Jesus, even by my standards that was a big one.
I am spent – seriously, I have been typing almost solidly since 640am and my fingers and my back hurt and I can’t imagine for one second that any of you woke up this morning thinking “Yes, I really can’t wait to hear Matt’s tediously-cynical meanderings about The Current Situation In Which We Find Ourselves” and as such I am not going to offer you any.
I hope you are ok, and not anxious or scared or hungry or cold or in penury. If you are any of those things, let me know if I can help. Most likely I probably can’t, which is why, as per usual, I instead offer the freshly-slain carcass of this week’s internet for you to worry at instead; get your nose right in there and sniff the entrails while they’re still warm and faintly-steaming, or alternatively leave them to mature over the weekend to get really ripe.
Oh, and if this isn’t enough, IMPERICA MAGAZINE ISSUE 3 IS OUT NOW! A mere £3 or equivalent, available in all major digital formats, and full of loads of genuinely good writing by a bunch of talented authors (none of whom, as per, are me). It really is worth a look, I promise, and I’m saying that even though I don’t see a penny.
Anyway, it’s that time again – settle in, brace yourselves and drink in the apocalypse in one heady draught; I am Matt, this is Web Curios, and I think that once again I have managed to break the 10k word mark for which I am genuinely sorry.
Oh, hang on, two small points of order:
- There is a LOT in here this week – noone’s expected to click on everything, unless of course you want to, but maybe instead just have a gentle browse and see what takes your fancy; there really is something for everyone (and if you can’t find anything, I promise you you have some fcuking niche interests)
- I’ve tried to keep it relatively-upbeat (well, the content at least; the writing is what it is at this stage, sorry), so there shouldn’t be anything hugely sadmaking – but generally-speaking, the first half-dozen links in the miscellenia are more ‘serious’ on the ‘rona, and the same for the long reads. Otherwise, you should be fine with everything else being reasonably gentle
RIGHT FFS GET ON WITH IT.
By David Bray
THE SECTION WHICH IS LOOKING AT THE TOTAL NUMBER OF LINKS IN THE CURIODUMP THIS WEEK AND IS HONESTLY FEELING A TOUCH DAUNTED AND SO IS JUST GOING TO CRACK ON AND TRY TO GET THROUGH THIS FIRST SECTION AT PACE IF THAT’S OK WITH ALL OF YOU:
- FB Launches Corona Help-Matching Service: It feels a bit weird to make observations about business-type stuff during something so, well, serious, but it’s remarkable the extent to which *gestures* all of this has really been the thing that has cemented s*c**l m*d**’s status as a genuine part of necessary human infrastructure rather than just ‘that thing we are all addicted to’. Facebook, with its status as ‘the most popular thing in the world that isn’t food or sex or sleeping or something necessarily biological’, has been quietly-impressive in the way in which its been tweaking its platform to better-leverage its scale; this announcement, whereby the platform’s set up a dedicated section to help those offering assistance with COVID-19 and those requiring it, is just one example. When this is all over, for better or worse we will all be slightly more in hock to Mark’s Big Blue Misery Factory than ever before.
- Facebook Watch Becomes More YouTube-ish: I know that that’s a terribly-written descriptor but, look, I have a lot to get through and it’s probably worth me admitting now that the quality of the accompanying prose is likely to be variable at best. Anyway, this is Facebook’s recent tweaks to its Watch functionality (the bit where it wants publishers to put their videos instead of YouTube) which make it far easier for content creators (ugh) to arrange, organise and promote their content, and which seems explicitly designed to promote and privilege episodic content. Another reason why you might as well put everything you make on every single available platform because, well, why the fcuk not? It’s not like you’ve not got the time on your hands now, after all.
- Messenger Gets A Desktop App : As a Messenger refusenik I was convinced that this already existed – turns out that til this week it didn’t, but now you can use Facebook’s proprietary typing-and-videocalling software as your preferred means of keeping up with people on your desktop as well as your phone. Do you want Zoom shadily sending all your call data, etc, to Facebook, or would you rather just kneel before the Zuckerbergian Godhead and hand them all over directly? Choices, choices.
- Businesses Can Now Display Temporary Service Changes: Business Pages on Facebook are as of the now able to display temporary services that they are now offering as a result of lockdown, etc – so takeaway, for example, or home delivery, or ‘we now sell online’, etc. I have literally nothing bad to say about this at all, for a change.
- Facebook Makes Marginal Improvement to Data Transparency: I presume that this is a long-planned, scheduled stop on a product development roadmap, as otherwise there’s no reason at all for them to be announcing an (admittedly minor) additional tweak to FB’s data transparency policies at a time when literally noone in the world is bothered about this sh1t any more (STEAL MY DATA, ZUCKERDADDY!). Anyway, Facebook users are, in addition to the patchy information they can see about their presumed interests and the like, now able to see some detail about both the ‘additional information’ from around the web that Facebook’s using to optimise one’s browsing experience, and the ‘inferences’ that Facebook makes about our preferences to determine specific elements of content delivery. It’s not a bad development at all, to be clear, but the company’s commitment to radical transparency is underlined by the final lines in the announcement where it directs users to where to find this ‘easy to understand and transparent new information’ and then offers them a largely-unintelligible link soup spread across approximately 8 different Pages.
- FB Tweaks Livestream Options: Because everyone has to stream their lives now to a greater or lesser degree (it’s the LAW – no, seriously, it is! Over the past week I have seen a staggering number of people across the socials breathlessly announcing that they are GOING LIVE later that day and exhorting people to tune in later and, look, honestly, I know you’re lovely and compelling but, really, we’re living in an era in which people already felt overwhelmed by the quantity of high-quality professional entertainment available to them so why the FCUK do you think they are going to choose to watch you lipsync in your kitchen when they could finally be getting round to watching the Sopranos?), Facebook’s now making it easier – you can now stream audio-only, there’s automatic closed-captioning, and its donations mechanic is now open to museums and other cultural institutions (though currently I’m unsure as to whether that’s global) so they can try and monetise their efforts. Useful and helpful updates, certainly, but it’s not going to make you a compelling live entertainer, John.
- Snapchat Launches Stories API: If you can’t beat them, infiltrate their websites! That’s right – Snap has finally bitten the bullet and decided that it might as well just accept the fact that other platforms are just going to keep stealing Stories as a format, and now offers the ability to use the original tech wherever you like. Want to build a Stories function into your app? Use Snap’s! Want to pull public Stories from Snap straight into your app or website? Amazing! This is really interesting, though it also feels potentially like it might also be approximately four years too late; still, I’d be fascinated to see some side-by-side comparisons, analysed TOO HARD by Mel or similar, of how quarantine is playing out on Snap vs TikTok.
- Pinterest Launches Verified Merchant Programme: BLUE TICKS FOR (SOME) SHOPS ON PINTEREST! FREE! APPLY NOW!
