviz done in Tableau over the top of it. It’s a bit janky, but nonetheless a nice alternative way to explore some of the GREAT POLITICAL ADVERTISING we’ve all been subjected to over the past year or so – it’s worth clicking the ‘Stories’ section to go through some of the curated datapoints they’ve collected, as it gives an idea of the sort of research you can undertake with a bit of effort.
• Poolside FM: Fcuuuuuuuuuuuuk. I just did a check and I featured the first iteration of this site in FEBRUARY 2014. FEBRUARY 2014!!! 5 and a half years ago! I was…oh, still in my 30s, fine, and already horribly broken and jaded, but, still, WOW have I been doing this crap for a long time. On the offchance, how long have you been reading this crap for? And, er, WHY? Anyway, Poolside FM is a BEAUTIFUL retro-style site which is basically just a bunch of 90s-ish music and video presented in a very vaporwave-y type faux-Mac OS. Which is a pretty nonsensical descriptor, I now realise, so click the link and be transported to an LA poolside two decades prior. Oh, in case you’re interested, here’s my intro from that February 2014 Curios – imagine the wavy lines across the screen presaging a brief moment of time travel…”Well HELLO! Isn’t it exciting? Today we celebrate that wonderful intersection of cold weather and gravity – the WINTER OLYMPICS! A few weeks when we can get all exercised about Russia’s absolutely appalling human rights record and attitudes towards non-heteronormative lifestyles whilst at the same time blithely ignoring the rank hypocrisy of many of our favourite brands who like to talk about how they’re all up for liberalism and diversity and frown upon homophobia and the like whilst STILL paying shedloads of cash for the right to advertise their crap at a wasteful, corrupt event in a country which turns a blind eye to stuff like this on an hourly basis. WELL DONE US AND INDEED THEM! (as an aside, yes it’s nice that Google’s doodle is today all rainbow-ish, but really – shouldn’t the richest and in many respects most powerful corporate entity perhaps maybe do a little bit more than effectively the graphic design equivalent of a subtweet at an entire country? No? Just me?).” Wasn’t that fun!
• FakeText Spotter: The past 18 months have seen an explosion of ‘AI’ (mostly not in fact AI) tools to create images and copy and sounds, tools which are increasingly appearing in versions which can be made us of by normies like us (albeit in slightly janky fashion); the past couple of months have seen a slightly nervous response to that, as people start to rightly question at what point we’re going to stop being able to tell when something’s been algogenerated or not. There have been a number of experimental tools designed to help determine whether an image is a product of a GAN, say, or whether a face filter’s been applied to an image, but this is the first I’ve seen that seeks to analyse text to determine the likelihood that it’s been spaffed out by a GPT-2 or similar. Plug in any text you like and the programme will analyse it to and tell you to what extent each word in the text was likely to be there, based on what the GPT-2 model was likely to predict. Which, again, is a horrible description, sorry – basically if all the words appear in a highly probable order, it’s more likely that the text was machine generated; humans are less predictable, is the upshot. Only a proof-of-concept, and as soon as the machines get better this stuff’s going to become impossible, but, well, have a play!
• Chalmers: A fascinating project, Chalmers is a chatbot designed by the city of Toronto to be an automated source of assistance for the homeless – users visit the site and are presented with a simple conversational interface which will let them find details of the nearest shelter, soup kitchen, medical centre, etc, as well as helping direct them to on- and offline mental health services and other support networks. This is SUCH a smart idea – obviously there are questions around accessibility, and how the target audience for the service can be made aware of it, and how to keep the information current and live, but in principle it’s a useful tool which offers practical support at low cost. There’s definitely a model here to be built on.
• Where You At?: This bills itself as ‘an event app for Snapchat’, and I think is effectively a third-party plugin-type app which allows you to create events and manage guestlists within Snap. Which, obviously, sounds like a terrifying recipe for the sort of parties made infamous in the early teens, when some kid would post an innocent houseparty invitation on Facebook only to find an entire community of meth addicts having complicatedly-lubey congress in the burnt-out ruins of their family home a few short days later. Which gives me an excuse to link to this, which is still one of the greatest TV interviews I have ever seen. Genuinely quite curious to know what Corey’s up to these days, should anyone fancy a bit of light detective work.
• Liquid: A lovely little bit of coding, this, offering you a fancy liquid simulation in-browser, which you can make move simply by waggling your phone. This used to be the sort of thing you had to download an actual app to experience; now it’s a few lines of code to run it in-browser (ok, fine, possibly more than ‘a few lines’, but you get the point) – at this rate we’ll all be able to play Playstation through Chrome in approximately three years, at which point noone will ever get anything done again and we’ll all basically just give up as a species and Wall-E ourselves into oblivion. Probably.
• A Witness Tree: On the one hand, this is a really smart little project in which a tree in Harvard forest in the US has been hooked up to a bunch of sensors and given the ability to automatically Tweet data about climate readings to the world, the idea to better communicate and personalise the very real effect of climate change on living organisms experiencing its effects in realtime; on the other, this is a tree basically live-tweeting its slow demise, which is quite deeply horrible if you think about it too hard. So, er, don’t!
• The iPhone Photographer of the Year Award 2019: Given the fact that I think it’s widely accepted that iPhones have long been surpassed in terms of camera quality by a bunch of other brands, it seems quaint that its the only brand that has its own dedicated photo contest (or at least that it’s the only brand that has a photo contest anyone’s heard of). That said, given the insane extent to which the current generation of phones tweak and manipulate every single image they shoot, the idea of having photography competitions at all seems slightly redundant; we should just let the image enhancing software models duke it out between them. Anyway, this is this year’s crop of excellent iPhone pics; regardless of whatever happens in post, the framing and composition in most of these is as stunning as you’d hope.
• Holoscape: This is a Twitter thread of demo footage of a game that doesn’t exist yet, but it’s worth checking out as a window into a potential future in which we’re all playing persistent, shared-reality AR shooters on our phones. Holoscape is a work-in-progress AR game, in which users can play in teams (MMO-style, ish), do quests, etc, all in a shared AR world in which an individual player’s actions can and do effect other players’ experiences. Which is a big deal – current AR games like Pokemon Go or the Potter one that weirdly noone seems to be playing work on a player-by-player basis, with everyone having their own, separate gameplay experience rather than sharing a gameworld, but this (and the eventual full version of Minecraft AR) is far more cooperative and collaborative and, as a result, potentially interesting.
• The Guardian Digital Design Guide: A beautifully-designed design guide, from the Guardian. This is clean and beautifully-presented and clearly laid-out and generally does a superb job of laying out the design principles that underpin the Guardian website, and is basically an object-lesson in clear communication of visual principles.
• Photorealistic Minecraft Textures: Oh WOW. You think you know Minecraft, right, all blocky textures and janky sprites and really impressive constructions, fine, if you view them in tilt-shift, but basically a kid’s sandbox? Well THINK AGAIN. This is amazing – a texture set designed by a pretty prolific modder which turns the previously childlike visuals of Minecraft into the sort of thing you see in the pages of terrifying ‘My Alpine retreat’-type design hagiographies in *Wallpaper or similar magazines. You can use this to create the most INCREDIBLE interiors, and if someone doesn’t start using this as an actual, honest-to-goodness shortcut for 3d architectural renders I’d be amazed. Aside from anything else, this now affords a really cheap and relatively easy way of creating hugely shiny interiors – pay a decent Minecraft builder, apply this texture and BANG, no need for hours of tedious 3d CAD-type work. Honestly, you could do LOADS of interesting stuff with this with a bit of time and imagination.
• Tera: I think I featured the NASA project that this is born out of in here last year – in any case, Tera is a project currently being crowdfunded on Indiegogo which is seeking funds to build a proof-of-concept eco-structure outside NYC – “Nestled in the woods of Upstate New York with sweeping views of the Hudson River, TERA is a high-tech, luxe, green eco-home that’s unlike any other on this planet – available on a nightly basis for anyone wanting a glimpse into the future of sustainable life on and beyond our planet. Developed from AI SpaceFactory’s NASA-award-winning Mars habitat MARSHA, it’s created with space-grade technologies and materials that were developed for long-term sustainable missions on Mars.” Basically this is going to be a super-trendy Airbnb, but the potential upside is that one can imagine a theoretical future where the learnings from projects like this are applied to mass construction in the future to minimise environmental impact, etc. Although we’ll almost certainly be past the point of no return by the time that happens, so, frankly, who cares? Christ, that was upsettingly nihilistic, sorry – it’s 848am and I am having something of a slump. I’ll try and pull out of it, maybe some toast will help.
• How People Around the World are Beating Summer: Ah, this’ll do the trick – a lovely collection of photographs of people around the world cooling down by whatever means necessary. Genuinely cheering, although it does rather point out that Summer appears to have decided to stop early here in London.
• Sculpt: I am sure you can probably do loads of really cool stuff with this webtoy by Stephane Ginier, but all I really care about is the fact that it gives you a spherical ball of flesh-coloured digital putty to play with and that, with a bit of time and effort and, fine, a bit of skill, you can create some genuinely horrific-looking little bald faces, not unlike those weird balls-with-faces toys that were popular for a while in the 80s/90s. You know, what were they called….Madballs! Jesus, they still exist? Anyway, you can make hideous faces in 3d, what more do you need to know?

By Nvard Yerkanian

NEXT, SOME PROPER TECHNO WITH AN HOUR’S MIX BY EXi!:

THE SECTION WHICH PRESUMES THAT NOW THAT SAUDI IS LETTING WOMEN LEAVE THE COUNTRY UNACCOMPANIED WE’RE GOING TO JUST FORGET ABOUT KHASHOGGI AND ALL THE OTHER STUFF, PT.2:

• Dog Photographer of the Year 2019: OH LOOK AT ALL THESE LOVELY ROFFS! Lots of lovely photos of lots of lovely dogs, all ratified as being lovely by the Kennel Club, no less! Obviously these are great photos of beautiful animals, but I do sort of feel honour-bound to point out that professional dog breeding as ratified by the self-same Kennel Club is a sort of horrorshow of unpleasant breeding practices and genetic lines inbred to a point of near-handicap. God, what a miserable, joyless funsponge I can be. ENJOY THE ROFFS!
• Spoton: Like Uber, but for pets! Is a pitch that I can’t imagine ever working, ever, and yet here we are – Spoton is, seemingly, exactly that, offering a specific car service which caters exclusively for people who want to travel with their animal companions. It’s only available in New York, and to be honest I can’t quite see it scaling; also, do Uber drivers get p1ssy about having animals in their cars? I have taken a very sick cat to the vet in an Uber and the lovely driver did a proper Steve McQueen to get us there before the poor thing died, so I’m slightly skeptical as to the need for this.
• Enfont Terrible: This is a truly appalling pun, but it’s also a very cool font toy indeed so I’ll let them off. The site lets you mess with any font you like to create your very own weird, stretched, compressed, glitched out version; you can drop in a font file to start playing, and the software allows for a pretty spectacular range of effects to be applied to create something truly unique. If you’ve ever wanted a font of your very own – I was once promised one, called ‘Muir’, by Lucy Brown; Lucy, if you’re reading this, I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN – then this isn’t a bad place to make one. It will be a weird, hideous mess, fine, but it will be YOUR weird, hideous mess.
• If This Is A Man: This is a couple of years old now, but it’s no less wonderful for it. This is the reading of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is A Man’ which took place at London’s Southbank Centre in 2017, recorded for posterity and presented as a series of recordings on Soundcloud. The narration is shared between various actors and notable figures from journalism and the press, alongside people with an historical connection to the work, and it’s done beautifully; the music which occasionally accompanies the prose is wonderfully complementary. If you’re not familiar with the book, this is your chance to rectify that – this is one of the greatest things ever written about the Holocaust, and the human capacity for endurance and forgiveness, and it is utterly, utterly brilliant (but you will cry like a child at various points throughout, be warned).
• Tuigram: A Spanish app whose sole purpose is seemingly to allow you to Instagram your Tweets (a sentence which I now want to go back in time and show to someone from 2003 to see what they make of it). I have no idea why you would want to do that, but if you do then this could be the best thing in Curios this week (it is not, how DARE you).
• Tidy Elections: Useful for political researchers and students of psephology, or anyone who wants some electoral datasets to play about with, Tidy Elections offers simple, clear electoral maps for unfashionable elections, created as a response to the fact that it’s often really hard to find clean datasets for less-reported-on nations. You want a clear breakdown of how the 2018 Timorese elections played out? You got it!
• Downie: ‘Download this video off YouTube’ services are ten-a-penny, fine, but Downie is seemingly a one-size-fits-all service which will let you rip any video from any platform with ease. It’s desktop only, and it’s paid-for, but if you somehow need to rip video from all over the web with ease and impunity then a) I posit you’re doing something borderline-nefarious; and b) this will help.
• Imagefinder: 200,000+ royalty-free stock images available to search and download. One to add to the list of ‘places I go when I have to find images for another fcuking pointless presentation and I have to pretend to care about copyright’.
• ORB: Or, the Open Reduction Blocks Project, which is taking the redacted elements of the Mueller report and turning them into individual artifacts – look! “What we did is extract all of the large black blocks in the Mueller Report as individual works of art. These individual works are called ORBs (Open Redaction Blocks). The mission of the ORB Project is to provide an open set of data and visual assets to allow artists and designers easy access to ORBs for use in their creative works. All ORB assets and data are released under a Creative Commons license, and are available for free to the public at “http://orb-project.us” and on Github. On this site you can view and download individual blocks from the gallery. We will also highlight creative projects using the blocks, as they appear.” Which is sort-of silly, but I do like the concept quite a lot, not least in terms of the artists’ chutzpah here.
• Unconsenting Media: A database allowing users to search for sexual violence in film and TV, so as to be able to check in advance whether something is going to contain specific scenes or themes that they or others will find distressing. It’s astonishing that 53% of all the TV shows currently in the database mention sexual assault or rape – is it really that essential a plot device?
• Photos of Old Cinemas: LOTS of photos of old cinemas! This is a fantastic collection, collected by location in the main, which lets you go back to an imagined golden age of the silver screen, when going to the pictures was an event and the architecture and exteriors reflected that. So much excellent design from the 50s and 60s in here, and so many future Wetherspoons.
• The Open Syllabus Visualisation: “This visualization shows the 164,720 most frequently-assigned texts in the Open Syllabus corpus, a database of 6,059,459 college course syllabi…By analyzing this across millions of classes, we can start to get a bird’s-eye view of the relationships among books, articles, and disciplines that emerges from the collective process of teaching and learning encoded by the syllabi.” I have no real idea what any of you might want to do with this, but it’s potentially interesting in terms of getting an idea of dominating themes or ideologies in contemporary academia, maybe.
• Every Windows 3.1 Theme: Are YOU nostalgic for old operating systems of yore? Why? They were awful, and however much you might complain about Windows Vista or whichever version is your personal, particular bete noir, you also know in your heart of hearts that it’s a million times better than it was attempting to navigate a GUI in the 80s or 90s. Still, you want a time capsule to the days of floppies and INCREDIBLY LOUD AND CRUNCHY HARD DRIVES then this is that time capsule.
• Soviet Photography: An incredible archive of the official photography magazine of the Soviet nation, starting in 1926 and going all the way to the mid-90s; this charts the development of a national/political photographic aesthetic, as well as shifts in camera technology, and is a total timesink for anyone interested either in the history of the Soviet Union or photography more generally.
• Scanimate: “Scanimate is an analog computer system that was built by the Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado in the late sixites and early seventies. In all only eight machines were ever produced.” It was used to make early-era CGI-type graphics for film and TV, and this is one man’s labour-of-love website to preserve the memory of the style and aesthetic of that era. If you’re in any way interested in 80s-style retro CG and that sort of general look, there will be a LOT to love on this site.
• Gotham Shanghai: ‘Gotham’ is, I concede, a pretty fcuking tedious and played-out aesthetic – yes, yes, we GET IT, Batman, you are MOODY and CONFLICTED and it is ALWAYS GREY AND RAINING – but this set of photos by Amey Khan, applying that exact sort of gunmetal aesthetic to the generally neon shine of Shanghai exhibits some quite gorgeous contrasts and is generally better than you’d expect.
• Buttsss: A brilliant and incredibly necessary collection of animated gifs of cartoon bums. Bums with eyes, with wings, with lasers emerging from the cheeks, bums with attitude, with sass, callipgyian bums, bums with barely a gradient – ALL OF THE BUMS, basically. If you can look at this without smiling and feeling a little bit happier about the world then you’re probably irreparably damaged by modernity and ought to consider maybe stepping away from the 21st century for a while. Please feel free to @ me on Twitter with your favourite bum, should you so desire (cartoon ones only, though, this isn’t some sort of thinly-disguised thirsty bongo-solicitation).
• The Opening Day of Disneyland: Happy faces! Retro vibes! The most genuinely horrifying Mickey and Minnie Mouse costumes you will ever have seen in your life! No, really, click the link and look at the second photo and wonder what the everliving fcuk Walt thought he was doing with those. Nightmares for days, I tell you.
• Stop Alien Abductions: Thanks SO MUCH Dan for sending me this – you will thank Dan too, once you’ve dived headlong into the exciting world of preventing alien abductions. This is SUCH a good site – incredible old-school design despite still being very much active (there are references to 2019 on there – can someone PLEASE tell this person about WordPress themes?), and a proper, actual, literal, tinfoil hat conspiracy. Michael Menkin is concerned that alien abductions are causing autism in children, and to guard against that maintains this site offering his skills as a constructor of anti-abduction helmets and baseball caps, specially designed and custom-constructed to Menkin’s own design to prevent mind control and interference by said alien visitors (you can find out more on the sister site Aliens & Children, fyi). This is…well, it’s exactly as you’d expect, and all the better for it, and I thank Mr Menkin for his tireless investigation into the root causes of autism. If nothing else, PLEASE can you start spamming this site in the comments of every single fcuking pr1ck on Facebook still banging the autism/MMR drum? I love the idea of their indignation as they insist that no, actually, this particular brand of ascientific mental is just TOO MUCH, whereas theirs is absolutely fine.
• Jace, The Ingham Family Reborn: Finally this week, what might be the apogee/nadir of YouTuber/Influencer grifting. You thought Belle Delphine’s bathwater the other week was a milestone? This is better (worse). The Inghams are apparently a YouTuber family, who recently-ish gave birth to a new addition which they chose to inexplicably name ‘Jace’ (I really, really hope it’s a tribute to this – by the way, WHAT a theme tune that was) – they’ve partnered with a maker of ‘reborns’ (those intensely creepy, ultra-realistic models of small children often purchased by people who’ve suffered miscarriages or early-infant death) to offer a limited-edition run of dolls of their son to whoever wants to pay £300 for one. WHAT?!?! WHAT THE FCUK?!?!? WHO IN THEIR RIGHT MIND WANTS TO BUY A DOLL IN THE LIKENESS OF A NEWBORN CHILD BELONGING TO A BUNCH OF FCUKING STRANGERS OFF YOUTUBE? WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH SUCH A THING!?!? HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN IT?!?!?! “Evening Karen” “Evening Susan” “What’s that, Karen?” “Oh, it’s just a doll I bought off the internet – did you know that that infant child is an exact replica of that belonging to a moderately-successful family of YouTubers called the Inghams?” “Really? How much did that set you back then, Karen?” “A very reasonable £344, Susan, and I got all the accessories too, and a chance to meet the Ingham family at a meet and greet picnic at which I will present them with a copy of their own child to gawp at in some sort of in-no-way-mad form of worship” “Sounds reasonable, Karen. Fancy buying these magic beans?” Everything is mad and everyone is an idiot, except for us (and I have my doubts about you tbh).