- The WHO Call To Creatives: The World Health Organisation has issued a brief (well, a series of small briefs) to creatives worldwide to come up with campaigns to educate people and boost public awareness of the steps needed to contain and slow the spread of the virus – anyone can submit work, use the assets and share their outputs on social, with the WHO selectively promoting those examples it considers to be particularly good. On the one hand, my initial reaction to this was ‘THANK GOD! THE CREATIVES ARE HERE! WE ARE SAVED!’ – then, though, I realised that I was being a total pr1ck and noone should ever mock or criticise people for trying to do something good, regardless of one’s own opinion of its likely efficacy. So I slapped myself around a bit, mentally and emotionally, had a small, conflicted cry, and then put it back on the list. There – that was a small insight into the link-selection process that goes on every week, and the rollercoaster emotional journeys I embark on every seven days. Fcuk me, it’s like Open House inside my mind.
- Did They Help?: Another repository of examples of companies doing good, or not doing good, in the face of pandemic; this one’s searchable by region, with a specific UK breakout, and features famouses as a separate category to businesses, and is a useful way of keeping tabs on this stuff.
- The Antioxidant Plum: Just because the world is going to hell in a handcart doesn’t mean that everything has to change – for example, we can still enjoy preposterously overengineered websites for products or goods or services that don’t really warrant the fancy webwork. Here, look, it’s a website for a plum – that’s the literal fruit, by the way, but not just any plum, oh no, this is the Queen Garnet plum, with antioxidant properties and whose powder sells for a frankly astonishing $50 a bag (fine, that’s Aussie dollars, but still), and which has a website which is designed with all the care and attention to detail of, I don’t know, a Farrow & Ball, or similar bastion of overpriced class signifiers. Particular joy comes from the copy, whose use of italics I’ve chosen to liberally mimic in my own writeup. As ever, immense fcuking kudos to whoever it was who sold in ‘a website, but for a fruit, but that will cost you upwards of £30k
By Toni Hamel
THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.1:
- All The Coronadatasets: Only of practical interest to those of you who do actual data-crunching; if you do, though, Google’s collecting all the publicly available datasets it can lay its hands on and putting them here for people to analyse and play with.
- Corona In The Commandline: I can’t remember if I told you about the Slackbot which Shardcore built for us, pulling the latest global ‘rony stats on command – anyway, this is a Github repo for code that will let you build exactly the same thing, drawing the latest info on cases and deaths and recoveries worldwide, along with the ability to pull country-specific data of your choosing. A gentle warning – turns out, the ability to get (relatively) up-to-the-minute information about a deathtoll that’s ticking upwards with a certain sense of inexorability isn’t hugely relaxing!
- Infotagion: This is an interesting UK initiative; Infotagion is intended as an easy-to-digest series of little infobites on COVID-19, designed to debunk myths that might be circulated online and specifically aimed at younger people or those who might not be receiving their information through more ‘official’ channels (an aside – I was talking to Iain Laurie on Twitter the other day, and it turns out he has no idea who Dominic Raab is; imagine! What bliss! What purity of soul and spirit! Didn’t stop him doing a lovely sketch of him, though). It’s been put together by former Chair of the DCMS Select Committee Damien Collins, and the people behind the YOOF MEDIA juggernaut that is Joe, and might be worth a look if you want stuff to fwd to people who are spouting bullsh1t about chemtrails or secret Chinese plots.
- CovidPause: You don’t need me to tell you this, obviously – you’re all grown-ups, or I hope you are (Curios is probably suitable for the mature teenager, so I’d probably rate it a 15) – but it’s obviously totally ok to ignore the news a bit. There’s so much of it, and it’s all so boring and so dreadful! This is a bit of code that you can install on your laptop or desktop which will block all the news about the ‘rona from your browser – I imagine it would render your browsing experience somewhat light, but that’s perhaps no bad thing. Actually, there’s part of me that thinks there’s a nice, short little arty video to be made showing what it looks like doing a normal day’s browsing across the web, but with all the pandemicnews blocked out – webpages swiss-cheesed, mostly-whitespace with the occasional, solitary bit of legacy-normality news marooned on the page. Can someone make that please and set it to minor-key piano music? Ta.
- Conference Call: What everyone’s life is now like for several hours a day – experience a browser-based recreation of the wonder that is group video chat! This is very good, not least because the jiggerypokery under the hood means that everyone’s experience on the site is subtly different. Bonus points for anyone who just streams this on their next Teams ‘experience’.
- An A-Z of Funny Lockdown Content: Regular readers will know that ‘heartwarming’ and ‘the lighter side of life!’ are not, were I to use content tags, the sort of content tags that would ever find a home in the right-hand sidebar of Curios (again, were such a thing to exist – this…this isn’t working well, this description) – still, I’ll make an exception for this thread, compiled with professional Twitter funnyperson David Levin and which pulls together some genuinely…nice examples of gently funny Twitter content which will make you, hopefully, do a smol smile (and will give you something to contribute to the seemingly neverfuckingending memechains on WhatsApp DEAR GOD WHEN DID WE ALL BECOME OUR FCUKING PARENTS PLEASE STOP FORWARDING EVERY FCUKING INANE THING THAT YOUR AUNT SENDS YOU PLEASE GOD).
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The Virtual Mall: Wow. This would be a quite remarkable undertaking at any time, but to make and release it when we’re all in lockdown and perhaps need the ability to wander through the wide corridors of a shopping precinct, even if only virtually…well, this is some next-level public service. It’s also INCREDIBLE – this person (I don’t know who made it, sorry) has built an entire virtual mall experience in Google Sheets. It’s oddly-reminiscent of a certain type of browser game from a decade or so ago, which may well be the point, and contains SO MUCH STUFF; it’s basically a bunch of interconnected Excel docs, all designed to look like the map of a shopping centre; clicking on different shops (or signs, or features) takes you off in weird different directions, with links to actual online retailers, internet games, bits of weird content…honestly, this is a total warren of wonderful, silly stuff, and is made near-perfect by the sincerity of the message on the homepage which apologises for the mall not being editable and blames the lockdown on ‘immature’ people who added some bongo to it. So pure, so beautiful. Thankyou Lauren Epstein for sending this to me – Lauren runs a WONDERFUL newsletter called ‘Essential Ephemera’, which you should all email her and ask her to subscribe to (she’s on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
). - Voleflix: I’ve featured Matt Round’s ‘Vole’ project on here a few times now, but make no apologies for doing so again – he’s just launched ‘Voleflix’, which is basically a bunch of great, full-length, public-domain films on YouTube (stuff like ‘The Man With The Golden Arm and other such classics), all compiled on his site with a nice interface and some bonus ORIGINAL CONTENT which is slightly-sillier but no less good. If you ignore the wrapping, this is a genuinely-useful thing to send to anyone you might know who might want a simple way of finding and watching about 50-odd old films for free whilst stuck at home.