By Steve ESPO Powers

FINALLY IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, WHY NOT ENJOY SOME DREAMY BALEARIC HOUSE?

THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!:

• Culinary Canvas: Just the one Tumblr this week, but at least it is in fact actually a Tumblr. Culinary Canvas is a website presenting the creative food photography of Lauren Purnell, who I think is based in the UK. If you ever need a shoot in which a bunch of food is made to look like, I don’t know, a messy pileup on the M6, Lauren may well be the person for YOU.

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Sick Sad Girlz Club: Pulled from the longread on chronic Lyme down *there*, this is an interesting Insta feed – it’s meant to offer a supportive position to women suffering with their bodies, whether with chronic illness or temporary pains, and it offers a pleasing antidote to the polished instaperfection of so much of your TL.
• The Pink Lemonade: A VERY well-curated feed of feminist artstuffs.
• Hayley Welch: Hayley Welch makes murals, amongst other things. Her feed is full of excellent work – the slightly sad bee almost broke me just now, though it could also be the very sad interview about Lyra Mckee which is currently on Woman’s Hour.
• Top Of Water Tower: Photographs of the tops of water towers in Japan. No, I know, but you’re wrong.
• Stef Dies: Last in this week’s selection of Instas, Stef Dies is a project in which the artist, presumably Stef, photographs herself looking dead in various places, in a play on the standard selfie pose. I love this SO MUCH.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!:

• Facebook Fact Checking: This is Full Fact’s (the UK’s independent fact checking body) initial report into Facebook’s fact checking processes – it’s interesting to read as an assessment of the difficulty inherent in implementing fact checking solutions at scale, an acknowledgement of the work Facebook is currently undertaking (which it’s fair to credit Facebook for; Full Fact broadly applauds them for their efforts, though with the obvious caveat that it’s still not enough), and, finally, as a sober corrective to the general Zuckerbergian ‘don’t worry! We’re building systems to automate all this stuff!’ rhetoric. The most important line in here to my mind is the one where Full Fact quite plainly state that they have seen no evidence at all to suggest that tech like this is anywhere near existing, and that the problem it is trying to solve might well be beyond the ken of existing processes and models. Techological solutionism as a flawed ideology? WHODATHUNKIT!
• Johnson as PR Offensive: I’ve got pretty serious Johnson fatigue at the moment (please, no sniggering), as I imagine do you all, but this piece is worth reading if you can stomach it; it’s a good portrait of the man as an exercise in PR, and contains several good observations about how and why that works, and why it’s perhaps a touch on the troubling side that MAINTAINING A POSITIVE ATTITUDE is now basically a sort of national-level diktat.
• Whither Filter Bubbles: Jeff Jarvis is a divisive figure, but this piece, in which he questions the assumption that we all exist in filter bubbles of our own making and it’s this that is contributing the the fractured, fractious nature of public discourse and the fact that everything is a MESS, is an interesting read. It’s less about filter bubbles per se, and more about the media’s tendency to pick a term or trope and uncritically run with it; see also ‘surveillance capitalism’, which Jarvis accurately points out is an unhelpful term in many respects, devaluing to an extent the very real and actual surveillance being undertaken by actual governments by equating it to the way advertisers use cookies. Contrarian, but smartly so.
• Chinese Business Models: VC-penned piece about how businesses in China are developing innovative business models online faster than you can say “wow, we lost the battle for the future before it even started, didn’t we?” Hugely interesting, I promise, even if, like me, you have very little interest in the business of business.
• Neom May Be Our Future: Do you remember Neom? Of course you do! Neom is Saudi Arabia’s planned ULTRACITY OF THE FUTURE: I featured it in October 2017, and described it thusly: “HOW FCUKING WEIRDLY SCARY IS THAT? Read the breathlessly-optimistic future utopian prose! See the photos of the in-no-way-repressed women jogging in croptops! It’s all going to be great! Then think a little bit longer, and consider that if you were Saudi and you were seeking international investment for your proposed future-leading hub city-state, you’d probably dial down the woman-suppressing rhetoric, at least til the first few rounds were closed. Then think quite how much this website looks like the opening 15 minutes of every single dystopian scifi you’ve ever seen, the bit before you realise that there is a HEART OF DARKNESS beating beneath the shiny metallic skin.” Anyway, this piece looks at the ridiculousness of the whole concept – vapourware for the plutocratically rich, kept aloft by puffs of hot air emanating from the mouths of luxuriantly-remunerated management consultants. Absolute madness, and still incredibly sinister.
• Famous Birthdays: One of a couple of articles this week that made me feel incredibly old, this piece profiles the database of famouses that is the website Famous Birthdays, that has seemingly by accident become an absolute magnet for YouTube and TikTok fandoms who congregate on the site to discuss their favourite streamers and ‘creators’ (God forgive me); this is sort of arcane and baffling, but also a great tip in terms of finding new influencers to work with (please stop working with these people, it’s HORRIBLE).
• How GenZ and Millennials Are Different: If you’re a strategyplannerinsightmonkey then this is a VERY useful read indeed, pointing out all of the behavioural and attitudinal ways in which GenZ differ from the now ANCIENT millennial demographic. The ‘why’ here is because apparently GenXers like me, who are currently raising GenZers, have markedly different value systems and parenting styles vs the boomers who raised millennials; whether you buy that or not, or indeed whether you believe anything at all this article says, it presents an awful lot of DATA that you can interpret to make whatever point you want – it doesn’t matter, the tactic is almost certainly going to be ‘co-create with the streaming community!’ whatever fcuking way you frame it.
• Where Everyone Is An Influencer: A slightly dizzying pen portrait of thys year’s InstaBeach event, at which a bunch of internet-famous children get invited by Instagram to hang out at a beach party and, I don’t know, film each other getting high on cola and fingering or something. There’s something quite creepy about all of this – not least the shot about halfway down which shows a slightly fat, middle-aged photographer snapping the beautiful young things in the party pen and looks a touch on the predatory side.
• Jojo Siwa is the Master of the Universe: This is the second ‘wow, so OLD’ article this week – before reading this, I had no idea at all who Jojo Siwa was; now I am slightly in awe of her terrifyingly perky song-and-dance routines, and the military-industriual entertainment complex that has seemingly sprung up to keep this tween at the peak of the pre-teen music business. This doesn’t seem like it can be doing the kid any good, does it?
• VSCO Girls: Oh, I was wrong, there are THREE pieces that made me feel old this week. This is about ‘VSCO Girls’, a term apparently catching on on social media to connote a particular sort of slightly-basic-but-pretty-WASP-type, based on their stereotypical use of the VSCO photoediting app. There’s nothing in here that’s not been a facet of teen life since the 50s – the cliques, the status anxiety, the slang, the bullying – but it’s the language and slightly weird air of self-awareness that pervades this that made it feel totally alien to me. Which, frankly, is good, as I am a nearly-40-year-old man and if it didn’t feel alien there are probably some problems with my lifestyle.
• Drinkable Weed: I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I quite like weed, but even as a habitual user I find the idea of consuming it in drink form a pretty ridiculous one. Still, there are lots of companies in the middle of the North American weed Wild West who are banking on the fact that I’m an idiot and in fact what people really, really want to do is get boxed off their tits on THC-infused mineral water – this piece is a slightly Gonzo-ish look at a few of the players. It does, I have to say, sound like the weed industry is probably quite a lot of fun at the moment (and a massive, massive racket).
• The Man Who Will Save The Grocery Store: This is an absolutely fascinating piece about the future of food retail, from the point of view of the retail and food consultants who are trying to prevent Amazon from consigning yet another bricks-and-mortar business to the past. Honestly, even if you don’t think you’re interested in selling groceries, or how design influences purchase decisions, or what the motivating factors are on consumption habits in 2019, you will find this compelling; oh, and, again, if you’re a plannerstrategyinsightmonkey this is very much worth reading.
• One Night Wonder: Writing a musical is HARD (I say that as someone who tried – we got all the songs, but trying to shoehorn them into a plot proved beyond us (me, mainly). I still maintain that ‘Sex in the Office’ was a stone-cold classic, though, and deserves to find an audience one day); imagine doing it, getting a slot on Broadway…and then having it shut down after only one performance after a critical mauling. This is about what that feels like (it feels horrible) – it’s a lot more uplifting than you’d think, honest.
• A Pre-schooler’s Guide To Managing Your Assistant: From McSweeney’s, this is very, very funny – although I say that as a childless man. Your reaction as a parent may be more of a knowing, slightly-pained chuckle.
• The Duct Tape Typographer: Short profile of Shuetsu Sato, a 65 year old employee of the Tokyo underground who has achieved a degree of fame and affection as a result of his painstakingly-cut, beautifully-designed public information notices on the network, which he makes using duct tape and a stanley knife. This is glorious, and there’s something so peculiarly Japanese about this honing of a single action to near-perfect status.
• A Brief, Awful History of the Lobotomy: Just be aware, if you’ve ever had a member of your family treated by lobotomy and don’t quite know exactly what it entails, maybe skip this one. Otherwise this is a brutal and quite horrifying look back at the early days of brain surgery and experimentation, when it was perfectly acceptable to take a bunch of patients from the local asylum and go rootling around their frontal lobes with a pointy bit of steel just to see what would happen. It’s easy to forget this – that,whilst we are obviously all standing on the shoulders of giants of science and research, whose methodological approach to enquiry enabled some of the greatest advances known to humanity, we’re also standing on the shoulders of the sort of people who’d think nothing of removing large chunks of someone’s cerebellum because, well, they were there and why not?
• Love, Peace and Taco Grease: Or, ‘How I Left My Abusive Husband and Found Guy Fieri’. Fieri, in case you forget, is the much-maligned TV chef and restaurant owner whose food is all about BIG FLAVOURS and who constantly seems to be shouting at a burger. This isn’t really about him at all; it’s instead a very, very good personal essay about escaping from an abusive marriage and finding freedom in unexpected places.
• When Lyme Disease Becomes An Identity: Coincidentally, in a week in which Lyme disease was in the UK news I also came across this piece, which looks at the strange and slightly mad world of ‘Chronic Lyme’, a variant on standard Lyme disease which is marked out by the fact that you can’t define its effects or its symptoms and people get VERY VERY VERY obsessed with the fact that they have it. I am fascinated by stuff like this – it’s adjacent to the other Very Online phenomenon of people who are convinced that they have tiny, itchy filaments embedded all over their skin – and the associated industries of massively awful grifters than inevitably spring up around them. Take a look at some of the numbers being quoted for treatments in the piece; insane.
• Love Island: The Experience: Amelia Tate goes to the Love Island Experience in Brighton, where people paid actual cashmoney to hang out on a shonkily-built replica of the show’s set, take photos with ex cast members and, er, watch the show on a big screen. You want a snapshot of the provincial youth of Britain in Summer 2019? You could do worse than this (this is said with much less snobbery than it sounds, promise).
• Subways Are For Sleeping: A wonderful piece from the archives of Harper’s Magazine, this is a 1956 profile of one Henry Shelby, an ordinary New Yorker who just so happens to be homeless. It takes you through Shelby’s routines – where he eats, where he sleeps, how he finds work and money – and as it does so paints a picture of a time so alien to now it almost feels like centuries ago, one in which it was perfectly reasonable for someone to be homeless and find work, and where Shelby’s status seems to confer him a sort of freedom rather than the abject misery he’d experience in 2019. Really, really interesting, and surprisingly cheering – you’ll leave it wishing Shelby well, and possibly wanting to go for a very long walk.
• The Hell Marathon: If the 20th century’s best sportswriting was largely considered to be that about boxing (pace DFW and tennis), I’d posit that the best stuff I’ve read over the past 20 years has been about running, and in particular distance/endurance events. This is another brilliant piece, focusing on the Hell Ultramarathon: “The Hell Ultra, an annual race in which contestants run nearly the entire length of the [Leh-Manali] highway, beginning in Manali and ending atop the Shanti Stupa—a Buddhist monument—in Leh. The 298-mile trip takes runners through five different mountain passes that reach up to 17,500 feet, equivalent to the higher of the two main Mt. Everest base camps. The first pass, known as Rohtang in the local language, translates to “pile of corpses” because of what it can do to travelers who attempt to cross it at the wrong time of year.” Quite, quite wonderful.
• The Chelsea Affect: Another archive piece, this is Arthur Miller, post-Monroe, reflecting on his sojourn in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. There’s a lot of era-appropriate namedropping, as you’d expect, which is occasionally confusing unless you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the artistic demi-monde of the 60s, but it’s a charming piece, Miller’s obviously a brilliant writer, and in the form of landlord Mr. Bard, one of the best real life characters I’ve read in a while.
• Longshore Drift: This is SUCH good writing – short fiction by Julia Armfield, about teenage female friendship and feeling out of place and dislocated and uncertain about you and the friend you cling to. I would read an infinity of this; the characters and the place and the prose are all perfect.
• On Writing: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece on writing by poet, copywriter and Friend of Curios Rishi Dastidar. Rishi’s writing makes me angry it’s so good – every line of this short piece is perfect, and I hate him for it.