- Harry Potter At Home: As part of the Great Content Bonanza of 2020, Pottermore (the online Harry Potter universe which I almost certainly don’t need to explain to anyone) has launched this section designed to give fans of Rowling’s ubiquitous series a bunch of additional ways to ENGAGE WITH HER IMAGINATION. Specifically, this is a series of resources for parents and teachers and children to help with keeping kids occupied, educated and entertained – features include ‘special activity kits from Bloomsbury to Scholastic, to nifty magical craft videos (teach your friends how to draw a Niffler!) fun articles, quizzes, puzzles and more’ -, and I can’t think of anything bad to say about it whatsoever. If you have Potter-obsessive kids to wrangle, I can think of no finer way of, er, wrangling them.
- Cards Against Humanity: Family Edition: CAH is not, as a rule, a child-friendly game, or at least not the sort of children that you might ever want to meet or hang out with. In response to the ‘rona, though, its makers have made and freely-released a version which, they say, can safely played as a family without having to explain to little Merlin exactly why ‘prolapse’ in that context is quite so funny. Download, print, play – I’ve taken a look at the cards, and whilst potentially a touch on the scatological side, they seem broadly fine for kids; you may want to create your own versions that use British vernacular, though, unless you want to end quarantine with your children happily bandying around terms like ‘butt juice’.
- The Sounds of COVID-19: I first featured Cities and Memory (a project which collects sounds from around the world and keeps them online, mapped to their locations, along with imagined sounds for the same places, to create a real/irreal aural topography of the planet) in Curios in February 2018 – this week the person behind it got in touch to tell us about their new tweak to the project, collecting the sounds of lockdown to create a record of the human experience throughout these ‘extraordinary times’ (sorry, promise not to use that again). “We’re inviting anyone around the world to send us a sound recording from wherever YOU are, and tell us a little about how things are wherever you live. You can listen to the sounds and read the stories so far on the map below – click on a point to listen to the sound, and hit the “info” symbol to read the story behind it.” PLEASE DO THIS – it is a wonderful project at the best of times, and this is a genuinely important piece of history-making. This project was on Radio 4 this week, lending a rare air of actual cultural legitimacy to the stuff I link to.
- Bored Solutions: Lots of ideas for stuff to do while you’re stuck at home. Some big, some small, all eminently achievable (not sure that I would necessarily count ‘watch all of Breaking Bad’ as a ‘project’, though).
- The Implied Gallery: I don’t know who’s behind this or when it was made – SORRY – but judging by the datestamps on some of the works, it’s new-ish. Anyway, ‘Implied Gallery’ is a…er…virtual art gallery, featuring a selection of rooms you can navigate through and peruse. The works displayed are by a selection of real-world artists, tending towards the digital/screen-based; I was surprisingly taken by lots of these, though as ever ymmv.
- Desktop Companions: Oh this is lovely. For those of you not lucky enough to have a feline houseguest like I currently do (latest feline update: my furniture is unlikely to emerge from this unscathed), you might want to take a look at this selection of virtual companions that you can download and install on your desktop or phone, like some sort of Clippy-ish Neopet-type idea. From an AR pet shark to a more classic desktop cat which will play with and eventually bury your icons, all of digital companion life is here. There are LOADS here, including the annoying Goose from a few months back – if you’re holed up with someone and can get access to their computer, this is the sort of gentle terrorism that they’re BOUND to find hilarious!
- We Link: Another digital art portal, this is new from the Chronus Gallery in Shanghai and presents ten ‘easy’ pieces of webart, all linked centrally from this one site. The website design’s VERY ‘oh, that particular aesthetic that all high-design people adopted for webwork from about 2018-9’, and not hugely easy to navigate, but each of the works is genuinely interesting and all but one I’d not actually seen before; most are, also, almost entirely-baffling.
- Globe Player: It’s amazing how many people last night I saw being openly conflicted at the fact that, yes, it’s great that the National put One Man Two Guvnors online for free, and what a great play it is but, well, it’s got James Corden in it and for that reason I simply can’t watch it (fwiw, I saw it at the theatre all those years ago and it was genuinely excellent, Corden or no Corden). Anyway, if you want a pleasingly-Corden-free theatrical selection, you could do worse than checking out this from the Globe in London – I think it’s new, and it offers a selection of classic Shakespeare, performed by the river. Right now there’s a Hamlet and ‘Two Noble Kinsmen’ available to stream in full, and I presume this will refresh over time, so worth bookmarking if you’re one of the few theatregoing people in the English-speaking world who still needs to see more Shakespeare (I know, I know, but really).
- Now Play This: Now Play This is the festival of games and play that’s been happening at Somerset House for a few years and which I was meant to be going to this afternoon but which, well, I’m not now going to for obvious reasons. Still, the organisers have put a bunch of events online over the weekend for anyone interested in games design and the theory of play and related concepts to stream and participate in. Best of these is the people from White Pube interviewing one of the Goose Game inventors inside Animal Crossing, taking place tomorrow morning from 11 (the ability to understand the description neatly determines whether or not it’s the sort of thing you might be interested in). NB IF YOU ARE READING THIS VIA THE CURIOBOT ON TWITTER IT IS NOW TOO LATE AND THIS IS IN THE PAST.
- Your Typeface: Make a font, based on the proportions of your face! This is silly and quite fun, and you get to download and keep the resulting textual mess that you produce (disappointingly, all the resulting outputs I’ve been able to create have been reasonably sober – and trust me, I have a weird-looking and misshapen face).
- Free, Small, Game-making Tools: If you’ve decided that ‘getting into making (or at least playing around with making) smol indie games’ is on your list of ‘projects to make myself feel guilty with during lockdown’, this document, compiled by the fabulously-named Everest Pipkin(!), is a goldmine; it lists all sorts of small, free, weirdly little resources for gamesmaking, from different platforms to build on, to sound libraries and graphics repositories and, basically, everything you might need to make YOUR quarantine indie sensation.
- Lockdown With Brian Harvey: Thanks to Rob Manuel for bringing this to my attention via B3ta. Did you know that the best person on YouTube right now is former East17 frontman and baked potato danger-fanatic Brian Harvey? You do now. Honestly, THERE IS AN 11-HOUR LIVESTREAM OF BRIAN HARVEY AND HIS MATES LEE AND MO JUST SORT OF TALKING INTO THE CAMERA AND AROUND THE 9H MARK THEY GO DOWN SOME WEIRD YOUTUBE RABBITHOLE ABOUT THE ROYALS BEING PAEDOS!!! It’s quite, quite wonderful, and makes me think that the future of streaming is perhaps far weirder than I had hoped.
By Jack Welpott
NEXT, HAVE AN HOUR OF CLASSIC PSYCHEDELIA, ALL MIXED OFF VINY BY JJ WHITFIELD!
THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.2:
- Shaderbooth: A warning – please don’t try and run this along with all the other Curios tabs as your laptop might well do something of a die. Still, worth a look if you’re interested in face filters and AR and how it (sort-of) works; Shaderbooth uses your webcam to run some fairly-simple AR work using facial recognition and WebGL to map effects on your fizzog; the nice touch here is that the code for each is live an editable, so you can adjust the various values of the filters used to see how changing certain parameters can alter the visual output, which from the point of view of learning about how this stuff works is potentially-invaluable. Alternatively though it’s a neat way of obscuring your own face, if you’re like me and have reached the point where you honestly never, ever want to see your own countenance again.
- My Lockdown Diary: Not mine, you understand (mine would be very dull and largely read “spent too long online; cooked Italian food; smoked an unconscionable amount of weed”), but a potential one for you or your kids to print out and fill in. You may not need some online stranger to help you create a fun diary-style activity book for your child’s lockdown, but, you know, gift horses/mouths, innit.
- Music Messages: You know Cameo, that ‘pay a semi-famous a tenner in exchange for them recording a message wishing your mate a happy birthday’ site? Well this is like that, but for musicians who want to earn a few quid by singing songs on demand. THIS IS SUCH A GREAT OPPORTUNITY!!! For £20 you can get a genuinely-competent musician to sing “Fcuk You Right Back” by Frankie to WHOEVER YOU WANT!! Sadly most of the artists featured only seem to want to turn their hand to existing songs rather than performing your own compositions, but I reckon with the right inducement anything goes; if there’s a particular song that’s guaranteed to trigger a friend, this is absolutely worth doing.
- Melee: Melee is Imgur’s new site dedicated to sharing gaming-related images and videos; basically a whole new social network just for gamers. It’s iPhone only at the moment, but it seems to be a quite light-function way of people posting screenshots and discussing titles and tactics; effectively like all the gaming subReddits, streamlined into app form. If you’re a gamer, or you work in the industry, worth a look.
- Glimpse: REJOICE FOR GIMP IS NO MORE!! Anyone who’s ever worked in digital design-adjacent disciplines for small companies is aware f the horror that was GIMP – basically open-source photoshop (fcuk you Adobe, I refuse to capitalise or acknowledge the trademark), which had all the features of the original product but a user=interface so bad it was known to reduce people to tears, as well as the most embarrassing name in all of software. Now it’s been rebranded as ‘Glimpse’ and the UI’s been updated and, honestly, if you can’t afford photoshop (or can’t get a corporate copy, or a hacked one) this is a great piece of software.
- Obscure PDFs: SUCH a great Reddit thread (thanks Paddy for linking to it – if you don’t already, you really should sub to his newsletter which is a bit like Curios but far-better-curated and significantly less, well, flabby). You want a rabbithole of literally hundreds of WEIRD documents to trawl through? A philosopher’s 10,000 word meditation on erotic art? The actual academic submission entitled ‘Take Me Off Your Fcuking Mailing List’? IT IS ALL HERE.
- Hey Robot: Did you see the thing in Private Eye this week about how lovable lawyers Mishcon de Reya has issued official advise to all staff from home that they ought not have any home assistant devices in earshot when on work calls? MAKES YOU THINK, EH??? Of course, the horse has already bolted as the stablehand worries confusedly at the fastenings on the barn door; you’ve all got one of the damn things and it’s TOO LATE. So why not take the opportunity to enjoy the newly-free Alexa game Hey Robot, where the gimmick is that each player has to get the voice assistant to say a specific word or phrase to win the round. This is a really clever idea, creating play from basically nothing and actually forcing players to think rather more closely than usual to the way in which their devices work, and the information they’re pulling. Good luck getting Alexa to say “jelly dildo”, mind.
- Old Street Brewery: FULL DISCLOSURE: My friend Ben is a bit involved with these people, and I have drunk their beer for free a couple of times. Still, this is A Good Thing – as per many other small brewing companies, Old Street Brewery has had to pivot slightly and is now selling their range of home-brewed beers with free delivery to ANYWHERE. So if you want decent beer (it really is very good, promise) delivered to your house so you can get fat and cirrhotic in peace, CLICK THE LINK!!!
- YTMND: YTMND, as some of the older webmongs amongst you will know, was one of the original meme-generation sites; anyone could log on, upload an image and an audiofile and create a page which they could then share with the world. Simple, stupid, often very, very odd pages, but still. It got shuttered a year or so ago but now is BACK, Flash-free and mobile-friendly and with SO MUCH silly, random stuff – honestly, it’s a proper throwback to EARLIER, BETTER DAYS, and is the perfect tool to make whatever throwaway rubbish you want to share with the world.
- NBA FM: Another week, another initiative by MSCHF – this, their latest drop, is SUCH a great idea that I am angry I didn’t think of it myself (you’d think, with the frequency with which I type that phrase, I’d be more realistic about my own creative abilities, and yet here we are). With the NBA season postponed, MSCHF has decided to do HYPERREALISTIC IMAGINED AUDIO COMMENTARY for all of the games that remained, playing through the rest of the season based solely on these made-up match reports. This is such an interesting piece of storytelling, and I wonder how scripted it is or the extent to which there’s in-commentary improv at play – with the right team of comedians, sportswriters and broadcasters there’s a genuinely fascinating idea in here.
- Welcome To The Hunt: This is an ARG. I don’t know any other details, other than it’s connected in some way to the Emoji Mashup Bot Twitter account (which tweets, er, mashups of emoji). The Twitter thread here linked attempts to get to the bottom of it, but this is very early days and could, I think, run for a while – I have NO IDEA what is going on here, but am quite looking forward to watching from a distance and finding out.
- Catface: I’m uncertain as to the current medical need for facemasks, but if you’re in the market for one but are…less than enamoured with the rather tedious designs available from major retailers, you may want to consider creating your own with this handy, step-by-step guide. The best thing? The resulting mask looks like a cat’s face! OH MAOW!! NB – Web Curios accepts no responsibility for any infections resulting from the very real possibility that this mask isn’t medically-secure.
- Google Artswap: The Google Arts and Culture App has just launched the ability to do style transfer on any photo you feed it, applying the style of a range of world-famous artists to your output. Which isn’t totally new as a thing, fine, but it’s Google and so the quality will be amazing; also, the last time anyone got excited by this stuff was around 4 years ago, meaning everyone’s probably forgotten it’s possible and therefore you can probably use this to pass yourself off as some sort of artistic savant while in quarantine. Alternatively, just make it your lockdown ‘thing’ to only post images in the style of Munch.
- 200 Videocall Backgrounds: Pick a new one each meeting. Honestly, what the fcuk else are you going to do? Ooh, hang on, no, here’s an idea – why not start hiding one, incongruous object in the background of each call you do? A vibe in the fruitbowl, say, or a surreptitious copy of ‘Justine’ in pride of place on the bookshelf.
- Figures in the Sky: This might just be wishful thinking on my part, but I swear that the skies over London have been clearer the past week, with stars slightly more visible than normal; is it likely light pollution levels will have fallen? Anyway, if you are in a position to see the night sky and stars, this is a lovely site which presents all the different ways in which specific stars have been incorporated into the star signs and constellations of various cultures and civilisations throughout history. Not only interesting – and, if you’re of a mystical/spiritual bent, the sort of thing that might make you spiral down a WE’RE ALL CONNECTED MAN wormhole – but also a rather nice piece of webwork.
- Koir: Zola Jesus is one of the people involved in this, giving it immediate musical credibility: “After many conversations about the state of the music industry, we wanted to help artists feel more empowered and sustainable with their work. Though livestreaming is not intended to replace live music, it gives musicians another option to monetize and promote their music. We feel it is important that musicians have as many tools and resources as possible in a time when the financial value of music is in decline. Koir v0.1 currently consists of an event calendar and thorough guides on how to livestream, written with the musician in mind. We are looking forward to expanding and adding new features as needed, but in the meantime we hope you find this helpful.” LOADS of interesting stuff in here, and an excellent place to experiment with finding new, slightly-leftfield music.
- iTalki: I didn’t know about this til my friend Alex mentioned it on a call this week – it’s probably really well known to those of you who’ve tried to learn languages online, but if you’re not familiar then iTalki is a platform which lets native speakers help learners get to grips with language and get paid a bit in the process. According to Alex, who til recently was living in the Far East, now is a VERY good time for native English speakers to earn a few quid by helping locked-down people improve their skills; frankly, there are worse ideas if you need cash.
- Good Covid: A Twitter feed sharing positive news from the depths of the crisis. Just in case you need occasional snippets of light amongst the horror.
- Free Games: Well, free boardgames, available to print – there’s a games company called Cheapass Games, an indie boardgame producer, which has made a bunch of its old titles available to print and play for free – there’s a reasonable selection here, including a few that are a bit Cluedo-esque, and if you’re all bored of the Game of Life and the LIES that it peddles about what being a grown-up’s like then you might find these a useful chang of pace.
- The Short Story Club: This is a nice idea and I presume one that multiple publishers are doing; read a short story by an author and then join a zoom chat with said author to discuss it with them. Cory Doctorow’s the first one signed up – there’s a cost to participation, but proceeds all go to charity and overall this seems like a fascinating way of being able to discuss and debate a work with its creator.
- Give A Sheet:Artists from around the world are creating original works on sheets of toilet paper which are being sold off through this website, with proceeds going to pandemic relief efforts. Whether or not you want a piece of art created on two-ply is of course an entirely personal question, but I do quite like some of the things on here; sadly my favourites are sold out, but it’s worth bookmarking and checking regularly as there’s seemingly a reasonable procession of work being added.
- Stay The Fcuk Home Bar: I really, really like the idea of this – a very oldschool-style chatroom, reminiscent of the very early web, with various rooms all themed around the idea of the website as a physical bar with different areas for people with different interests…circa 1999, this would have been an absolute riot of ASL?-ing and trolling and genuinely, naive attempts at connection; now, sadly, it’s dead, and I’ve been checking reasonably-regularly to find signs of life. Still, that means that if you so choose you and your friends can TOTALLY annexe this and OWN it; have you ever wanted to be the tough, scary barflies with a corner of the venue (by the jukebox) just for you? GREAT! I think this would work loads better if it didn’t try and add video and voice; make this text-only mass livechat and I reckon it would be BUZZING (maybe).
- Yur: I genuinely don’t understand this – can someone explain it to me? Yur is a ‘virtual fitness-tracking device’ – like a fitbit, but one which exists only in VR to track your calorific expenditure whilst in virtual space. BUT WHY???? WHY CAN YOU NOT JUST USE YOUR STANDARD FCUKING FITNESS THINGY THAT IS STRAPPED TO YOUR ACTUAL WRIST??? Is it just so you can check how many caolries you’ve burned without breaking immersion? Still, this is seemingly compatible with every single VR device, so if you want to know exactly how many calories you’re burning through whilst playing Beatsaber (lots) or masturbating to POV Hentai (none, you pervert, STOP IT) then this might be worthwhile.
- The Global Haiku Project: This charmed me so much this week – I love it almost TOO MUCH. It’s very simple – sign up, and you’re invited to contribute an opening, a middle and a closing line of a haiku; the first is to start one of your own, the second to build on someone else’s start, and the last to complete a poem. Wonderfully, there’s syllable-tracking built in to the site, meaning it’s hard to fcuk it up and therefore the outputs are LOVELY; the site will email you when the haiku you’ve contributed to are ready, so you get these occasional, unexpected fragments of poetry throughout the day. So far, absolutely everything I have experienced through this has been delightful – well DONE, everyone!
By Abi Rice
NOW, DRUM’N’BASS, COURTESY OF GODDARD!
THE SECTION WHICH HAS NOT WRITTEN A NOVEL OR STARTED A PODCAST OR EMBARKED UPON ANY DOMESTIC IMPROVEMENT PROJECTS OR DECIDED TO GET REALLY INTO EMBROIDERY OR SKETCHED OUT A FITNESS REGIME OR CREATED A LOCKDOWN ENTERTAINMENT PLAN OR HAD ANY SORT OF EPIPHANY ABOUT ITS OWN EXISTENCE AND WHICH IS LARGELY OK WITH THAT, PT.3:
- Holy Art: Thanks Rina for this, possibly the greatest and certainly the most necessary online shop I’ve seen in weeks. Holy Art sells ALL SORTS of holy artefacts, including an awful lot of Padre Pio-related tat (my benchmark for a high-quality purveyor of godly gewgaws). Given quite how end times a lot of this feels right now, Pascal’s Wager suggests you might want to start stocking up on some iconography – pleasingly much of what’s on sale here also appears to be scented, so you can keep your home holy and fragrant with just one purchase!
- Playtronica Online Synths: Want a bunch of totally free synth toys, all browser-based, that you can play with to make music and BEAUTIFUL SOUNDS? Yes, you probably do – after all, what else are you going to use to compose the lockdown musical that we all know the world needs to hear (sample songs to include: “I Just Can’t (Eat More Pasta)”, “I Panic Bought Your Heart But Now It’s Past Its Best-Before Date”, and “What It’s Like (Knowing Exactly How Regular Your Partner Is”).
- Gifcap: This is a genuinely useful tool; Gifcap lets you record gifs direct from your computer screen, choosing to record from a specific window or the whole view. If you’re making tutorial materials, or just want an easy way of capturing gameplay or similar, this is GREAT. Equally, if you just want to create a gif of someone slowly and deliberately typing “What you just said made me want to turn you inside out and rub the exposed flesh with seasalt” for use on social media, then it’s great for that too!
- The Military Industrial Powerpoint Complex: This came up in conversation on Twitter yesterday, and I realised I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the whole thing – if you’ve not seen it before this is the Internet Archive’s repository of the very best (worst) of US military Powerpoint presentations; I recommend you go deep and long here, as this very much rewards some infospelunking; more than anything, though, is the fact that all of these are the most incredibly-concentrated distillation of a certain type of late-90s/early-00s digital aesthetic that I can only describe as ‘blue polo shirt, chinos and VERY CHUNKY white trainers’. Honestly, it will make sense when you click.
- Human Chatbot: This is an interesting product that I’m not sure that anyone ever asked for – chatbot software that presents a human face, responding vocally to your typed inputs. Why in the name of Christ I would want to have an already-clunky and inevitably-disappointing interaction with a nested conversation tree made even slower by the need to listen to a voice reading out the information rather than letting me just read it, I have no idea – yet here we are. Although it did make me think of a future in which all of us on lockdown spin up secondary careers as live, work-from-home, videochat customer service drones for Amazon, which now I type it sounds terrifyingly plausible.
- The Gallery of Regrettable Food: Slightly amazed I have never linked to this – if you want to see a bunch of photos of food that will make you feel significantly better about your own culinary efforts, this is the motherlode you’ve been waiting for.
- A Tiny World: Oh this is LOVELY! “A Tiny World is a passion project. It details one artist’s experiences and discoveries in the microscopic world. What can we see with a microscope? What kind of art can be created with it? What does it teach us about the world, about life, and how can it prompt our imagination? By sharing this journey with you, my hope is that maybe you’ll be inspired to get your own microscope, or to look closer at the little objects and creatures all around you!” If you have kids who like creepy crawlies and are into nature, this is practically-perfect.
- Colorables: FREE PRINTABLE COLOURING PAGES FOR ALL AGES! Honestly, if you have small kids it’s almost worth buying a printer for stuff like this.
- The Earth in Minecraft: You know how the section header for this bit is all about how it’s ok to not actually be doing anything right now other than, well, coping? Just for a moment, imagine the other end of the spectrum – imagine looking at the vast swathe of time available to you and thinking ‘you know what? This is exactly the right time to attempt to create a 1:1 scale recreation of the entire Earth in Minecraft!’ And yet that is exactly what the lunatic – the glorious lunatic, let’s be clear, but a lunatic nonetheless – behind this project has chosen to do. The link here takes you to the wonderfully-grandiose announcement video; there’s a discord you can sub to to get involved, but I imagine that this is for the seriously-committed only.
- SUSPENSE Radio Dramas: “On September 30, 1962 a major milestone in radio drama came to an end with the final episode of the long running series, SUSPENSE. Ironically, the episode was titled “Devil Stone” and was the last dramatic radio play from a series that had its roots in the golden age of radio. What began as a “new series frankly dedicated to your horrification and entertainment” took on a life of its own mostly due to the talents of some outstanding producers and adaptations and original stories from the cream of mystery writers of the time. The golden age of radio was truly the golden age of SUSPENSE as show after show broadcast outstanding plays which were “calculated to intrigue…stir [the] nerves.” 911 radio plays from the 40s, 50s and 60s! SO MUCH STYLE! Honestly, I’ve listened to a few of these now and they are wonderful; great stories, great acting, and proper time travel – wonderful, and a perfect bedtime story if you’re in the market for such a thing.
- Colours LOL: Colourpalettes, named from an adjective list of over 20,000 words. If you were ever into the naming styles of Urban Decay back in the late-90s (so many women in their late-30s/early-40s now reminiscing about their burnt roach eyeshadow) then you will enjoy these a lot – I personally think that ‘self-respecting gold’ sounds like something that Fenty could reasonably bring out next week tbh.
- The Papercraft Jukebox: Print and fold a jukebox to house your phone in. Look, you’re going to run out of stuff to do soon, don’t scoff.
- Text Adventures: ALL OF THE TEXT ADVENTURES! Oh my days! Zork! Zork 2! Er, ZORK 3!! So many that you’ll never have heard of! Links to new games, old games, games of every single genre you can imagine, all based around reading and typing (occasionally clicking)! Honestly, if you’re of a certain vintage then this will be a wonderful trip down memory lane; if you’re too young to remember any of these, and have no idea why anyone would want to play a ‘game’ that includes no graphics and involves you having to type stuff then, well, LEARN, CHILD! Seriously, you could pass quarantine solely by playing through everything collected here.
- Keep On Beat: A browser-based rhythm game which is quite tricky and explained quite badly but which, as soon as it clicks, becomes VERY addictive indeed.
- Northbound: Travel North. Stay alive. See what happens. This is very simple, but far more entertaining than I’d expected; lots of fun, especially if you’re a fan of survival/horror/postapocalyptic-type narratives (and WHO ISN’T in the year of our lord twentytwenty!)
- Doom 3, In Your Browser: If you’re not playing DOOM Eternal – and it is very good, I promise – you might want to play this one instead. Be warned, this is another one that will make your laptop wheeze like…no, probably can’t use that analogy right now.
- Picohot: Superhot is a very, very clever game, which uses movement and time in hugely smart ways to subvert the FPS genre quite stunningly. Picohot is that game, remarkably remade for the in-broswert Pico-8 8-bit console. This is really, really fun, though again it’s explained appallingly-badly. Fiddle around, you’ll get the hang of it.
- Providence: Many years ago (circa 2003ish), author Max Barry wrote a novel called ‘Jennifer Government’ and promo’d it with a website called ‘Nation States’ which let you design your own little country and see how it developed based on your loose guidance (you can still play it here – it’s a lot of fun). Now Barry’s written a new novel, this one called ‘Providence’, and again there’s a game to accompany it- this a small slice of interactive scifi fiction, where you get to play a crew member taking part in a battle simulation on a spaceship. Nicely made, leaves you wanting more, and a smart piece of promo which I firmly believe more publishers should copy.
- Mackerel Media Fish: I don’t want to tell you too much about this. Just know that it is not quite what it looks like, and it gets quite weird very quickly, and you should click on EVERYTHING and see what happens. I love this, and I love that it exists, and I really want as many of you to play it as possible; it’s part loving p1sstake of the old web, part-ARGish game, part interactive fiction, and it’s odd and very funny. GO ON CLICK THE LINK WHAT THE FCUK ELSE ARE YOU GOING TO DO???
LAST UP IN THE MIXES, LET’S CLOSE WITH THIS SLIGHTLY-TERRIFYINGLY-HYPER MIX BY BENDROWNED!
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!:
- Lim Heng Swee: Lovely, cute illustration style, often featuring animals. The sort of thing that if you’re a particiular style of person you’ll look at and think, ‘ooh, I’d love that as a tattoo’.
- Alison Mckenzie: Papercraft and felt art. Simple, bright and very pleasing.
- Waltz Binaire: “Waltz Binaire (Berlin) is a visual studio for machine creativity”. SO much good design-y CG animation and composition.
- Covid Classics: You may have seen some of these clipped in web roundups this week; credit to the people behind this Insta, who’ve done amazing reach in no time with these domestic recreations of classic artworks – a bit like Low Cost Cosplay guy, but with a National Gallery membership.
- Virtual Street Photography: I adore this. This is a hashtag rather than a single account, but it’s full of photographs taken in-game by real world photographers who are finding their ability to get out and shoot curtailed slightly by THE VIRUS. Some of the compositions in here are superb; I reckon we’ll see the first big gallery show of this sort of work by the end of the year or in early 2021.
- Bellissimo Zine: An Instazine celebrating the very particular aesthetic (mainly: crime, Italodisco and cocaine) of the beaches near Rome – principally Ostia, Fregene and a few others. If you’re Italian, this will basically transport you; if you’re not, this will be another nail in the coffin of the concept of ‘Italians as the most stylish nation in the world’.
- Animation Fella: Thanks to Chris Smith for this – Animation Fella is filthy and very funny and sort-of horrible, and shouldn’t be watched by your kids.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS BUT ALSO OF THE NEWLY-RESURRECTED CONCEPT OF ‘THE BLOG’!
- Indoor Voices: “Blogging is not a substitute for direct action. Direct action in this case involves staying home. Blogging is one thing to do while staying at home. Please wash your hands. It’s hard to believe, but there was a time where the internet was just full of casual websites posting random stuff. And you’d go to them maybe even multiple times a day to see if they had posted any new stories. It was something we all did when we were bored at our desks, at our jobs. Now there are no more desks. But there are still blogs.” Founded by some proper writers, including the excellent Kevin Nguyen, this has already collected some wonderful vignettes. Superb.
- Four Each Day: Reader Scott Williams got in touch last week to tell me about this project of his, and it is unexpectedly WONDERFUL. Four Each Day is a relatively-simple writing exercise, in which Scott writes four sentences each day and posts them on this blog; each day, the sentences are inspired by or stem from that day’s events, personal or global, and as such it becomes a short, staccato series of dispatches from the now as seen through his eyes. Honestly, this is such a lovely idea; I would love to see a selection of other diaries compiled and maintained in this style.
- Just A Day: A group of friends – one of who I used to work with, but who doesn’t read this I don’t think and therefore will have NO IDEA that I am featuring it here – have collectively decided to track their experience of THESE FCUKING TIMES WE LIVE IN via this blog, and are inviting others to submit theirs too. Less overtly-curated than Indoor Voices, but no less interesting; honestly, one of the few good things to emerge from the past few weeks is the reemergence of personal writing of this sort online, long may it persist.
- Pi-Slices: An actual tumblr of digital animation in the glitchy style – because those still exist too, thank God.
AND NOW, LONG THINGS WHICH ARE LONG AND WHICH SELECTION DID THIS WEEK, I PROMISE, TRY AND STEER AWAY FROM THE BLOODY VIRUS BUT IT TURNS OUT THAT IT DOES RATHER DOMINATE THE CONVERSATION:
- Four Timelines: Look; I don’t know what’s going to happen, you (unless I really have misjudged my readership) don’t know what’s going to happen, world leaders don’t currently know what’s going to happen…that’s ok! Just embrace it! Embrace the uncertainty and lack of control! Enjoy the feeling of the universe just rolling right over you as if you weren’t there, flattening you with its cosmic indifference! CRUSH ME WITH YOUR DISREGARD, EXISTENCE-DADDY! Ahem. Anyway, this is by way of intro to this rather good overview of four possible medium-term outcomes from the current…SITUATION – from the best-case to the…well, not worst-case (we’re not thinking about that one right now), but at least significantly-worse case. My precis? I don’t think I am going to be going on that holiday I booked for September, basically.
- But How Will We Pay For It?: Expect this to be one of the big ideological battlegrounds of the aftermath – if, as we are repeatedly told, there is no way of magicking money into existence and getting it to the people or services who need it, how exactly is it that governments the world over have been able to find the funds to bail out their local economies when push came to ‘AAAARGH JESUS FCUK’? The answer, inevitably, is complicated, but this article does a reasonable job of outlining the basic concepts behind modern monetary theory, the leftish branch of economics beloved of the new-left in the US and significant swathes of the web’s armchair economicsts which suggests that government can actually print as much money as it likes without leading to the sort of hyperinflationary sh1tshow we’ve always been warned will result. I am not an economist – OBVIOUSLY – but if the past month or so proves anything it’s that anyone pretending it’s a science rather than an ‘art’ is a fcuking chancer.
- The NHS At Capacity: OK, all the caveats here – I am not a doctor, I do not work in the NHS, I do not have access to HMT data and information about the strategic approach to nationalised healthcare over the past two decades…with all those to one side, this is a very, very good piece of journalism by Chris Cook in Tortoise analysing how the NHS has been effectivekly been traduced by two decades of underspending at a capital level, and it’s this which has left us so particularly-vulnerable to the sorts of issues we’ve seen this week in terms of personnel, capacity and material support. If any of the information, or the way i’ts interpreted, in this article is wrong, by the way, I’d love someone to point me at a substantive critique of its position.
- Premonition: I was talking with Rob Estreitinho earlier this week – whose newsletter you should also subscribe to, by the way; it’s a genuinely interesting and thought-provoking way of looking at philosophy, rendered all the moreso by Rob’s curious mind (also, the fcuker does it in his second language, which is upsettingly brilliant) – about ‘stuff wot might happen’ after all this, and he kindly shared this article with me as a followup; it’s very good, full of smart little nuggets about how the world could maybe alter slightly post-lockdown. It’s all speculation, fine, but it’s interesting and grounded in sensible logic, and if you’re a strategywanker then it’s exactly the sort of thing you’ll read, think ‘I wish I’d written that’ and then plagiarise wholesale for the next week.
- The White Collar Virus: This is something else that I think (hope) will alter significantly once this is played out; the two-tier (ok, so there are multiple tiers, but work with me here) nature of the way in which people are affected by this based on income and lifestyle, and the way in which it’s entirely possible to manage the cognitive dissonance of clapping for the NHS and not tipping your Deliveroo driver. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and self-awareness will have spent time thinking of the inherent inequalities built into the way in which we exist in the West, but, personally at least, I’ve never seen them quite so starkly exposed; it’s like that scene in Indiana Jones where he blows dust over the invisible cobbles to highlight them, if you know what I mean (and yes, obviously I am aware that the fact that I am saying this suggests its own uncomfortable truths about the middle-class bubble I live in). Shall…shall we rip this all up and start again?
- The Fate of the News: I saw someone on Twitter comment that the print edition of Wednesday’s Mail contained 4 adverts, a couple of which were from the Government – whilst obviously I’ll shed no tears if that rag’s ‘rona’d into oblivion, there’s no way in hell that the wider media landscape is emerging from this in any recognisable shape. This is a New Yorker article examining how this might play out – whilst the examples it cites are North American in the main, the broad points it makes – about the impossibility of advertising as a workable method of funding a free press once again coming to the fore – are universal.
- Smartphones Aren’t The Problem: Altogether now kids…’CAPITALISM IS!’ To be clear, this is me agreeing wholeheartedly with the premise of the article (in Jacobin, so, er, you’d expect it really) – to whit, that the real enemy was mass consumerism all along! I’m not being flippant, honestly; I think the recalibration of how we think about our relationship to technology will be really interesting here, because for the next few weeks at least it’s going to be significantly less driven by the commercial imperative and therefore we’ll be forced to reexamine what exactly it is about that relationship that we dislike. Is it the devices, or what we are using them for – and what forces motivate that usage? I FCUKING WONDER.
- Fun Things To Do On Videochat: On the one hand, this list of 50+ ‘fun’ things to do with your friends to keep the video chat fresh might be an interesting and useful set of ideas for some of you; on the other, WHAT ABOUT THOSE OF US WHO DON’T WANT TO TALK TO ANYONE??? The company I work for – the two glorious days a week of paid employment I manage – has been doing all sorts of (genuinely nice, no sarcasm here) things for staff, such as setting up coffee dates between people who don’t know each other so they can make friends, having team drinks…look, right, I don’t mean to be a cnut, but I didn’t talk to anyone when I had to go into the office so what makes you think this has changed? WILL SOMEBODY THINK OF THE INTROVERTS????
- Choreographing The Street: Excellent, imaginative commissioning by the New York Times, which got its dance critic to discuss the odd choreography of social distancing as we all struggle to keeping a 2m distance whilst at the same time not moving like a weird Roomba; honestly, before the past few weeks I thought I had discovered every single possible way in which I could hate my fellow Londoners, but well done the ‘rona for managing to make me discover a whole new reason to wish death on my fellow citizens!
- Egg Cartons: The most interesting boring story of the week, which explains why, despite the fact that chickens are still apparently doing their own job perfectly well, there are difficulties buying eggs in some parts of Europe – this is all down to a crisis in the supply of egg cartons, most of which are supplied by one of four factories, one of which has been shut for a fortnight. A perfect encapsulation of the problems with massive, massively-complex supplychains, especially those that operate at the very margins of efficiency.
- FOMO In Animal Crossing: I’ve not seen as many thinkpieces about Animal Crossing as I’d expected, perhaps because the sorts of journalists most likely to write those are still too busy playing Animal Crossing. Still, I did ‘enjoy’ this one, which basically features a bunch of people who don’t enjoy the game quite as much because they go on social media and see other players sharing photos of their seemingly-superior game experiences. I was rendered almost-speechless by this – I appreciate that the myth of the ‘fragile’ millennial is one almost-entirely made-up by people of my age writing about millennials in the media, but, well, WTAF?
- Cock and Ball Torture: This is an article all about men who enjoy cock and ball torture – specifically, having their testicles stamped on, twisted, kicked, that sort of thing – and the women who deliver it to them. This is included partly as I had always been curious as to exactly how you learn this is what you’re into, partly because it’s pleasingly horrible (honestly, I felt slightly like I’d been slammed in the ‘nads myself for the majority of the article; you may well do so too!), but, honestly, mainly because I really like the juxtaposition of the previous article and this one.
- An Oral History of MySpace Music: I was a bit too old to get properly into MySpace, but my friend Luke introduced me to it – his band was on there, and he taught me how pages worked and how to find interesting bands and, for a time, I genuinely enjoyed rootling around on there for interesting new sounds. This is a GREAT oral history, interviewing a mixture of people from the platform, bands who found their breakthrough on it, former users and a variety of other tangentially-related folk who explain how it transformed the music industry and the business of being an artist, forever. It is, though, weirdly silent on the frankly insane number of musicians who seemingly used it exclusively as a way of fcuking their (often very young) fans, which inadvertently sort-of caused the whole revenge-porn thing via sites like the now-infamous ‘Is Anyone Up?’.
- Outperforming Atari: This is VERY TECHNICAL; if you saw the news this week that DeepMind’s built a new AI that has taught itself to beat 57 old Atari games, you might have been curious as to how that worked and what exactly it means. This post on DeepMind’s blog explains (in pretty rudimentary fashion, thankfully) how the AI trained itself and what that teaches us about learning; honestly, so interesting, even if I am too thick to understand more than about 15% of it.
- An Oral History of the TMNT Movie: That’s ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’, in case you didn’t guess (also, does anyone remember how the title was changed in the UK to ‘Hero’ turtles because the BBFC determined that ‘Ninja’ was a term likely to increase violence and aggression amongst kids (a very un-80s objection, on reflection?) – this is a brilliant look back at the making of the first film, which I promise you will want to watch as soon as you’re done reading this.
- Life Online in 2001: I’ve written about early livestreamers on here before, but never Tanya Corrin – she and her boyfriend streamed their whole life from their apartment, over 70 cameras and mics capturing everything, from fcuking to sh1tting to everything inbetween, to a curious audience. As we’re all sitting at home streaming bits of our existences across the pipes 20 short years hence, it’s an interesting point of comparison; what’s fascinating to me is how this never really progressed beyond this in the intervening two decades. Will we now suddenly discover we all have an appetite for this sort of kitchen sink voyeurism?
- Gem Fatale: On the jewellery trade in New York. If you have seen Uncut Gems, you will adore this; if you haven’t seen Uncut Gems, you will adore this.
- Eating For Two: Finally this week, an angry and funny and very caustic piece on what it’s like being left by your husband when heavily pregnant. Superb – get yourself a proper drink and enjoy: “The first thing I ate in 2020 was a multigrain bagel with cream cheese from Dunkin’ Donuts at 6:15 a.m. The bland mass of bread food was especially insulting because I was at JFK, a few miles from New York City, where I’d just spent New Year’s weekend eating real bagels with friends before flying back to Los Angeles. My breakfast was a choice of circumstance, or at least that’s what I told myself then. It’s what I’ve told myself almost every day since, as I made slew of impulsive decisions: moving to an apartment so expensive I had to borrow money from my sister; seeing a Reiki healer who made pained-chimp noises as she circled her hands above my heart; telling a Citibank telemarketer who asked how my day was going, “Well, Reginald, I’m seven months pregnant and my husband just cheated on me.” (To his credit, Reginald took five seconds and then responded, “I have an offer that will make your day even better.” I signed up for it.)”
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!