By Sophie Gabrielle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is from a few years back, but editor Paul found it courtesy of Rupert Goodwins on Twitter; it’s 2001 redone as though it were a Picasso painting, courtesy of style transfer software, and it looks WONDERFUL. Take any frame of this, blow it up and whack it on a wall, it would look great:

2) This is VERY trippy. A video for Bunny’s Dream by Matthew Dear, created entirely through VR puppetry software, in which the titular bunny is chased through a fantastical landscape by…er…a weird VR goose-type-thing? Anyway, it’s very hallucinatory, but it gives an idea of how much you can do with puppetry in a virtual space:

3) Previous Curios favourites, Korean pop-punkers Drinking Boys and Girls Choir, are back with their latest single called ‘Big Nine LET’S GO’ and it is typically excellent. Try not feeling a bit perky after you listen to this:

4) This band is called Snarls, and if I were ever asked ‘what do archetypal art students look like in 2019, Matt?’ I would point the questioner at this video (I mean, LOOK AT THE DRUMMER! He may as well have St Martin’s written through him like a stick of rock!). The song’s called ‘Walk in the Woods’, and it’s really very good in a hugely early-90s sort of way:

5) UK GRIME CORNER! This is ‘Pass The Mic’ by The Heavytrackerz and it’s a multi-MC extravaganza (and Manga, as usual, wins hands-down). The beat here is superb, btw:

6) This is by Emma DJ. It is called ‘Slug’. It is…challenging, and the video is horrible – I mean genuinely unsettling CGI. I would tell you to enjoy it, but I’m not 100% certain it’s possible to do so:

7) This is a quite astonishing piece of music and I absolutely adore it. It is NOISY and SCREECHY and INDUSTRIAL and all-told quite frightening, but it’s also an absolute banger, the video is wonderfully unpleasant, and if you mixed this with some drill’n’bass I think you would have a classic for the ages. Honestly, this may well be my song of the year to date. It’s called ‘Love Is A Parasite’ and it’s by Blanck Mass:

8) This is called ‘Oligarchs’, and it’s one of the most impressive pieces of concept-CG I’ve seen in an age. Slight shame that so many of the models are of the generically-pretty anime girl type, but the overall design and aesthetic here is really strong:

9) Last up this week, this is 100 Gecs. I don’t know if you’ve heard of them – I only discovered them this week, and they immediately catapulted to the top of my list of ‘music that if I had children I bet that they would insist on playing really loud to upset me’. This is utterly baffling, very NOW and sort-of brilliant – see what you think. This is called ‘800db cloud’, and you just try making sense of it OH AND LOOK AT THAT WE’RE AT THE END BYE I LOVE YOU BYE BYE BYE HAVE A LOVELY WEEK AND I WILL SEE YOU IN SEVEN DAYS TAKE CARE AND BE KIND TO EACH OTHER AND BE KIND TO YOURSELVES AND BE KIND TO ANIMALS AND BE KIND TO STRANGERS AND LET’S ALL TRY AND JUST HAVE A GOOD OLD TIME OF IT BECAUSE I LOVE YOU AND I WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY BYE TAKE CARE I LOVE YOU BYE!!:

Well, Donald might be a racist, but it looks like we’re getting one of our own in next week so, well, let’s not get too smug about how we’re ‘better than all that’. In less than seven days, barring some sort of miracle, we’ll finally find out what the protocol is about moving one’s mistress into No.10. GREAT!

Let’s not think about that, though. Let’s not think about the rain either. Let’s instead focus on THE MAGICAL AND EXCITING WORLD OF THE INTERNET – the good bits, the fun bits, not the horrible bits with the nazis in. Lie back (don’t lie back, this is the vaguely metaphorical bit of the intro rather than a set of explicit instructions ffs!), relax and let the following 8,000-odd words soothe and destress you, like one of those weird purple massager things that looks worryingly like a dildo but which your mum assures you really isn’t – yes, once again it’s THAT TIME (Friday! Lunchtime!) and THAT PLACE (your inbox! or the Imperica website) and that means WEB CURIOS! Try not to be too upset. 

By Nick Runge

FIRST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, ENJOY THIS 80s-TINGED BEAUTY FROM RADIO GRINGO!

THE SECTION WHICH HAS FOUND IT A *BIT* DARKLY FUNNY WATCHING PEOPLE GET FROTHY-MOUTHED ABOUT ‘THE DEATH OF THE INFLUENCER ECONOMY’ BEING ENGENDERED BY INSTAGRAM TESTING THE DEATH OF THE ‘LIKE’:

• Facebook Workplace Getting More Expensive: I’ve had cause to use Workspace again recently after quite a long hiatus and, well, it’s quite underwhelming, isn’t it? Anyway, my opinion doesn’t matter at all – what DOES matter is that FB is hiking the price of its workplace product by $1 per user for its professional license, and introducing a new PREMIUM pricing bracket for people who, I don’t know, don’t feel like Mark Zuckerberg is getting richer fast enough. It’s not an interesting announcement, fine, but it’s another slow news week and I’m clutching at straws somewhat here so bear with me and we can get through this difficult first section together (or, if you’re unaccountably reading this despite not having any actual professional need to, STOP IT! This is only for the advermarketingprdrones! Save yourself!).
• Facebook Christmas Insights: Whilst for the majority of us Christmas is still a faintly illusory mirage on the horizon, there are a few of you who I know for a fact have this month had to engage in the slightly perverse spectacle of showing off this year’s seasonal wares to a bemused (but mince pie-hungry) press-pack. Yes, it’s CHRISTMAS IN JULY time, when Amazon, M+S and the rest show off the stuff that we’re all going to be fighting over in the aisles come December – or, in Facebook’s case, the time when they release a new tool allowing you to access a bunch of consumer data about consumer behaviour at that most MAGICAL time of year! This is, I have to grudgingly admit, reasonably useful – you can get a whole bunch of country-specific data about how people decide what overpriced, overmarketed crap to buy each year to INFORM YOUR STRATEGIES (or, more likely, to put into a largely-phoned-in presentation explaining why, once again, you’re spending all the budget on FB/Insta ad inventory). IT’S ONLY 5 MONTHS A WAY FFS! START SELLING! Oh, and there’s a whole PDF guide to selling more tat to idiots at Christmastime available to read here if you want it – you may be unsurprised to learn that the main takeaway is ‘buy more advertising through the Big Blue Misery Factory’.
• Instagram Testing Killing ‘Likes’: IT’S KILLING THE INFLUENCER ECOSYSTEM! THEY’RE UNDERMINING OUR ABILITY TO MONETISE! No, kids, not it’s not and no they’re not. It’s just a test, in a few countries, and the UK isn’t one of them, and even if they do implement it all it means is that the influencer racket will become marginally less grifty than it is at present, and, honestly, what’s really killing the influencer game is the same sort of preposterous circle-jerky environment that pricked the mummyblogger bubble a decade or so ago, not to mention the fact that you’ve all been gaming the system with bots for years anyway. Ok? OK!
• Twitter Gets Revamped Design: Noone likes it! They’ll all forget about the old design within a week! There’s no practical difference to the product anyway! Onwards!
• Twitter Launches ‘Arthouse’: ‘Arthouse’, contrary to what you might initially infer from the name, isn’t in fact Twitter’s in-house incubator for new and exciting avant-garde cinema; instead, it’s a new offering to help you…MAKE MORE ADS!!!! Yes, that’s right, it’s another ‘agency within a social platform’-type offering, charging eye-watering rates to connect brands with creators and engender EXCITING BRAND-LED COLLABORATIVE CREATIVE OPPORTUNITIES! Indefatigable social media enthusiast Matt Navarra (seriously, Matt, how do you maintain your seemingly-ceaseless enthusiasm for this rubbish? Doesn’t your soul ache?) got hold of the rate card for the service, and with a minimum spend on creative and advertising of $100kish, this is very much the sort of thing you probably don’t want to tell your clients about lest they stop wasting their money with you and start wasting it directly with Twitter instead.
• More Global Digital Statistics: We Are Social have dropped their latest kilometric presentation on ALL OF THE WORLD’S SOCIAL MEDIA STATS. Look! Numbers! Data! All the information you should need to be able to persuade your clients that they will DIE if they’re not on A N Other s*c**l m*d** platform (they won’t die; it probably won’t make one iota of difference at all, frankly!)!
• Reddit Metis: This is a genuinely useful little tool which lets you get a summary of any user’s Reddit profile – most engaged-with subs, most common posting topics, etc etc. If you need a free resource to help inform an influencer or seeding campaign on the platform (kill me now) then this is probably really quite helpful; aside from anything else, I very much appreciate the easy-on-the-eye design (small thing, but often tools like this are eye-gougingly ugly).
• Image Resizer: Plug in an image, export it in the perfect dimensions for whichever social platform you choose. This is a GODSEND – honestly, I can’t stress enough how much this is worth bookmarking and keeping close.
• Emoji Vision: You will doubtless have been celebrating World Emoji Day this week – I know, I was excited too! – and will perhaps have been so excited that you missed this rather excellent campaign from the RNIB, which used the day to announce its work to reimagine emoji to be more accessible to the visually impaired. The website outlines the project, shows the design work in progress, and is generally a nice wrapper for a really nice little PR stunt – I was really impressed by this, so GOOD WORK everyone involved in it.
• Twingo: It’s been a while, but I’m delighted to once again feature one of Web Curios’ favourite types of vaguely work-related content – yes, that’s right, it’s another MASSIVELY OVERDESIGNED FRENCH WEBSITE! Once again the digital creative agencies across the Channel have played an absolute blinder in convincing a client that, rather than a standard, if shiny, website to launch a new thing, they instead need a HUGELY INTERACTIVE WEBGL MASTERPIECE (it may not be webGL, but well, I don’t care)! Drive a Twingo! Play a game! Enjoy the 3d rendering! Wonder at what they trousered for this and how many actual visitors this site is likely to have! This is, honestly, great, and more power to everyone involved in it.
• Rules of a Fcukbuddy: Finally in the ‘professional’ section of Curios this week, this is a very antipodean website designed to remind men that it’s important to use protection when having casual sex with multiple partners. The tone of voice here is ACE – I particularly liked the somewhat-cheeky rule ‘Don’t Tell Your Wife’ – and the photography and design are also really cool. You can submit your own ‘rules’ for consideration – I would love to see the unmoderated submissions here.

By Sarah Delaney

NEXT, ENJOY THE LATEST IN YAEJI’S EXCELLENT ‘BEATS IN SPACE’ RADIO SHOWS (HONESTLY, THIS IS SUCH A GREAT MIX!)!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL SOMEWHAT IN DENIAL ABOUT THE FACT THAT BY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK THAT MAN IS LIKELY TO BE PRIME MINISTER, PT.1:

• The 2019 Lyttle Lytton Contest: Long-term readers will be aware of the immoderate love I feel for Adam Cadre and his annual exploration of the very worst in short-form novel openings – this is a cousin to the more renowned Bulwer-Lytton contest, which invites submissions for the worst opening line to an unwritten novel, but with the gimmick that submissions must be 200 characters or fewer. As ever, these are GLORIOUS and I don’t want to quote too many because I want you to dive write in and enjoy the mangled prose. Still, here’s my favourite from this year’s selection – you go and find your own: “Tiffany had always dreamed of attending the Gathering, but even as Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J stomped triumphantly onstage, she couldn’t take her eyes off Brian”. Genius.
• AI Portraits: Upload a photo and watch as it’s reimagined by a MACHINE INTELLIGENCE (not, in fact, an intelligence) and recreated in one of a variety of styles. This is very impressive – it’s not a style transfer, which we’ve seen a lot of before; instead the system has been trained on a selection of different artists’ works meaning that it ‘chooses’ what style to ape itself, but then creates its own image from scratch based on its interpretation of what you feed it. Which is a hugely clunky description, sorry, but is the best I can do. Honestly find a decent, well-lit photo of someone’s face and marvel as this site turns it into a passable Caravaggio pastiche – this is hugely impressive.
• The History of Web Design: An excellent site, created as a promo for the coffee-table book of the same name, which takes you back through 30 years of website design trends and offers a nice window into how incredibly shonky everything online was in the early-00s (although, on the plus side, visible area on an average webpage was more than 30% and you didn’t have to accept fcuking cookies all over the fcuking places, so maybe things were better then after all). There’s something pleasingly time-capsuleish about this, and you’ll be reminded of some web hits from yesteryear like The Wilderness Downtown (or at least you will if you’re like me and have spent far too much time over the past 20 years staring at a screen in the hope that it will make you feel marginally better (it won’t)).
• African Storybook: This is such a cool resource – apparently it’s been around for a few years, and it’s nice to see that it’s still active and being updated. “The African Storybook initiative aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Our vision is for all young African children to have enough enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading. On the African Storybook website users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.” SO many different stories and languages here – my only complaint is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of switching the stories into English, meaning I can’t attempt to teach myself Setswane via the medium of kids’ stories.
• Social Platforms as Physical Tech: Oh I love these! Reminiscent (to my mind) of the work of mid/late-90s Designer’s Republic, this is a series of illustrations imagining what the the world’s social networks would look like if they were physical objects; so, Insta as a camera, Twitter as a morse code tapper, etc. SO good – the artist’s name is Sheng Lam, and the link takes you to their portfolio on Artstation – once you scroll past the social media machines, you’ll discover a whole host of other great stuff; the robot whales are a personal favourite of mine. This person is insanely talented (and based in Manchester, apparently, so why not book them?).
• The Nexar Live Map: This is a quite mental vision of the future. Nexar make dashcams and similar sort of tech – this is a map of New York which lets you see recent footage from their kit, creating a sort of semi-realtime videomap of the whole city. Honestly, I can’t quite express how amazing this is – did you ever read The Circle? It’s basically like the endpoint of that novel (well, almost) where everywhere in the world is networked and visible online – you can jump to anywhere (well, almost) in NYC and see footage from a few minutes ago, enabling you to get specific information about traffic, roadworks, etc, in up-to-the-minute fashion. Fine, there might be some privacy concerns – ha! – but the overall effect is dizzyingly future and quite astonishing.
• Fcuk This Pay Me: Kickstarter as art platform! Fcuk This Pay Me is seeking funding for a ‘conceptual art project that makes visible the invisible labour of an artist’s life’. Obviously this is a LOT of high-concept w4nkery, but, equally, I very much enjoy the conceit here – “a real-time conceptual artwork that reveals the practical aspects of life as an artist, including cash flow, performative social obligations, and other emotional and financial labor (both online as well as the physical investment that goes into making work). The purpose of this piece is to pull back the curtain on the gig economy for contract and creative labor, and to raise awareness of contemporary art practices as they relate to expression and survival under capitalism.” Rewards include a livestream of the artist enjoying the utilities your donation has paid for, or “one of six “limited edition” updates which you can frame as a visual piece of art describing [their] adventures of trying to get responses to unpaid invoices”, which gives you a pretty decent idea of the vibe here.
• Video Object Removal: A Github entry, meaning there’s not a lot to do here unless you’re an actual code-wrangler – still, you can see gifs of how the tech works. Which is impressive enough (for me at least – you may have higher standards, but, if you do, what are you doing here?). This is code which lets anyone input video, highlight an object within it, and then have software automatically remove said object from all frames of the footage. Obviously it’s hardly seamless – you can very much see the joins in the outputs – but it’s again interesting less for what it is now than for what it will inevitably eventually become.
• Journey to the Microcosmos: Would you like a brand new YouTube series exploring the exciting world of INCREDIBLY SMOL WATERBORNE ORGANISMS? Would you like to dive deep into the universe of monocellular organisms? YES YOU WOULD! This is unexpectedly fascinating, I promise – I had no idea that tiny little sacs of assorted proteins could be so engaging. Also, if you’ve got a vaguely sciencey kid, this will enthrall them.
• The Incredible Pet Shop Boys Discography Analysis Motherlode: Do you like a particular artist or band? I mean really like, to the point of having gone to see them more than a dozen times in concert, perhaps having named a kid after them, that sort of thing? However much of a fan you are, I can guarantee you that you don’t like them as much as this person likes the Pet Shop Boys – or, if you do, you’re certainly not putting the same amout of effort into demonstrating your affection. This is…amazing; the navigation is a bit iffy, but just click on the ‘Where do you want to go?’ text in the top left and MARVEL at the wealth of insight available in the drop-down. You want analysis and commentary on every single PSB single and album they have EVER released? GREAT! Honestly, this is obsessionally brilliant – Wayne Studer Phd, I salute your indefatigable endeavour here, you are a fabulous madman.
• Climaginaries: I had a drink with a couple of people from Extinction Rebellion this week; man, they know how to put the fear up you. This isn’t anything to do with them, but it is about how we’re screwing the planet in a variety of imaginative, short-sighted ways. This is a project by “a multidisciplinary group of scholars from Lund, Utrecht, Durham and Warwick Universities exploring innovative and creative ways of envisioning how a post-fossil world might look like, and the means through which it can transpire. The project is a response to the fact that the power to enable and govern transition to a post-fossil society not only relies on scientific facts and legislative measures, but also on effectual means to envision post-fossil worlds. By providing new knowledge on how stories of climate futures circulate, translate and resonate, [they] aim to leave participants with a new sense of the features that make climate change matter socially and culturally.” There’s lots of really interesting stuff to read and learn and think about on here, although it’s also obviously hugely disheartening.
• Decapital: Is this a real thing? Let’s presume it is! Decapital is an anonymous (at least to me) fund offering upto $1000 to anyone with an idea – here’s the blurb. “Decapital funds individuals or small group of folks with a track record of making things. Creative and social projects of all kinds are welcome. You don’t need to be a professional activist or have a fine art background to apply. You don’t need 501(c)3 non-profit status or business plan. A track record of successful projects is more important than anything else. You may include links to previous projects in your application.What kinds of projects? Beautiful, creative, and political projects. Decapital funds a wild variety of projects—protest art, DIY engineering, creative campaigns, fringe art, unusual things, participatory events, projects that challenge structures of power. Primarily, we provide funding for projects that are otherwise difficult to fund.” There’s no indication that this is only open to projects in the US, so why not apply if you have an idea? The deadline is Wednesday 24th July, so GET TO IT.
• RedditTube: A site which lets you plug in any subReddit of your choice and which will pull the videos from it and play them in a neverending unbroken sequence. What you choose to use this for is YOUR business and I will not judge you.
• Freemium: Boring-but-useful site, this, collecting a whole host of free-to-use tools for a variety of purposes – from coding to design to project management and beyond. You’ll have heard of lots of these, but equally you’ll probably come across one or two useful things you didn’t know existed. Worth a look if you’re the sort of person who’s always after ways of CRUSHING IT MORE EFFICIENTLY.
• Elvie: Elvie is a company which makes female-centric technology, the idea being that there isn’t enough tech designed with a female-first ethos and that that needs to change. At present it sells two products – a breast pump and a pelvic floor trainer, both of which are beautifully-designed if nothing else (I’m sure they’re both great, but being in possession of neither lactating breasts or a uterus I’m not really in a position to judge) – and I’ll be interested to see what they decide to approach next.
• Perfectly Cut Screams: My friend Nick was opining on Twitter that there were few things he loves more than online videos that cut out JUST as things are getting a bit intense; then he found THIS Twitter account, which exists solely to post that exact genre of content. Truly, the world is a serendipitous wonder at times. These are SO GOOD, although each and every one will leave you hungrily wondering “yes, fine, but what happened next?”. Also, WHAT is the man in the car screaming about? We will never know, and that makes it all the more beautiful.
• The Audubon Photography Awards: The Audobon Society is an organisation that I managed to pass approximately 36 years of my life not knowing about but which now I cannot go a month without hearing about – is this a result of them becoming markedly better at communications, the internet pivoting towards birds, or the simple fact that twitcher-related content tends to find you as you hurtle reluctantly towards middle-age? No idea, obviously, Anyway, this is a collection of photographs from their annual bird photography contest and WOW are these some fine feathered friends – honestly, even if you ordinarily couldn’t give two hoots (b’dum-tish!) about avians, these are some wonderful shots.
• Text Portraits: Grant Custer has, for reasons known only to himself, made this little webtoy which generates a black and white ASCII version of your Twitter avatar using only letters used in your Twitter bio. Why? WHY THE FCUK NOT EH?
• Ferly: This is a sex-ed app for women, designed to assist with ‘sexual self-care’ – it self-describes itself as being “your guide to feeling confident, healthy and sexually empowered. Learn the art of sexual self-care, the most pleasurable activity in pursuit of wellness. Unwind with [our] mindful practices, stimulate your brain and body with sensual stories or take a moment to reflect on what great sex means to you.” On the one hand, this is A Good Thing and sexual openness is always to be celebrated; on the other, when did w4nking get so complicated?
• Chestfaces: The best new Twitter account I’ve seen in a while – celebrities with their faces replaced with their chests. Horrifying, compelling, amazing.
• Throwflame: What could be better than a drone? How about a drone with a flamethrower attached to it and which you can now fly around incinerating anything you fancy in the blink of an eye? No, that is obviously significantly worse, and yet that’s exactly what a company called Throwflame has invented – it’s seemingly a real product, though I’m not 100% certain that it’s entirely legal; still, why not order one and find out (please don’t order one)?

By Giuseppe Palmisano

NOW WHY NOT ENJOY SOME BRAND NEW AND YET STILL VERY OLDSCHOOL DNB?!

THE SECTION WHICH IS STILL SOMEWHAT IN DENIAL ABOUT THE FACT THAT BY THIS TIME NEXT WEEK THAT MAN IS LIKELY TO BE PRIME MINISTER, PT.2:

• Flash Drives for Freedom: A project which seeks to collect unused USB drives from people across the world, wipe them, fill them with anti-Kim Jong Il propaganda and smuggle them into North Korea ‘by a variety of means’ to get them into the hands of people living under the regime (I know that this is very, very childish, but I can’t help think of the gold watch bit in Pulp Fiction here – I KNOW, I KNOW, I’M SORRY). You can mail in USBs for them to wipe and reuse if you like – Christ knows it’s something to do with all the branded corporate ones every office has thousands of.
• Sleeptalk: This is a VERY old site – I think from 2010 – and you’ll need to enable Flash to ‘enjoy’ it, but it’s almost worth the hassle. Sleeptalk is an app which is designed to record any mutterings you make while you kip so you can listen into whatever it is that your id feels the need to express while you’re REM-ing; the website features the ‘best’ of these recordings that anyone at all can listen to. There’s no indication – ok, fine, I’ve not really looked into this that much – that there’s any consent involved here – do the recordings just get automatically uploaded? DO THESE PEOPLE KNOW I’M LISTENING TO THEM? This is very, very odd, and strangely quite creepy; it just feels a bit wrong, if you know what I mean. Special shout out to the Australian woman murmuring ‘little whorebag’ as she slumbers – so SWEET!
• Go To France: Carolyn Boyle is a writer, journalist and Francophile; this is her website, where she shares her tips and recommendations for tourists, covering the length and breadth of the country and covering food, accomodation and the rest. If you’re planning a trip this is a brilliant resource.
• Smoking Chefs: Photographs of workers in London’s Chinatown, smoking between shifts. Simultaneously intimate, voyeuristic, weary, sad and timeless, these are GREAT shots and I really want a plate of dumplings now.
• Livecams: An excellent selection of working webcams from across the US, each featuring LOVELY CRITTERS! You want brown bears? You want puppies? You want eagles and otters and elephants? O MAOW! O ROFF! SO MANY CRITTERS!
• Etymonline: The online etymology dictionary! Want to find the origin and evolution of any word in the English language? No, you probably don’t, but you SHOULD. BE MORE CURIOUS FFS! I mean, if you’re not inspired to go delving after reading the superbly-comprehensive entry for ‘cnut’ then I don’t know what’s wrong with you frankly.
• Tarot-o-Bot: Created by design agency illo, this is a fun, silly, beautifully-designed little webtoy which draws a three-card design tarot on demand, and then interprets it for you – the interpretations are all whimsical predictions about the design industry, and feature things like ‘your creative director will deliver all feedback via the medium of Insta stories’, which will probably appeal more to those of you working in the industry than the rest of you. What? FFS not everything can be universally appealing, wind your neck in.
• Old Bailey Online: Oh me oh my! “A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.” This is, honestly, remarkable – you can search the entire archive by keyword, meaning you can find records of trials featuring your ancestors, stories of murder and revenge, and a remarkable number of instances of people thieving each others’ chickens. This is basically the greatest collection of historical writing prompts you’ll ever see, and if you want some inspiration for that historical potboiler you’ve always wanted to write then, well, GET ON WITH IT YOU LAZY FCUK.
• The Pigeon Movie Database: A comprehensive resource detailing avian appearances in modern cinema, and generally looking at the world of filmmaking through the eyes of a…er…pigeonphile? This is obviously not really a comprehensive database of pigeons in flims, but it’s still quite funny so I’ll let it off.
• The 2019 Artistic Swimming World Championships: Or at least photographs of the 2019 artistic swimming world championships. This is synchronised swimming meets Cabaret, as far as I can tell, which a startling number of sequins, rictus grins and jazz-hands, and the photos are astonishing – the first one alone feels like it ought to win all sorts of awards, and they don’t let up as you scroll through the selection. SO good.
• Uninteresting Photographs: A Twitter account which offers exactly what its name suggests – a selection of incredibly underwhelming photographs. I sort-of feel this ought to be an Insta feed really – I just checked, it isn’t – but it’s still pretty good. Where do these come from? Who takes them? WHY?
• Storm Area51: You will, if you’re any sort of webmong worth your salt, be aware of the current meme-y plan to storm Area51 (you know, where the US keeps all the SECRET ALIEN GUBBINS that they’re hiding from us all) that’s been gathering pace over the past few weeks – this is the associated Facebook Group, and, whilst this is obviously just a stupid joke that has snowballed, it is simultaneously an excellent window into the general madness and incomprehensibility of online culture here in the year of our lord two kay nineteen. It’s just an astonishing carcrash of irony, stupidity, sarcasm, meme culture and PURE INTERNET, and I love and hate it simultaneously. If you want a brief idea of how incredibly layered and self-referential the world of extremely online has become, take a read of some of this and then imagine trying to explain some of the jokes to someone from just 5 years ago.
• Unicron: I am not, to be clear, the sort of man who spends money on or owns vinyl toy figurines – I don’t judge you if you are (apart from Fat Bob, who I do very much judge), it’s just not my thing. That said, this makes me ALMOST change my mind – toy company Hasbro has one of those LEGO-esque crowdfunding setups, where limited edition or exclusive designs will get made in limited numbers if a set number of enthusiasts commit to shelling out for the product; this is them offering to make UNICRON FROM TRANSFORMERS, if 8000 middle-aged losers shell out $800 each for the privilege. I COULD BE ONE OF THOSE MIDDLE-AGED LOSERS! For those of you whose childhoods were less Transformers-obsessed than mine, Unicron is a big baddie from the giant transforming robots canon, and he turns into a PLANET that EATS OTHER PLANETS and oh God I am basically 9 years old again and I MUST NOT BUY THIS.
• Queer Scifi: A site collecting recommendations of science fiction and fantasy novels featuring queer protagonists; fantasy’s not my genre, but I can imagine this being a useful resource for anyone who likes that sort of thing but is a *bit* bored of Conan-style heteroboning in loincloths.
• NASA Flickr: Thanks to Paddy, whose newsletter I stole this from this week – this is a wonderful collection of photos from NASA on Flickr. People, planets, spacecraft, moonwalks, stars, nebulae…SO MUCH SPACE.
• Ultimate Ungulate: Have you ever spent an afternoon wasting time at work browsing the web (NO OF COURSE YOU HAVEN’T) but been left vaguely dissatisfied because of the lack of high-quality ungulate material available to you? Have you always harboured a secret – or overt; why be ashamed? – desire to know more about hooved mammals and their wants, desires and secrets? Well don’t I have a treat for you! I can’t be mean about this – it’s genuinely informative, well-maintained and the site’s owner, one Brent Huffman, clearly loves his ungulates. It’s just, well, this sort of VERY SPECIFIC, very deep investigation into niche stuff scratches a peculiar itch deep within me and for reasons I don’t quite adequately understand sort-of makes me want to cry. Best not to dwell too much on it, on balance.
• The Trocadero: When I was but a smol child, I would come and visit my dad in London at the weekends and, if I was very lucky, he’d take me to the Trocadero – in the early 90s, it was THE most exciting place in the world, especially if you grew up in Swindon where the acme of underage town centre entertainment was flicking chips at goths and attempting to eat 15 doughnuts in under 10 minutes. It was PACKED with arcade machines and flashing lights and EXCITING SLIGHTLY OLDER KIDS whose acne and slight smell of stale B&H spoke of FREEDOM and EXCITEMENT and THE PROSPECT OF ONE DAY LOSING ONE’S VIRGINITY! This is a wonderful Twitter thread which tells the history of the venue, including all sorts of wonderful, nostalgia-inducing photos. Honestly, this made me SO happy.
• Popup Trombone: Absolutely the best single-webpage gag I’ve seen all week, and a hugely satisfying one to boot.
• Tina Kraus: Tina Kraus makes rather wonderful paper art- this is her portfolio. The animals are just WONDERFUL.
• Terraria: You might not think that you need or want a YouTube channel devoted solely to presenting soothing videos of people putting terrariums together, but you have no idea what you actually want and should listen to me because only I can see the desires that lurk deep in your soul.
• Kibus: Obviously you want the best for your fur baby (sorry) – OBVIOUSLY. You want all the best toys and the treats and suchlike, and if you could afford it you’d probably want some sort of gourmet chef preparing meals on demand, but you can’t quite afford it, much to your shame and chagrin. Still, never mind, Kibus is the next best thing – “with the Kibus device you will be able to offer your pet a natural and healthy food, which is human-grade, minimally processed and completely tasteful. You only need to program the home appliance and fill a tank with water and the other tank with dehydrated pet food and Kibus will make everything else for you! Your pet will enjoy a healthy, natural and just-cooked meal. The device has also a water bowl which is always full so that pets have always water available.” I mean, what? It’s a device that will…what, warm up kibble for your cat? Can you imagine what this would make your house smell like? Also, I don’t know about your pets, but if my girlfriend’s cat is anything to go by you’d be knee-deep in uneaten, warm kitty chow within about three days.
• Sonny: What bathroom feature do you most want to make portable and carry around with you? Your mirror? The lovely lighting? The…er…bidet? Yes, that’s right! Sonny is the nearly 20x funded Indiegogo sensation offering thousands of people the opportunity to carry a reasonably high-powered water pick with them wherever they go so that they can worry at their bemerded anus with some cleansing H2O. On the one hand, big fan of a clean bum over here; on the other, this feels like it’s going to end up with fecal matter all over the walls of a public toilet cubicle when you get your angles wrong. This feels to me like it might not eventually work 100% as advertised, but maybe I’m just a foul-bottomed cynic.
• Spy Intrigue: This is an EXCELLENT piece of interactive fiction – I don’t want to tell you too much about it, but you can happily kill 45m with it and it will make you laugh a LOT (or it will if you have a similar sense of humour to me, which, given you’re reading my writing, I’m going to vaguely assume that you do. Unless you’re reading this out of some sort of masochistic impulse in which case, really, stop it).
• Bumface Poohands: Finally this week, it’s not big or clever but this book title and premise made me laugh a LOT. Also, it’s by Kunt of Kunt and the Gang ‘fame’, and as such I will recommend it unreservedly; I read his autobiography in an afternoon over Christmas and, while it’s fair to say there are better-written books out there, I laughed more reading it than at anything else I have read this year. Go on, treat yourself to a copy, I promise you won’t regret it (probably, although your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for comedy songs about Madeline McCann).

By Lin Yung Cheng

LAST UP IN THIS WEEK’S MIXES, SOME HOUSE AND DISCO BANGERS FROM MELVO BAPTISTE!

THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:

• Tiny Pricks: The awful man in the White House says and does some dreadful things. Tiny Pricks takes them and makes them into works of embroidery.
• Baz Furnell: Baz Furnell makes quite incredibly intricate pen drawings which, I promise, are MESMERISING.
• Zoerism: Street art with a very clear and, to me, slightly baffling focus on cars, both as subject matter and material. Odd, but a very strong aesthetic here.
• Downtown Collective: Collecting drawings and illustrations of New York storefronts and restaurants. Lovely.
• Miki Kim: Oh WOW tattoos. These are sublime.
• Black Forest Woods: Incredibly soothing photos and videos of high-end carpentry and woodworking which will absolutely give you tingles if you’re that sort of person.
• City Live Sketch: Pietro Cataudella is an artist/designer type person; his Insta feed is full of small visual gags in which he combines sketches in his notebook with scenes in the real world to comic effect (and which is loads better than my joyless little writeup here has made it sound).
• Tito Merello: Morello is a painter from (I think) Spain – this is his Insta feed. His work is GORGEOUS.
• Andrew Jonathan Design: FULL DISCLOSURE – Andrew is a friend of mine, though not one of the ones who reads Curios and so he may NEVER KNOW about his exciting inclusion in this week’s Insta roundup. He recently quit his job to pursue his dream of being an interior designer – his Insta feed is basically his lookbook/portfolio, and if you’d like a bit of very stylish interiors inspiration then I suggest you give it a follow. If you ask him nicely he’ll recommend you some throws or something (SORRY ANDREW I KNOW IT’S MORE COMPLICATED THAN THAT).
• Barbie: Barbie on Instagram is some sort of incredible postmodern performance art project and, honestly, may be the best dissection of Insta culture and the oddity of it all that currently exists. I am totally serious about this btw.

LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG!

• Neuralink: Elon Musk this week announced that his latest project has already managed to get a monkey to control a computer with its brain; this is an overview of the actual science behind the hype, and is sober-enough in tone to point out that this stuff is actually quite a long way away still, and the ability to control anything with any sort of precision using only the POWER OF OUR MINDS isn’t quite to hand just yet, despite what the ever-marching army of Musk fanboys might want to think. Obviously hugely impressive and not a little terrifying, but also obviously still very much vaporware at this stage.
• Hosting Hate Online: I’ve been waiting for this story for a couple of years now, ever since the Murdoch press started going for Google in a big way for hosting hateful content (THE IRONY!) – this story is about the companies that providing hosting to some of the world’s more objectionable websites, the ones peddling nazism and hatred and bigotry (no, not Twitter! LOLzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz), and how they just seem to get a free pass for it from everyone; GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, Google…all the big names, all profiting from the horror. Any proper outlets want to write this one up (sorry Gizmodo, but)?
• How Facebook’s New Ad Transparency Tools Will Work: A really good explainer about exactly what the new ad transparency settings will tell you about why you’re seeing ads on FB, where the advertisers got your data from, etc – the update’s not reached me yet, so I can’t personally comment on it, but based on this excellent writeup it seems to be pretty much incontrovertibly A Good Thing.
• The Facebook Poker Bot: Perhaps I simply wasn’t reading closely enough, but I didn’t see too much of the coverage of the latest advance in gameplaying AI mentioning the fact that it’s a Facebook product. It is, though, and this piece does a decent job of explaining why it’s a significant development and what it might enable future software to do more efficiently – effectively this is a tiny step in enabling machine intelligence to make assessments about the truth value of a statement when delivered by an individual with intention to deceive. Which on the one hand is potentially really useful, and on the other brings even closer a future in which the machines will know everything and we won’t be able to fool them and oh god this ends badly doesn’t it?
• The Future of Video: A report from this year’s Vidcon, the annual jamboree for video platforms and creators which has for years been dominated by YouTube but which according to this report is this year seeing TikTok hoovering up all the attention as YouTube struggles with issues of moderation, community toxicity, creator burnout and the rest. The thrust of the piece is generally that YouTube’s struggling for relevance and attention, which, frankly, is balls; I wouldn’t give up on it quite yet.
• Amazon’s Project Go: A really interesting look at the genesis and evolution of Amazon’s Project Go – it’s physical retail space offering which dispenses with cashiers in favour of a seamless ‘walk in, get stuff, walk out’ shopping experience. As with everything about Amazon it’s hugely impressive and utterly chilling at the same time – I can’t even begin to imagine how terrifying a meeting with Jeff Bezos would be (mech suit or otherwise).
• Have We Hit Peak Podcast?: So, so much of this piece feels like an Onion parody, not least the entire opening section describing two young Americans feelings of dismay and disappointment when their generic, ill-considered, no-effort podcast didn’t instantly garner them influencer status and a bunch of brand deals. Aside from that, though, it’s a pretty good look at the current state of the podcast ecosystem, and a decent illustration of why the world probably doesn’t need an unedited recording of you and your mates LOLing it up whilst hungover (YOU ARE NOT THAT FUNNY, KAREN).
• Level Design Patterns in 2d Games: This is a pretty technical post about videogame design, fine, but it’s also a really interesting insight into the tricks and tools that game designers use to create an optimal player experience, and if you’re an ageing gamer who remembers the halcyon days of the side-scroller then this will be genuinely fascinating; otherwise, it’s still a good explanation of how design influences usage if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
• The Coast of Utopia: Vanity Fair hangs out with the infuriatingly Instaperfect influencers of Australia’s Byron Bay – the piece is largely judgement free, and in fairness none of the people featured come across particularly badly (or at least, not compared to some of the Instadetritus one reads interviews with), but it’s a decent encapsulation of the sheer surreality of the Insta-industrial complex and the people who exist within it.
• Occupy White Walls: Occupy White Walls is a videogame-cum-art-project which lets the player create their own gallery, fill it with work of their choosing, and then explore it and the galleries of others in virtual space – it sounds LOVELY, and seems to raise interesting questions about the nature of the gallery-going experience, discussions of art, etc.
• Warped: After last week’s piece on Blink182, another time machine back to the 90s/00s with this retrospective on the Warped tour (which I was stunned to fnd out was still giong) and a look at this, it’s supposedly final incarnation. It’s funny to think how mainstream all this stuff was 20 years ago, and how long that slightly weird XXXXTREME! Stuff persisted for afterwards – what’s best about this piece, though, is all the photos of ageing pop-punkers looking a big flabby and worse for wear. I often ask myself what we’re all going to look like when we’re all old and the tattoos are sagging – this, it turns out, is the answer.
• The Murky Ethics of Posthumous Music: Because I am old and mainly listen to Radio4 I had literally no idea that a version of ‘Higher Love’ featuring Whitney Houston’s vocals was being touted as THIS SUMMER’S DANCEFLOOR BANGER, but apparently it is. This is a really good piece on the song, it’s genesis, and the oddity of using the vocal track of a deceased artist in this sort of production; as I type this I’m listening to the track and fcuking hell it’s awful; Whitney was so much better than this.
• The YouTube Candidate: What’s politics going to look like when today’s kids become old enough to vote and decide they want to see Ninja, Yogscast and Zoella running the country? At present it’s hard to imagine it will look appreciably worse. This is a profile of US YouTuber Joey Salads, famous for prank videos but who’s now attempting to parlay his skills as…as…as a man who makes prank videos on the internet into a run for Congress. This is by turns very funny – Salads is, it’s fair to say, a man for whom minimalism and restraint are largely unknown concepts – and a bit troubling; you get the feeling that Salads may not make Congress, but it won’t be long before someone else like him does.
• The Impossible Dream: On why the pursuit of happiness is a fundamentally stupid thing to aim for and serves only to make us miserable. “The appetite for pleasure, as understood by Hobbes, has two disturbing features. First, it never ends until death. There is no stable condition that counts as being happy; there are only fleeting experiences that must be renewed constantly. We are (though Hobbes doesn’t use the phrase) in an endless pursuit of happiness, and in order to attain happiness, we are in pursuit of the power and wealth that we believe will make it possible. Second, we take an imaginary pleasure now in our future pleasures. And since happiness is subjective, imaginary pleasures are just as authentic as real ones. Thus fantasy and reality become interchangeable.” Well quite.
• Workers of the World: A brilliant Bloomberg piece in which they profile 10 millennials from around the world, interviewing them about their lives and their jobs, their hopes and fears. Each piece is presented in the voice of the interviewee – honestly, these are all superb pen portraits, each with a beautifully-distinct voice. I fell slightly in love with the kid from South Africa, but you will each have your own favourites; wonderful.
• If Men Carried Purses: A really interesting essay on the extent to which garment design impacts or reflects relative expectations placed on men and women to clean, tidy and generally restore order in their environment. I had honestly never thought about any of the stuff in here, which suggests that there’s quite a lot of truth in it.
• My Unsexual Revolution: Diane Shipley tells the story of her sex life, or lack of it, and the steps she took to understand that perhaps sex wasn’t for her after all, and that she didn’t want to do it. I really like this piece – it’s clear-eyed, unsentimental, honest, and…I want to say ‘neatly-written’, which sounds like faint praise but is very much not meant as such. Very good indeed.
• 9 Months With Fan Bingbing: Fan Bingbing, as you doubtless all already know (having read about her in Curios before, obvs), is China’s biggest movie star who recently got into trouble with the Chinese authorities, was very publicly shamed for tax irregularities, and disappeared for 9 months or so. This article is by Rian Dundon, who was her English tutor for a time a few years ago, and it is FASCINATING, not just about Fan herself but about the weird and VERY dodgy-sounding world of Chinese films. It also contains a slightly-buried allegation that David Carradine was somehow offed by Fan’s gangster manager, which is a bold claim to make in your own name – I do hope Rian’s not easily findable.
• Why We Should Read John Updike: A brilliant essay in defence of Updike – and other authors of the same ilk – which makes the excellent point that, regardless of what we might think about the distasteful masculinism of the author or some of his novels’ tropes,the quality of the writing is such that it withstands criticism. Regardless of what you think of Updike (personally I adore the Rabbit novels and quite a lot of his other stuff as well, though equally there are a few things that are pretty much unreadable in 2019), this is just a really solid piece of writing and criticism, and I applaud the spirit.
• The Murderer, The Writer, The Reckoning: About writing in prison, by a writer, in prison. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but this contains the most arresting opening paragraph of any essay you will read all year. John J Lennon can certainly write, though there’s a chilling quality to the prose; I can’t quite tell whether this is informed by what you learn about him as you read the essay or something inherent in his writing.
• Et Tu: Another superb reflection, this time by Lidija Haas, on the Me Too movement, where it has led us, and what the world feels like now that we’ve ostensibly recalibrated our morals a bit.
• Going Down The Pipes: Finally in this week’s longreads, an article from way back in 1996 – this is the celebrated essay that inspired the film ‘Pushing Tin’, all about air traffic controllers in New Jersey and how insanely, crazily stressful their job is. This is an all-time classic piece of writing – brilliant characters, brilliant setting, tension, humour, the works. Honestly, you’ll enjoy this SO much, I promise. It’s long, though, so make one of those big Sports Direct mugs of tea to go with it.

By Jack Teagle

AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!:

1) This is my friend Little Chris’ favourite band, or it used to be, and this song will make you feel 15 again – The Menzingers, with ‘Anna’:

2) Excellent advice in this song from Idles – ‘Never Fight A Man With A Perm’:

3) This is a GREAT song – it’s called ‘Don’t Cling to Life’ and it’s by The Murder Capital, and the video is ART:

4) This is A Certain Ratio with a cracking track and a video featuring some EXCELLENT old-school dancing, as well as the wonderful vocals of Barry Adamson – it’s called ‘Dirty Boy’:

5) HIPHOP CORNER! Common is an all-time great rapper, and this is a typically great track. Hercules, ft. Swizz Beats – SO good:

6) Last up this week, this is scratchy, odd little number with an absolutely compelling video – I could watch this forever, it’s mesmerising and the model/actor is incredible. It’s called ‘St Seraphim Redux’ and its by Collapsing Scenery and, well, ENJOY AND TAKE CARE AND HAVE FUN AND I LOVE YOU AND WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I REALLY APPRECIATE YOU AND EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO AND THAT I HONESTLY TO BELIEVE IT’S ALL GOING TO BE FINE I WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK AS USUAL BUT UNTIL THEN YOU BE CAREFUL OUT THERE AND BE NICE TO YOURSELF OK I LOVE YOU OK BYE!: